Ibrahim Salman
2019
By 2050, 68 percent of the world's population will be living within or adjacent to a major city, foreshadowing discussions of infrastructure, housing, urbanity, and co-living amongst the majority of the constituencies inhabiting our world. London specifically is home to some of the most expensive properties in the world, making access to affordable housing almost impossible to moderate-income Londoners. This project used the current climate in London to integrate an investigation of building envelopes with proposed affordable housing to meet diverse needs of modern Londoners and address the atomization of their lives.
The envelope, recently, has become the last order of production in a contemporary architectural realm fully equipped with the theoretical tools to challenge it. Ironically, the architectural envelope is architecture’s most communicative element. Be it social, political, technological, aesthetics, environmental, etc., the envelope is the convergence of all or some of these concepts and has the potential to communicate them. This socio-political critique of the envelope sheds light on its multiple attachments and complexities. It also enables us to frame the envelope not merely as a representation of an idyllic symbolic vision, but instead an assemblage of smaller social and political atoms with differing motives and interests. Face Value investigates the architectural envelope as a methodology to exploit today’s atomized society.