Abstract:
With the rapid development of technology, the city is moving at a faster pace than ever before. With the network of instant data transfers and increasingly faster transport, people are travelling from place to place by using the timeliest means. As a result of the efficiency in movement and transport, activity centres are created within the urban environment as places where people gather and information exchange occurs. The distance between the urban and the suburban environment is widened and 'void' spaces are created as a result of these concentrated hyperactive nodes. For example the presence of a space such as a restricted brownfield site located between two active nodes of Newmarket and City Centre is almost ignored. This thesis seeks to analyse the relationship of the site to the current context and explore how those relationships in turn affect the dialogue between buildings and the people. It will analyse the urban planning principles at a macro scale and apply them to a single architectural body within the chosen site at a micro level. The goal is to create an intervention - a connection in the urban fabric to activate the void space that is the current site. In addition, this thesis will also examine the modular components of urban planning and architectural design. It will explore how a set of modules can be mutated and repeated to allow for flexibility within mixed-use apartments, and at the same time create efficiency in the design. The aim is to find a set of rules and patterns at an urban scale and resize them in order to apply them at a micro scale. It aims to design a program that that is non site-specific, but ultimately can be applied to the chosen site.