Overview
Chunesh Sripalasetty, a fourth-year architecture student at Lovely Professional University, designed The Ground as a solo competitor from India — across a major time-zone difference, alongside teams from some of Europe's most established practices. His proposal refuses the market, museum and cultural-centre defaults and instead imagines Old Spitalfields Market as a permanently open civic refuge: free at every hour, for every person, with no ticket, no transaction, no closing time.
The concept
The Ground emerges from a deep reading of Spitalfields' 350-year history as a place of perpetual arrival — the Huguenot silk weavers in 1685, the Jewish community from Eastern Europe in the 1880s, the Bangladeshi families from Sylhet in the 1970s. Every community arrived alone and uncertain, and the building held all of them without asking anything back. The proposal asks it to keep doing exactly that for the next hundred years. Five architectural moves carry the idea: a Water Threshold at the entrance marking arrival; a permanently empty and free Commons Floor; a Woven Field of Corten steel spanning between the columns; a Memory Mezzanine carrying the living archive of every community that came before; and a Lantern Clock using calibrated reflective panels to tell civic time through light. At the centre of the nave, a helix climbing structure uses the Victorian column grid as its armature — the 1885 engineers having, almost accidentally, designed the world's most beautiful playground. The proposal is read across five temporal states — a spring community-growing market, a winter solstice feast, Ramadan Iftar, a pandemic distribution crisis and a 2054 heatwave emergency. The building changes completely every season; the purpose never changes.
Workflow & process
Chunesh began with history, memory and human emotion rather than form. Before opening Gendo he spent hours building an emotional archaeology of Spitalfields — understanding the grief of Huguenot exile, the resilience of the Jewish East End, the fought-for belonging of the Bangladeshi community, the layered complexities of contemporary cultural displacement. Only after understanding what the building had carried emotionally across 350 years did he begin designing. He used Gendo as an iterative design and visualisation tool to test six temporal states of the proposal. His prompt methodology was carefully structured around subject, context, spatial conditions, atmosphere, lighting and material character — keeping the imagery architecturally precise rather than merely aesthetic. Multiple iterations were produced and critically rejected wherever the historic iron hall lost presence or the conceptual integrity weakened. Final images were selected only when the Victorian structure remained the undeniable protagonist of the narrative.
Interview
Q: Was this your first time using Gendo, and how has your relationship with it evolved?
I began using Gendo one week before the competition opened. I had no prior experience and learned its logic entirely through the brief and the starter pack. What I discovered quickly is that Gendo rewards architectural thinking rather than artistic prompting. The more precisely I described spatial, atmospheric and structural conditions — capital heights, the quality of diffuse Victorian lantern light at noon, the Corten steel weathering to rust-red over time — the more architecturally intelligent the outputs became. Gendo did not replace design thinking. It accelerated it. What would have taken days of traditional rendering I could test in minutes, which meant I could afford to be wrong many times before being right once. In one week my relationship moved from curiosity to genuine design dependency. I now think of Gendo the way I think of a section drawing — not the final answer, but the instrument through which spatial ideas become testable and communicable.
Q: What did the result mean to you — and what would you do differently next time?
Receiving an Honourable Mention as a solo student working from India — across a major time-zone difference and alongside teams from some of Europe's most established practices — means more than I can easily articulate. It confirmed that architectural thinking is not defined by geography, resources or team size, but by the depth of observation, seriousness of intent, and willingness to think critically about space, people and the conditions architecture responds to. If I competed again I would invest much more time documenting the evolution of the work from the very beginning. The 15% process score was not simply about showing iterations — it was about making the thinking, the failures, the pivots and the gradual sharpening of the idea visible as architecture in their own right. I would also push the speculative and emotional imagery further. Some of the project's most original moments — the 3am occupation, the collective grief scenario, the 2081 cocooned-column vision — carried the strongest narrative potential, yet several did not fully make it into the final presentation. Extraordinary architectural conditions demand equally extraordinary representation.
Q: In your own words, what was it like to compete in Gendo 48?
It was the closest thing to a genuine design education I have experienced outside a studio. For 48 hours I was not a student producing work for assessment — I was an architect responding to a real brief, a real building, a real deadline and a real jury. The pressure clarified everything. Every decision had to be justified, every image had to earn its place, every word on a sticky note had to explain a decision rather than describe a picture. The constraints of the Victorian iron hall — the fixed columns, the protected trusses, the glazed lantern — became the most generative force in the design. The brief stated that the building type did not yet exist, and that single sentence changed my approach. The question was no longer 'What programme fits this building?' but 'What human condition does this building respond to?' Designing something worthy of Spitalfields' 350 years of holding exile, migration, grief, loneliness and collective life — even within a student competition, even from India, even alone — became one of the most serious architectural challenges I have faced.
Key takeaways
The Ground is one of the most conceptually ambitious entries in the competition, and a quiet rebuke to the idea that AI workflows favour speed over substance. Chunesh's process — beginning with 350 years of social history, then using the canvas to test atmospheres with surgical precision — is a template for how the next generation of architects might use these tools. Recognition this serious, at this scale, from this position, is the kind of result that reshapes a career.