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Architecture and City Space

Part 1 Project 2000
Kristina Neveriova
University of Westminster | UK
''Imagine an underground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance open to the daylight and as wide as the cave. In this chamber are men who have been prisoners there since they were children, their legs and necks being so fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads...
Some way off, behind and higher up, a fire is burning, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them runs a raised way...''

(Plato: The Republic, Book VII, The Simile of the Cave)

It is quite possible for two kinds of worlds always to exist together for a long time without the presence of a thing of one of the worlds affording us any reason to believe that the second world exists.
An 18m wide stretch of platform in St. Pancras station in London is to accommodate:
girls and boys who have become lost and
commuters who like to swim in artificial waters.
The Platonic distinction between the visible and the intelligible world and the possibility of freedom within such realms underpinned the program I formulated in response to the given brief.
My interest in this project is how the poetic mental space of text conveying a dramatic performance can be transformed into an architectural space, that can be penetrated through a sheet of paper - the drawing, just as Plato's mental space, the cave can be accessed through a sheet of paper - the book.

Kristina Neveriova


The programme we set invited the students to think about action and existence in the everyday world. The idea of action was explored through the notion of 'commuters who like to swim' and of existence through the notion of 'girls and boys who have become lost'. The everyday site for the investigation was the 18 metre wide, by 150 metre long, strip of platform at St Pancras Station.
Kristina, who has been studying on the Architectural Engineering pathway, produced the most interesting work quite simply because she addressed all three issues and was able to express this engagement in an architectural project of great clarity.

2000
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