Labs serve the wider studio's architectural and urban work, as well as external clients with bespoke research; by operating outside the confines of traditional architecture.
By doing so, we explore emerging human, urban, and digital frontiers. Our projects range from anything between improving social value in cities to growing bio-based building materials and developing augmented reality design tools.
People
Know Your Health
‘Know Your Health’ is an online tool and downloadable guide, created with partners Centric Lab and Comuzi, to help people living in cities to identify how their environment is impacting their health, and then empower them to improve their situation and long-term health resilience as individuals and a community.
Reap What You Sow
‘Reap What You Sow: Valuing Workplaces that Grow Good Ideas’ is a case study on the process of measuring and monetising the well-being value of biophilia in architectural design. The study – run in collaboration with academics from Loughborough University, the University of Reading, and biophilic experts Benholm –explores how healthy and sustainable design decisions can be given a monetary value to enable real estate clients to fairly evaluate the worth of these interventions alongside other project costs.
Planet
Timber Towers
The Timber Towers were proposed in junction with University of Cambridge researchers and Smith and Wallwork Engineers, to develop strategies for the use of timber in high-rise construction. ‘Oakwood Tower’ is a proposal for a 300-meter timber tower in London’s Barbican Centre. The team’s second proposal ‘The Lodge’ is a 130-meter timber tower envisioned in The Netherlands. The team investigated the structural possibilities and the health and wellbeing benefits of a residential high-rises made of timber.
Unfolding
PLP Architecture has joined creative forces with the Centre for Natural Material Innovation at the University of Cambridge and Dukta to develop a sustainable geometric timber structure exhibited at 2021 London Design Biennale, at Somerset House in Central London. Unfolding examines the evolving relationship between nature and city, natural materials and buildings, and a flexible, adaptable and responsive future unfolding that balances people with the planet.
Technology
IUMO
IUMO (Integrated Urban Mobility) is a long-running study, with input from experts at the Transport Systems and Logistics Laboratory and Reed Mobility and support from Epic Games MegaGrant, to reimagine Crossrail 2. The project envisions the next generation of public transport by replacing conventional trains with high-speed platoons of shared Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEVs) running in a single Crossrail tunnel.
Genetic Form Miner
Genetic Form Mining Tool (GFM), a multi-parameter digital tool that ‘mine’ the most optimal architectural form for a building within a given set of planning constraints. The tool primarily uses height and setback compliance checks to determine results. It is influenced by constraints such as daylight compensation, which prescribes minimum and maximum base heights, sky exposure planes, and permitted encroachments and recesses.