Working Archive

Third-Year Design Studio Project

1. Semester Two

Between Noise and Stillness: A Working Archive for Millennium Mills

Between Noise and Stillness reimagines Millennium Mills as a working archive: a place where industrial memory is not preserved as a static ruin, but reactivated through making, movement, sound, and spatial transformation.

Drawing from the machinery, structures, and fragments of the historic mill, the project develops an architecture embedded within the landscape of North Woolwich. Organised around the foot tunnel and river edge, carved spaces for fabrication, film, exhibition, and public occupation emerge from the ground, creating a continuous relationship between archive, infrastructure, and terrain.

The proposal explores how fragments of the past can be reassembled into new forms of collective experience, where architecture becomes a living process of production, adaptation, and renewal.

Traces of a Process

This body of work is not a conclusion, but a trace of a process. Each drawing and model records an attempt to read space through fragments, interruption, and material memory. The results sit between archive and speculation, proposing architecture as something continuously assembled rather than resolved. The work was awarded the Saunders Architects Prize for Experimentation.