Overview
Kurt Chan and Thea Jiang — both working in the Netherlands, with backgrounds spanning Mecanoo, Cobe and Schmidt Hammer Lassen — won Gendo 48 with Spitalfields Living Room, a proposal that reclaims Old Spitalfields Market as a place of production, learning and exchange. Their entry treats the Victorian iron hall less as a heritage object and more as an active civic interior: a place where craft, migration and survival can write a new chapter together.
The concept
Spitalfields has always been shaped by makers — through silk, trade, migration and survival. The Living Room imagines a next chapter for that history: an agora, a library, a workshop and an incubator, all held within one of London's most extraordinary iron structures. The programme centres on tacit knowledge — the kind of skill that lives in the hands, that no tutorial can replace. Four zones (children, adults, fabrication, shared space) sit inside the existing market grid, separated by colourful modular elements and soft fabric thresholds that bring vibrancy to the muted historic fabric while helping people navigate the hall. Temporality is central. The modules are mobile, set on wheels in reference to Spitalfields' historic wholesale porters, and the space changes with daily, weekly and seasonal rhythms — from community painting and collaborative construction to eventual dismantling and upcycling. A living room, in other words, that is genuinely lived in.
Workflow & process
With only 48 hours, Kurt and Thea worked intentionally from the first hour. Friday evening was spent re-reading the brief and aligning on what the jury was actually asking for. By Saturday morning they had landed on the makerspace idea and were sketching, writing and gathering references in a shared mood board on the Gendo canvas. The canvas became their working surface — archival images, mapping, weekly schedules and spatial observations all in one place, turning fragmented research into a coherent story. Early image tests on Gendo showed that colourful pavilion-like structures could easily become chaotic inside the open hall, which led them to introduce curtains, softer thresholds and clearer zoning. Once the principles were set, they moved into Rhino for the base model — context, iron structure, modular interventions — then used Enscape for base views and developed them further in Gendo, layering atmosphere, people, activity and programme until the proposal had the warmth their concept demanded.
Interview
Q: Was this your first time using Gendo, and how has your relationship with it evolved?
This was not our first AI image tool, but Gendo felt like the first one truly tailored to architectural workflow. With other tools the process was fragmented — new chats, reloading, changing dimensions, photoshopping, downscaled images. We were looking for a more centralised system where image generation, editing, comparison and collaboration could happen in one place. We discovered Gendo shortly before the competition after seeing Ismail demo the canvas workflow, and the learning curve was almost zero — many tools seemed designed for architectural thinking specifically: material masking, style generation, iterative image development. The canvas quickly became the most important feature. It let us keep changes visible, compare options, build on previous ideas and comment directly in the process. Since then we have started using Gendo in our professional workflow, especially during early concept development. Even with a simple white massing model it helps us communicate ideas, materiality and atmosphere more directly within the team.
Q: What did the result mean to you — and what would you do differently next time?
Winning meant much more than receiving a title. It felt like validation of our curiosity, and an encouragement to keep exploring what AI brings to design. These tools are lowering what were once incredibly high technical thresholds — especially in image generation — and they let anyone with a strong idea, spatial imagination and a compelling narrative bring a vision to life. Creativity and storytelling become even more fundamental. Seeing all the entries for Gendo 48 also showed us how much more there is to learn. Other teams pushed the toolset in ways we had not fully explored, from rendered sections and animated plans to detailed zoom-ins.
Q: In your own words, what was it like to compete in Gendo 48?
Gendo 48 was a unique experience, and something we will cherish for a long time. The short deadline pushed us to work smart and make full use of the platform — from using the canvas to share ideas collaboratively, to rendering images simultaneously in the final hours. What we appreciated most was that the canvas board itself became the final submission. That made the process and workflow just as important as the final product. In such an intense, hackathon-style competition you are forced to be both precise and creative.
Key takeaways
Spitalfields Living Room stands out for the discipline of its decision-making under pressure. Kurt and Thea treated the canvas as the project's connective tissue — research, references, iteration and submission held in a single working surface — and let the historic iron hall remain the protagonist. The result is a proposal that feels both rigorous and warm: a civic interior that knows exactly why it exists, and a working method other studios can learn from.