Housing:Market Part 1 Project 2000 Masashi Miyamoto London South Bank University | UK The project is for urban renewal and transformation. The housing association owners of this site in Hackney are in effect the local community of the area. I am only keen to vitalise the essence of their daily activities, creating a symbol of existence. I intend to design structures that inscribe the spontaneity of function and human necessities: for example, the compression of man and market, or the rules of openings and closings. I then make comment on who sets these laws. The project seeks to create a string of stimuli and substance. The materiality tends to interpret the beauty of ashes as a relative of the aesthetics of grandeur. I am interested in making a synonym of strength, drawing in stereotypes of textures and developing an enduring gesture of truth, function, and honesty. Masashi is a student with a strong interest in the literal and metaphorical meanings of architecture. His project for a housing association is remarkable because he seeks to reduce architecture to essences without trivialising its content. He considered that housing could not in itself define the site: the place needed an anchor, and so a market was made around which the housing operated.The use of powerfully brooding models to explore the texture and terrain of the site, and an insistence on the imposition of strong geometries in the design has created an interesting tension. The site is in most respects an unremarkable place, but with Masashi's buildings it becomes focussed and marked. And this is not at the expense of the architecture becoming an object imposed on it. Instead, the city gains from the new intervention, and the new buildings find a home for themselves.Masashi's treatment of the section of his project was impressive. The floor planes are used in a very plastic way, and the screening of the interior is both controlled and abstract. At both the urban and material levels, this is a very satisfying scheme.