Large City Architecture

Large City Architecture began as a reading of Ludwig Hilberseimer and became, over six years, the lab’s method for composing cities from parts. The doctoral thesis and the book The Mereological City (2016) read the modern city as an assembly whose elements can be described, counted, and recombined; the research clusters at the Bartlett, RC8 and RC17, turned that reading into a design method, with student teams composing large urban ensembles from discrete parts and winning the UCL Gold Medal in Urban Design in 2018 and the Silver Medal in 2019.

The program’s public record spans a decade of exhibitions: WanderYards entered the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in 2018; Maison Partino went to the Prague Experimental Architecture Biennale in 2019; One Minute Architecture was shown at the virtual Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2021; and the Large City Architecture Research exhibition at the Mebane Gallery in Austin in 2022 gathered twelve years of the work from five institutions.

The program is archived, and its vocabulary, mereology among it, stays with the books where it was developed. What carried forward is its deep structure: many agents held together by their mutual resistance rather than by a single rule. Compositional Intelligence is where that structure meets generative models, and where this program hands over to the ones that follow.