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plug and work/live/play

Part 1 Project 2007
John Dent
Manchester School of Architecture Manchester | UK
The illustrated project is a generic pilot scheme for live/work communities for creative industries.

The proposed concept it is to be regarded as a generic ideology which could take place on any canal in any city. The site chosen to illustrate the concept lies to the west of Castlefield, Manchester.

A radical concept in living, working and playing, the concept evolves around regenerating post-industrial brown field sites as ‘urban farmland’ and re-instating canal networks as creative incubators and major elements of the urban infrastructure.

John Dent


John’s proposition is a radical concept in living, working and playing that evolves around regenerating post-industrial brown field sites as ‘urban farmland’ and reinstating canal networks as creative incubators and major elements of the urban infrastructure.The illustrated project is a generic pilot scheme for live/work communities for creative industries, in Castlefield, Manchester. The proposal is both intrinsically site specific and yet universal, as it could take place on any canal in any city.

The interest and emphasis of his work lies within the process. John developed an outstandingly intuitive way of working, using software and digital modelling truly as a design development tool to set up methodologies for generating architectural form.He continually evolved his models to respond to an increasingly complex set of parameters.

Conceptual acuity is sustained through articulate and refined realisation studies: a radical concept in modular / prefabricated construction comprising of simple, clever, widely available technology. Time is treated as a design item and the necessity of change, becomes a value, which has been built into the thinking of the project. It is a system of mass-customisation; the proposed pilot scheme is not viewed as a finished product, but as a continuously negotiated collection of products and their accommodation.

John’s work challenges and extends the accepted boundaries of instrumental competence in architecture.

2007
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