LAUREN GABBITAS
Portfolio of Work
MASTER'S STUDIO
An Unavoidable Post-Scarcity World: MATRIX
The inevitable developments of the fourth industrial revolution demonstrates a change in character, use and experience of space. It imagines a future society to collate both physical and digital realms in automation and artificial intelligence. With the scenario of automation and AI replacing the traditional system of human labour, this thesis proposal assumes the concept of money will become obsolete and, instead, find the value in quality in life. Therefore, the idea of an experience economy becomes viable with a social credit system. It questions how do we define value when human labour required to create goods and services rapidly reaches zero; how do you manufacture society?
PROFESSIONAL STUDIES I
Adaptive Reuse: Telephone Exchange
Infrastructure / technology infrastructure / Manchester digital / digital media / telecommunications / telephone exchange (how technology has changed for the telephone) / obsolescence in technology /designing space where technology can grow and adapt.
To prevent a building becoming obsolete, designing with the agenda of a multiple-use space that can be adapted to suit human needs, where humans take influence from the past historic telephone switchboard and essentially become the operator of the building design.
PROFESSIONAL STUDIES II
Housing: International Hedging Infrastructure
Building on existing evidence of social, cultural and economic engagement with emerging issues of Brexit, in the context of the Irish border, the proposal required to explore housing as a border condition. The delivery thus generated an international zone on an area of the border that crosses the river and a marina in the Northern Irish town of Belleek. In doing so, proposed an international marina to establish a community of profit-merchants seeking the benefit of trading with both sides of the border.
PROFESSIONAL STUDIES III
The Greater Manchester Department of Architecture (GMDA)
A ‘proto-practice’ design response to what are the current issues with the built environments and what the future of architectural practice could propose.
BACHELOR'S STUDIO
Psychogeography: Walking In The City
An investigation to how people interact with a cities grid; decisions they encounter when approaching a change in direction through the city and the effects of emotion and behaviour of the individuals. Ideas of taking untraditional routes around the streets, explored by De Certeau, in cities led to further research into the term psychogeography: an approach to geography that highlights playfulness and wandering around urban environments.
INTERGRATED DESIGN
Art and Exhibition: Blind Light
“Architecture is supposed to be the location of security and certainty about where you are. It is supposed to protect you from the weather, from darkness, from uncertainty. Blind Light undermines all of that. You enter this interior space that is the equivalent of being on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea. It is very important for me that inside it you find the outside. Also, you become the immersed figure in an endless ground, literally the subject of the work” Antony Gormley.