On Tuesday 11 June 1918, five mischievous, thrill-seeking women dressed in cotton twill jumpsuits, black leather button boots and floppy bonnets sipped tea while they gradually ascended high above the London skyline – a rebellious escape from the restrictive confines of their brick terraced houses below. Determined to experience more of the world beyond their domesticated lives, these industrious women took the wrenches out from their pockets, turned the necessary valves and filled the chamber below their feet first with water, then with gas, activating a large-scale Victorian infrastructural device and their ascent to the top of the Bromley-by-Bow gas holder. As Alice, Doris, Ethel, Hilda and Rose – workers of the Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company – drank their Earl Grey and peered through the wrought iron decorative Doric and Corinthian columns, they were struck by the expansive view. Unencumbered by the opaqueness of walls and enclosures, they gazed upon the world below, built upon industrialised colonial economies, discriminatory government systems and pattern-book homes. Uplifted by the voyage, the emboldened women stepped back onto the ground, joined their fellow Suffragettes and began dismantling conventional models of living by voting to change the world.

This year, will Diploma 16 unhouse the house?

As contemporary society hurtles along, engulfing AI-driven machines, digital fabrication systems and zero-carbon processes into its everyday fabric, the house has remained largely unchanged and static for centuries. We will read London through its infrastructural systems as a fertile space for new models of living and design a series of domestic devices that are shaped by the active and tangible impact of time in order to dismantle the typology of the house. DIP16 will speculate on house(s) for the here or there, now and again, near or far, and over and over, while we wander through dimensions of time – travelling together to ______ where?