The Red Line

Atelier FLUX projects investigate how Architecture can establish a state of change. This year we have been exploring temporality and asking questions such as: Who is the city for?

To build tomorrow's cities, architects will need alternative modes of practice. Students in Flux have been focusing on a speculative approach to design, analysing and investigating interrupted city processes as a tool for reimagining tomorrow's city.

This year the Atelier has worked in the heart of Manchester city centre, with one of the most significant post-industrial wastelands in the UK, one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution. The Mayfield area, adjacent to Manchester's central train station, has been a blind spot in Manchester's mind's eye for over 50 years; it is walled in by the high railway viaducts and the Mancunian Way.

The Red Line is the ubiquitous line of ownership on a development plan. that define a site's boundary for an owner/client. The student's brief was to reinterpret the redline as a threshold and propose what should be built IN and OUT of it. The project proposals connect existing-working parts of the city through the site and propose how architecture can establish everyday life in this area and reconnect the city.

Mayfield has been a rare opportunity for students to engage with live briefs, a developer who co-authored the brief, and a broad range of built environment professionals and creative practitioners immersed in the transformation of Mayfield, from Art, Anthropology, Archaeology, Creative Writing, Dark-Design, Fashion, Narrative-Change, Philosophy, Photography and Psycho-geography to challenge students design proposals on the go each week and provoke a rich discussion along the way.