Heat Island

25/11/2021

Excited to announce that this year Heat Island are co-ordinating a design studio on the BSc Architecture degree program .

19/11/2021

Luke Jones considers whether a post-carbon architecture might in fact echo some of the fundamental material principles, such as all-timber construction. Non-Extractive Architecture: On Designing without Depletion Vol.1 Edited by Space Caviar Published by V-A-C and Sternberg Press

31/03/2021

OPEN BLOCK: A Design & Build workshop to help make a new community space on Chisenhale Road, E3.

1. Open Design Day: Scale modelling with VR and Unreal Engine to design and visualise different possibilities.

2. Community Onsite Construction: Build the designs, materials and tools supplied.

Taking place at the space next week 5th-9th April - everyone welcome. Participation via a sign-up sheet for Covid safe timed slots - link in bio.

08/03/2021

The first phase of is on site - good luck to all the children and parents getting back to school today!

25/02/2021

Great write up of recent community playground and street reclamation (including ) in today's Guardian by .

Fun to get a mention - link in bio.

15/02/2021

According to J. Kirchherr (et al.) there are 114 different defintions of the circular economy. We thought why not try and invent a few more?

Some research + ideas from a lecture on potentially conflicting definitions of circular design we gave at last years AA Visiting School

11/02/2021

Very pleased to announce that our project 'Evaplaza' was recently awarded an honourable mention in the international Cool Abu Dhabi competition to address rising urban heat and create more habitable cities.

The project builds on 'Evapanel' - our porous ceramic elements facade design system - and expands it into a modular structure for public spaces and parks. The result is a low-energy approach to reducing urban temperatures and cooling outdoor spaces while supporting sustainable planting and drainage.

10/02/2021

We've recently been working with parents from the Chisenhale Primary School to transform low-traffic streets around the school into a shared community space and playground.

More details coming soon but if you want to help support the project and find out more: https://www.spacehive.com/chisenhalelearnplaycreate

03/11/2020

We're very excited to launch the final project from this years Heat Island Research Residency:

An Erratic Calendar - Time Design & The Renewable Transition by Zoe Panayi
.. a project explores the future of renewable energy and the potentially profound social and cultural implications of power sources that promise clean, cheap abundant energy – but just not all the time.

The conventional wisdom suggestions that the storage capacity of the UK grid is likely to increase in tandem with increased investment in renewables, but exactly how fast and how large this infrastructural shift might be raises some hugely significant questions about how we might design systems in response to such fluctuations across hours, days, months, years and even decades?

The project explores different overlapping cycles involved in the production of renewable energy, in particular the daily, monthly and yearly fluctuations of solar and wind energy. Are moving away from an economy based on always-on, continuous output and processes and towards a world where the time cycles for industrial production of steel, hydrogen or cement might need to be reconsidered and redesigned? Could the future of manufacturing be seasonality?

The project includes a prototype interactive calendar that compares historic weather and energy demand data across cyclical periods of time allowing us to visualise these future relationships from a new perspective.

Find out More:

A project developed during the Heat Island Research Residency 2020 by Rosa Whiteley.

22/10/2020

Next up in the showcase of this years Heat Island Research Residency projects we have Phoebe Walton's project PWSMPFI which explores the role of climate modelling and data visualisation in expanding the possibility space of alternative futures.

2020 has been a year in which graphs and models have taken centre stage in the formation of media narratives. Our relationship to the global COVID-19 pandemic, alongside our comprehension of ecological collapse and perhaps even our collective capacity to imagine 'the future' are increasingly mediated by the outputs of computational models. Just how do we relate to these complex, often opaque tools and the speculative worlds they foretell?

PWSMPFI is not only a brief history of international climate models and the highly influential scenarios, climate pathways and policy actions they generate, but also a moment of reflection on the abstractions they depend on. Should we consider deep future climate forecasts to be speculations, fictions, design briefs – or all three?

Find Out More:

A project developed during the Heat Island Research Residency 2020 by Phoebe Walton.

21/10/2020

We're very excited to be launching the projects from this years Heat Island Research Residency. Everyday this week we'll be show-casing one of the three projects that our residents produced - up first we have:

Rosa Whiteley - London's Oil Critters: Material Secrets of an Oil City

An investigation into the economics and ecologies of the oil industry in London, that uncovers the surprising biological and material interdependencies of the globalised oil industry. It charts the rapidly shifting growth patterns of four organisms - or critters - who's lifecycles are intertwined with the production and shipping of oil products.

In a year in which we have experienced the spectacle of 'negative' oil prices alongside a international shake-up of global oil corporations, the project reflects on the ubiquity of oil as energy source and chemical building block, exploring how biological systems respond to the fluctuations of commodity markets. What do the secret lives of barnacles, quagga mussels and their shells tell us about the state of our oil hungry economies?

Find Out More

A project developed during the Heat Island Research Residency 2020 by Rosa Whiteley.