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The City and the City; Millennium Mills; Immigrant Reception Community

Part 2 Project 2013
Matthew Downey
University of Kent | UK
Millennium Mills, a former Docklands Flour Mill, now squatted by various refugee groups is transformed into a host agent acting as a ‘scaffolding mechanism’ within the liberties and constraints of a traditional ‘bonded warehouse’. The core of the proposal is an inchoate Trade Centre, a market place.

Millennium Mills harbors a diverse international community of economic migrants and their imagined illicit procurement and wholesale of culturally related imports. By integrating different imported technological traditions, systems, construction methods, materials, cultural mannerisms, modes of spatial compromise and negotiation, the developing multicultural community shapes architecture of shared identity.

A crosshatch of benign and potentially malevolent government surveillance and monitoring of immigration emerges alongside an architecture of a new nationalism.

The aim here is to challenge contradicting ideologies of society and culture, in a proposition accommodating a diverse stakeholders and activities, where all play a role in the building and which function simultaneously towards a highbred architecture of new nationalism, for residents, and our own society at large, with the intention of also enabling residents to receive official entry into the UK by ultimately obtaining British citizenship.

Matthew Downey

Tutor(s)

2013
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