Our building design
Our Success Stories
Community Engagement
Our architectural services place people and community at the heart of our projects. Our collaborative design approach allows us to engage with communities in an unique way, resulting in an appropriate outcome that responds to the context.
Our Building Design have facilitated and hosted community engagement and participatory design workshops in the UK and internationally.
Our community participatory project the Rajapur Community Building for Women's Literacy and Healthcare Centre, has received a number architectural awards.
Community Participatory Design Workshops:
The Brady Arts & Community Centre, Whitechapel, London
Hosted by The Arts Team, Tower Hamlets
Architecture Workshop : Mapping 'safe spaces' in Whitechapel. December 2022
Empowering young people from Minority Ethnic Background through Architecture
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Our co-founder Tumpa has hosted a participatory design workshop with young people and champions from the local communities, in Whitechapel.
The participatory workshop facilitated the act of mapping of the neighbourhood,
using creative process, enabling us to see the area both more objectively and critically.
We have explored 'safe spaces' through local knowledge and mapping exercises which enabled the participants to form opinions of their neighbourhood and how to subsequently come up with solutions to problems we highlight in the mapping.
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The workshop promoted architecture to the young people from ethnic minority background. It included information about the pathways to become a qualified architect in the UK.
The aim of the workshop was to expand access to architecture to communities from minority background, to address the lack of representation, in architecture field.
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Images: courtesy of the Arts Team, The Brady Arts and Community Centre - Tower Hamlets
Community Participatory Design Workshops:
Idea Store, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets. London
Hosted by LB Tower Hamlets' Regeneration Team
‘Act’ to ‘decolonise climate and socially responsive design’:
London Festival of Architecture. 30th June 2022
Our co-founder Tumpa has facilitated and curated a participatory design workshop with young people and champions from the local communities, the CSM Architecture Studio 11 and the representatives from the local authorities, LB Tower Hamlets Regeneration Team.
For connecting, engaging, participating with local marginalised groups to develop tools for “Spatial Activism” and investigating ways architecture can respond to climate and social injustice.
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The Design Workshop included the themes: Carnival of waste “Wastivism” & ’Upcycling Waste’ Workshop & Children’s activism, Fabric Parade- History of tailoring in East End, Air Pollution – “Is Air Racist”
Environmental Cost of Food - Recreating market stall, Paper making & Fabric Workshop.
Community Participatory Design Workshops:
Brady Arts & Community Centre, Whitechapel, London
Hosted by The Arts Team, Tower Hamlets.
Celebrating International Women's Day: March 2022
Promoting Architecture to Females from Minority Ethnic Background
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Our co-founder Tumpa has facilitated a participatory design workshop with young people and champions from the local communities, in Whitechapel.
The workshop facilitated an exchange to promote architecture to the young female, from ethnic minority background. It included information about design portfolio, entry requirements to architecture degree course, the journey to become a qualified architect in the UK and career paths in architecture.
The aim of the workshop was to expand access to architecture for females from minority background, to address the lack of representation of females of ethnic minority background, in architecture field.
Community Participatory Design Workshops:
Rajapur Community Building for Women's Literacy & Healthcare,
Rajapur Village, Bangladesh
Hosted by Mannan Foundation Trust
Understanding the Climate and the Changing Climate:
Empowering the women in the community
The classes are led by our co-founder Tumpa. She has been working with a community teacher who teaches the students craft skills enhancing the local crafts. The core skills have enabled the graduated students to begin their own business and empowered the local women to generate their own income and to gain financial independence.
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These workshops began by engaging the community members to participate in discussions and to communicate their understanding of the climate and the changing climate. The community’s diverse methods of measuring the climate led us (participants) to discuss how different methods of measuring the climate, impact our understanding of a place, the climate and the landscape. The collection of the information was gathered by the community engagements and participation in the workshops, story-telling sessions, role play, interviews with individuals, drawings by the community members.
This led us to understand what impact the extreme weather is having on the lives of the community.
Community Participatory Design Workshops:
With Rajapur Community, Rajapur Village, Bangladesh
Hosted by Mannan Foundation Trust
Improvising Architectural Responses to the Changing Climate
To address the issue of irrigating (during draught), the vegetable patches for the households, during our community workshops the participants, improvised a design and made a device (an architectural intervention), inventing a collective design solution within these workshops. This consists of a frame made out of bamboo (sourced from the bamboo gardens in the Rajapur village), that encloses a thin mesh that captures droplets from the high humidity in the air at certain times of the day (e.g. when temperature decreases below dew point usually at sunrise). It is very easy to construct, to transport to various sites and has easy maintenance. It is able to collect water from the humid air which is then used for irrigating the crops and assist in growing food in extreme climate. The design of this prototype was shared, demonstrated and disseminated for others to construct their own version at home.
Architecture through Community Participatory Design Workshops:
Rajapur Community Building for Women's Literacy & Healthcare, Rajapur Village, Bangladesh
Hosted by Mannan Foundation Trust
This is a community focused charity project led by the UK registered charity Mannan Foundation Trust. This community building accommodates free healthcamps for the community and free literacy classes for the disadvantaged women in the village. We worked with the charity and the communities living in the remote village called Rajapur, to work towards improving access to healthcare and education in Rajapur.
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The process of the design of the Rajapur Centre, was an inter-cultural one; a team of London-based professional volunteers fundraised and worked with the local communities in Rajapur. To ensure the transfer of distribution of power and to achieve community-ownership, local community was involved from the outset, in design and in the final build.
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The design strategy we adopted to build the Rajapur Centre is constructed from rammed earth and bamboo, the building sits on (concrete) stilts above a pukur (rainwater collecting pool), so it benefits from evaporative cooling through its special perforated bamboo and earth walls. Local materials utilised are intended to be resilient to the area’s challenging climate; the high thermal mass of the rammed earth walls help combat extreme temperatures that can reach 45 degrees or above.
During monsoon season flooding is avoided as the building is raised and the rain is embraced and collected in the pond (below) to enhance the fish-farming pond’s eco-system.