A storyteller

Some people are silent, some speak and some sing. We believe that we express ourselves the best through drawings as a means of storytelling. I believe it is this shared philosophy that brought Jo Lynn and I to collaborate in a joint thesis. We believe in necessitating a critical sensibility, a sense of curiosity and an openness to the adventure latent in every piece of work. 

Our thesis explored the Top of Town, Bradford as a collective environment by intertwining the public spaces and intimate private spaces within the context of the High Street. We were very much inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Leon Krier’s principles on new traditional architecture and new urbanism, as it became the impetus for the project.

By decoding the parallel layers, transect pockets and line of life in the Top of Town, our proposal is a network of Communal Villas, an experimentative and explorative research on how the future of High Streets could be through the introduction of a communal-led typology and its influence on the regeneration of the Top of Town. The buildings as a collective with the public interventions form an identity for the Top of Town in the projective future as we reveal the invisible cities of Bradford; reconnecting its past, present and future.

We hope the journey in finding the beautiful chaos and the moments in the city has brought us all to appreciate the erased, concealed and unbuilt. Where deep falseness lies upon our imagination, we are able to construct an interface between the city and the room. It is in these mundane scenes, we see the perfect depiction of chaos; a wonderful presentation of drawings of people, space and time into their narrative structure.