Xylospectrum
Architecture: MArch
Katie Coan
Year 01
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Project
Set in the context of the Barbican, Xylospectra acts as a physical protest against prescribed conformity, offering a space for artists to explore creativity. The project blends together different pods, catered towards individual needs of their occupying creatives, set across a forest of timber columns.
The project challenges the dominance of unsustainable materials and rigidity of heritage restrictions. It demonstrates how architecture can be renewable, responsive, and deeply personal without compromising structural integrity or environmental responsibility. Harnessing the use of responsibly sourced timber and reclaimed leather, the design acts as a creative alternative to the Barbican’s carbon‑heavy legacy, proposing a future where material choices carry ethical and aesthetic weight.
Xylospectra stands as both an architectural proposal and a cultural argument - an insistence that creativity must not be contained, preserved, or held at arm’s length. Set against the Barbican’s monumental stillness, the project proposes a living, breathing alternative; a structure that grows, adapts, and refracts the identities of those who inhabit it. Where the Barbican’s concrete mass resists change, Xylospectra embraces it, offering a framework that evolves with its occupants and celebrates the diversity of their practices. Xylospectra draws its vitality from the present moment; from the artists whose work and presence continually reshape it. It becomes a catalogue not of what has been, but of what is unfolding. In a landscape defined by preservation, it argues for possibility.
