Design Anthology PG12 Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2) Compiled from Bartlett Summer Show Books
Our Design DNA At The Bartlett School of Architecture, we have been publishing annual exhibition catalogues for each of our design-based programmes for more than a decade. These catalogues, amounting to thousands of pages, illustrate the best of our students’ extraordinary work. Our Design Anthology series brings together the annual catalogue pages for each of our renowned units, clusters, and labs, to give an overview of how their practice and research has evolved. Throughout this time some teaching partnerships have remained constant, others have changed. Students have also progressed from one programme to another. Nevertheless, the way in which design is taught and explored at The Bartlett School of Architecture is in our DNA. Now with almost 50 units, clusters and labs in the school across our programmes, the Design Anthology series shows how we define, progress and reinvent our agendas and themes from year to year.
2023 Architecture is a Time Traveller Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2022 Architect as Storyteller: Forest City Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2021 Rewilding London Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2020 Cultivating the Future and the Past Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2019 Designs on the Past, Present and Future Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2018 A City in a Building in a City Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2017 What is New? Matthew Butcher, Jonathan Hill 2016 The Public Private House Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2015 Occupying the City of London Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2014 The Shock of the Old and the Shock of the New Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2013 Factual Fictions Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2012 A New Creative Myth Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2011 Hybridisation and the Air and Industry of London Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2010 Time, Motion, Energy Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
2009 Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2008 Hubbert Curve Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2007 Making History Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2006 City within a City, the Independent Quarter Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2005 About Time Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 2004 The Public Private House Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
2023 Architecture is a Time Traveller Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
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Architecture is a Time Traveller
PG12
Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Assembled from materials of diverse ages, from the newly formed to those centuries or millions of years old, and incorporating varied rates of transformation and decay, a building can curate the past, inform the present and imagine the future, transporting us simultaneously to many different times. The stones of a building belong to the geological time they were wrought, the time they were quarried, the time they were integrated into a construction site, the ever-progressing time of subsequent environmental change, and the varied times they are experienced. We may seem to travel back in time, even as architectural materials and components have literally travelled forward to meet us. A building does not just exist in time: it creates time, travelling forward as a message to the future. However, there is nothing as old-fashioned as a past vision of the future. We have all experienced the sense that time has reversed. An era that seemed to be in the past becomes the future. In the 21st century the environmental catastrophe of 20th century agricultural overproduction now sees hedgerows replanted, industrial pesticides discarded and farms rewilded. The low tolerance of complex building systems sees thermal comfort reassessed and traditional technologies revived. This year students in PG12 have designed for a future time and place, and creatively considered their relations with both past and present. Flowing incessantly back and forth but never remaining the same, the river is a metaphor for the passage of time. We began the year at the strategic regeneration site of Gravesham Borough Council at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. For our field trip we studied past visions of the future and imagined future visions of the past in Edinburgh and Glasgow along the Forth and Clyde rivers. Students have subsequently designed a new civic architecture, in a time and place of their choice, with the ambition that their building is inventive and bold, considering both the need for longevity and the ability to anticipate and respond to change.
Year 4 Maria Chiocci, James Hepper, Edwin Maliakkal, Naomi Powell, Alice Shanahan, Jiayi (Silver) Wang, Yuen-Wah Williams Year 5 Ted Bosy Maury, Xinhao Chen, Giorgios Christofi, Bryn Davies, Silvia Galofaro, Pierson Hopgood, James (Kai) McLaughlin, Kwan Yau (April) Soo, Joe Watton, Yunshu (Chloe) Ye Technical tutors and consultants: James Hampton, James Nevin Thesis supervisors: Camillo Boano, Eva Branscome, Murray Fraser, Sophia Psarra, Guang Yu Ren, David Rudlin, Robin Wilson, Fiona Zisch Critics: Sabina Andron, Felicity Atekpe, Kirsty Badenoch, Sabina Blassiotti, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Ana Monrabal-Cook, Penelope Haralambidou, Jan Kattein, Constance Lau, Elliot Nash, Rahesh Ram, Tom Reynolds, Isaac Nanabeyin Simpson, Dom Walker, Tim Waterman, Alessandro Zambelli
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12.1 Giorgos Christofi, Y5 ’Aphrodism: (Re)forming Cypriot Heritage, The Parliament of Social Affairs’. The project assesses the Cypriot buffer zone as an infrastructure of segregation between the two communities inhabiting the island. The project proposes transforming the buffer zone into a social affairs parliament, resolving frictions and promoting symbiosis between Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots by enforcing a cultural merger through the cultivation of the Cypriot landscape. 12.2 Kwan Yau (April) Soo, Y5 ‘Architecture as the Guardian of Collective Memory’. Swimming is a seemingly innocent and mundane activity that is familiar yet cleverly allows for the congregation of people. The project takes the approach of being apolitically political and proposes peaceful collaboration to build an urban pool. It engages with significant buildings and explores previously unconsidered ways of interacting with water. 12.3 Alice Shanahan, Y4 ‘Playing Politics: A People’s Parliament’. The North Yorkshire coastline is being pushed to breaking point: environmentally, socially and politically. Realised through political, material and seasonal transitional timelines, the architecture responds accordingly. Community and the need for radical change are re-embedded into the landscape, redefining connections between land, sea and people. 12.4 James Hepper, Y4 ‘Building [Dwelling]: The Slow Build’. In the era of the instant, this project looks instead to wider timescales: tidal rhythms, seasonal cycles and the gradual accretion of the salt marsh. In the postindustrial waterfront of Gravesend, The School of Earthworks and Ecology celebrates slowness in its shifting, slip-cast spaces and remedial planting strategies. 12.5 Edwin Maliakkal, Y4 ‘An Architectural Palimpsest’. Mumbai has a remarkable history interwoven with the textile industry and its mills, many of which are now derelict. The proposal aims to capture the essence of Mumbai, demonstrating an admiration for its identity and cultural heritage. In doing so it evokes a sense of familiarity by encouraging memories of Mumbai to be inscribed and erased over time. 12.6 James (Kai) McLaughlin, Y5 ‘A Paper Architecture for Messy Hybrids’. The project tackles the fixed understanding of hybridity, investigating different types of cultural intersection and their manifestations. A squatting Paper School in the former Imperial Paper Mill becomes a site for messy, diverse identity production, usurping the imperialistic provenance of the mill. Paper’s material capacity is expanded to serve the processes of learning, testing, negotiating, building and rebuilding in a dialogue of collective cultural production. 12.7–12.8 Silvia Galofaro, Y5 ‘The Mud Dredger: Muddy Waters and the Unloved Spolia’. The proposal challenges the forgotten relationship between the City of London and the River Thames. A mud-dredging building is proposed that carefully selects and curates the river’s leftovers. The building contributes to improving the river’s health by simultaneously reconnecting the city to some of its lost or overlooked accounts. 12.9 Yuen-Wah Williams, Y4 ‘Coalhouse, Stiltbury: A Collaged Architecture’. Severe weather anticipated as a result of climate change means that much of Tilbury, Essex is at risk of flooding. This project collages together local architectures that are vulnerable to flooding and raises them on a reclaimed steel frame that sits over Coalhouse Fort. Tilbury’s large unemployed population will be offered the opportunity to retrain and learn construction trades to form the workforce that will carry out the project. 12.10 Naomi Powell, Y4 ‘Regenerating the Hoo: Creating a Symbiotic Relationship with the Thames Estuary’. Taking the stance that we must learn to live with flooding, climate 370
researchers and citizen scientists act as guardians of the river, establishing a hybridised wetlands centre. Through the cultivation of oysters and seagrass, and the harnessing and amplification of natural regenerative processes they learn and share vernacular construction skills to create an architecture designed to deteriorate. 12.11 Maria Chiocci, Y4 ‘Monumental Arcadia’. Based in Rousham House and Gardens, the project considers the construction of a monumental arcadia – a poeticshaped space associated with natural splendour in which animals and humans live in harmony. The proposal uses a scenographic approach to encourage moments of rest and contemplation, creating an architecture of Otium. 12.12 Jiayi (Silver) Wang, Y4 ‘In the Presence of Absence’. Within their absence lies a reminder of the former prosperity of the River Thames’ downstream towns and the artistic finesse of Chinese artistic techniques. Inspired by the journey of a museum conservator, the project’s design unveils a silk painting restoration, transforming this hidden craftsmanship into a performance for all. 12.13 Ted Bosy Maury, Y5 ‘A Cornish Pixie: Reading the Witches of Boscastle’. The project embodies the theatricality of tarot readings. This is realised through performing a ‘reading’ of the North Cornish site of Boscastle; its attendant climate-precarity, history of salvage and magic, coastal liminality; and the collection of the existing Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. 12.14 Bryn Davies, Y5 ‘The Metamorphosis of St Luke’s: Resplendence, Ruination, Renaissance’. The project charts the inhabitation of St Luke’s Gravesend from its 1960s inception as a non-denominational place of worship on the banks of the Thames, through a steep period of decline and ruination due to dwindling passenger numbers, to its current day renaissance as a new school of fine art. 12.15 Pierson Hopgood, Y5 ‘White Mountain College: A Research and Rehearsal Library for the Dyslexic Arts’. This project imagines a Library for the Dyslexic Arts set in 1960s Ash, Kent. The library is an educational facility for painting, sculpture and architecture that utilises dyslexic thinking to further the art world and to drive research. The library’s collection continually evolves creating a dynamic interplay between artworks and architecture. 12.16–12.18 Xinhao Chen, Y5 ‘House of Spirits’. The project reflects on worship and ritual, questioning how spirits and the living might interact without the involvement of religion. Proposing an alternative worship ritual, centred on the harvest of sorghum, a set of built forms for human occupation are proposed, dedicated to the spirits of Dachuan, China. 12.19 Joe Watton, Y5 ‘Cliffe Fort: An Adaptable Monument’. The project imagines an alternative history for Cliffe Fort, an abandoned Victorian military site near Gravesend. Questioning Silkin’s post-war rehousing programme, the site is reappropriated as an experimental ninth new town for the capital; built interventions serve as monuments to the longlost qualities of life in the slums of wartime London.
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2022 Rewilding London Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
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Architect as Storyteller: Forest City
PG12
Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
We expect a story to be written in words, but it can also be delineated in drawing, cast in concrete or sown in soil. Such tales have special significance when they resonate back and forth between private inspiration and public narrative. Conceiving the architect as a storyteller places architecture at the centre of cultural production, stimulating ideas, strategies and emotions. Exceptional architects are also exceptional storytellers. While a prospect of the future is implicit in many novels, it is explicit in many designs. Some architects conceive for the present; others imagine for a mythical past, while yet others design for a future time and place. Alternatively, an architect can envisage all three in a single structure. To understand what is new, we need to consider the present, the past and the future: we need to think historically. Our concern is the relevance of the past – recent or distant – to the present and future, even as we speculate on the question: how and why might this happen now? As well as history in its broader sense, we are interested in personal history. PG12 encourages students to develop a personal collection of ideas, values and techniques that reflects their unique outlook. Our project brief for the year was the Forest City. We considered the city as a place of nature and growth, and the forest as a state that connects air to earth, climate to geology. We observed how each forest, city or building is a complex ecosystem, teeming with creatures and subject to their rhythms, intertwined in a network of relations with other life forms, including humanity. The Forest City, being analogous to an ever-changing ecosystem, should be more temporally aware than other architectures. It requires constant re-evaluation, encouraging and questioning the creative relations between objects, spaces and occupants at varied dimensions, scales and times. Multiple iterations of the Forest City were designed and redesigned, both literally and allegorically. With the forest journey acting as a metaphor of the imagination, each project was founded upon the stories that students conceived, the research that they undertook and the architectural languages that they developed and honed across the year.
Year 4 Theodosia (Ted) BosyMaury, Giorgos Christofi, Silvia Galoforo, Pierson Hopgood, James (Kai) McLaughlin, Joe Watton Year 5 Caitlin Davies, Lola Haines, Theodore Lawless Jones, Jaqlin Lyon, Sijie Lyu, James Robinson, Felix Sagar, Gabrielle Wellon, Tianzhou Yang, Yunshu (Chloe) Ye Technical tutors and consultants: James Hampton, Chloe Hurley, James Nevin Thesis supervisors: Gillian Darley, Stephen Gage, Christophe Gérard, Stelios Giamarelos, Polly Gould, Elise Hunchuck, Thomas Pearce, Guang Yu Ren, Oliver Wilton, Stamatios Zografos Critics: Alessandro Ayuso, David Buck, Carolyn Butterworth, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Kate Cheyne, James Hampton, Penelope Haralambidou, Jessica In, Chee-Kit Lai, Constance Lau, Thandi Loewenson, Artemis Papachristou, Barbara Penner, Rahesh Ram, Elin Söderberg, Jonathan Tyrrell, María Venegas Raba, Dominic Walker, Dan Wilkinson, Fiona Zisch
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12.1 James Robinson, Y5 ‘Martian Migrators: The Non-Essential Essentials of Thriving on Mars’. The project examines how humans might flourish on Mars. The notion of thriving is explored through the development and success of humans and architecture in the inhospitable environment of Mars. Components of Martian thriving are questioned through individual and large-scale studies. 12.2, 12.3 Caitlin Davies, Y5 ‘For Peat’s Sake: A DEFRA Institute of Agricultural & Architectural Research’. Proposed as the new seventh division of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the institute acts as a site where agricultural and architectural research can be developed in tandem. By moving government offices to the remote peat bogs of the Yorkshire Dales, the project reframes nature as the building’s primary occupant and explores how architecture can be an active participant in the conservation of these damaged landscapes. 12.4, 12.5 Tianzhou Yang, Y5 ‘A Sanctuary for Chinese Calligraphy in the Desert’. This project explores ways to preserve the art of calligraphy and its spirit of independence in an ever-changing political and cultural environment. Located in the harsh environment of the Gobi Desert in north-west China, the sanctuary is far from the political and urban madding crowd, in the hope that unwanted hands are kept away from the masterpieces of calligraphy. The centre allows calligraphers to study these masterpieces in peace, so that recognisable versions can continually contribute to the preservation of cultural heritage. 12.6, 12.7 Felix Sagar, Y5 ‘The Chalk Works: Chalk-Based Renovation, Remediation and Regeneration’. Through establishing wider systems of material industrial symbiosis and methods of tailored chalk-based renovation, this project proposes the use of waste chalk ‘filter cake’ to renovate, remediate and regenerate the derelict Shoreham Cement Works, converting it into a ‘Chalk Works’ – a construction school which offers an alternative material-driven curriculum. 12.8 James (Kai) McLaughlin, Y4 ‘Staging Liminality’. The project explores ways in which effective cultural hybridisation can mobilise direct forms of productive ecological and societal change. It proposes the construction of a Japanese Noh theatre on the site of a recently demolished lighthouse on the shingle spit of Orford Ness. The scheme uses reconstruction as a ritually resilient practice to act alongside this dynamic landscape of coastal erosion. These rituals of construction are superimposed onto a wider shingle restoration scheme, blurring the boundaries between performance, restoration, participation and construction. 12.9–12.11 Lola Haines, Y5 ‘A Debate in the Dark’. How can we have more accessible ways of seeing and sharing our riverscapes? This project provides an alternative way of engaging with our riverscapes. An eco-political initiative of dark sky river corridors addresses distinct yet overlapping subjects: water and light pollution, climate change and flooding, and social and economic migration. 12.12 Jaqlin Lyon, Y5 ‘Cold Comforts and Savoury Air: A Hospital for Bodies and Buildings’. Through the dialectic of illness and repair, the project explores notions of care at the scales of body and building. Treating an array of illnesses which at times overlap in surreal and theatrical operations, the hospital conflates past, present and future narratives within the crumbling city of Kiruna in northern Sweden. 12.13, 12.15 Theodore Lawless Jones, Y5 ‘A Weird Pub in the Middle of Nowhere’. Bizarre carvings on the King Stone monolith on Stanton Moor posit a pictorial and literary conundrum in which Charles Dickens’s imaginary 306
realm enters the actual. Both the real and fictitious worlds exist as vignettes in an inverted presentation of the mundane to deliver a body of junctures and phenomena celebrating the mystery. 12.14 Joe Watton, Y4 ‘Of Sheep, Stone & Hedgerows’. The project responds to the recent developer-led expansion of Axminster, a historic agricultural market town in East Devon. The current masterplan is used as a testbed to develop a more socially and ecologically responsive vernacular derived from the centuries-old network of Devon hedgerows which currently occupy the site. 12.16–12.18 Sijie Lyu, Y5 ‘Getting Lost in the Woods’. We are obsessed with the undistorted quality of glass but overlook its magical potential. The project challenges the limited range of applications glass is currently afforded within the built environment. Material choices in the proposal often counter building conventions, demonstrating the performative and theatrical side to a new architecture located in the Black Forest, Germany. 12.19 Giorgos Christofi, Y4 ‘Re-Fertilising Gaia’. The Temple of Gaia (goddess of the Earth) is located between the city of Kalambaka and the Meteora forest in Greece. The Ancient Greek ritual of Thesmophoria is revived in the temple in an effort to encourage the regrowth of the forest in exchange for human fertility. 12.20 Pierson Hopgood, Y4 ‘Lore of the Land’. The New Epping Commune, an evolving school of craft and construction, explores the long-lasting metaphorical connection between storytelling and craft. The project focuses on the importance of using one’s hands and building a deeper spiritual connection with the process of making. 12.21 Theodosia (Ted) Bosy Maury, Y4 ‘Spinning Ruins’. This is an alternative history in which the Crescent Wool Warehouse in Wapping is adapted and added to by two artists in alternation. Over the course of several decades, the pair make an accretive theatre, constructed of salvaged materials, castings, rubble aggregates and wool, which filters and stores storm surge water. 12.22 Silvia Galofaro, Y4 ‘San Siro: Destroying and (Re)building an Icon’. The project reimagines the iconic San Siro Stadium in Milan, scheduled for demolition in 2026, by reanalysing the contemporary notion of iconoclasm. By referencing the Duomo Cathedral of Milan and the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo guild, the project explores the process of reverse quarrying through the Roman technique of spolia. 12.23 Gabrielle Wellon, Y5 ‘Freedom to Roam’. The project presents a proposal for a more progressive right to roam in England that encourages greater inclusivity and access to open space. By extending the right to a wider variety of landscapes and designated openaccess buildings, the proposal intends to encourage roaming, both internally and externally. Situated in the context of Wiltshire’s private estates, the constructed spatial narrative is based on the allegorical Wiltshire ‘everywoman’, Ruby.
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2021 Rewilding London Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
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Rewilding London
PG12
Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Exceptional architects are exceptional storytellers. Such tales have special significance when they resonate back-and-forth between private inspiration and public narrative. When everybody else is looking at one time and place, it is always good to look elsewhere as a discovery may be yours alone, and thus more surprising. In PG12, we learn from the past and stimulate radical solutions for the future. Our project this year was ‘Rewilding London’, from which new architectures, landscapes, ways of living and cities emerged. The source of inspiration might be a person, place or event. Equally, it could be a construction technique or material language. The inevitability of change – whether of climate, ethics or architecture – requires us to utilise it, notably as a design may take years to complete. Conceiving design, construction, maintenance and ruination as simultaneous ongoing processes that occur while a building is occupied, we encourage designs that are drawn in multiple times and states. Assembled from materials of diverse ages, from the newly formed to centuries or millennia old, and incorporating varied rates of transformation and decay, a building is a time machine that curates the past and imagines the future. The last ten years have witnessed significant changes that will influence our education, jobs and national identities: the 2008 worldwide financial crash, 2016 Brexit vote and the target for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Furthermore, 2020 and 2021 were momentous years as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ideas about climate change express wider societal values, including attitudes to nature, governance and design. The dangers of global warming are real and need to be addressed when and where possible, notably because their effects are unequal, often causing greater harm to disadvantaged communities. Awareness of climate change may also encourage cultural, social and environmental innovations and benefits, whether at a local, regional or global scale, stimulating more thoughtful and exciting designs. Architects must have the courage to ask awkward questions. We need to look deeper into the past and further into the future. Rewilding usually entails transforming land into a self-conserving system with minimal human intervention, but the term has greater relevance when it is applied to the urban as well as the rural. It is understood as a means to acknowledge the interdependent coproduction of the human and non-human in all aspects of a shared Earth.
Year 4 Caitlin Davies, Lola Haines, Theodore Lawless Jones, Jaqlin Lyon, James Robinson, Felix Sagar, Gabrielle Wellon, Tianzhou Yang Year 5 Sabina Blasiotti, James Bradford, Jean-Baptiste Gilles, Elliot Nash, Callum Rae, Arinjoy Sen, Benjamin Sykes-Thompson, Chuxiao Wang, Yunshu (Chloe) Ye Technical tutors and consultants: James Hampton, James Nevin Thesis supervisors: Alesandro Ayuso, Edward Denison, Murray Fraser, Daisy Froud, Stelios Giamarelos, Elise Hunchuck, Zoe Laughlin, Tania Sengupta, Iulia Statica Critics: Kirsty Badenoch, Carolyn Butterworth, Blanche Cameron, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Adrian Hawker, Jan Kattein, Toni Kauppila, Constance Lau, Igor Marjanovic, Jason O’Shaughnessy, Franco Pisani, David Shanks, Tim Waterman, Alex Zambelli, Fiona Zisch
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12.1 Callum Rae, Y5 ‘The Olive Morris Institute for Drawing, Building and Squatting’. The project provides an alternate proposal for the site formerly occupied by Olive Morris House: the Lambeth Council housing office in Brixton and named after the housing activist Olive Morris. The proposal is a new educational institution that teaches hand-drawing and construction skills as constituent parts of an architectural education that combine in the embodied act of squatting. 12.2–12.4 Arinjoy Sen, Y5 ‘Rituals of Resistance: Narratives of critical inhabitation’. The project addresses the contested inhabitation of fragile ecosystems in the Sundarbans, situated in the borderlands of Bangladesh and India. It proposes a self-sustained productive settlement that fosters a construction of spatial identity, while elevating the significance of indigenous land stewardship. Additionally, the settlement seeks to increase the ritual narrative practices of marginalised and hybridised identities, as a means to resist erasure, through the apparatus of a travelling theatre. 12.5 Jean-Baptiste Gilles, Y5 ‘The Bricks, the Stucco and the Air’. Before we can propose a less-damaging way of living in which isolation of the building is reduced, air must be considered as an architectural material. The project is a series of bedrooms for guests of the Royal Institution. An architecture is created that can be appreciated through the bricks, stucco and the air. 12.6–12.8 Chuxiao Wang, Y5 ‘Lost in London’. The project is an enigmatic book describing the lives of monsters in London. The monsters struggle to adapt to city life and carry out their purpose of freeing the ravens in the Tower of London. By telling their stories and experiences, the book explores a non-anthropocentric city life involving history, mythology, legend and literature, interweaving the real with the unreal and history with the future. 12.9 Jaqlin Lyon, Y4 ‘The Embassy for Dirty Things, Messy Ideas & Unfinished Endeavours’. Dirt denotes difference; using its power to disrupt, the project proposes a reconfiguration of cultural attitudes, bureaucratic order and objective values. Exploring the transgressive potential of programmatic hybrids and formal paradoxes to overcome binaries within social, cultural and political operations, the Embassy combines a laundromat, debate chamber and printing press in London’s bureaucratic district. This creates space for public exchange in the margins of hegemonic structures. 12.10 Felix Sagar, Y4 ‘The Aldgate Chalkland School of Special Scientific Interest’. The proposal explores wilding the un-wild city child using chalk as a ‘bonding material’. By using atmospheric phenomena, human and non-human occupants establish new urban dialogues. The project explores how an existing building and curriculum might be altered to support a wild and non-didactic learning model. Inspired by biological mutualism, the method links the process of play to biological and geological cycles that create new learning landscapes. 12.11 Lola Haines, Y4 ‘A Theatre for ‘Lesser’ Creatures’. The theatre addresses urban society’s disconnect with nature. Learning from and giving agency to the environment creates a dialogue of exchange with humans. The theatre’s function is linked to natural and seasonal events, like insect migration and behaviour, to stimulate greater change across the city. As insects disperse pollen, a wandering theatre festival seeds the ground for future growth. 12.12–12.14 Sabina Blasiotti, Y5 ‘The Village Inside the Nuclear Power Plant’. The design narrates the future of a decommissioned nuclear power plant and the surrounding village Mihama in Japan. The narrative generates and is generated by an interminable dialogue between nuclear forms and heritage, recycled nuclear 266
waste and traditional customs in the coastal town. This dialectic is further reflected in the construction of a Shinto sanctuary, integrating ceremonial and commercial activities such as fishing, rice farming and sake brewing. 12.15 Benjamin Sykes-Thompson, Y5 ‘Barking Sands & Borough Bells: The London sound authority’. The project is informed by Japanese sound culture that does not resonate with architectural acoustics and reintroduces the overlapping aural communities that once made up London’s population. Architecturally, spaces mimic the aural spaces of old Whitehall – areas of rumour, declamation and democratic ‘transparency’ – while also exploring the phantom sounds that exist between ourselves and the perceived built environment. 12.16–12.17 Theodore Lawless Jones, Y4 ‘The New HM Liberty of the Clink’. A contrived shimmering neon microclimate, where darkness reveals lost rhythms in sedentary human existences, stimulates behaviour to rewild London. Condemned prisoners, guilty of environmental wrongdoing by the Court of the Clink, lead a primitive existence in their communal and autonomous garden complex. The objectives are personal desistance, the empowerment of synanthropic birds within their delicate urban-ecosystem and the consequent realisation of mutual fulfilment and natural affinity. 12.18 James Robinson, Y4 ‘Martian Miners of Portland’. Having settled on Mars for the past 30 years, the first Martian miners have come back to Earth. Residing on the Isle of Portland, Dorset, within the Coombefield Quarry, the practice of a New Stone Age is formed. Fabricated from the history of Portland and future Martian regolith mines, the Portland-Martian vernacular is created. 12.19 Tianzhou Yang, Y4 ‘Ode to Life: A natural process’. This project is designed for gradual and pain-soothing organic burials where both fallen leaves and deceased human bodies integrate with nature to nurture new life. Fallen leaves are collected and memorialised through the construction and reconstruction of the cemetery. Human bodies are composted to further contribute to the prosperity of plants, accentuating that life is not linear but circular. 12.20 Caitlin Davies, Y4 ‘The Worshipful Company of Dismantlers’. The 111th guild within the City of London promotes the reuse of the city’s architecture through the act of dismantling and remantling. The new guild reflects the role the built environment plays within the environmental crisis and how we might change the practices and reasons for building as we do. 12.21 Gabrielle Wellon, Y4 ‘News from Nowhere’. Rendering the fantastical commons-based world of cooperation, sketched out by William Morris in his utopian novel News from Nowhere, or, an Epoch of Rest (1890), the project proposes a community in Gospel Oak, London, that is self-governed, managed and developed by the residents. Morris’ conceptualisation still retains the potential to stimulate a democratic dialogue between work, art, nature and society. 12.22 Elliot Nash, Y5 ‘Forgetting Whitehall; Casting Blackhall’. The project proposes a building that subverts methods of physical and non-physical preservation, to fold time through Whitehall in pursuit of a kind of rewilded London. It moves through themes of redaction and transience, and the idea of the counter monument to arrive at an architecture that challenges contemporary thought and practice around conservation.
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2020 Cultivating the Future and the Past Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
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Cultivating the Future and the Past
PG12
Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
A building can be designed for the present, in response to contemporary contexts, needs and desires. A design can be a selective, critical and creative response to the past. Equally, a prospect of the future can be implicit in a design, which is always imagined before it is built and may take years to complete. Some architects conceive a design for the present, some imagine for a mythical past, while others design for a future time and place. Alternatively, an architect can envisage the past, the present and the future in a single architecture. Architectural time incorporates design, construction, use, maintenance and ruin. Rather than a temporal sequence, each stage can occur simultaneously. Demolition is essential to construction and building sites often appear ruinous. Ruination does not only occur once a building is without a function: it is a continuous process that develops at differing speeds in differing spaces while a building is constructed and occupied. Assembled from materials of diverse ages, from the newly formed to those centuries or millions of years old, a building incorporates varied rates and states of transformation and decay. Our increasing appreciation of sustainability and limited resources can lead us to recognise that maintenance might be where some of the most impressive and challenging innovations are found. Fluctuating according to the needs of specific spaces and components, maintenance and repair may delay ruination, while accepting and accommodating partial ruination can question the recurring cycles of production, obsolescence and waste that feed consumption in a capitalist society. The inevitability of change – whether of use, climate, or governance – requires us to consider the future as well as the present. How should a building react to climate change when, for example, it is predicted that London will have the climate of Barcelona by 2050? How long should a building last? 100 years? 200 years? 1000 years? In response to anthropogenic climate change and in support of sustainable development, we propose that buildings should be designed to endure and adapt, emphasising longevity not obsolescence. Construction, maintenance and ruination are conceived as simultaneous and ongoing processes. Our designs are drawn in varied times and states. In PG12 this year, the farm is a metaphor for a design project. Combining construction and maintenance, growth and decay, a farm is always specific to the qualities of a place – its climate, topography, material and social conditions – and what is best cultivated there, whether that is food, wind, stories, health, architecture, community or ideas. A farm can build upon its past and cultivate the future.
Year 5 Amelia Black, Jonathon Howard, Laura Keay, Przemyslaw Rylko, Isaac Simpson, Serhan Ahmet Tekbas Year 4 Sabina Blasiotti, James Bradford, Jean-Baptiste Gilles, Elliot Nash, Callum Rae, Arinjoy Sen, Aryan Tehrani, Benjamin Sykes-Thompson, Chuxiao Wang, Yunshu (Chloe) Ye Thank you to our Design Realisation tutor James Hampton and structural consultant James Nevin Thesis supervisors: Stylianos Giamarelos, Anne Hultzsch, Sophia Psarra, Tania Sengupta, Oliver Wilton Thank you to our critics Alessandro Ayuso, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Ben Clement, Sam Coulton, Sebastian de la Cour, Stelios Giamarelos, Mary Vaughan Johnson, Jan Kattein, Perry Kulper, Constance Lau, Igor Marjanovic, Ganit Mayslits Kassif, Mario Pilla, Elin Soderberg, Eva Sopeoglou, Sumayya Vally, Dominic Walker, Izabela Wieczorek
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12.1 Isaac Simpson, Y5 ‘An Architecture Between Cultures: the Highland Council’. This project is an imagination of the African gaze mapped onto the British landscape. The project’s ambition is to challenge existing landownership boundaries by constructing a ‘radical’ vessel that roams across the Scottish Highlands, rehabilitating the land and cultivating conversations in a way that requires communities’ cultural diversity and appreciation. 12.2 Amelia Black, Y5 ‘St Just State’. The landscape of Land’s End was forever changed by the human endeavour to extract tin and copper from the earth. St Just State is a micro-nation striving to re-industrialise, rejuvenate and re-establish the local economy. A new vernacular of industrial buildings reclaim the tin mines of a now deprived area of West Cornwall. Sculpted from the landscape, they are constructed by the community that inhabit them. Forever evolving, St Just State not only produces goods, but a skilled construction workforce. 12.3–12.4 Laura Keay, Y5 ‘The New English Rural’. This project is essentially the development of a code for living that proposes new and/or refined approaches to how we might construct a rural architecture, and how we might reuse and repair. This is applied to a somewhat counter-intuitive testbed site to what we might judge to be rural – a brownfield site in Rochester, that is struggling both socially and economically. The main outcome deals with the issues of unemployment, education and income, exploring whether a rural life can contribute to an urban community’s wellbeing and future development. 12.5 James Bradford, Y4 ‘Westminster Arboretum’. The Westminster Arboretum is an architectural response to the threat of global warming, seeking to protect native British species of tree from extinction. Constructed and grown from the trees themselves using traditional horticultural methods, the project suggests a necessity that cities must adopt a hybrid between an architectural and a reforested landscape. 12.6 Yunshu (Chloe) Ye, Y4 ‘Operation Hide and Seek: The Ministry of (Anti)-surveillance’. As the UK hurtles towards a surveillance state during the Covid-19 crisis, this project seeks to create an anti-surveillance government body that is ‘hidden in plain sight’ by being temporarily ‘blinded’, ‘muted’, or ‘deafened’ with the help of a series of playful mechanisms inspired by children’s games. 12.7 Chuxiao Wang, Y4 ‘The Rebirth of Peng’. All things have spirits. This project narates a space as a living creature, recalling a spiritual connection among monster (shelters), nature (the local environment) and mankind (users). Born as a half-fish half-bird monster, ‘Peng’ uses its talent to guide the poet to sense the wind, creating an intimate dialogue between the poet and nature. This bond evokes the poetry of life. 12.8 Callum Rae, Y4 ‘The House They Left Behind’. Consisting of a public house, a town hall and a private residence, this project is a reassertion of the political and social qualities of publicly owned social spaces and a reimagining of Victorian bar spaces and thresholds. 12.9 Sabina Blasiotti, Y4 ‘The Death, the Vine and the Soil’. This project introduces a human composting facility and biodynamic winery in the abandoned island of Poveglia in the Venetian lagoon. Poised between the notion of the ‘terroir’, phenomenology and Gothic architecture, the design rises from the ground where it will return in the fullness of time. 12.10–12.12 Jonathon Howard, Y5 ‘A Liminal Place: the (Re)construction of Kilmahew’. This project considers the role of the architect and archaeologist in uncovering the peculiar past, present and future of St Peter’s Cardross, Scotland. Students of a hybrid school of architecture and archaeology propose and test new forms of construction 262
through the reconstruction of the forgotten Kilmahew house, exercising tectonic, archaeological and architectural palimpsest. 12.13 Serhan Ahmet Tekbas, Y5 ‘The Ruins of the Woodland Library’. Found within Sherrardspark Woodland in Welwyn Garden City, this project is inspired by the literary principles of Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Framed as a parafiction, the project explores fertile ground to find meaning between principles of literary fiction and the architectural imagination. It is a venture into a realm of dichotomies between architecture and literature, architecture and landscape, architecture and the wilderness. 12.14–12.15 Arinjoy Sen, Y4 ‘Productive Insurgence: Towards the Autonomous (Re)production of Common(s) Within and Against the State’. This project seeks to question the ways in which the people of Kashmir, India produce and reproduce themselves in order to create an apparatus for (re)production towards a circular economy independent of State-Capitalist systems, facilitated by the continuous construction, maintenance and development of built infrastructure. The project situates itself within the ongoing political crisis and conflict in Kashmir to propose a productive network of commons within and against State control, towards a form of emancipation and sustenance for the community in this struggle. 12.16 Elliot Nash, Y4 ‘The Imitation Custom House’. This project proposes an architecture whose construction is rooted in the poetic. The Imitation Custom House is cast from the existing neo-classical Custom House, from which it derives its ‘copied’ physical character. The Thames is employed as both the building’s site and the medium of its construction; the concrete mix is cast with the rise and fall of the river’s tides. 12.17–12.18 Jean-Baptiste Gilles, Y4 ‘The School of Architectural Ignorance’. In the face of a climate emergency, this project rests upon the idea that sustainability can no longer be a step in the architectural process, but rather should become fundamental to its creation. In order to do so, a fundamental rethink of our relationship to the building, and our methods for creating buildings should happen. At the School of Architectural Ignorance, the curriculum turns academics specialising in climate research into teachers of students of architecture. Their ignorance of architecture is turned into an advantage, allowing for inventive and unprejudiced thinking, influenced by the constant mutations of the clay-constructed school as it reacts to its immediate environment. 12.19 Benjamin Sykes-Thompson, Y4 ‘Re-flooding the East Anglian Saltmarsh’. The government’s new Environmental Land Management System (ELMS) programme is used to fund four architectural insertions, dwarfed in size by the expanse they form, which breach existing sea walls and curate tidal flows. These insertions return drained land to sea and reframe societal notions of landscape ‘stewardship’ and the role of architecture in mediating this conversation. 12.20 Przemyslaw Rylko, Y5 ‘The British Library North’. This project investigates the relationship between ever-expanding knowledge and the physical experience of accessing it. Looking at the role of the library in the 21st century, the British Library North mixes the analogue and digital, the extraordinary and everyday, the monumental and intimate. Past and future exist together in a single building.
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Designs on the Past, Present and Future Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
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Designs on the Past, Present and Future
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Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
The architect will ‘always be dealing with historical problems – with the past and, a function of the past, with the future. So, the architect should be regarded as a kind of physical historian… the architect builds visible history’,1 wrote art historian Vincent Scully (1920-2017). The architect, therefore, is a ‘physical novelist’, as well as a ‘physical historian’. Histories and novels both need to be convincing but in different ways. The historian acknowledges that the past is not the same as the present, whilst the novelist inserts the reader in a time and a place that feels very present, even if they are not. Although no history is completely objective, to have validity it must appear truthful to the past. A novel may be believable but not true. As a history is a reinterpretation of the past that is meaningful to the present, each design is a new history. Equally, a design is equivalent to a fiction, convincing users to suspend disbelief. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be delineated in drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in soil. A building can be designed for the present in acknowledgement of contemporary contexts, needs and desires. A design can also be a selective, critical and creative response to the past. Equally, a prospect of the future can be implicit in a design, which is always imagined before it is built and may take years to complete. Some architects design for the present, some imagine for a mythical past, whilst others create for a future time and place. In many eras, the most fruitful innovations have occurred when ideas and forms have migrated from one time and place to another by a translation process that is stimulating and inventive. Thus, a design can be understood as specific to a time and a place, and also a compound of other times and other places. In conceiving a design as a history and a fiction, we encourage a simultaneous and creative envisaging of the past, present and future in a single architecture. We began the year by studying unrealised architectures to understand how politics, economics and aesthetics undermined their construction. We wanted to understand the stories – some fact and others fiction – that surround their histories, and to speculate upon the question: ‘How and why might this happen now?’ Our project was to design a public building that imagined the past, present and future in a single architecture, representing and stimulating the values and practices of two interdependent organisations – national and international – and multiple populaces – local, regional, national and international – that collaborate and prosper for mutual benefit.
Year 4 Amelia Black, Jonathon Howard, Laura Keay, Przemyslaw Rylko, Isaac Simpson, Aryan Tehrani Year 5 George Entwistle, Tasnim Eshraqi Najafabadi, Niki-Marie Jansson, Francesca Savvides, Yu (Nicole) Teh, Yat Chi (Eugene) Tse, Dominic Walker, Yushi Zhang Thank you to our Design Realisation tutor James Hampton and structural consultant James Nevin Thank you to our critics: Ana Araujo, Alessandro Ayuso, Matthew Blunderfield, BarbaraAnn Campbell-Lange, Sam Coulton, Mark Dorrian, Adrian Forty, Murray Fraser, Stylianos Giamarelos, Niamh Grace, Penelope Haralambidou, Bill Hodgson, Mary Vaughan Johnson, Brian Kelly, Perry Kulper, Chee-Kit Lai, Constance Lau, Ifigeneia Liangi, Lesley McFadyen, Barbara Penner, Rahesh Ram, Sophie Read, David Shanks, Sayan Skandarajah, Tania Sengupta, Dan Wilkinson, Alex Zambelli
1. Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), pp221, 257 253
12.1 Tasnim Eshraqi Najafabadi, Y5 ‘Transforming Coryton Refinery to a Post-Petroleum Garden Town’. This project is a critique of oil culture and envisages post-petroleum imaginaries for a former refinery in south Essex. An experimental garden town in a refinery, the proposal oscillates between poetic and practical, suggesting gardening as an agency and a way of life to provide for society and rehabilitate the dilapidated ecology. Composed according to available resources, it comprises infrastructural interventions and architectural typologies which blend the land’s past and future. 12.2 Niki-Marie Jansson, Y5 ‘The Ally Pally Annex: A masonry megastructure’. This project seeks to connect and dismantle established social and financial boundaries between London boroughs, in an attempt to address a group of urban, environmental, sociological and psychological problems. The design proposal manifests as a series of elevated and subterranean load-bearing masonry infrastructures that integrate themselves on a masterplan scale within London. They converege at a proposed megastructure undercroft at Alexandra Palace in north London. The infrastructure utilises the structural typology of the vault as a flexible building strategy. 12.3 Przemyslaw Rylko, Y4 ‘House of Leave and Remain’. This project reflects on the poor quality of discussion between so-called ‘Brexiteers’ and ‘Remainers’. A sequence of acoustic, tactile and visual links attempts to connect people who might have different political opinions by establishing them as partners in conversation, instead of opponents to be defeated. The project is a response to the condition of Brexit, but is not ‘for’ or ‘against’ it; instead its primary aim is to foster principles of mutual understanding and respect. 12.4 Amelia Black, Y4 ‘The People’s Republic of Foundlings’. A critique of the Garden City Plan, ‘The People’s Republic of Foundlings’ is a micronation that uses the development of construction skills and community building to create a new egalitarian community typology. Each resident is fundamentally involved in both the material and immaterial construction of the community, utilising a systematic division of domestic and physical labour, as well as shared spaces, to alleviate pressures of a traditional ‘female’ caregiver role. 12.5–12.6 Jonathon Howard, Y4 ‘Sh*tHouse to Penthouse’. The project chronicles a selected sequence of domestic built interventions in unoccupied buildings in Hackney Wick that transfer from site to site and progressively accumulate into a complete building that recalls the memories of all the previous sites. The project narrates a renewal of current housing conditions through a variation of transformative processes that incorporate memories of the past and present, and that can be a suggestion for a potential future. 12.7–12.8 Laura A Keay, Y4 ‘Leyhalmode – The Fisheries Courthouse’. This project explores how a country might choose to rethink how it draws upon its own natural resources to build, govern and trade. It is set within a satirical Britain, in post-Brexit 2029, after a no-deal vote within parliament has led to to a halt in trade between the UK and EU. The architecture harks back to ‘older’ construction techniques, as the building industry is constrained by materials only produced and manufactured within the UK.
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12.9 Isaac Simpson, Y4 ‘Terra Nullius: A vast land belonging to no-one’. The project’s ambition is to challenge the national borders of West Africa with another border, in order to redefine the term ‘border’; not as a line that splits cultures but as a line that connects. The West African institute of agroforestry will walk across the sub-Saharan lands planting rows of tree fields creating a reforestation border that re-fertilises the arid land for future agriculture. The locals decide the direction of these tree fields, in turn describing a new border mapped by the people, for the people. 12.10–12.12 Dominic Walker, Y5 ‘The Orkney Island Re-Forestry Commission’. This project seeks to understand the role of ‘origins’ and ‘endings’ in the production of architecture. The idea of ‘endings’ has become a growing theme in our comprehension of climate change, yet our minds are still captivated by the idea of salvation through technology. This project instead considers the idea that perhaps we have, as a species, reached a natural ending within the deep cycles of the world? 12.13 Francesca Savvides, Y5 ‘The Case for a New Architect’. The project is inspired by the recent movement to re-establish architecture departments in the public sector, and studies previous models of practice, such as the London County Council, to gauge what opportunities and capabilities would be afforded to architects in these new cross-boundary roles. The project proposes the ‘Bishopsgate School of Building’, a holistic school where architects, planners and construction workers would train together to develop a new age of ‘civicness’. 12.14 Yat Chi (Eugene) Tse, Y5 ‘A Museum of Hong Kong, by Hong Kong, for Hong Kong’. The Museum of Hong Kong sets out an approach for Hong Kong’s future in China. The result is a new reality of Hong Kong that contains China. The idea of reality in the architecture is expressed through symbolism. The project addresses the struggle of Hong Kong architects to retain a sense of their own cultural identity in modern international contexts by posing the questions: ‘What is Hong Kong?’, ‘What should be remembered?’ and ‘What should be forgotten?’ 12.15–12.16 Yushi Zhang, Y5 ‘The National Agricultural College 2028’. The project proposes a new model for the future of farming and rural dwelling under a ‘no-deal’ Brexit scenario. Taking the form of an agricultural college, the project proposes the possibility of a more democratic, cooperative-owned farm, with a new ‘national agricultural conscription’. This is in order to regenerate a new attitude towards farming and making farming a life skill rather than a profession. 12.17–12.18 Yu (Nicole) Teh, Y5 ‘Institute for International Summit Negotiations’. As a reaction to the current de-globalisation movement, the project proposes an Institute for International Summit Negotiations, providing a space for press conference talks and private discussions. Sited in Singapore, a place seen as a neutral territory, it is a critique of the over-conditioned environment (both in terms of light and air) that itself seems to reveals a fear of darkness and disorder. The project focuses on the uses of darkness and natural ventilation, questioning how these ‘fears’ have brought about detrimental environmental consequences that should be addressed. 12.19–12.21 George Entwistle, Y5 ‘Wilding the City of London’. The project outlines a proposal for a town hall, set within a new forest planted in the heart of the City of London, replacing Guildhall as the seat of power. Covering ten acres of the Square Mile, the forest plays on historic precedent and folklore, and represents a place of liberty. The project is the antithesis of the current spatial conditions within the city and is divorced from its social, economic, and political hierarchies. Instead, it represents a more primal, natural order of governance.
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A City in a Building in a City Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
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A City in a Building in a City Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Year 4 George Entwistle, Niki-Marie Jansson, Francesca Savvides, Serhan Ahmet Tekbas, Yu (Nicole) Teh, Yat Chi (Eugene) Tse, Dominic Walker, Yushi Zhang Year 5 Sophie Barks, Boon Yik Chung, Samuel Coulton, Iga Martynow, Daniel Meredith, Elin Soderberg, Eleni Zygogianni The Bartlett School of Architecture 2018
Thank you to our Design Realisation tutor James Hampton and our DR structural consultant James Nevin Thank you to our critics: Ana Araujo, Alessandro Ayuso, Roo Bernatek, Nicholas Boyarsky, Eva Branscome, Tom Coward, Edward Denison, Max Dewdney, Ben Ferns, Jan Kattein, Constance Lau, Ifi Liangi, Thandi Loewenson, Hugh McEwen, Tom Noonan, Samir Pandya, Rahesh Ram, Peg Rawes, Sophie Read, David Roberts, Tania Sengupta, Takero Shimazaki, Sayan Skandarajah, Eva Sopeoglou, Ro Spankie, Catrina Stewart, Michiko Sumi, Dan Wilkinson
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The Roman god Janus looked two ways simultaneously: to the past and to the future. The most creative architects have also looked to the past and to the future in order to reimagine the present. In many eras, the most fruitful architectural innovations have occurred when ideas and forms have migrated from one time and place to another, by a process of translation that has proved to be as stimulating and inventive as the initial conception. Twenty-first-century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new. According to Vincent Scully, the architect will ‘always be dealing with historical problems – with the past and, a function of the past, with the future. So the architect should be regarded as a kind of physical historian…the architect builds visible history’. The architect is a ‘physical novelist’ as well as a ‘physical historian’. As a history is a reinterpretation of the past that is meaningful to the present, each design is a new history. Equally, a design is equivalent to a fiction, convincing users to suspend disbelief. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be delineated in drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in soil. As well as being tangible and physical, a city may exist in our memories and in our imaginations, and no-one shares the exact same knowledge or experience. Architects from the Renaissance to the present day have repeatedly emphasised the analogy of a house to a city, which is notably expressed in Andrea Palladio’s remark that ‘the city is nothing more or less than some great house and, contrariwise, the house is a small city’. The house he refers to is not the private house that we know today, but a house that combines private and public lives, whether a farm, a business or a workshop. Precedents for such a megastructure – that incorporates multiple functions in a single form – include Old London Bridge, Kowloon Walled City, and the welfare state universities of the 1960s. In response to climate change and the need to create a compact, sustainable and seasonal city, Unit 12 proposes that all the programmes – houses, schools, farms, cinemas, businesses, industries – necessary to sustain a rich and varied urban life should once again be integrated into a single complex – a city in a building in a city – an intimate megastructure.
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Fig. 12.1 Elin Soderberg Y5, ‘The Woodland Parliament’. The Swedish Riksdagshus (eng: Parliament) is in need of renovation. The project proposes an alternative seat for the Riksdag, relocated from central Stockholm to the depths of the Royal National City Park forests at the fringes of the city, and speculates on a revived Swedish timber architecture that continues to draw upon the primitive memories of the forest. Figs. 12.2 – 12.4 Eleni Zygogianni Y5, ‘The Village of the Two Rivers: A New Hope for the Future of Greece’. The project is a believable utopia, a modern myth and hypothesis on how Greece could be transformed in the future by repatriating the emigrated ‘Generation G’ that left the country after the economic crisis. The project reconstructs and revives the public ‘heart’ of the Cretan village in a surreal and symbolic
dialogue with the culture, history and stories of the island. Fig. 12.5 Sophie Barks Y5, ‘The Central Civil Registration Bureau’. The project reddresses the mandatory civil registration integral to the underpinning of our status within society and the key life events of birth, marriage and death. It considers the process as moments of civil celebration and reflection. Furthermore, the project examines architectural language and historical ‘styles’ with the hybridisation of the image of history within modern design.
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Figs. 12.6 – 12.8 Iga Martynow Y5, ‘Slavic Free Theatre’. Inspired by the Belarus Free Theatre and designed with the aim of becoming its main performance space, this open-air theatre combines the aesthetics of Soviet Modernism with traditional North Slavonic architecture. Set within an artificially-created tidal meadow, the building explores notions of modern Slavic identity through symbolic ornament. Fig. 12.9 Boon Yik Chung Y5, ‘A Portrait of London’. A tragicomedy, this project explores the potential of architecture as a commentary on the human condition through designing spaces that reveal social tensions and existential angst, represented in paintings, embedded with political, social, cultural and art historical allusions, mirroring the grandeur and grotesque of contemporary urban living.
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Fig. 12.10 Yu (Nicole) Teh Y4, ‘City of Darkness’. The City of Darkness is a critique of the over-conditioned environment of Singapore, from the excessive use of artificial lighting to air-conditioning. The proposal focuses on the design of the first building of the city, the house of the Mayor – a place of work and display for architecture and art of the dark. Fig. 12.11 Francesca Savvides Y4, ‘The Green Line Parliament’. The project is sited in Cyprus in the Nicosia buffer zone and is a new parliamentary building to be used in the event of a solution to the ‘Cyprus problem’. Until that day the building stands as a monument and as a space for ongoing peace talks and communal projects. Fig. 12.12 Dominic Walker Y4, ‘The Monastic School of Architecture’. One might see architecture itself as a sort of quasi-religion, rich with tradition and myth.
Its practices have long been associated with ideas that stretch beyond economics and utility. This proposal seeks to celebrate such a mythic notion of architecture, through the implementation of a lifelong hermetic educational model. Fig. 12.13 Niki-Marie Jansson Y4, ‘The Independent Province of Angel’. The Slow City responds to the erratic and fast paced nature of urban redevelopment prevalent in today’s society, and aims to exploit brick as London’s default material. The project manifests itself as an incremental infrastructural development within Angel, Islington, reintroducing brick manufacture as a local productive industry, in order to provide a catalyst for integrated social development.
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Fig. 12.16 Yat Chi (Eugene) Tse Y4, ‘The Guild of Bitcoin Miners’. The project outlines the disarray and ugliness of the capitalist society in the UK by using the rise of Bitcoin to pose the question ‘what is the most valuable?’. The Guild would develop a new Gothic language for the 21st century and offer a school to re-educate unemployed Welsh coal miners with a new craft. Fig. 12.17 George Entwistle Y4, ‘Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society’. The project takes the form of a design for the headquarters of a new and alternative planning authority for London. A subverted spatial sequence and curious detailing in the design of the headquarters aims to assist in tackling the corruption that is currently present within the planning process.
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Fig. 12.14 Yushi Zhang Y4, ‘An Art Academy for the Forgotten Coal Miners’. The project responds to the closure of the largest open pit coal mine in Fushun, China. It seeks to re-imagine the life within the coal mine after its industrial life span. The project explores the process in finding a new architectural language and identity for the abandoned site and its forgotten people. Fig. 12.15 Serhan Ahmet Tekbas Y4, ‘The Monument To The Lovers of Famagusta’. Sited within the contested grounds of Famagusta in Northern Cyprus, the monument and performative architectural characters are constructed of social, cultural and political stories that propose a future for the ghostly Salamis Ruins. The project investigates the role of the storyteller architect and explores dichotomies that include written/oral stories, human/machine and human/architecture.
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Fig. 12.18 Daniel Meredith Y5, ‘HMYOI Hutton’. The project is a young offenders institution, sited near Torridon in the Western Highlands of Scotland. The institution is located directly over the Lewisian Complex, the oldest bedrock geology in the UK. Through building with such ancient materials, excavated from the site, the institution aims to instil an appreciation of the present. Fig. 12.19 Samuel Coulton Y5, ‘London Resomation and Physic Garden’. Inspired by Derek Jarman, and Yves Klein’s blue monochromes, the project is a proposal to introduce a resomation necropolis and physic garden; in which our relationship with death is readdressed through the implementation of a botanical garden on the site, fed by the nutrient rich effluent water, generated through resomation.
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What is New? Matthew Butcher, Jonathan Hill
Unit 12
What is New? Matthew Butcher, Jonathan Hill
Year 4 Sophie Barks, Boon Yik Chung, Samuel Coulton, Iga Martynow, Dan Meredith, Elin Soderberg Year 5 Christia Angelidou, Mariya Badeva, Emma De Haan, Mihail Dinu, Clare Hawes, Rawan Hussin, Raphae Memon, Meya Tazi, Ioana Vierita The Bartlett School of Architecture 2017
Thank you to our Design Realisation tutor James Hampton of Periscope, and DR structural consultant James Nevin of Blue Engineering Thank you to Ben Clement and Sebastian de la Cour of benandsebastian Thank you to our critics: Ana Araujo, Alessandro Ayuso, Shumi Bose, Eva Branscome, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Tom Coward, Oliver Domeisen, Ben Ferns, Paul Fineberg, Omar Ghazal, Sean Griffiths, Jessica In, Chee-Kit Lai, Constance Lau, Lesley McFadyen, Tom Noonan, Luke Pearson, Peg Rawes, Gilles Retsin, Tania Sengupta, Ana Vale, Nina Vollenbröker, Dan Wilkinson
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The desire for the new is seen in our need to consume the latest fashions, technologies, artworks and ideas. The promise of the new stimulates the recurring cycles of production and obsolescence that feed consumption in a capitalist society. But it is also a creative and critical stimulus to cultural, social and technological innovation. This year, our aim is to explore how this informs the ways we conceive and produce architecture. Often, what is presented as new is not new at all, but a revival of an earlier form, idea or practice. To ask ‘What is new?’ involves other questions: why is it new, how is it new, and where is it new? Alongside cultural and social investigations into notions of newness, we ask what is really new in any subject that concerns us. The 20th century avant-garde were the quintessential advocates of the new. They sought to discover art forms that would question bourgeois traditions and transform society culturally, socially and politically. Their influence was profound even though they were assimilated into the cultural establishment. To explore the possibilities for a better world, we ask what is a new avant-garde today, what should it propose, what values and systems should it question and why. To understand what is new, we investigate the present, the past and the future: we think historically. Defining something as new is an inherently historical act because it requires an awareness of what is old. We are not interested in unquestioning newness for its own sake, and we do not wish to reject the past or negate its value. Sometimes the old is even more radical than the new. Rather than the modernist tabula rasa in which the new destroys the old, we propose an evolving dialogue between the new and the old in which one informs the other. Thomas More’s Utopia celebrated its 500-year anniversary in 2016, reviving questions of its present relevance. One possible translation of its full title ‘De optimo rei publicae deque nova insula Utopia’ is ‘Of a republic's best state and of the new island Utopia’. More was reputed to have refused to translate his Utopia from Latin, but we look at translation as a means to imagine the new. Our site is Berlin. More than any other European city, Berlin offers a cavalcade of buildings that were once really new. Continually reinventing itself, Berlin offers a historically and politically fecund environment in which our students proposed a state, an island or a quarter of considered newness. Initially this new state was remotely imagined from London. In Berlin we set its foundations, and on our return to London this ‘city within a city’ was brought to fruition.
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Fig. 12.1 Raphae Memon Y5, ‘Tierwald: Berlin’s City-ArchitectScenographer’. The project is a landscape of buildings-aspublic-squares, deep in a constructed forest within Berlin’s Tiergarten. In the centre is the city-architect-scenographer, a yearly appointed artistic director of the city who coordinates the fragmented architectures so that they transform during the interstices between sunrise and sunset. The design facilitates scenographic proposals for the city, which are designed, built, tested, performed and stored. Light creates perceptive conditions of darkness and provokes scenographic occupations for the future. Fig 12.2 Iga Martynow Y4, ‘Museum for Dada Art’. The museum is located on the exact site of a 1920s exhibition. It plays on ideas of the nonsensical and absurd, recreating the original gallery as a labyrinth of
interconnected rooms, inhabiting the spaces between the white, superfluous grid. Fig. 12.3 Elin Soderberg Y4, ‘The New Friedrichshain Bank’. Addressing themes of financial speculation and time, the project positions itself within the recurring property cycle. Set within a geological and seasonal timescale, it discusses the possibility of a new model for slow banking. Fig. 12.4 Boon Yik Chung Y4, ‘Museum for 20th Century Arts’. A fix for Herzog & de Meuron’s botched attempt, the project employs creative strategies associated with artistic practice in the synthesis of idea and physical production of architecture, to create gallery spaces truly representative of 20th century arts: radical, humorous and subversive. The alternative proposal tests the limit of architecture as a creative practice, and personal and societal
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12.8 expression. Fig. 12.5 Sophie Barks Y4, ‘Kriminalgericht Totschlag; Law Court, Berlin’. The project responds to the constructed, complex environments of dreams that feature a directory of architectural elements both familiar and unfamiliar, assembling these fragments and juxtaposing them together. It also embodies the liminal transition theories of ritual and its place within our society. Fig. 12.6 Dan Meredith Y4, ‘The Cuvry Brache Memory Health Clinic’. The project proposes that in a society obsessed with information and data collection, the things we remember are new. Forgetting is made spatial and experiential through degradation – symbolic of the decay of human memory. Fig. 12.7 Samuel Coulton Y4, ‘Berlin School of Environmental Policy’. Climatic conditions are recorded and celebrated as the occupants and architect enjoy
‘submitting to the seasons.’ Timescales at the micro and macro levels are exhibited, through tracking of the sun across a room, bleaching of cladding over a year, or gradual change in how the building can be used. Fig. 12.8 Mariya Badeva Y5, ‘Eastern Objects, Western Fields: The Architecture of the New Berlin Quarter’. Situated in Berlin’s biggest void, the former Tempelhof airport, the project explores newness and nostalgia, utopia and heterotopia, emptiness and possibility, event and appropriation. An island within a city, the proposal conceives of a new quarter in the heart of Berlin, established by the users of the field. A dispersed assemblage of unexpected individual buildings, the dynamic space is put to the creativity of the new non-architect, allowed on the field not simply as a visitor but also as a creator. 197
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12.9 Fig. 12.9 Emma de Haan Y5, ‘New Architecture of Romance’. We are at a moment in history where political relationships between countries, governments, politicians and subjects are turning sour. As a reaction, this project proposes a New Architecture of Romance for Berlin. Applied to a Ministry for Foreign Reunification affairs, the building facilitates the long and intimate discussion needed for diplomats to decide whether to divorce, marry or reunite. Its language challenges our flippant visualisation of romance, reinstating its fundamental importance with a material palette that is also a relational cross-section.
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12.11 Figs. 12.10 – 12.11 Ioana Vierita Y5, ‘Under the Linden-Tree, a Nursery and an Elderly Care Home in Berlin’. This project proposes a new urban model for a future intergenerational city as a new typology for urban space. It seeks to unite generations that have become estranged from one another, or who are generally displaced outside the city centre, by offering them a habitat in the city. Continuing the tradition of German Romanticism’s desire for a harmony between the creative genius and the rational world, public space is represented as a dreamy part-paper, part-papercrete ambiguous space, which stirs the visual imagination.
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12.12 Fig. 12.12 Mihail Dinu Y5, ‘EU Renegotiations Institute’. This project is concerned with the Union’s Extended Process of Self-Inquiry initiated in the aftermath of the British EU Referendum. Its functions are housed within a parastatal architecture which manifests critical distancing through its campus layout. Material unity and the stereotomics of the fragments washed ashore by the flexing and convoluting of the Spree create an architecture of multiple localities within the city of Berlin.
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12.14 Figs. 12.13 – 12.14 Clare Hawes Y5, ‘In the Pink: A New Headquarters for the United Nations’. Following the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, the future status of the United States within the United Nations has become uncertain. The project speculates on the relocation of the UN Headquarters from its existing location in New York to Lustgarten, Berlin. The project is an investigation into where the new headquarters should be located, what it should look like and how it might function.
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12.16 Fig. 12.15 Rawan Hussin Y5, ‘The International Commission for Nazi-Looted Art’. The proposal is a response to the looting of art in Germany by Soviet forces after World War II, and its hardness is an analogue for its fleshy history. A new advisory body is responsible for investigating the war-related removal of cultural property under Soviet occupation, while housing a collection of objects that have been subject to illegal trafficking and destruction. Fig. 12.16 Meya Tazi Y5, ‘Kreuzberg is Not Babylon: The Civil Defence Community of Kreuzberg’. The project becomes the symbol of its resilient and insurgent communities, a prototype of resistance against gentrification. An alternative ecological typology uses waste to counter the urban and anthropogenic crisis. An architecture of assemblage, as a barometer to the changing environment 202
of Kreuzberg, destabilises the entrenched imagery of individualistic mastery and control of the mogul system. Kreuzberg’s waste becomes its resource reservoir and resists its full domestication. Fig. 12.17 Christia Angelidou Y5, ‘Four Journeys to ‘New Hope’, a School for Cypriot Peace Culture Education, in the Last Divided Capital: Nicosia, Cyprus’. The project attempts to restore peace in the island of Cyprus, by inviting people from both Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities to recognize their shared connections to existing places of division. Four journeys through four different parts of the school unfold temporal and physical locations of the past as a crucial means of creating understanding between the different groups of people.
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The Public Private House Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
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The Public Private House Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Year 4 Christia Angelidou, Mariya Badeva, Emma De Haan, Mihail Dinu, Simona Fratila, Clare Hawes, Rawan Hussin, Yi Lu, Raphae Memon, Ilaria Rigodanzo, Henry Schofield, Meya Tazi, Ioana Vierita
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Year 5 Stephanie Brancatisano, Kacper Chmielewski, Holly Crosbie, Matthew Sawyer, Luke Scott, Zahra Taleifeh, Matthew Turner Thanks to our Design Realisation tutor James Hampton and structural consultant James Nevin We would also like to thank our critics: Eva Branscome, Ruth Bernatek, Emma Cheatle, Tom Coward, Edward Denison, Tina Di Carlo, Oliver Domeisen, Murray Fraser, Omar Ghazal, James Hampton, Colin Herperger, Charles Holland, Jan Kattein, Chee Kit Lai, Constance Lau, Ifi Liangi, Jon Lopez, Hugh McEwen, Lesley McFadyen, Hikaru Nissanke, Tom Noonan, Luke Pearson, Mariana Pestana, Rahesh Ram, Peg Rawes, Jane Rendell, Alisdair Russell, Oliver Salway, Tanya Sengupta, Ro Spankie, Eva Sopeoglou, Tijana Stevanovic, Elly Ward, Gabriel Warshafsky, Dan Wilkinson, Alex Zambelli
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In Unit 12, we recognise the history within the discipline of architecture – an internal dialogue of evolving ideas, forms and tectonics – and we equally acknowledge the history of architecture’s interdependence with social, cultural and political developments. Claiming a degree of artistic autonomy is as necessary to creative speculation as understanding and engaging contemporary conditions. In many eras, the most fruitful innovations have occurred when ideas and forms have migrated from one time and place to another by a process of translation that has been as inventive as the initial conception. Critical admiration of the past has often been a creative stimulus in the present. Erwin Panofsky even identifies the start of the Renaissance with the moment when “the whole classical sphere … became an object of nostalgia”. The unnecessary opposition between tradition and innovation was a modernist cliché. But the most celebrated modernists were more subtle in their approach, leading Le Corbusier to compare Platonic forms to cars and Mies Van Der Rohe to state: “I felt that it must be possible to harmonize the old and the new in our civilisation. Each of my buildings was a statement of this idea”. Vincent Scully concludes that the architect will “always be dealing with historical problems—with the past and, a function of the past, with the future. So the architect should be regarded as a kind of physical historian”. The most creative architects have always looked to the past to imagine a future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it. Twenty-first century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new. A recurring theme states that the house is the origin and archetype of architecture. The home of the home, as we understand it today, is seventeenth-century Netherlands, when domestic architecture became private and familial. In subsequent centuries, the segregation of functions within the home mirrored the segregation of functions within the city. Challenging this isolation, Louis Kahn recalled the Renaissance analogy of a house and a city to characterise the house as the smallest social institution, concluding that, “every building is a house, regardless of whether it is a Senate, or whether it is just a house.” Our project this year is the design of a house-institution for an international organisation or society in London, which as a place to live and work has a public and a private life.
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Fig. 12.1 Kacper Chmielewski Y5, ‘Humanistic Typology’. The project investigates a relationship between elements of ecclesiastical architecture and the fulfilment of the psychological needs of humanity, with special attention to religious interpretation of light. Questioning the notion of Divine Light, the project proposes its replacement for secular society – Humanistic Light – relating translucency of digitally milled marble to the works of Johannes Vermeer, and humanist values. Fig. 12.2 Christia Angelidou Y4, ‘The Future of Humanity Institute’. The project unfolds as a narrative, which takes part in a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally. The spaces witness contradictory events and programmatic impossibilities: surgeons, philosophers and astrophysicists all congregate until new hypotheses appear.
The collage technique is evident in the juxtaposition of materials and the fragmentary conditions hint of an architectural language of assemblage. Fig. 12.3 Raphae Memon Y4, ‘The Theatre of Tectonic Veils’. As a tower of theatre, the building hides and reveals the backstage nature of everyday performance on the streets of Seven Dials. By night a scenography emerges to transform the area into a working stage-set. Veils become tectonic and spatial as actor/ spectator boundaries are broken, and the public space performs within a new narrative. Fig. 12.4 Yi Lu Y4, ‘Confucius Institute’. Located on Wood Wharf, a former dockland close to Canary Wharf, the institute acts as a temporal retreat allowing people to slow down the pace. The architecture is interpreted in phenomenological dimensions, directed towards spatial
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12.6 sequence, light, and material, which formulates users’ multi-sensory experience and ultimately leads to one’s spiritual cultivation — the core thinking in Confucian philosophy. Fig. 12.5 Mariya Badeva Y4, ‘The UNPO Public Private House’. Remembering that autonomy refers to notions of separation, opposition, confrontation and critical distance, and defined by certain new typologies, the project proposes a house-institution for the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation — UNPO. The project highlights the creative tension between the claim to autonomy and the social and political realities of the present. Fig. 12.6 Matthew Turner Y5, ‘The New London Law Court’ questions the traditional solidity of the language of the law court, in which the architecture is often one of stability and reassurance in opposition to the
ambiguity of right and wrong. It is located at the confluence of The River Fleet and The Thames, a hinterland between the power of The City and Westminster. The location was once known as Alsatia, a sanctuary that was immune to the powers flanking it. Thus, the building inhabits a fluctuating intersection of both the political and environmental.
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Fig. 12.7 Ioana Vierita Y4, ‘A House for Natural Philosophers’. The proposal explores the possibility of a fully permeable research institution. As a reflection of the empiricist way of learning, based on intuitive thought and personal understanding, the experience of the building resides in the perception of ephemeral moments, playing on the idea of distorted memories and unfamiliarity of space that once seemed familiar. Fig. 12.8 Rawan Hussin Y4, ‘The International Climate Change Register’. The isolated structure seals itself in an ancient woodland, and explores the relationship between the natural and artificial. The institute will contribute towards the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to review and assess the most recent scientific information produced on site. Fig. 12.9 Emma De Haan Y4, ‘The Compulsive Creator’s
Drawing Centre’. Within every creative process, there is a compulsive obsession with production. A pattern of creation — a compulsion to draw. The building explores the explainable and the inexplicable, conscious and subconscious, intended and accidental. Examining how users may interrupt a desired system creating an exquisite corpse, grafting owner and un-ownership. Fig. 12.10 Mihail Dinu Y4, ‘Royal Commission for Perpetual Peace’. Negotiations involve intense dialogue between two or more parties. In the proposal delegates assess the viability, stability and risk of their strategies with every exchange. The design reflects on these human practices and negotiates timescales, skills and the human component into a unified space, radiating architecture.
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Fig. 12.11 Henry Schofield Y4, ‘Exuberance Architecture’. A language derived from analysing the dichotomy between religion/hedonism. The project references versions of the temple of worship and the garden of paradise that it depicts. Exotic fruits, lavish colours and voluptuous bodies are three key typologies recognised throughout the temple that have been applied to the design of a Soho Love Hotel and City of London Police Station. Fig. 12.12 Simona Fratila Y4, ‘Deptford School of Etiquette’. The proposal comes as a reaction to current economic investments by looking at different forms of capital. It follows Pierre Bourdieu’s interpretation of mannerism as a form of cultural and embodied capital. Architecturally, the project analyses the concept of stairs, reinterpreting them symbolically as a form of social ascension.
Fig. 12.13 Meya Tazi Y4, ‘Nascere: The House of the Stewards of the Orchard’ escapes the inception of humanity as a geological force, modifying man’s behaviour with its non-human creation. In a forced intimacy and coexistence, human labour redeems the contaminated land of Silvertown for the life of a new orchard — a territory where man-made does not resist the autonomy of nature. Fig. 12.14 Clare Hawes Y4, ‘Tower Hamlets Civic Centre’. The project proposes a new civic centre for the communities of Tower Hamlets. Visitors are encouraged to donate materials at the wedding and memorial ceremonies, offering visitors a sense of ownership. The building is an architecture of celebration: celebrating life, death, community and place.
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12.15 Fig. 12.15 Matthew Sawyer Y5, ‘The Masonic Temple’. The proposal metaphorically utilises the Freemasons' infamous relationship with public and private spaces to critique the increasingly urgent issue of undemocratic land ownership in London. The architectural typology is crafted around the notion of transparency, as its revealing crosssectional façade exposes the Temple’s daily work both to its surroundings and within its context. The architecture directly responds to the critique by providing moments of openness, contrasted against the historic Masonic privacy. This ultimately causes its visitors to question their ability to experience the architecture in its entirety.
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12.16 Fig. 12.16 Holly Crosbie Y5, ‘Gallions Reach’. A hydrological landscape that aims to decontaminate a toxic urban site. The proposal divides the site into smaller test sites, each on a ten-year cycle of stabilising the contamination and providing a safe and usable public space. The language of the architecture has evolved through the manipulation of water and as a continuation of the landscape. The buildings are formed of nested layers; the outer layer provides a protective shell that is softened by the weather, while in contrast; the inner habitable layers are highly glazed, cleaned and polished. The internal spaces provide varying degrees of environmental comfort with no definitive threshold between interior and exterior. 189
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12.18 Fig. 12.17 Stephanie Brancatisano Y5, ‘The Global House of Mayors’ proposes an alternative mode of democratic urban governance which resonates in the dual global/local condition of our urbanised world. Sited at Rainham Marshes in the Thames Estuary, the House is in constant exchange with nature, seeking to inform the decision-making processes of the mayors. Fig. 12.18 Zahra Taleifeh Y5, ‘The Registry — Birth, Marriage, Death’. A model building for the devotion of objects, identity and sexuality as opposed to social hierarchy, wealth and power. The project speculates a Registry Office as a place that re-emphasises the ceremonial aspects of registration rather than the administrative processes, a monument to the public and a site of ‘public intimacy'. 190
Fig. 12.19 Luke Scott Y5, ‘Law and the Natural Order’. The proposal recognises the Law as a distinctly human practice; its associations being with the civilised and structured society. In order to isolate and enhance the platonic nature of this practice, it is embedded within an expressly organic, non-human condition, as the hard lines and choreographed occupation of the Court meets the sporadic life of the forest.
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Occupying the City of London Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
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Year 4 Stephanie Brancatisano, Kacper Chmielewski, Holly Crosbie, Matthew Sawyer, Luke Scott, Zahra Taleifeh, Matthew Turner Year 5 Akhil Bakhda, Samiyah Bawamia, Larisa Bulibasa, Alex Cotterill, Benjamin Ferns, Helena Howard, Tereza Kacerova, Joseph Reilly, Adam Shapland The Bartlett School of Architecture 2015
Thanks to our Design Realisation tutor James Hampton and structural consultant Ben Godber. We would like to thank our critics: Abi Abdolwahabi, Gianluca Adamei, Alessandro Ayuso, David Buck, Shumi Bose, Nat Chard, Tom Coward, Alison Crawshaw, Maria Fedorchenko, Daisy Froud, Omar Ghazal, Manuel Jiménez Garcia, Rory Hyde, Adam Kaasa, Jan Kattein, Constance Lau, Ifigenia Liangi, Lesley McFadyen, Justin McGuirk, Tom Noonan, Luke Pearson, Francisco Sanin, Eva Sopeoglou, Jill Stonor, Michiko Sumi, Gabriel Warshafsky, Nina Vollenbröker, Fiona Zisch
In the early 18th century around 500,000 people squeezed into the City of London, with homes, businesses, industries and cemeteries side-by-side. Today, less than 10,000 people live there. The City’s massive buildings and tight street pattern make it the most urban part of Greater London but it is only a workplace, and empty at the weekend. Unit 12 proposes that the City’s population will increase to 500,000 so that its dense urban life will match its dense urban fabric. No longer will the City be dedicated only to the financial market. Instead, it will contain all the activities associated with metropolitan urbanism, as well as those that challenge familiar assumptions about urban life. Each student in Unit 12 has proposed a new building and a new programme that contributes to a socially, culturally and politically vibrant City of London. Monument and Ruin The early 21st century is often associated with ephemerality and transience. Without rejecting these qualities, we propose that monumentality should be celebrated too. Rather than only adulatory, the monument’s purpose is complex and questioning. The etymology of the term refers to the Latin monumentum, which in turn derives from monere, meaning to remind, warn and advise. The monument is interdependent with the ruin. Monuments can be ineffective means of collective remembrance, and their original meanings are soon obscured unless they are reaffirmed through everyday behaviour. Alongside the creation of monumental buildings that recall and represent societal values, there is a process of forgetting in terms of material decay and ruination, which may result from natural processes or human actions. Monumentality is a characteristic of the City but it only serves to glorify the financial market. Instead, we have inverted familiar hierarchies so that unexpected and everyday building programmes are celebrated. We have posed the question: what should we monumentalise today? And equally, we have asked: what should we ruin today? Rather than the monument and the ruin being conceived as conflicting, they are constructive themes interdependent within a single building dialectic. Designs on History To design, the architect must decide what to remember and what to forget. Vincent Scully concluded that the architect will ‘always be dealing with historical problems – with the past and, a function of the past, with the future. So the architect should be regarded as a kind of physical historian’.1 The most creative architects have looked to the past to imagine a future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it, revealing its relevance to the present. 21st century architects should appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new. 1 Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (1969), London: Thames and Hudson, p.257
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Fig. 12.1 Benjamin Ferns Y5, ‘Pontifical Academy of Sciences’. Architecture must be used to challenge the docile pedagogy on the role of knowledge in education, the morality of scientific endeavour, and to respond with a transcendental teaching rooted in inquisitiveness and experiential realities. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, established in 1603, is assembled from raised thematically organised libraries and ritualistic lecture spaces, situated within a modulated landscape to induce physical and metaphysical wandering. Fig. 12.2 Kacper Chmielewski Y4, ‘Atheistic Typology’. It is estimated that by 2040 affiliations to the Anglican church in Britain will be less than 1% of the population. A new contemporary type of cubistic iconoclasm has been developed to accommodate for the discourse between the fallen religious
doctrines and nostalgia for ecclesiastical beauty. Fig. 12.3 Holly Crosbie Y4, ‘Rehydrating the City of London’. The monument to drinking water provides two basic needs for life, water and shelter. A landscape of filtration along the river fleet purifies surface and river water to rehydrate the dry drinking fountains of the City of London. The curious forms of the filtration landscape become a riverbank retreat. Fig. 12.4 Luke Scott Y4, ‘An Alternative Civic Archetype’. The streets of the City of London serve as a new political stage, in which a field of elements are assembled, deconstructed and appropriated through crowd occupation. Destablising familiar forms, materials, and symbols of municipal architecture through their rearrangement, the proposal seeks a permeable and interpretive theatre for events to unfold in the street.
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Fig. 12.5 Matthew Sawyer Y4, ‘A New Guildhall’. The project hypothesises a future City of London. A new Guildhall administrates and facilitates the deconstruction and reconstruction of the city in an attempt to increase experience. The building also houses an archive to collect and display relics from the ‘Old City’. Fig. 12.6 Stephanie Brancatisano Y4, ‘The City Cooperatives’ seek to monumentalise nature by giving power to ephemeral moments of the environment. Nature represents adaptation and diversity, countering the social and economic exclusivity that pervades The City. The project addresses this monoculture by proposing a network of decentralised Cooperative Councils, bringing the priorities of all Londoners to the forefront. Fig. 12.7 Matthew Turner Y4, ‘The London Institute of
Alternative Cartographies’. The London Institute of Alternative Cartographies is located at the confluence of The River Fleet and The Thames, a political and environmental fault line between the powers of The City and Westminster. In this fluctuating environment the project develops a fractal tectonic in order to alter perceptions of mapping and definitions of space. Fig. 12.8 Zahra Taleifeh Y4, ‘Birth, Love and Death: The Registry Office’. The public building works on the premise that each person would register a birth, marriage and death here, allowing the architecture to be experienced at three different stages of life and in three different emotional states. The architecture plays with perception, depending on the emotional state of the user, and the same room can be read in three different ways: as life, death or love.
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12.10 Figs. 12.9 – 12.10 Joseph Reilly Y5, ‘The Raft of the Medusa’. Crossrail have sent 4.5 million tonnes of earth, from beneath the City of London’s Streets, to Wallasea Island in Essex. The project follows the exiled earth down the Thames to Wallasea where a new simpler city emerges upon the foundations of ancient London. A brewery, bakery and mill are built around a vast floating raft of wheat: a commodity for a cleaner economy. The programme laments the disappearance of the City’s vibrant past life, whilst allegorically critiquing the sterility of the contemporary plutocratic City.
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12.12 Fig. 12.11 Akhil Bakhda Y5, ‘Mars Circus, City of London: United Spacefaring Nations Headquarters’. The little known UNOOSA (United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs), is currently one of the largest committees in the United Nations. With a membership of 77 nations, 14 of which are currently spacefaring, the committee has grown rapidly from its humble beginnings in 1958 when there were only 18 member nations. The committee has had to respond to spikes in space activity from a small base within the United Nations Offices in Vienna. This project explores the notion of a new United Spacefaring Nations Headquarters in the City of London to house the activities of the burgeoning UNOOSA, particularly in response to the ever intensifying space race to Mars. Fig. 12.12 Adam Shapland Y5, ‘Independent Cornish Assembly’. Cut into the
sublime granite cliffs between Geevor and Levant coastal tin mines, the Independent Cornish Assembly is proposed as a direct response to the growing campaigns for Cornish Independence and political separation from a centralised Westminster government. The project imagines a parliamentary system which is embedded within a prototype industrial landscape designed to de-water the extensive underground flooded mine shafts and tunnels whilst extracting the high concentrations of precious metals from the contaminated water. The resulting hybrid architectural condition therefore aims to demonstrate a practical clean-up model whilst evoking experiences of the picturesque and industrial sublime. 187
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12.14 Fig. 12.13 Helena Howard Y5, ‘The City of London Craft Guild of Polychromy’. The guild proposes a re-engagement with craft through the introduction of a 21st century Gothic revival. Polychromy is used to counteract the new 21st century blandness – that of the steel and glass financial sector. Apprentices aged 18 and above are taught both digital and analogue techniques of architectural colour production, in order to facilitate the spread of the New Gothic polychromy throughout the Square Mile and beyond. Fig. 12.14 Tereza Kacerova Y5, ‘The Neighbourhood House’. In a city where property prices and rents are increasing every year, the project questions the efficiency of modern living and proposes to rethink the typology of a home as an enclosed, compartmentalised and increasingly segregated space. 188
The project argues that the architecture of the domestic sphere shapes the way we inhabit our surroundings and proposes a house as a neighbourhood. This consists of a public, private and intermediate zone, which compensates for the size of the dwellings and provides necessary space where the residents can spend their time, live-work-meet.
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12.15 Fig. 12.15 Larisa Bulibasa Y5, ‘A Financial Library For The Square Mile Labyrinth’. As a microcosm of the City of London, the Financial Library is an attempt to translate the complex and often conflicting state of affairs apparent in the incomprehensible and absurd theatrical scene of the financial district into a labyrinthine architecture that is simultaneously a narrative and a physical experience.
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12.17 Fig. 12.16 Alex Cotterill Y5, ‘Planned Ignorance ’. Through speculating on a reinhabitation of the City of London to its former capacity, this project is a satirical take on modern society’s struggle to become ‘sustainable’ at the expense of their normal lives, capitalising on the economy of pleasure as an analytical and idealistic tool to integrate society with its waste and reinvent Eden on earth. Fig. 12.17 Samiyah Bawamia Y5, ‘Association of Feminists in Property’. The architecture of the headquarters for the Association of Feminists in Property responds to the second-wave feminist movement by accepting and empowering the female experience, while playing up feminine attributes as defined in Luce Irigaray’s writings. Taking precedence from the reading of Sir John Soane’s museum as a feminist architecture, the
headquarters aim to generate ideas and hidden associations, while creating subjectivities rather than being prescriptive. A saturation of space and colour is also a reaction against the 20 th century modernism which has left the City of London with a limited architectural vocabulary and palette.
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The Shock of the Old and the Shock of the New Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Unit 12 The Shock of the Old and the Shock of the New Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Year 4 Akhil Bakhda, Samiyah Bawamia, Larisa Cosmina Bulibasa, Alex Cotterill, Ben Ferns, Helena Howard, Tereza Kacerova, Joseph Reilly, Adam Shapland
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Year 5 Rodolfo Acevedo Rodriguez, Amy Sullivan Bodiam, Emma Clinton, Jason Coe, Leon Fenster, Alastair King, Samuel Rackham, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Wilkinson, Xuhong Zheng Thank you to James Hampton, our Design Realisation Practice Tutor and Ben Godber, our Design Realisation Structural Consultant Thanks also to our critics: Ross Exo Adams, Fulvio de Bastiani, Shumi Bose, David Buck, Ben Campkin, Emma Cheatle, Mollie Claypool, Nigel Coates, Tom Coward, Tina Di Carlo, Stewart Dodd, Adrian Forty, Daisy Froud, Ben Godber, James Hampton, Penelope Haralambidou, Colin Herperger, Charles Holland, Catherine Ince, Moira Lascelles, Marina Lathouri, Constance Lau, John Macarthur, Igor Marjanovic, Luke Pearson, Barbara Penner, Chris Pierce, Rahesh Ram, Peg Rawes, David Roberts, Michiko Sumi, Tania Sengupta, Liam Young, Alessandro Zambelli and Fiona Zisch
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A Twenty-first Century Grand Tour Eighteenth century architects spent at least three years in Italy, collecting ideas, principles, experiences and artefacts to transfer home, from south to north. Their purpose was not to copy what they had seen but to translate it to a new context and climate, thus inventing a new architecture and a new landscape. The Grand Tour continued into the twentieth century. Commissioned to design a house when he was 20 years old, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s first client paid for his tour of Italy, while Rome inspired Louis Kahn in 1950 and Roma Interrotta defined postmodernism in 1978. This year, we travelled to Florence, Mantua, Venice, Verona and Vicenza on a twenty-first century Grand Tour. The most creative architects have always looked to the past to imagine a future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it, revealing its relevance to the present and future. Twenty-first century architects should appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new. Designs on History In 1969 Vincent Scully concluded that the architect will ‘always be dealing with historical problems – with the past and, a function of the past, with the future. So the architect should be regarded as a kind of physical historian … the architect builds visible history’. Like a history, a design is a reinterpretation of the past that is meaningful to the present, transforming both. Equally, a design is equivalent to a novel, convincing the user to suspend disbelief. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The architect is a ‘physical historian’ and a ‘physical novelist’. What is a New City Today? Our site is Stewartby, a 1920s model town built to serve the world’s largest brickworks. The London Brick Company commissioned neo-classical public buildings and housing by Sir Albert Richardson, The Bartlett Professor of Architecture, who lived nearby. Today, the brickworks is abandoned and the town is empty, but just an hour from London. To imagine a new city, each student has designed its first civic building, which is a microcosm of the city and a catalyst for its growth. A hybrid of architecture, infrastructure and landscape, the civic building establishes a symbiotic relationship with its ever-changing immediate and wider contexts. Attentive to the environment, it recognises the co-production and creative influence of natural as well as cultural forces. Discursive, it encourages social and political engagement, and the interaction of public and private lives. Inventive, it reimagines histories and narratives, creating new myths for a new city.
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Fig. 12.1 Rodolfo Acevedo Rodriguez Y5, ‘The House of Eros’. The home was once the microcosm of the ideal society, with love and charity replacing the capitalism of the outside world. Today, ancient mythology comes to life in Stewartby, relating the narratives of humans and deities, which together with contemporary technologies introduce a new activity and meaning to the already there. Fig. 12.2 Adam Shapland Y4, ‘The Environment Agency Headquarters for Flooding’. The proposed building and surrounding landscape activates, and is activated by, the movement of flood water, which is re-directed south from the Great river Ouse at Bedford, in a seasonal relief effort. Fig. 12.3 Akhil Bakhda Y4, ‘Manifest Destiny: The Case and Consequences of Colonising Mars’. In its preliminary stages, this project seeks to explore the story of American
Frontier history in seeking to understand the trajectory of how we will colonise Mars from 2030. Fig. 12.4 Samiyah Bawamia Y4, ‘The Porcelain Foundation of Stewartby’. The Porcelain Foundation is perceived as an icon of luxury, replacing a polluted territory. It is a critique to Venturi’s statement of ‘Less is bore’ and investigates the idea of the building being a crafted object, relating to shrines and follies. Fig. 12.5 Ben Ferns Y4, ‘Solforico Consulate’. Through a composition of perverse juxtapositions and subverted hierarchies, the Italian Consulate is assembled from a montage of sulfur and brick. It questions Neapolitan identity, perception and transparency in hybrid spaces, revealing a sulfuric industry.
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Fig. 12.6 Helena Howard Y4, ‘The City Of Gastronomic Lichenology, Stewartby’. The city of Stewartby acts as the world centre for research into gastronomic lichen as a potential new source of nutrition, in order to alleviate the inevitable food crisis brought about by climate change. Fig. 12.7 Larisa Cosmina Bulibasa Y4, ‘The Urban Forestry College’. The project engages with exploring symbiotic relationships between architecture and nature looking at a physical and a poetical level between the two of them. Fig. 12.8 Tereza Kacerova Y4 ‘Clay Nanocomposite Fabrication Ground For Emerging Airship Industry’. Following on the industrial heritage of the site, the project proposes an alternative for an existing resource – Oxford Clay. A clay nanocomposite membrane fabricated on site is further utilised in construction of a training centre for
airship pilots. Fig. 12.9 Joseph Reilly Y4, ‘Anachronistic Forestry in the Near Future’. The project exists within the reforestation of Bedfordshire’s post-industrial brickfields. The uncanny architecture combines crafted pieces of timber with reclaimed objects from the redundant brickworks factory. Within a vast burgeoning woodland an anachronistic sawmill and workshop building form the first and last elements of a new slower city. Fig. 12.10 Alex Cotterill Y4, ‘(Stewartby) Land Mill.‘ The landfill can be understood as both a place of shared social significance, a collective repository for discarded material and an essential resource for exhausted material goods; it is somewhere between these three that the project sits.
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12.12 12.13 Fig. 12.11 Alastair King Y5, ‘A Home, an Office and a University’. This project explores the identity of Sir Albert Richardson (1880-1964), a Modern Georgian Paradox, through multiple scales, times and modes of representation. Fig. 12.12 Xuhong Zheng Y5, ‘Wilderness Institute’. Situated on the edge of a disused clay quarry at Stewartby, the Wilderness Institute houses a community of researchers, ecologists, planners and artists who inhabit the sublime wilderness of both the landscape and the architecture, establishing a new research and planning centre. The building forms an inhabitable wall around the pit, controlling entry and views into the site whilst acting as a catalyst for wilderness to develop – through actions such as seed dispersal, wind funneling, rainwater collection and release. The journey through the
building is constructed as a journey through a landscape. Fig. 12.13 Emma Clinton Y5, ‘Cathedral of St Thomas, Cathedral of Doubt’. Using Doubting Thomas as a narrative device, the project is designed through a series of fragments, exploring theological themes of the body and soul. In a constant state of disrepair, it becomes a celebration of our mortality, suspending disbelief through a tactile experience, explored through a series of incomplete pencil studies and 1:1 models.
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MArch Architecture Unit 12 The Bartlett School of Architecture 2014 12.14 Fig. 12.14 Daniel Wilkinson Y5, ‘The Courthouse of the 23rd Baroque’. This project speculates on Eugenio D’Ors’ idea that the Baroque isn’t a finite period in art history, but a recurrent disruptive artistic and political social cycle. Situated in the abandoned economic wastelands outside of Stewartby, the Court acts as the starting point for a new city which aesthetically turns away from the efficiencies and banalities of the structural celebrations which have dominated architecture for over a century. Acting as a landmark for its own logic, the Court structurally obscures itself through an ornamental irruption.
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12.16 Fig. 12.15 Amy Sullivan Bodiam Y5 ‘The New Crystal Palace’. Located on Deptford’s riverfront, the New Crystal Palace, a combination of the Master Shipwright’s house and new Kaleido Park, is a monument to Deptford’s industrial past and Sayes Court, London’s lost garden. Live-work opportunities are offered in a community built on respect for nature, industry without drudgery, equality and well being for all, ideals that resonate with those of the 1960’s counter culture. Small industries grow and sparkle like crystals as the Palace evolves. Festivals are held regularly to celebrate the rich tapestry of spaces and minds within the Palace. Fig. 12.16 Leon Fenster Y5, ‘Exilic Landscapes’. The projects asks what an idiosyncratically Jewish architecture might look like and posits that it is one which embraces the notion of exile
and the restlessness of uncertainty. A religious architecture not of the inaccessible sacred but of the disorder of human contradiction. A reading of history filled not with absolutes but with constant negotiation. As George Steiner puts it, ‘this is an era in which increasingly large swathes of humanity are “becoming Jews,” as defined by a consciousness of exile. Hence this approach to religious architecture is of great consequence for our age’.
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MArch Architecture Unit 12 12.18 12.17 The Bartlett School of Architecture 2014 12.19 12.18 Fig. 12.17 – 12.18 Samuel Rackham Y5, ‘The Royal Instituion’. This project concerns the construction of a new home for the Royal Institution on the Thames Southbank. The Royal Institution was the flagship institution of Romantic Science, where the arts and sciences were of equal importance and the theatrical nature of science was celebrated. This project aims to reintroduce these values and provide the foundation for a relationship between these seemingly oppositional domains. The institution will be given a new status as a representative of both Science and Art and by displaying the excitement of experimental science it can again become a part of the wider public consciousness.
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Fig. 12.19 Jason Coe Y5, ‘The New Bedford Forum’. The New Bedford forum is the public and political centre of New Bedford, a democratic model city for the Bedford Cooperative Brickworks. The city implements a participatory form of governance for its local government, while the brickworks are jointly owned and managed by its citizens. Objects of democratic activity are articulated through the brickwork, which lay dormant awaiting their activation through social occupation. Fig. 12.20 – 12.21 Louis Sullivan Y5, ‘The Living Dam’. A proposal towards a new typology of dam in response to the current anti-reservoir sentiment and the recent history of the world’s large dams. A useful pyramid for the twenty-first century, an Arcology, away from the image of solitary
hydrological infrastructures and towards a model which is not only integral but also integrated with society, environmentalism and ecology which may help alter the public perception of the essential infrastructures, re-instigate the principles of a hydraulic empire and encourage a cultural attitude towards beneficially living with dams.
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Factual Fictions Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
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Factual Fictions Jonathan Hill, Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow
‘English novels of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were perceived by many of the middle and upper classes as immoral and illicit not only for their criminal content but for their very enterprise of fictionalising, inventing, forging reality, and lying. Novelists not only made up their stories, they also denied that their invented stories were fictions.’ Lennard J. Davis, 1983
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Histories and novels both need to be convincing but in different ways. Although no history is completely objective, to have any validity it must appear truthful to the past. A novel may be believable but not true. But recognising the overlaps between two literary genres, Malcolm Bradbury notably described his novel , 1975, as ‘a total invention with delusory approximations to historical reality, just as is history itself’. Objective as well as subjective, a design is a reinterpretation of the past that is meaningful to the present, transforming both, like a history. Equally, a design is equivalent to a novel, convincing the user to suspend disbelief. Part novelist, part historian, the architect creates ‘factual fictions’. Sites of History ‘The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.’ T.S. Eliot, 1917 The history of architecture can be conceived in terms of the need for individuals, or societies, to contradict, reinvent and distort – as well as affirm – a philosophical and aesthetic orthodoxy. These shifts may be necessary for the discipline to respond to changing social and cultural needs, or stem from a human desire for reinvention, which in turn affects social and cultural patterns. Students of Unit 12 were asked to challenge and expand a particular orthodoxy, to understand a particular aesthetic and philosophical position, and to create a personally driven shift in that stance.
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Specification and Craft ‘On a wet day it may look drab and forbidding, and they might scuttle away from it. On a sunny day it’s magical, but then buildings are like that, they should be.’ Denys Lasdun, 1979 For an (architectural) factual fiction to be believable there needs to be a real understanding of craft, materials and detail, which should not only have a convincing provenance and be subject to rigorous testing but also be grounded in an appreciation of the political, cultural and meteorological climates in which they can thrive. Industries and Infrastructures for an Independent London ‘But, it is manifest, that those who repair to, no sooner enter into it, but they find a universal alteration to their Bodies, which are either dryed up or enflamed, the humours being exasperated and made apt to putrifie, their sensories and perspiration so exceedingly stopped, with the loss of Appetite, and a kind of general stupefaction, succeeded with such and, as do never, or very rarely quit them, without some further Symptomes of dangerous Inconveniency so long as they abide in the place; which yet are immediately restored to their former habit; so soon as they are retired to their Homes and they enjoy fresh again.’ John Evelyn, 1661 Even in the 17th century, London was ten times the size of the second largest English city. Today, it is culturally, socially and economically distinct from the UK and has more in common with New York and Shanghai than Aberdeen and Manchester. Proposing that London should have the degree of autonomy given to Catalonia in Spain or Scotland in the UK, we asked students to design industries and infrastructures for an independent London. In Unit 12 our discussions are dialogical. Some students supported London’s proposed independence, while a few suggested that it should become more dependent, and others focussed on the independence of other regions.
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Unit 12 would very much like to thank Domi Oliver and Carl Vann, Design Realisation Tutors, and Ben Godber, Structural Consultant, as well as the critics: Alessandro Ayuso, Nick Beech, Shumi Bose, Carolyn Butterworth, Barbara Campbell-Lange, Nat Chard, Emma Cheatle, Tom Coward, Alison Crawshaw, Oliver Domesien, Bill Hodgson, Will Hunter, Jan Kattein, David Kohn, Adrian Lahoud, George Lovett, Hugh McEwen, Ollie Palmer, Mariana Pestana, Sophia Psarra, Natasha Sandmeier, Ruth Silver, Eva Sopeoglou, Catrina Stewart, Tom Weaver, Finn Williams and Danielle Willkens. Year 4 Emma Clinton, Jason Coe, Daniel Leon Fenster, Alastair King, Samuel Rackham, Rodolfo Rodriguez, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Wilkinson, Xuhong Zheng Year 5 Christine Bjerke, Graham Burn, Feras El Attar, Charlotte Knight, Anders Strand Lühr, Amy SullivanBodiam, Fiona Tan, Cassandra Tsolakis, Kieran Thomas Wardle, Owain Williams, Zihong (Tim) Yue
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Fig. 12.1 Cassandra Tsolakis, Y5, An alternative school of architecture in London based on decoding the underlying universal orders which structure our experience. The school argues for freedom and insight into design by encouraging fragmentation as a principle technique. Fig. 12.2 Samuel Rackham, Y5, The Royal Meteorological Society: Exploring notions of romanticism through the marriage of art and science, the society creates meteorological phenomena within an ornamental framework, capturing the beauty of weather through architectural form. Fig. 12.3 Louis Sullivan, Y4, The Cockaigne Academy of Sugar Production. A modern interpretation of the medieval mythic utopia of Cockaigne. An edible architecture constructed entirely of caramel and realising dependency on sugar through the built environment.
Fig. 12.4 Daniel Wilkinson, Y5, Communism I gave you my heart, you cooked it medium well. The leftovers from failed Communism are ground into aggregate for an ideological slurry. This happens in London, a result of the CPC’s financial assistance to the UK.
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Fig. 12.5 Xuhong Zheng, Y4, Orchestration of light, shadows and politics at the New City Hall. A set of new civic halls across the city for an independent London, proposing an architecture that exploits the temporality of natural light to determine how politics and activities occur within different spaces. Fig. 12.6 Emma Clinton, Y4, The Cloth House. The project is interested in the relationship between body and garment as an allegory for the built environment. The ‘completed’ building – or garment – is manipulated, adapted and transplanted by the dweller. Fig. 12.7 Rodolfo Rodriguez, Y4, The station will accommodate the flow of passengers going to and coming from London to work, as well supply destinations with the necessary fuel to service the station building. The programme of the infrastructure is based around the meteorological
calendar and the cycle of the seasons. Fig. 12.8 Jason Coe, Y4, A Bell Foundry for New Jerusalem: A Participatory Democracy for London is realised through the implementation of an aural communication network of bells and a new civic architecture for London. Fig. 12.9 Alastair King, Y4, Tower Hill Community: a building for a community of construction workers, critiquing the banal architecture of modern London with an architecture informed by ‘A Pattern Language’. Fig. 12.10 Daniel Leon Fenster, Y4, As disparate cultures collide, picturesque ornament is rescued from the wreckage of bland multiculturalism. Wren’s heavenly domes are borrowed by Chinese companies and inverted to become a descent into glorious debauchery and frivolity.
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MArch Architecture Unit 12 12.11 The Bartlett School of Architecture 2013 12.12 Fig. 12.11 Feras El Attar, Y5, The Aerotropolis of Sheerness. An airport-cum-city model that encourages integration between aviation and the city, using an architectural language that reflects and enhances the spatial/bodily disposition experienced in the realm of air travel. Fig. 12.12 Fiona Tan, Y5, A Manual Towards a New London satirises the curious habits of Londoners as seen through Singaporean eyes. The building celebrates and enforces the arbitrary etiquettes that govern life in London. Fig. 12.13 Owain Williams, Y5, The Gasification Authority is a government energy department charged with licensing industrial operations in UK coal mines. With reserves set to expire within 40 years, the building considers its imminent redundancy and the establishment of a devolved government for the Rhondda Valley directly in its place. 180
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12.17 Fig. 12.16 Christine Bjerke, Y5, The FX Beauties Club explores feminine economies with the focus on the historical and contemporary ‘floating world’ between the woman and money, power and mirrors. Fig. 12.17 Graham Burn, Y5, Flatpack school redux: an MDF Russian Orthodox school, church and community centre in Harringay. The Orthodox Church is at the centre of Russian life: religion, education and community have come together as the spine of the population throughout history, and are deployed here in an emerging worker community. Constructed entirely from MDF, inherently fragile and responsive when exposed to weather and use, the building acts as a barometer for shifting policies and politics on a local, national and international level by being in a constant state of construction, repair and decoration to
counter erosive effects of occupation and prepare for future use. Fig. 12.18 Kieran Thomas Wardle, Y5, The Palace of Eastminster. An agoric building to temporarily house Parliament on the banks of the Thames in Essex. The Palace of Eastminster reconfigures Parliament around the notion of the public square, forcing elements of encounter and protest into the heart of the legislative programme.
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A New Creative Myth Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
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A NEW CREATIVE MYTH
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Exceptional architects are exceptional storytellers, weaving a narrative that completely convinces the designer as well as the users. Denys Lasdun succinctly remarked that each architect must devise his or her ‘own creative myth’, a set of ideas, values and forms that are subjective but also have some objective basis that helps to make them believable. Lasdun concluded “My own myth … engages with history.” Creative architects have always looked to the past to imagine the future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it, revealing its relevance to the present.
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A city also needs a creative myth, which allows its inhabitants to understand it collectively and imagine its future. A new creative myth generates a new genius loci — genius of the place — an idea that originated in classical antiquity and has influenced architects for centuries. The genius of the place is made as much as it is found, formed from the fusion of new ideas, forms and spaces with those already in place. Edinburgh became the ‘Athens of the North’ and Rome is associated with La Dolce Vita, the good life. Sometimes a myth fades and a new myth must replace it for a city to prosper. To explore this idea each student developed their own ‘creative myth’ to allow them to design a building that could propose a new ‘creative myth’ and genius loci for the city it inhabits. This year our site was Istanbul, a city whose character, name and architecture have changed many times. Once the capital of the Roman Empire and then the Ottoman Empire, it is now the principal city of the Turkish republic. As Byzantium, it was renamed Constantinople in honour of the Roman Emperor. Its modern title — Istanbul — derives from a Greek phrase that means both ‘in the city’ and ‘to the city’. Istanbul’s most famous building — Hagia Sophia — exemplifies the city’s shifting image. First a church and then a mosque, it is now a museum and representative of Ataturk’s secular republic. Located both in Europe and Asia, Turkey’s future may lead towards the European Union or in a different direction. Istanbul is a city of many dualities. From its location, the city straddles the Bosphorus Strait, the divide between East and West. To its religion, the secular state is overwhelmingly Muslim but has Christian and Jewish communities that connect to and provide an echo of Istanbul’s many pasts. And finally to its economy, Istanbul is a city where great wealth is held by a few and poverty experienced by many. Within this context, and key to our investigations, was an examination of distinct sites, spaces and economies within Istanbul that are under extreme pressures to re-invent or defend themselves for survival. As a starting point
Unit 12 would like to thank Dominique Oliver, Carl Vann, Ben Godber; Rachel Cruise, Oliver Wilton, Shibboleth Shechter, Brendan Woods, Peg Rawes, Hilary Powell.
Year 4: Graham Burn, Charlotte Knight, Lulu Le Li, Anders Strand Lühr, Fiona Tan, Cassandra Tsolakis, Owain Williams, Kieran Wardle, Tim Zihong Yue Year 5: Emily Farmer, Jerome Flinders, Patrick Hamdy, Benjamin Harriman, Ifigeneia Liangi, Yifei Song, Gabriel Warshafsky
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The following pages give a glimpse of the work of the unit produced within this last year. The work can also be seen as a continuation of themes that have developed within the unit over recent years, with each year having added something new to the unit’s agenda, ambition and passions. Unit 12 has always encouraged the work of each student to be particular to his or her own interests, allowing them to develop a particular and distinct architectural voice that can be tested and developed through research, programme, drawing and making. This year, and in recent years, the work of the unit has also been able to continue a theme that we have become increasingly interested in: monumental buildings. In particular, those buildings designed and viewed under construction, in use and in ruin, with each phase to be seen as neither distinct, nor unique nor final. In Unit 12 we have continued to consider and develop a contemporary meaning of monumentality. Allowing a diverse range of influences, including social, political and meteorological, to play a part in the life and the material of the monument. Rather than static monuments as a unit we have proposed buildings that are in a state of flux, caught between the monument and the ruin, the material and the immaterial.
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for these investigations we looked at, and researched, the waterfront area of Zeytinburnu and its attempts at economic regeneration after the disappearance of the area’s tanneries. We examined underground economies within the city, including a previously state-supported black market. We looked at a city with its history of immigration and its many different communities, not all now welcome. We considered the place of religion and its architecture in a secular, but significantly Muslim, state. And lastly we sought to understand the slow extinction of the artisan industries in the area of Sishane, an old commercial centre in pre-Ottoman and Genoese times. Through this interrogation a deeper understanding of the city, its future as well as its past, has been established, acting as a catalyst to each student’s individual approach to their architecture, their reading of site and understanding of history.
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Fig. 12.1 Gabriel Warshafsky, A Grotesque Public Body, Istanbul. Roof Plan, Detail. A new headquarters for Istanbul’s public corporations, centring around the annual sponsorship and production of the world’s largest feast. Fig. 12.2 Patrick Hamdy, Saliferous Monastery, Istanbul. The Saliferous Monastery attempts to provide the city with a new urban pilgrimage site, incorporating an annual salt harvest, which will begin on an existing national holiday celebrated on 23rd April. The natural occurrence of decay conflicts with the man-made task of daily construction and maintenance of the monastery. Fig. 12.3 Gabriel Warshafsky, A Grotesque Public Body, Istanbul. Long Section.
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Fig. 12.4 Patrick Hamdy, Saliferous Monastery, grid building which generates its independent source of Istanbul. Long Section. Fig. 12.5 Charlotte Knight, The power — a symbol for autonomy from the authority and Nameless Monastery, Istanbul. Night Perspective. The power of the government. Nameless Monastery conceals a theological school for the Eastern Orthodox Church of Constantinople, illegally continuing its teaching so that the ancient religion will not be lost. As the nuns retreat from the outer world, they see only the sky and are thrown back onto their solitary selves. Fig. 12.6 Fiona Tan, The Lost and Found Power Station, Istanbul. Snapshots. A monument to the faceless migrant worker who built the city but remains excluded from it. It becomes an allegorical response to the fragile existence of the migrant class, and the government’s refusal to grant them a settled identity by proposing a completely off-
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Fig. 12.7 Emily Farmer, The Writers’ Harbour, Istanbul. The Authors’ Lobby. The Writers’ Harbour, which inhabits the interstitial site of Istanbul’s main passenger port, is occupied as both a tourist thoroughfare and a safehouse for proscribed authors. The Harbour is the first purpose-built headquarters for an existing board, The European Writers’ Parliament. Fig. 12.8 Cassandra Tsolakis, Gateway into Phanar. Losing Your Marbles. Challenging the perceived value of location, the Gateway into Phanar encourages the returning Greek population to question the intrinsic connection between humans and their notions of ‘home’. Fig. 12.9 Tim Zihong Yue, The Institute of Leathercraft, Istanbul. From destruction of flesh and bones to the craft of skin, from nightmare to aspiration, the architecture is an allegory for the essential transition underlying the leathercraft industry.
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Fig. 12.10 Lulu Le Li, Water Theatre, Istanbul. Morning Perspective. A living body: breathing and sweating to modify its environment. The labyrinthine spaces within work with strategies of revealing and framing to blur the distinction between performer and spectator as they engage with filtered and artificial weather conditions. Fig. 12.11 Graham Burn, ROCOR (MDF) Church of Aksaray, Istanbul. Large Etching. A Prototype Russian Orthodox Church is erected across a dormant construction site. Constructed entirely from MDF, the building weeps, warts and wilts in the Istanbul climate. Glossy paints and varnishes are applied religiously to preserve the church. Fig. 12.12 Benjamin Harriman, A New British Consulate Typology, Istanbul. Wedding Chapel Model. Sited in Istanbul, it is a slow, unwieldy, but rapid to
dismantle, networking and promotion facility. Fig. 12.13 Owain Williams, Findikli Garden Foreign Office, Istanbul. Elevation Detail. Charged with cultivating planting for a picturesque garden, a centrepiece meeting room forms a loaded backdrop for Turkish foreign policy on the banks of the Bosphorus. Fig. 12.14 Benjamin Harriman, A New British Consulate Typology, Istanbul. Courtroom Model. Fig. 12.15 Benjamin Harriman, A New British Consulate Typology, Istanbul. Police Station Model.
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Fig. 12.16 Anders Strand Lühr, The Nation of Sivriada. Section: The Island is Carved out by the Quarry. Sited on an island of the coast of Istanbul in the Sea of Marmara, this project proposes an environment that is a symbiotic merging of nature and culture- whilst exploiting it for its resources through the reintroduction of quarrying. Fig. 12.17 Kieran Wardle, Council for Territorial Exchange, Istanbul. Perspective. The Council investigates the attribution of authority, through architecture, to an invented political organization that attempts to govern questions of power and identity through discussion and compromise. Fig. 12.18 Jerome Flinders, Hypoxic Complex, Istanbul. Perspective of Gateway to Complex. A Clumsy Climate Change Mitigation Strategy and Asthma Sanatorium in Istanbul.
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Fig. 12.19 Jerome Flinders, Hypoxic Complex, Istanbul. in having sex. The lover’s tree house is a response to Roof Plan. Fig. 12.20 Yifei Song, The Circus City, limited private space. It is designed so that people would Istanbul. Plan. The project aims to re-introduce the have to hold hands in order to climb on it. circus programme to the City of Istanbul, searching for a new experience that reinterprets the traditional Turkish acts. The circus offers a fictional and nostalgic world which criticizes the contemporary nature of Istanbul’s rapid urban transformation. Fig. 12.21 Yifei Song, The Circus City, Istanbul. Spectator exploring the trapeze. Fig. 12.22 Yifei Song, The Circus City, Istanbul. View of upper gallery. Fig. 12.23 Ifigeneia Liangi, Nostalgia of the Future, 2013. The Lover’s Tree House. The apartments of the area of Kipseli are particularly small and private space is limited. It is common for big families to use the living room as an extra bedroom, which causes difficulty
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Hybridisation and the Air and Industry of London Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
M A rch A rch U n i t 12
HYBRIDISATION AND THE AIR AND INDUSTRY OF LONDON ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’ T.S Eliot The Future of the Past Unit 12 investigates contemporary and historical trends that emphasise the interrogation of historical discourses and styles as a means of design. In particular we examine how these practices sample, adapt and then hybridise preexisting references to illicit new significance. Such a hybrid can be a means of criticism as well as production, both in terms of what is proposed and how it is communicated, so that individual architectures explore and expose understandings of site, time and history.
Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow & Professor Jonathan Hill
Modern Romanticism The term ‘romanticism’ is often applied pejoratively, suggesting disengagement from contemporary concerns. Instead, collaborations and conversations between painters, poets and scientists characterised eighteenth-century romanticism, which valued intellect as well as emotion, invention as well as history, time as well as place. Unit 12 identifies the romantic origins of an architectural environmentalism that has
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had a profound influence on subsequent centuries. Today, anthropogenic climate change ensures the increasing relevance of this evolving tradition. The Air and Industry of London Recognising a ‘Hellish and dismall Cloud of SEACOALE’, John Evelyn proposed a number of practical and poetic remedies in Fumifugium, 1661, the first book to consider London’s atmosphere as a whole. Coal-burning trades, butchers and burials were to be relocated east of the city so that the air and water would be unsullied. Evelyn’s proposal was only instigated centuries later and London continued to be known as the “Big Smoke’ until the mid-twentieth century. London is now the cleaner, functionally segregated city envisaged by Evelyn. But to create a compact and sustainable city, MArch Unit 12 proposes that London’s industries—breweries, brickworks, cemeteries, power plants—are once again integrated into the city as long as they do not pollute its air and water, responding to Evelyn’s poetic intentions. Year 4: Feras El Attar, Emily Farmer, Patrick Hamdy, Benjamin Harriman, Anders Luhr, Yifei Song, Amy SullivanBodiam, Olga-Maria Valavanoglou, Gabriel Warshafsky Year 5: Steve Baumann, Christopher Cox, James Crick, Omar Ghazal, Geraldine Holland, Michael Hughes, Thomas Luke Jones, Na Li, Dijan Malla, Hugh McEwen, Catrina Stewart, Erika Suzuki
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12.3 Fig. 12.1 Omar Ghazal, Frame House, Battersea, London. Functioning as an allegory and critique of the historical, and continuing, militarisation of the child in Western society, ‘The Frame House’ proposes a new Boy Scout headquarters next to Battersea Dogs Home in London. The project explores architecture’s role in constructing notions of the self and nationhood. Fig. 12.2 – 12.3 Chris Cox, The London Brickworks, City of London. Utilising the waste clay excavated from building sites across the City of London, The London Brickworks proposes a new model industry, which reintroduces brick production into the heart of the metropolis as the building material for new housing that will significantly increase the City’s residential population.
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12.7 Fig. 12.4 The monastery houses both the Tibetan Dalai Lama and the Chinese Panchen Lama, each occupying the building according to particular rituals and needs. Two means of construction — fast industrial production and slow laborious craftsmanship — are combined so that the building assumes a hybrid state that can be read politically, programmatically and architecturally. Fig. 12.5 Na Li, Monastery of the Himalayas, City of London. Fig. 12.6 James Crick, The Threadneedle Boxing House, City of London. Incorporating a boxing club on the site of the Royal Exchange, the building’s programme and architectural language are both literal and allegorical, with references to the raw aggression and discipline of boxing and the translation of roughly hewn timber sections into carefully crafted timber joints. The building houses the performance of the boxing match and is itself
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a performance. Fig. 12.7 James Crick, The Threadneedle Boxing House, City of London. Fig. 12.8 Erika Suzuki, Her Majesty’s Paper Factory, City of London. Utilising the vast quantities of waste paper produced by the City of London, the building recycles and manufactures paper for use in both print production and building construction. As a speculative and experimental building material, paper generates an architecture that is industrial in structure, form and surface articulation. Fig. 12.9 Michael Hughes, The Reformation of the General Post Office for the Digital Age, City of London. This project proposes a new model for the Royal Mail, in which airships and rockets replace traditional modes of transporting mail. With the implementation of this new infrastructural system the skyline of London is transformed into a high level performance stage in which airships pirouette and rockets’
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12.11 vapour trails frame the night sky. Fig. 12.10 Catrina Stewart, The Farm House: Colour for a Greener Architecture, Southwark, London. The Farmhouse Tower is a new model for urban farming and self-sufficient communal living, powered by the energy created from waste. Twin programmes — intensive agriculture and energy production — require the towers to be densely planned and personal space is limited. Those who abide by the tenancy rules are rewarded with additional space and privacy, allowing this colourful architecture to be more sinister, with its punitive overtones an allegory of contemporary sustainability. Fig. 12.11 Hugh McEwen, Aylesbury Town Hall, Southwark, London. A new town council is proposed for the existing but neglected Aylesbury Estate community. The first building for this new council, the Town Hall aims to encourage increased engagement between the
community and council. Aylesbury Town Hall uses a pop aesthetic with vernacular patterning, allowing the architecture to be approachable and inclusive, yet also politically and socially propositional.
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12.15 Fig. 12.12 Luke Jones, The Intellectual Commons, City of London. Initially formed from a series of rogue university departments, all of which were axed due to economic cuts, ‘The Intellectual Commons’ references the Arcadian aspirations of 1950s welfarism while it presents a new prototype for intellectual debate and cultural discourse, in which buildings alter, shift and grow in response to diverse demands. Fig. 12.13 Geraldine Holland, Bathing House, City of London. Constructed from chalk, steam and glass, ‘The Bathing House’ presents a new typology for the housing tower in which extensive communal and public rooms balance private apartments. Drawing water from London’s rising water table, the building seeps, steams and weeps, continually evolving a system of lakes, waterfalls and bathing pools as spaces to aid social interaction. Fig. 12.14 Dijan Malla, The College of Faith and Reason, Russell Square, London.
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Informed by the fusion of the arts, sciences and spirituality in late seventeenth-century England, the College of Faith and Reason facilitates academic research amidst an eclectic and allegorical collection. The architecture works playfully with the occupants’ preconceptions of the relationship between private and communal spaces, engaging all the senses as a means to encourage and increase communication and collaboration. Fig. 12.15 – 12.16 Steve Baumann, The New London Necropolis, City of London. Combining the programmes of necropolis, power station and orchard, this project seeks to readdress our contemporary relationship with death and its role in planning the contemporary city. Utilising the energy capacity and allegorical potential of the three programmes, ‘The New London Necropolis’ is self-sufficient, independently managing the relentless cycles of life and death that are housed in its fabric.
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Time, Motion, Energy Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Dip/MArch Unit 12 Yr 4: Steven Baumann, Oliver Bawden, James Crick, Omar Ghazal, Michael Hughes, Luke Jones, Na Li, Dijan Malla, Hugh McEwen, Erika Suzuki, Daniel Swift Gibbs Yr 5: Tom Noonan, Tom Reynolds, Anna Vallius
Time, Motion, Energy This year we explored time, motion and energy. On sites situated along the Thames, Year 5 students each proposed a building for a specific site that had a catalytic effect on London and a locality. The most creative architects have looked to the past to imagine a future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it, revealing its relevance to the present. Soane looked to ancient Greece, Mies admired Schinkel and the Smithsons absorbed the spirit of the picturesque. As a creative stimulus and narrative resource for twenty-first century architecture, Unit 12 focuses on earlier centuries as well as those more recent. When everybody else is looking in one time and one place, it’s always good to look elsewhere. Combining our concerns for immediate and historical time, we draw buildings in multiple states: under construction, as a recently discovered ruin, and with a future use. Representing loss as well as potential, the ruin is a means to represent time and reconsider monumentality. Combining a concern for subjective experience and environmental awareness, Unit 12 recognises a picturesque and romantic thread that began in the eighteenth century, continued in romantic classicism and was revived in the mid-twentieth century as a means to question one modernism – international, mechanical and insensitive – in favour of another – local, emotive and environmentally aware. Today, climate change ensures the increasing relevance of this evolving tradition.
Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow & Jonathan Hill
Top: James Crick, Egeus (the barn). Middle: Anna Vallius, Public Bath-house Along the Subterranean Walbrook, section. Bottom: Luke Jones, New Imperial Finance Ministry, sectional perspective; Daniel Swift Gibbs, IERS HQ: Calibrometric Projection Series III.
Clockwise from top left Erika Suzuki, Domestic River Smokery, elevation; Dijan Malla, Cathedral, Isola de San Michele, section; Na Li, Monastery of the Himalayas, City of London, perspective; Steven Baumann, Urban Cemetery, axonometric; MichaelHughes, Agrarian Airship Terminus, perspective; Omar Ghazal, Halfway House, The Dining Plane and The Smoking Pan; Hugh McEwen, Anarchitecture, linocut; Oliver Bawden, House Module, under construction.
Tom Reynolds, Brickworks and Night School, Mucking, sections.
Tom Noonan, John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Science, Deptford. Clockwise from top left: detail; the new forest; undercroft.
Tom Noonan, John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Science, Deptford, river perspective.
Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Dip/MArch Unit 12 Yr 4: Michael Wai Ho Hung, Villian Wing Lam Lo, Tom Noonan, Tom Reynolds, Erika Suzuki, Anna Vallius. Yr 5: Hakan Agca, Will Wai Lam Chan, James Church, Alex Hill, Kumiko Hirayama, David Potts, Francesca Wadia, Eva Willoughby, Alan Worn
“Perhaps when you cut into the present the future leaks out” William Burroughs, Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups, 1976
During the 1950s writer William Burroughs and artist Brion Gysin experimented with a new writing technique dubbed the cut up and later the fold in. These experiments involved taking an initial text that was then cut up at random and re-arranged to create a new text. The aim of these experiments was to alter certain given assumptions of our understanding of time, history and memory. They were later used by Burroughs as a means to predict the future. This year Unit 12 used the principles of this technique and its emphasis on the cut, incision and juxtaposition, both conceptually and physically, in determining architectures, readings of site and understandings of architectural history. Many of the most creative architects have looked to the past to im agine a future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to transform it, revealing its relevance to the present. Soane looked to ancient Greece, Mies admired Schinkel and the Smithsons absorbed the spirit of the picturesque. Modernism was supposedly based on the rejection of history but this is now known to be a myth. As a creative stimulus and narrative resource for twentiethfirst century architecture, Unit 12 focuses on earlier centuries as well as those more recent. When everybody else is looking in one time and one place, it’s always good to look elsewhere. “Berlin is a laboratory. Its historical richness lies in the prototypical sequence of its models; neoclassical city, early metropolis, modernist test bed, war victim, Lazarus, Cold War demonstration, etc” Fritz Neumeyer, ‘OMA’s Berlin: the polemic island in the city’, 1990 This year the site for this investigation was Berlin.
Jonathan Hill, Elizabeth Dow, Matthew Butcher
Above: Will Chan, City of London Saffron Monastery.
Above: Alex Hill, The Alchemic Plant, Templehof.
Clockwise from top left: James Church, The Institute of Monumentality; Erika Suzuki, The Multicultural Cemetery, Tempelhof; Hakan Agca, The Carbon Capture Plant, super-critical furnace; Anna Vallius, Institute of Negotiation, Tempelhof; James Church, The Institute of Monumentality; Lam Lo, Sanatorium of Light, Water and Glass.
Clockwise from top left: Francesca Wadia, The Halal Abattoir Berlin; Tom Noonan, The Ministry of Urbanism meets the Institute of DeUrbanism; Tom Reynolds, Recovery of Soul: Woodcut House; Michael Wei Ho Hung, The Seed Bank for Urban Agriculture; Kumiko Hirayama, Colour Farmada, Berlin Airlift; Eva Willoughby, The Weavers of Tempelhof.
This page: David Potts, The Museum of Illicit Culture. Previous page: Alan Worn, Curated Cultural Outpost.
Hubbert Curve Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Dip Unit 12 Yr 4: Hakan Agca, Will Chan, James Church, Kumiko Hirayama, Christian Madsen, Fei Meng, David Potts, Francesca Wadia. Yr 5: John Ashton, Cat Jones, Fai Lam, Yejun Pee, Louise Strachan, Xin Yu.
Hubbert Curve In the 1956 meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the noted geoscientist M. King Hubbert predicted that available fossil fuel reserves would be dramatically reduced by 2050 and fully depleted by 2200. Hubbert’s accurate prediction of the 1970s energy boom and subsequent fuel crisis - the Hubbert Peak - gave credence to his other prediction - the Hubbert Curve. In 2007 the town of Hubbert Curve was established as a speculative prototype and viable precedent for communities in Britain to exist without fossil fuels. Independent from the administration and laws of the UK government, and sited at the edge of London, the town is tolerated by government agencies on the basis that it shares its knowledge of new methods of energy generation with the general population of the UK. Sustainable, the town trades and exchanges with its environment, adapting and adjusting, in response to the other. Self-sufficient, each building produces its own power and creates an excess that serves the general needs of the town. Seasonal, the town is responsive to its climate and site, creating conditions that are conducive to its survival and growth. Discursive, the town encourages social and political engagement, and the interaction of public and private lives. Independent, the town learns from earlier centuries as well as those more recent, inventing and adapting narratives, histories and myths that define its character. In New York, students were given the option to continue with Hubbert Curve or to devise their own project. In Unit 12, as well as history, we are interested in personal history. When everyone else is looking in one direction and one place, it’s always good to look elsewhere.
Jonathan Hill, Elizabeth Dow, Matthew Butcher
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Top: David Potts, The Trading House, during a celebration. Bottom: Xin Yu, Lower Hope Marshville, bathroom window.
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Clockwise from top left: Xin Yu, Lower Hope Marshville; Fei Meng, Mud Bridge, Cliffe Creek, perspective of bridge keeper’s house; Will Chan, U(dys) topia, panorama; Hakan Agca, Beacons at Lower Hope Point, microalgae growth structures.
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Clockwise from top left: James Church, section through Lime Kiln and chalk cliff with Parson’s Pigeon Racing Club beyond; Cat Jones, Guild of Dressmakers, New York, stitched indigo facade dissolving; Cat Jones, Guild of Dressmakers, New York, front door; Kumiko Hirayama, Floating Algae Farm (a Celebration of Pollution), Cliffe Marsh, night view. Opposite page: Cat Jones, Guild of Dressmakers, New York, elevation through thoroughfare.
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This page: Neil Kahawatte, The Residence of the UK Minister of the Environment and the Holkham Land Agent. Top: the summer recess. Bottom: autumn storms. Facing page: Peter Watkins, The Dunwich Foundation - a House for Displaced Populations, Morston, the parishioner’s bench after the twenty-five year storm, 1842.
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Making History Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Dip Unit 12 Yr 4: John Ashton, Alex Hill, Cat Jones, Antonios Kallergis, Fai Lam, Ben Lee, Yejun Pee, Louise Strachan, Elly Tabberer, Alex Tait, Eva Wiiloughby, Xin Yu. Yr 5: Neil Kahawatte, Peter Watkins.
Making History As a creative stimulus, narrative resource and gene pool for twenty-first century architecture, Unit 12 focuses on earlier centuries as well as those more recent. When everybody else is looking in one direction and one place, it’s always good to look elsewhere. Because as well as history, we are interested in personal history. Weather Architecture Often understood as distinct from architecture, weather can instead be a positive and initiating architectural force. Contemporary weather is not limited to sun and rain, it also includes the changeable hybrid weathers that society and architecture manufacture. A weather-responsive and weatherabsorbing architecture is indicative of a wider agenda: a changeable architecture for changeable conditions. The Port Authority A port is a means and site of exchange, whether of energy, goods or information. A port also harbours, and develops. Our project is The Port Authority. Our site is coastal, shifting and subject to conflicting natural and man-made forces - winds, tides, politics, climate change - that affect each other on a global and a local scale. On a coastline where some ports are now a mile inland and others are submerged by the sea, we aim to establish a new port and a new town. We propose an architecture that reciprocates, trades and exchanges with its environment, one expanding and contracting, receiving and donating, adapting and adjusting, in response to the other.
Jonathan Hill and Elizabeth Dow Technical Tutor: Chris Davy
Top: Xin Yu, The Dancing Wonderland, Wells-next-the-Sea, concrete wall and fabric wall. Middle: Fai Lam, The Sailor’s Workshop, Wells-next-the-Sea, the invisible story. Bottom: Ben Lee, The School Retreat, Blakeney Point, the boiler room.
Clockwise from top left: Alex Hill, The Colossus of Wells, Wells-next-the-Sea, section; Louise Strachan, Glass Blower’s Studio, Holkham, the view inland; Cat Jones, Morston Village Hall, elevation and The Morston Shipwright/Dressmaker’s House, elevation; Yejun Pee, The Retreating Music Rooms, Holkham, after a sand storm; Elly Tabberer, The Hunting Lodge, Holkham, the trophy chair.
Clockwise from top left: Eva Willoughby, Blakeney Farm, Blakeney Point, seasonal farm produce calendar; Neil Kahawatte, The Residence of the UK Minister of the Environment and the Holkham Land Agent, the great hall in a downpour; Peter Watkins, The Dunwich Foundation—A House for Displaced Populations, Morston, the parishioner’s canopy, 1832; John Ashton, The Shedding Myth, Blakeney, the monster in the marsh and sectional perspective; Eva Willoughby, Blakeney Farm, Blakeney Point, samphire pot roof and algae stills.
This page, top to bottom: Neil Kahawatte, The Residence of the UK Minister of the Environment and the Holkham Land Agent, weather laboratory, measuring change; Peter Watkins, The Dunwich Foundation—A House for Displaced Populations, Morston, the lead miners wait, 1901 and the view towards Morston, 2020 and the arrival of the Manor Garden Allotments, 2008.
This page: Neil Kahawatte, The Residence of the UK Minister of the Environment and the Holkham Land Agent. Top: the summer recess. Bottom: autumn storms. Facing page: Peter Watkins, The Dunwich Foundation—A House for Displaced Populations, Morston, the parishioner’s bench after the twenty-five year storm, 1842.
City within a City, the Independent Quarter Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Dip Unit 12 Yr 4: Beatie Blakemore, Ed Carter, Neil Kahawatte, Gro Sarauw, Peter Watkins. Yr 5: Eva Baranyai, Geraldine Booth, Ben Clement, Sebastian de la Cour, James Hampton, Emma Neville, Pouya Zamanpour.
City within a city, the independent quarter The Trading House This year's project is The Trading House, a home to industry and commerce. On sites in Venice and London, The Trading House is a catalyst for a productive and thriving city independent of tourism. Here trade is also understood as a model for the relations between a building and its immediate and wider environments. Weather Architecture Rather than opposed to architecture, weather can be a positive and initiating architectural force. Contemporary weather is not limited to sun and rain, it also includes the changeable hybrid weathers that society and architecture manufacture, carbon monoxide pollution, flooding, acid rain or the electromagnetic weather of the mobile phone, radio and computer. A weather-responsive and weather-absorbing architecture is indicative of a wider agenda: a changeable architecture for changeable conditions. Making History We are interested in the new. But we are equally interested in the old. As a creative stimulus, narrative resource and gene pool for twentieth-first century architecture, Unit 12 focuses on earlier centuries as well as those more recent. When everybody else is looking in one time and one place, it's always good to look elsewhere as a discovery may be yours alone, and thus more surprising and personal. As well as history, we are interested in personal history. Technical Tutor: Chris Davy Environmental Tutor: Prashant Kapoor
Jonathan Hill and Elizabeth Dow
Top: Emma Neville, Climate Register, Venice, paper reading room. Middle: James Hampton, Accademia della Morte, Venice, the death of the campanile. Bottom left: Emma Neville, Climate Register, Venice, wax balustrade; right: Ben Clement, Spaces For Solitude: Bankrupts' Institute, Venice, misadministration office.
Clockwise from top left: Peter Watkins, The Archive of Oral Histories, Rialto, Venice, glass chair; Pouya Zamanpour, Silent Dialogues, Arsenale, Venice, internal perspective; Ben Clement, Spaces For Solitude: Bankrupts' Institute, Venice, mastering yourself; Eva Baranyai, The City of London Cries, Smithfield, London, ballroom reflected ceiling plan; Peter Watkins, The Archive of Oral Histories, Rialto, Venice, petrified forest; Sebastian de la Cour, The House of Obstacles and Invitations, Venice, a bonsai in bondage.
Left:Sebastian de la Cour, The House of Obstacles and Invitations, Venice, (top) a door to burgle detail, (bottom) a door to burgle . Right: Ben Clement, Spaces For Solitude: Bankrupts' Institute, Venice, the plumber who gives too much.
This page: James Hampton, Accademia della Morte, Venice, the timber yard.
Top: Neil Kahawatte, House of Tides, Venice, section. Middle left to right: Peter Watkins, The Archive of Oral Histories, Rialto, Venice, section; Beatie Blakemore, The Janus House, Venice, water seepage; Eva Baranyai, The City of London Cries, Smithfield, London, acoustic pavement detail. Bottom left: Ed Carter, Consulate of the Peoples' Republic of China, Venice, lacquer wall, detail, right: James Hampton, Accademia della Morte, Venice, the memory palace. Facing page: Geraldine Booth, Nursery-Nursery, Browning's Island, Little Venice, London, section.
About Time Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Dip Unit 12 Yr 4: Eva Baranyai, Geraldine Booth, Ben Clement, Harriet Comben, Sebastian de la Cour, James Hampton, Ann Leung, Emma Neville. Yr 5: Anton Ambrose, Jennifer De Vere-Hopkins, Laura Dewe Mathews, Misa Furigori Gonzalez, Louise Heaps, Lina Lahiri, Bilal Mian, Tobiah Samuel, Paul Thomas, Olga Wukounig.
About Time Our project this year, a Public House, is a Time Machine and a Weather Station. Public House The most private of spaces, a house familiarly houses an individual or a family. But we also speak of the House of Commons, the house of correction, the curry house, the art-house, the hothouse, and many other houses. This year, our project is such a public house. It is a house to house a society. Time Machine References to C20 modernism dominate contemporary architecture and earlier periods are largely ignored. As a creative stimulus, narrative resource and knowledge base for C21 architecture, Unit 12 focuses on earlier centuries as well as those more recent. Seen in this light, architecture, as a discipline and as a building, is never complete; it is a compound of many moments, not one. Weather Station Instead of the familiar opposition of weather and architecture, weather is a principal material and weathering is a principal process of the Public House. Weather can be man-made and electromagnetic as well as natural, while weathering is not simply decay. It can be protective, as in the rust coating on Corten steel, and positive, drawing attention to the wider environment and the possibility and potential of change. For Unit 12, weather is a positive and initiating architectural force. Technical support: Chris Davy. Critics: Abi Abdolwhabi, Constance Lau. Consultants: Prashant Kapoor (Price and Myers), Rutger Snoek (Michael Hadi).
Elizabeth Dow and Jonathan Hill
Clockwise from top left: Tobiah Samuel, Misa Furigori Gonzalez, Louise Heaps, Jennifer De Vere-Hopkins.
Clockwise from top left: Bilal Mian, Lina Lahiri, Olga Wukounig, Paul Thomas. Overleaf, left: Anton Ambrose, right: Laura Dewe Mathews.
The Public Private House Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Dip Unit 12 Yr 4: Anthony Ambrose, Laura Dewe Mathews, Louise Heaps, Candas Jennings, Lina Lahiri, Jessica Lawrence, Tobiah Samuel, Rafaelle Seth, Umut Yamac. Yr 5: Matthew Butcher, Charlie de Bono, Catherine Greig, Evelyn Hayes, Chee Kit Lai, Juliet Quintero, Rupert Scott, Ruth Silver, Max Dewdney, Tim Wray.
The Public Private House A recurring theme in architectural discourse states that the house is the origin and archetype of architecture, the manifestation of its most important attributes. Certain houses are both an official residence and a home, the representation of both a public and a private self. This year our project is to design such a house in London for a person or group with both a public and a private life. In accordance with the Mayor’s demand, outlined in The London Plan, for new housing to accommodate other social programmes, The Public Private House is doubled publicly and privately, coexisting with another function and other occupants. The Public Private House is a prototype for dense, urban living. Exploiting the fluctuations of architecture and nature, it creates a self-sufficient micro-city and hybrid ecology – natural and artificial – conducive to its survival and growth. In seasonal dialogue with its environment, it is a catalyst for change an architectural fertiliser in a specific part of London. Critics: Abi Abdolwahabi, Constance Lau.
Elizabeth Dow and Jonathan Hill
Clockwise from top left: Juliet Quintero, Charlie de Bono, Tim Wray, Matthew Butcher, Evelyn Hayes.
Clockwise from top left: Chee Kit Lai, Ruth Silver, Max Dewdney, Matthew Butcher, Rupert Scott.
ucl.ac.uk/architecture