Workshop with Year 5 and 6 students from Holy Trinity Primary School, photography by Rikard Svalastoga Kahn.
Questioning who gets to shape the built environment - as much as how it gets shaped - has been an important theme throughout the London School of Architecture’s (LSA) first ten years. This has been at the heart of the LSA’s progressive teaching model, is present in much of the school’s teaching and student work and has, since 2022, been guiding our Access and Outreach campaign, Part 0. The 20-year anniversary of the LFA has coincided with the LSA’s 10-year anniversary and move to our new home on Beechwood Road in Dalston, making this year’s theme, Reimagine, particularly relevant to the school and a fantastic opportunity to celebrate our move to the area.
Inspired by the traditional ‘cabinet of curiosities’ used to exhibit artefacts from around the world, the Dalston Pavilion has been designed and built by CITIZEN, the LSA’s newly established project delivery office, under the leadership of Roy Coupland and Yang Yang Chen. In collaboration with Hackney-based makers and artists, the structure is itself an embodiment of the principles that Part 0 embeds into its courses: Crafting Cities; (Un)Building; the EPQ in Architecture; and PlanBEE London, in which working with the built environment is presented as a collaborative endeavour that requires the expertise of many professionals with a range of skill-sets.
Located in a car park next to the LSA on Beechwood Road, in a highly residential area between the Rhodes Estate and Dalston Square, the pavilion was able to display the School’s work with young people in an open-air, public setting. Simply by occupying and activating this public space the LSA has been able to build relationships with local individuals, as well as neighbouring organisations, Forest Road Youth Hub - the largest Youth Hub in Hackney - and Holy Trinity Primary School, which is opposite the LSA. Building these relationships is fundamental to the school’s long-term mission to be a proactive stakeholder in Hackney and to work closely with the communities that we want our students - the next generation of practitioners - to serve first and foremost.
Workshop with Year 5 and 6 students from Holy Trinity Primary School, photography by Rikard Svalastoga Kahn.
The festival has been an opportunity to further our Access and Outreach work through the Dalston Pavilion which hosted twenty-two events throughout June this year, welcoming over 450 guests. The programme reflected the school's ambition to encourage people to consider how they might shape the built environment, offering workshops for young people that encouraged them to think critically about the spaces they know and how they could work better for themselves and others. Film screenings and Q&A sessions delivered by Rio Cinema presented Hackney through the eyes of local directors, provoking questions about how the borough is shaped, who it is shaped by and whether it is being shaped successfully for those who live there.
Throughout this year’s LFA the LSA has been able to offer a physical ‘one-stop-shop’ for young people keen to explore their interest in design and place-making. The pavilion has hosted workshops by a range of exemplary organisations, such as Homegrown Plus, RIBA Youth Forum, Open City Accelerate, Drawing Matter and many more, which has given participants the opportunity to discover a variety of incredible opportunities in one location.
The hope is that the Dalston Pavilion has been able to act as a springboard for young people who are passionate about design and curious about how the spaces we move through impact people's lives. Whether these young people go on to work in the built environment sector or not is secondary to the hope that they will have come away from a workshop feeling empowered to think critically about their surroundings and welcome to engage in shaping them if that is what they want to do.
The pavilion was designed and built by CITIZEN, the LSA's newly established project delivery office led by Roy Coupland and Yang Yang Chen, in collaboration with Arup and the New School of Furniture Making, with contributions from Studio Superfluo, Or This, Orsman Construction and Rhodes Estate residents. The pavilion’s artwork was designed by arts agency OllyStudio. The pavilion was made possible thanks to generous donations from the Stephen Lawrence Day Foundation, the Marchus Trust, WISA Plywood, Latham Timber and E Roberts Timber.
Workshop with Year 5 and 6 students from Holy Trinity Primary School, photography by Rikard Svalastoga Kahn.
Images courtesy of the London School of Architecture.
