The Urban Refuge of

the Rohingya

Remembering, Reconstituting & Reimagining Home
This project attends to the spatial understanding of ‘home’ across the trajectories of the Rohingya, a community that has been violently ‘unimagined’ from their homeland and has experienced prolonged displacement caused by their genocide, expulsion and statelessness. The work explores the ways in which the Rohingya remember, reconstruct and (re)imagine home throughout their displacement. As such, the project is divided into two parts. The first *remembers* spaces and practices which are no longer, in an attempt to archive what has and continues to be erased, while the second *reconstructs* and *reimagines* a spatial proposal in the Rohingya community's primary site of resettlement, the city of Bradford in England. The proposal appropriates a prominent existing and abandoned structural type or 'host', the industrial mill, to imagine alternative ways of domestic/urban inhabitation for resettled Rohingya communities. Nesting cultural artefacts, vernacular spatial elements such as the veranda, and larger spatial logics of private and public as ‘guest’ structures, it imagines moments where the ‘guest’ type challenges and is challenged by the ‘host’ type. As a result, orthodox notions of domestic, public, and labour are subverted to allow for radical forms of reproduction to occur across the city.
Institution
University of Cambridge
Year
2024
Accolade
Awarded a Distinction
Three Scenes: the Loom, the Tea House and the Staircase

Part I: Remembering Home

The Erased Material Cultures of the Rohingya: An archive cataloguing dozens of structures systematically destroyed in Rakhine State

Three Maps: Objects, Space and Memory

Three Axonometrics along the Trajectory

Part II: Reconstructing and Reimagining Home

Worm's Eye Axonometric-Existing Mill Buildings (1:200)

Plan-Ground Floor with Fragment Interventions (1:50)

Plan-Floor 01 with Fragment Interventions (1:50)

Latitudinal Section with Fragment Interventions (1:20)

Five Fragments: the Loom, the Minaret, the Pond, the Tea House and the Greenhouse

Technical Details: Using Timber to Shore a Mill Building

A Tapestry of Home: Remembering Homeland and Reimagining Home

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