Marta Hilmo Lundheim

Crafting Tabula Plena: A Play with Social and Material Ecologies

Worldwide, cities full of absences have driven their people to a life of boredom and solitude, as the connection to the material world is lost.

This thesis explores craft as a way to reattach the citizen to material and social ecologies and thereby create a catalyst architecture. By redefining craft as an intervention in existing material flows, a new approach to architecture emerges, where the site becomes the material.

The project transforms the site from an absence to a park, workshop and rewilding research centre. Through redirecting flows of water, heat and material on, in and from the site, an approach to sustainability is developed that does not seek the maximum conservation of energy, but instead considers redistribution of energy and circularity as integral to the design process.

This results in an architecture where the site is a tabula plena: a circular, diverse and context-specific take on industrial London.

More information

• Master thesis 'Crafting Tabula Plena: A play with social and material ecologies'