RIBA East Midlands Charette 2022

Wednesday last week I had the great opportunity to participate on this year’s RIBA Charette representing Pick Everard, which brought together many students from different universities in the East Midlands as well as other practitioners and tutors to work around the idea of transforming the Lee Circle Auto Magic car park into a social condenser.

The day included briefing at Beta X and a group site visit to Lee Circle in the morning and designing workshop at DMU in the afternoon. Each practitioner was assigned a group of students to support and discuss potential design ideas, which allowed for a great exchange of experiences and ideas towards re-thinking the car park typology into more sustainable and communal spaces which could serve as a design model for re-thinking car park structures in general.

The students synthetised the ideas in sketches, diagrams, and visuals to be pinned up by the end of the day for a round of presentations that included the participation of a local planner, structural engineer, landscape architect and LRSA architects’ members who provided valuable input into all presentations’ ideas. The day was full of fresh ideas to a very contemporary issue being discussed by planners, architects, and urbanists all around UK, and has proven to allow for great solutions by gathering so many minds from different career levels and places.