THE ART SCHOOL ON OXFORD STREET

The Art School on Oxford Street, Hedley’s graduation project, proposes the conversion of the former London College of Fashion into an alternative model for living, learning and working in central London. Developed in response to the student housing crisis, the project brings students and practising professionals into the same building, allowing education, production and domestic life to overlap rather than exist as separate programmes.

The existing structure is treated as a material resource as much as a building, with elements dismantled, reused and reassembled as part of its transformation. At its centre, the Cyanolith, a vessel cultivating cyanobacteria for the production of bio-concrete, turns the school itself into a site of material experimentation. The result is an art school conceived less as a finished institution than as a framework continually altered by the people, materials and activities within it.