MSA Stage 5 School of Architecture
Thomas Whiting
I am interested in an architecture that deals with material and site sensitively and intelligently, exploring how a building project’s response to the city/territory/programme can be expressed and through its tectonics. Most recently I have been preoccupied with architecture as an apparatus or backdrop to our everyday lives, and the relationship between architecture and infrastructure in urban and rural environments.
In the first semester of Stage 5 I undertook an exchange semester to the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland. The resulting project, Simple Pleasures, was developed in collaboration with Kyrre Beck Myreng under the academic guidance of Kersten Geers. Under the brief EVERYTHING.GLORIOUS we sought to question, revisit, and revise the Modern Project, returning to a focus on the Large Number through a series of mass housing projects for the Belgian city of Charleroi.
In the second semester Simple Pleasures became a sort of mise en scene for the Diploma Thesis RE-FRAMING THE BELGIAN LANDSCAPE. A continued investigation into Charleroi, the thesis deals with how the city’s sprawling urban form can accommodate future growth through a series of pointillist interventions.
Simple Pleasures
The project is located in the suburban mat south of the airport and north-east of the centre of Charleroi. The project is a set of interventions along a length of an overgrown former railway turned cycle lane which cuts through the suburban landscape. These interventions seek to use this strand of light infrastructure to connect fragmented green space in the suburban mat to create a new way of moving around and living in the landscape. There are three types of intervention: infrastructure, landscape, and housing. The infrastructure is concerned with creating new connections between fragmented green space. The landscape is concerned with the pleasure and recreation of suburban living, collectivising and amplifying it. The housing is concerned with providing an inhabited edge, on one side to the green infrastructure, the other to varied green space. The architecture is light and simple, imagined as a scenography upon which a large life can be lived.
Developed in collaboration with Kyrre Beck Myreng.
RE-FRAMING THE BELGIAN LANDSCAPE
Re-Framing The Belgian Landscape critically examines the legacy of individualist, laissez faire suburban building in the territory of Wallonia and how it might be framed and contained as the economy and population grows. Charleroi, the most populous city in Wallonia and a paradigm of modern history, with explosive growth during the industrial revolution from manufacturing steel to its subsequent de-industrialisation and decline, is the context for the thesis. History risks repeating itself with a sharp increase in the population and the growing new technology industry. Its rapid, unplanned suburban growth sprawls outwards, the urban centre so small to render the centre-periphery dichotomy redundant, instead, Charleroi is understood as a single form: a suburban mat.
The thesis is given form through the identification of and subsequent intervention in the hollow cores of unplanned suburban blocks. A loggia, part circulation route, part service infrastructure forms the perimeter of the sites, framing and containing future development. Three key programmes are drawn out which align with the Bouwmeester’s needs of the city; local food production and food literacy; new innovative industry to boost the economy; and a strategy for leisure spaces. The city grows, the suburban mat densifies and diversifies, the landscape beyond the city remains untouched.