Filters in Fleet Street
Gatehouses function as repelants, but
The act of aggregation is not mere addition, it is a process of removing and adding in order to add something else.
My project is about gatehouses or filters and inner courts or rabbitholes. I found in Temple a unique urban condition where open spaces, similiarly to italian piazzas, free space from activities to activate voids. How this inner courts or urban room meet the city was introduced with an specific architectural type: the gatehouse.
Learning from the city, I needed a test ground to apply this principles. Seven Dials offered also a unique condition in the opposite direction, in an area surrounded with commerce, inner courts would be introduced to balance the commercial and the social, by removing buildings and adding filters, I try to break down the directness of diagonal into a maze line circulation that offers a peripheral circulation where the exterior feels interior.
Gatehouses function as repelants, but
By using the unit of the city, the house, Temple hides behind a condensed facade which merges its gates within its context
Defined almost entirely in terms of circulation, the courtyards are the relationship between one another.
Ground condition in Seven Dials is opened up by freeing it from car ciruclation, allowing pedestrians to take over the narrow street. The single axis also brings back relevance to the monument.