Beyond the Walls

As architects, we spend most of our time organising walls to enclose space, and composing openings in walls. The modern architect Louis I. Kahn argued that we should understand buildings as ‘societies of rooms’. He coined that phrase to highlight how architecture uses walls to bring people together – and also to keep them apart – structuring human interactions, and mirroring wider structures in society. Kahn understood how the walls of buildings change social relations, and how they configure the social contract between people. Walls manipulate human relations through enclosure, openness, transparency, privacy, view, sound, silence, light, and materiality. 

This studio began not with walls at building scale however, but instead with urban and landscape walls that operate at a much larger scale than the individual building. And specifically with Newcastle’s city walls. What if we were to reinstate Newcastle’s city walls, we asked? How could it make opportunities for social connections, for example, or economic regeneration, or for a wider reimagining of the city? 

After this initial exercise, we moved beyond Newcastle’s city walls to investigate how to intervene in different wall conditions. Projects examine, for example: a new political assembly for the UK’s fabled ‘red wall’; a house for people recently released from prison; the class barriers of architectural education; the imaginary walls separating the period actors of Beamish folk museum; generational barriers in imagining the future city; and the disassembled walls of Newcastle’s former Royal Arcade. 

Studio tutor: Professor Adam Sharr