Following the challenging couple of years, getting back to normality seems like an unattainable goal. New challenges and new behaviors will shape our shared spaces. With a focus on youth, their education, culture, fun and relation with their city and its communities, students designed through narratives mixed use spaces for their generation, to respond to their daily challenges. The projects propose new ways of coping and new forms of living.
The 10 students worked on 2 sites located on both extremities of Damascus Street: A previously Adventist church with a school and the “white house” turned from a residence into a club. Both sites hold strong urban and social identities that helped each student define a personalized program, through research and observation.
The repetitive drop beams in the church building were both a constraint and an opportunity as they create a large ground floor with no columns. The white house on the other hand, is a charming and poetic space, with a very irregular triangular footprint surrounded by streets.
By understanding users’ preferences and needs, balanced with space functionality, design basics, planning, materials and elements, furniture, textiles, lighting and colors, the studio presented an interesting variety of projects with focus on engaging the different communities and allowing the designed spaces to connect the users through a network of shared interests.