East London, Organic Development — the algorithmic city

East London has a particularly fragmented urban structure. Unlike the Haussmannian centre of Paris or Manhattan's regular grid, the eastern districts of London developed from the bottom up — layer by layer, without a central plan, responding to migrations, industrialisation and successive waves of economic change. This decentralised character became the starting point for the 2018 project.

Three theoretical sources

Metabolism — the Japanese architectural movement of the 1960s, which proposed the city as a living organism: replaceable capsule housing modules plugged into permanent megastructures. Kisho Kurokawa and Kenzo Tange showed that architecture could be designed like biological systems — with a built-in capacity for evolution and renewal.

Situationism — the philosophy and artistic movement of the same period. Guy Debord introduced the concepts of dérive — spontaneous drifting through the city according to its "psychogeography" — and détournement, the transformation of existing space. The city is not a permanent structure. It is a stage for situations.

New Babylon — the long-running project of Constant Nieuwenhuys (1956–1974): a network of interconnected platforms suspended above old cities, inhabited by nomads without fixed homes. Space as a continuous experiment, endlessly reconfigured by those who inhabit it.

Structure and module

The project developed prototypes of modules based on the tetrahedron — one of the space-filling polyhedra, solids capable of filling space without gaps or waste through simple repetition. The algorithmic construction of structures allowed different spatial configurations to be generated depending on local conditions, density and direction of growth.

The key principle: the scale of the space was not imposed from outside — it was determined by the user. Each unit could expand or contract according to current needs. The structures grew organically, responding to human needs in real time — just like East London itself: unplanned, but with a certain logic beneath the surface.

Significance of the study

The project was a prototype study of the possibilities of an architectural system that responds to the city as it is — decentralised, unplanned, alive — rather than imposing order upon it from the outside. In a world of ever-faster demographic and economic change, the question of the adaptability of architectural form remains open.