Unit 6 are fascinated by the civic potential of architecture; how it can embody and encourage the common ground of living together in a city. How might our built environment offer resistance to the toxic polarisation of contemporary public life, defining places to gather, talk, play, work and enact the rituals that bind communities?

We also explored load-bearing structure as the most enduring of a building’s layers. How can we make this construction re-configurable and primed for future re-use, while maintaining a strong figurative character? If we can do this well, we will drastically reduce the carbon cost of demolition and destructive adaptation.

We drew these strands together in Leith, with proposals for civic architecture that explicitly recognises the differing rates of change of a building’s layers. The public places that we designed have characteristics that are robust in space and in time. We see the ruin latent within the new construction and welcome that too into a future city more supportive of civic values than where we stand today.