Emilia Tudor - MA Interiors
ECHO
Echo is the culmination of my Master’s journey, shaped by a fascination with performance art, a deepening interest in sensory design, and a growing question about how sound defines the spaces we inhabit. It is both record and resonance: an attempt to design architecture that listens as much as it frames.
The project is set within the Castlefield Congregational Chapel in Manchester, a building that already carries layers of echo - both acoustically and culturally. Once a place of worship, later an ’80s recording studio, and now an office building, it embodies the city’s shifting cultural voice. Its soaring ceilings and stone walls produce long reverberation times: atmospheric for music but blurring for speech. Rather than suppress this, Echo embraces it, tuning each floor to a distinct frequency.
The design unfolds as a vertical composition. The basement remembers ritual and stillness, housing Oto, a matcha bar where the sounds of preparation become a performance, alongside spaces for sound healing and reflection. The ground floor celebrates Manchester’s rebellious music heritage through a sound bar and DJ booth, amplifying resonance and rhythm. The mezzanine shifts to intimacy, with an archive bar, record booths, and conversation pods made from recycled brass instruments. Finally, the bell tower transforms into a Sonic Lighthouse, projecting Manchester’s voices back into the city as patterns of light.
Echo is not simply a scheme but rather a manifesto: sound is not background, it is structure. It carries memory, heritage, and material weight. At a time when cities are often flattened by uniform facades or sanitised atmospheres, Echo insists on resonance. It reimagines architecture as polyphonic, where buildings act as instruments, tuned differently yet part of the same composition. To design with echo is to design with memory; to design with sound is to design with life.
