Last year, DIP10 used Hawkmoor’s seven churches as starting points to scan different parts of the city. By reassessing their architectural, religious, social and political roles, we developed twelve new foci for London. We will now reverse the process and start by questioning how political and religious divisions influence the makeup of space. An initial workshop in Belfast will allow us to witness and work with an ongoing political and religious divide that has now come to a head, becoming the diplomatic, territorial and physical sticking point of the Brexit process. Learning from this discordant situation, we will concentrate on London where we will use a chosen division, an architectural focus and a borough to reassess the relationship that exists between physical structures and situations and to articulate the reciprocal nature of division and engagement.

In order to counteract the pitfalls of topicality, we will scan an arbitrary area of the city, identify the relevant physical and social variables, and create an abstraction of it in the form of a multilayered 3D construct. We will immerse ourselves in the real context of the city, work with its abstraction and experiment with alternative ways of inserting new interventions that will have a direct effect on the future of London. The emphasis will be on the making of spaces that exploit the intricacies identified in the scan.

Can we blur the distinction between the space of architecture and that of the city? What roles do division and engagement play in the construction, perception and experience of space?

Using the construct as a working tool, we will oscillate between the political and the social, between the territorial and the experiential, to carry out frequent spatial experiments, design a contemporary focus and devise strategies to influence the policies of the relevant borough.