MSA Stage 5 School of Architecture
Tamzin Dodd
Access to the Anthropocene: An exploration of female spatial agency in Marseille.
The ethical city is ascribed by its harmonious relationship between the built environment, nature, and human life. It embraces reciprocity, treating these elements as interconnected, not separate entities. Resilient city design necessitates strong connections between individuals, local communities, and urban environment. The thesis explores the themes of female spatial agency; questioning our access to historic buildings, and the readability of historic cities like Marseille through the navigation of a harsh topographical environment. This is explored using the three key motivations: politics, professionalism, and ecology.
Whilst over half of the population is female, historic cities such as Marseille are built by men, failing to consider the lives and needs of women and girls. The production of space is inherently political due to momentary social responsibility and appreciation of long-term consequences. To respond to the politics of gender, responds to spatial inequalities in Marseille, with limited space for women to gather outside the home.
Professionalism positions the Architect as invested in reaching a balance between contrasting drivers; stability, openness, outreach and inward spaces and centralisation, with a central theme of access for all needs leading the organisation.
Connecting the agent, space and building into a wider ecology allows the co-determination of social and environmental conditions for resilience. Advocacy for reuse is driven by a recognition of climate change as a humanitarian issue, aiming to protect those with the least agency over mitigation and most vulnerability to extreme weather and pollution.
Spatial agency is to command a public space and leave an impression. Marseille is an enclosed city, bounded by the mountains and coastal edge, the challenge therefore is to reuse existing sites and structures to address current issues. The reuse of existing buildings encourages the exploration of female spatial agency to build upon their existing relationship to the city. Reuse and adaptation will explore relationships between existing stone buildings and modern, natural materials reflecting evolutionary themes through the material language.
Research // Site Analysis
The definition of feminism is the ‘advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes’ and describes a feminist as being dedicated to this. Feminist analyses of architecture focus on the inequalities of gender relations and the importance of diverse roles in resilient and functioning communities and planning systems. A feminist approach to design operates from the perspective of being inclusive of valuing each individual equally, regardless of gender, socio-economic background or race, rather than a focus on women only. Our cities consist of a variety of cultural expressions, and the planning of space can be centered around narratives and memories of the ‘other’ currently excluded from the public fabric of a place.
The site for a focus on female spatial agency was chosen based on the density of the site, its connectivity to the wider city, and relationship to services such as a school, market shops and lack of surrounding social services.
The chosen site is near Cours Julien, near the 6th Arrondissement boundary relating to the surrounding 1st and 5th Arrondissements. The Haussman-style building at 41 Cours Lieutaud is two storeys, overlooked by a vehicular bridge connecting Rue D’Aubagne to the steep topography change and allowing key traffic artery of Cours Lieutaud to pass underneath. A footbridge leads the pedestrian from Rue’Aubgane to Escaliers du Cours Julien, which climbs 10 meters to arrive at a public square, filled with bars, restaurants, and street-art. The metro station, Metro Notre Dame du Monte has two points of access, from the staircase and below the footbridge on Cours Lieutaud providing the chosen site with reliable transportation links. The neighboring building is an entrance point for Ecole Cours Julien, a small-scale primary school, accessible from Rue d’Aubagne and Cours Julien, where the primary school building is surrounded by a courtyard playground. The relationship between the primary school and women’s Centre provides a unique opportunity for centralization of shared spaces, outreach and creation of moments of culture teaching and learning essential to social resilience. The site establishes the thesis as an exploration of duality, intersections between space, work and play, stability and openness, old and new, women and children.
To understand the complexities of the site, shaped by the topography change, photographic documentation was undertaken to understand the three different conditions on site, understand density and changes in building typologies and heights.
Research // Strategy
The gap between de-carbonization and the reality of carbon emissions in the construction industry is widening. Although the idea of sustainably retrofitting existing building stock has been present for many years, Architects are yet to universally adopt it as a circular economy mechanism to take climate responsibility. Retrofit, or Adaptive Reuse can be a vital tool to achieving total sustainability, meaning complete environmental, social and economic sustainability which creates longer life cycles, preserved embodied carbon and enriched relationships between old and new fabric. However, the barriers to the implementation of Adaptive Reuse as common practice are entirely political but difficult to overcome, is not the same as impossible.
The technical focus of the thesis is to interrogate the existing site, building layout and fabric to integrate feminist inclusive design principles. This will demonstrate the possibilities of adaptive reuse, and update the existing fabric without damaging and thus enhancing the historic buildings to be accessible.
To demonstrate how historic cities can be adapted to create inclusive and sustainable environments, the adaptation of existing buildings is vital. This goes beyond the direct inclusion of women, but considers all, and therefore the natural environment.
The Proposal // Brief
The proposal is focused around adapting the existing buildings to accommodate a new accessible street leading from Cours Lieutaud to Cours Julien which acts as an alternative to the Cours Julien steps, or steep long walk around the topography. The new street served by two elevators at the east-west access points, and wrapping staircases to provide services to all levels of need.
The implementation of the new street transforms the existing buildings into host spaces for the programme of the building and acts as an organisational tool to advertise the uses of the building to passers by. To achieve this external street circulation a range of scales of Adaptive Reuse are explored.
The proposal of the women’s centre, caters to the need for female spatial agency in Marseille, and aims to integrate feminist and accessible design principles into a historic landscape. The layout of the programme is organised vertically, include areas for health, green spaces, educational services, parental support and social and cultural spaces.
The Proposal // Final Design
The new shading facade used to unify the three existing buildings presents the proposal as a permeable entity, aiming to display activity through the layers of the existing and proposed elements, and implementation of planting peering through the voids. Highlighted in pink is the presence of the new accessible street, clearly visible and identifiable without signage, which provides an alternative to the steep topography and existing Cours Julien steps. The elevation retains the existing levels and responds to the pre-existing access points creating an outreaching language with the new secondary limestone facade aiming to unify the three existing buildings, and integrate them into a single proposal.
The elevation to Cours Julien aims to open the existing school building up to the public square of Cours Julien and reforming the formal and enclosing nature of the 1850s building. This is achieved through the carving of the ground floor to open up the existing light well and removal of the entrance gate for re purposing, and the additional massing inserted into the fabric to break the hausssman articulation rules. The pink circulation decks signal the entrance and explore themes of outreach into the public square, with planters curving to reveal the new accessible street and thus implementing feminist wayfinding principles.
Throughout the scheme, wayfinding and readability principles are explored to aid those with alternative needs of language barriers to occupy the building, incorporating feminist themes of access. These include orientating users towards the next level of circulation at points of arrival, working with the existing fabric to create sight lines through spaces to allow users to immediately locate bathrooms and exits, and grouping types of space with window types to influence the behaviors in varying levels of public and private realms.