Precedents and development

My primary programme is to allow stay at home women to become integrated in the community to remove the isolation felt by many of them.

I began to look at precedents of communal housing, the idea that while there are individual homes, there are also spaces within the site that are shared between the households. This would allow for interaction and a community to be formed.

The example I looked at was the first cohousing project in the UK. It comprises of 34 residences and a central 'common house' where communal meal take place a few times a week. There is also a large common room and communal garden.

I also started looking at precedents for the community building. I remembered the New Arts Exchange from a lecture I went to by Habinder Birdi from Hawkins\Brown Architects. The gallery, in Nottingham, has a similar programme to mine in that it is a building for the community and aims to create a stronger sense of community through the arts. I started to look at how this was achieved through the use of light and space.

From here, and after reading MATRIX, I began to redevelop my programme. While it was still quite vague and I hadn't even started to think about the housing, now it seems to all be coming together.

My next step it to look at the spatial values of my programme and give dimensions to this. Once this is done, I am going to start making marks on site. I want to make a site model and smaller models to represent the different spaces. This will let me play around with my programme on the sites and help me to start generating a design for my buildings.