Luke Gifford
Architecture March
The Bartlett UCL
Specialisms: Architecture / Embroidery / Modelmaking
Location: London, United Kingdom
Luke Gifford
First Name: Luke
Last Name: Gifford
Specialisms: Architecture / Embroidery / Modelmaking
Sectors:
My Location: London, United Kingdom
University / College: The Bartlett UCL
Course / Program Title: Architecture March
About
Luke is an architectural designer and artist, having completed his part 1 and part 2 at the Bartlett School of Architecture. His research explores the spatial potential of storytelling, fictions and oral histories in shaping culturally hybrid domesticities. Luke’s creative practice is informed by domestic crafts like tapestry making as well as digital and analogue modes of production that allow for hybrid methodologies to inform design.
Hybrid Reveries: childhood fictions for rural assemblies
Hybrid Reveries explores the domesticity of Kerala’s Anglo-Indian community, examining how familial stories, native crafts and collective childhood memories produce a distinctly hybrid architectural language. In response to the 2020 removal of Anglo-Indian parliamentary representation, a speculative response is formed that aims to instil cultural solidarity as a combative tool to spatial injustices. Fact and fiction are interwoven through oral histories to construct an architecture rooted in nostalgia, memory and rural identity. A master plan for the rural town of Kumbanad, where traditional ways of life are in decline is designed. The plan takes form through three spatial archetypes: 'The Colonial Ghost', which adaptively reuses abandoned homes built for status rather than necessity; 'The Ageing Home', a care home fulfilling the needs of an ageing population; and 'The Forgotten School', a nursery centred on native craft, storytelling and the validating rurality.
Competitions
