The third annual STORE London Summer School in Art & Architecture challenged students to design, construct and arrange an open air stage in over two weeks in Dalston’s Gillett Square. Working closely with performance artists Firdaws Fourcroy and Paulina Lenoir, and with the support of Hackney Co-operative Developments, students tailored a collaborative design to the performers’ script and the complex dynamics of the square. A stage ‘in the round,’ that is encircled by the audience, can create a complex and immediate critical relationship between performer and viewer. Throughout the Summer School, students rehearsed, prototyped and built in the square itself, in full view of the general public. In this sense, students were encouraged not just the final show, but the workshop itself as ‘in the round,’ continuously testing the relationship between architecture and performance in a challenging urban environment.