Another gift: Diploma 14's Louise Underhill is featured in Wallpaper's yearly guide to the best design graduates! Louise's project was a radical rethinking of the London terrace. She substituted the party wall with a modular system of concrete panels; this system creates a series of enfilades which can accommodate unorthodox family arrangements. The result is a space which is monumental in scale, rejecting the standard bourgeois room for a set of 5x5x5 halls that can host smaller scale, room-like impermanent structures in between furniture and architecture.
Louise's thesis is particularly representative of the research Diploma 14 has been developing in the last few years. We have been working on the relationship between housing typology and forms of life - a theme that is well expressed in Louise's work which uses a tectonic invention to address what is ultimately a problem of subjectivity. This is why it is such a joy to see her project featured in a commercial magazine: it feels like many years of discussion, and the collective intelligence of a few generations of Dip 14, are going out there in the world and making their appearance even in mainstream media (which, as we know, is 'almost alright').
In the last years we have focused on the scale of the dwelling; this year, we hope to try to link this kind of typological experimentation with a stronger large-scale strategy. So, watch this space, as we are indeed always looking forward to the next big thing.