AJ 2022 Student Prize Postgraduate Nominee
MArch Year 2, The University of Greenwich

Quote from The Architect's Journal:

Every RIBA and ARB-accredited school in the UK was invited to nominate students for the fifth annual AJ Student Prize, which celebrates the best work across three categories: undergraduate, postgraduate and sustainability.

HCA Hus

The project is situated inside the childhood home of Hans Christian Andersen, a mystical early nineteenth-century space where the storyteller's dreams were crafted into fairytales. The house is the site for this speculative, miniature project, set during his childhood from 1805 to 1817: A home, a workspace, and a chamber for imagination.

Andersen's childhood was troubled; he was abandoned by his birth parents at an early age, after which an alcoholic washerwoman adopted him with an impoverished shoemaker. His grandfather become mentally insane, and his grandmother was incarcerated. This project investigates the relationship between Andersen and his stepfather, the shoemaker. In addition, it is a speculation on how Andersen's imagination was able to develop to such an extent in such a troubled environment. 

The stepfather constructed the architecture in the project, utilising found materials and offcuts from his shoemaking craft to bring his lonely and isolated stepson some joy during his childhood.

There are thirteen fragments in total, one for each of the years Hans Christian Andersen lived in the house.

The house has been deconstructed into fundamental architectural elements such as the wall, floor, furniture, bookshelf, and more. Each element is reinterpreted to act as a site for micro-scale architectural interventions. The soul of the house, the enchantment that inhabited his fictional worlds, and the spaces in which he composed the early stories are considered in the architecture; the spatial interventions intend to extract themes from the stories and act as early precursors for them.