This weeks celebration of students work is by Quadri, whos work we had the pleasure of sharing last year. Since we last met Quadri, he has successfully graduated his Part II degree from Manchester School of Architecture. Through this journey Quadri has been able to realise his true architectural passions and interests. These interests lie within the natural infrastructure and social systems that cities and settlements are built upon, and how these places adapt to resource depletion and cognitive activity. His interests also lay at the intersection of postmodernist architecture and social responsibility in the architectural profession.
This is demonstrated by a series of projects that investigate new forms of representation (materiality, thresholds) under an intersectional design ethos that values the local, cultural, tectonic, spatial, and social organisation of communities and the built environment. Quadri has captured his passion through his final year project, which offered a practical, architectural response to institutional anti-Blackness in the British education system. Quadri believes that there is an entire system of law and order embedded within the field of architecture, as it has a demonstrated potential to serve as the arena to demand and receive all forms of social, political, and ecological justice. As a future architect himself, it is a perpetual aspiration and duty of his to wilfully walk into this purpose, rather than shy away from it.
Please enjoy Quadris final project below where he expresses his interests and passion through architectural design.
| Project Overview and Aims
“BLACK & BRITISH: Reclaiming ‘Blackness’ through Radical Independent Education” is created in response to the inherent discrimination existent in the British education system today. This is forged on the premise that anti-Blackness cannot be divorced from the British education system; the two are interwoven when it comes to understanding the Black-British plight in historical and contemporary times.
Integrating three distinct learning processes: Humanities, S.T.E.M and The Arts, the proposal focuses on the latter to facilitate a reclamation of Black Power, through what is coined as ‘Edu-fication’. Located in Brixton in the London Borough of Lambeth, the journey through the sites bears much socio-political and symbolic significance. Alongside ongoing gentrification conflicted by the displacement of the diaspora community, this project took a critical architectural approach of gentrification and current education systems, proposing an alternative model for Brixton.
The project reclaims space for this abused community by championing radical politics and synthesising the physical (architectural response) with the metaphysical (political response). The diaspora will be given the opportunity to undergo the process of reclamation through healing and learning. A journey through three buildings perpetuating alternative Black Learning, eventually this blurred the boundaries between investigation and projection, forming a Black-led autonomous architectural imagery.
