The Gatehouse
PROJECT The Gatehouse is a social platform for lifelong learning in the heart of the city. The scheme incorporates educational facilities for students and the public, and offers a place of respite for the city. The project tested the effects of ‘defined’ and ‘diffused’ threshold conditions to disperse movement through the resistant urban fabric of Fleet Street. The Gatehouse integrates a proposal on the basis of the natural morphology challenging the lateral definition of Fleet Street which restricts transverse movement through the city. The project unifies educational and public space with a series of courtyards and colonnades designed to play and pause movement. STORY OF LOCATION The Gatehouse is located along Fleet Street at a historically significant boundary between Farringdon within and Farringdon without. These are two wards of London once partitioned by a great city wall. Just a few meters away from the site where Ludgate Circus breaks the defined flow of the city from East to West stood historic Ludgate. This medieval threshold once functioned as a system for mass movement between the inner and outer parts of the city. As a social forum for gathering public and privileged realms in one unified space the building materialises the findings from my thesis to draw movement from the city into the heart of the building.
