This weeks celebration of students work is by Elise Colley, a recent Part II graduate from Manchester School of Architecture. Elise started her architectural journey at the University of Nottingham where she completed her Part I degree, following this, she gained work experience at Rolfe Judd. In her most recent achievements, Elise has graduated her Part II Masters and has successfully become a Part II Architectural Assistant at Hawkins\Brown. Along side studying and working, Elise is the co-founder of BLM_Arch@MSA, a student collective looking to address and challenge systemic racism within Manchester School of Architecture and the architecture profession as a whole.
Elise's key interests in architecture are parametric design and designing for resilience. Through viewing her project you will see the powerful, dark imagery she has created to showcase her final project. Please enjoy Elise's work below.
| Vectr
| Project Overview
As part of the CPU[ai] Atelier at Manchester School of Architecture our brief focused on using complexity framework to develop digital design tools, computational thinking and urban theories in relation to resilient urban futures. Our task was to work as a consultant for Manchester City Council (MCC) on the Northern Gateway redevelopment project (a joint venture between MCC and the Far East Consortium). We needed to examine and analyse the existing site and proposed development plans from a future city perspective, in order to ultimately determine how the project could become more resilient. My group chose to focus on this from a pandemic resilient perspective.
| Project Aim
The current COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the built environment is inadequately prepared to deal with the spread of infectious diseases and that we need spatial, physical systems to adapt to the new reality. This, alongside the ongoing threat of climate change, means that there perhaps has never been a more critical time to address these two issues (designing for climate and pandemic resilience) together through the practice of architecture. However, while there is a plethora of research to support the spatial design of climate resilient cities, there is an insufficient amount of research to support a pandemic resilient spatial strategy.
This project is based on the belief that there will be future pandemics, and so it is essential for architects, planners and other urban designers to be able to test and visualise the impact their spatial designs have on the spread of infectious diseases. Therefore, we propose ‘vectr’, a computational design tool that generates and simulates the spatial design of cities for mitigating the spread of infectious diseases.
By Elise Colley and Henry Baker
