Design Anthology PG17
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.
2024 For Things to Remain the Same, Everything Must Change
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Nasios Varnavas, Tamsin Hanke
2023 The Dialogical Architect
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
2022 Between
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
2021 Extended Mind
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
2020 Prompt Score Ensemble
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
2019 Deep Future, Deep Past
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
2018 The Protagonist
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
2017 2 3 5 7 11 13 17
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
2016 Taking Time
Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
2015 Devo Max
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
2014 The Open Work
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
2013 Materials: Ideas
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
2012 Take It from the Top
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
2011 Do Undo Do
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
2010 Decay and Emergence – The Becoming of Cities
Adam Cole, Tilo Guenther, Níall McLaughlin
2009 The Recovery of the Real
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
2008 The Absence of the Architectural Object
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
2007 Migrations
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Bev Dockray
2006 Unreal Constructions
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
2005 Emerging and Dissolving Places
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
2004 Ground-Horizon
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
2024
For Things to Remain the Same, Everything Must Change
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Nasios Varnavas, Tamsin Hanke
For Things to Remain the Same, Everything Must Change 1
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Nasios Varnavas, Tamsin Hanke
While buildings are rooted in place, they are planetary creations, embedded in a global tangle of relations. Architecture can no longer be conceived as purely site-specific. It intertwines with the local, yet it must evoke a planetary imagination and set planetary boundaries to care for the Earth as our client. Ultimately, buildings need to be gentle with the places they belong to and the Earth system as a whole.
The Earth’s crust is the thickest physical palimpsest of time, accumulating fossils, minerals and natural resources while also tracing an overpowering Anthropocene. Most importantly, this ‘underland’ stores the sediments of human creations, our memories and hopes, and the secrets and failures of our ancestors. As architects, we are in the midst of making ‘the palaeontology of our present’. 2
This year we considered how our creations weigh and form strata for the future. We questioned the relationships between contemporary life and the passage of a longer time, entombed beneath our feet and released by building processes. We imagined buildings as vessels for living and, at the same time, thought of them and the tools of their making as fossils-to-be.
Our field trip to Sicily raised opportunities for an architecture that engages with contemporary forms of cohabitation, history, myth, migration and settlement, resources, the climate and a magnificent natural world. We created projects that are based on a deeper understanding of doing and undoing architecture, the rise and fall of cities and infrastructures, village depopulation and development, temporality, ecology and adaptation, plant and animal habitats.
For PG17 the architect mediates and works dialogically in an emergent culture. Dialogical architects develop processes of design rather than single products. They weave together a creative web of connections so that architecture can benefit from chance encounters, negotiations, and the shared proximity between materials, ideas, social realities and desires.
Year 4
Panagiota Grivea, Peter Holmes, Sarah Kay, Richard Kirk, Ying Tung (Ruby) Ng, Eleanor Pavier, Amy Peacock, Georgie Stephenson, Zekun Tong, Giacomo Francesco Vinti
Year 5
Basil Babichev, Rory Browne, Tessa Lewes, Jeff Qu Liu, Kevin Poon, Thibault Seiji Ryba Quinn, Ben Smallwood
Technical tutors and consultants: James Daykin, Sophia McCracken, Ioannis Rizos, Michael Woodrow
Thesis supervisors: Hector Altamirano, Kelly Alvarez Doran, Jane Hall, Joshua Mardell, Oliver Wilton, Stamatis Zografos
Critics: Jessam Al-Jawad, Felicity Atekpe, Kirsty Badenoch, Colin Herperger, Madhav Kidao, Guan Lee, Francesco Moncada, Will McLean, Thomas Parker, Lorenzo Perri, Sophia Psarra, Mafalda Rangel, Edoardo Tibuzzi, Mike Tonkin, Victoria Watson, Mika Zacharias
Partners: Drawing Matter, Lucia Pierro
1. This title is from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (London: Vintage, 1958).
2. Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019).
17.1 Jeff Qu Liu, Y5 ‘Engraved Cycles’. Inspired by Sicily’s interdependent scales and geology, the project weaves the life cycles of a marine, human and regenerative lithosphere using local limestone and granite. Located in Addaura, the proposed design features a marina complex and a civil registry, revitalising the old port’s industrial remains. The proposal integrates Sicilian human and material timescales into a sustainable architectural possibility.
17.2 Thibault Seiji Ryba Quinn, Y5 ‘Fragmenting and Condensing Civic Space’. This project reinterprets civic space in the context of dynamic sociopolitical and geological forces shaping Palermo. The revealing of hidden underground waterways and railway tracks overlaps with the connection between institutional power and local people. The fragments of the jigsaw of diverse public spaces are condensed as a common ground for the multicultural people of Palermo.
17.3 Zekun Tong, Y4 ‘Water Field Islands’. An open kindergarten is proposed within a public landscape on a reclaimed coastal habitat in Palermo. The landscape negotiates digital scripting and physical modelling in the abstraction of water. The buildings provide various children’s learning spaces for the nearby marginalised community. A playful, light and airy environment is created through the use of wooden trusses and waterreed cladding, locally sourced.
17.4 Peter Holmes, Y4 ‘All That’s Left Behind’. Many buildings in Prizzi stand abandoned due to depopulation. Should we preserve the hill town as an edifice, or extract its stone to build anew? Prizzi is carved up, exploited for its material resources and renewed to meet the challenges of its reduced population. What is justified when all gains are tied to a material loss?
17.5 Eleanor Pavier, Y4 ‘Welfare Island Hostel’. This project explores the retrofit and reclamation of Giarre’s 1985 abandoned Olympic Polo and Athletics Stadium. Addressing unprecedented environmental and agricultural challenges, this hostel sits on a key migratory path for tourists, refugees and job seekers, and uses the stadium’s foundations to emerge as a testbed for radical agrotourism and revolutionary education.
17.6 Ying Tung (Ruby) Ng, Y4 ‘Casting, Imprinting and Constructing’. The project explores material contingencies through the construction of physical models. The collection of models demonstrates the experimentation process of a new casting method that uses an elastic membrane to enhance material performance and capture the expression of materials as they transition from a liquid to a solid state.
17.7 Ben Smallwood, Y5 ‘The Notifier of the Anthropocene’. The project is located in Sicily, specifically at the island’s largest landfill. The building serves as an archive that interacts with the worsening conditions of flooding, material extraction and waste. The structure adopts the haphazard Sicilian tiled roofs to house proxy records and apparatus that naturally scar, stain and erode the building, recording the worsening climate.
17.8 Tessa Lewes, Y5 ‘Hades and Persephone’. This project is a spatial manifestation of the Sicilian myth of Hades and Persephone. The architecture is an extension of the landscape, offering a poetic spatial journey through a landscape of divine ritual. A farm adapted to a future climate sits above an excavated myth-telling theatre. The project preserves the divine, dramatic and eternal narratives of Sicily’s mythical past.
17.9 Sarah Kay, Y4 ‘Incompiuto’. This project engages with an incomplete building, ‘the palace of concrete’, in the unfinished town of Librino. It explores material reuse through processes of carving and demolition, allowing light, air and space for gathering. The building builds and unbuilds itself, mirroring the cycles of construction and demolition seen in many of Sicily’s cities today.
17.10 Richard Kirk, Y4 ‘The Hill of Shame’. In Pizzo Sella, a mountainside is scarred by illegal mafia construction. Imagined in phases, temporary architectural installations of a living herbarium provide infrastructure for both the demolition of politicised ruins and a simultaneous cultivation of restorative gardens. Grounded in a culture of site-specific reuse, material reclamation defines the architecture, allowing the materials by which the mountain was defaced to enact its restitution.
17.11–17.12 Rory Browne, Y5 ‘Towards Slow Heritage’. The project proposes minimal landscape infrastructure within the Necropolis of Pantalica’s UNESCO buffer zone. A typology of platforms and plinths enhances visits to the site while small-scale archaeological, film and music festivals activate it seasonally. The phased proposal nurtures a slower connection to the land, offering a temporal recognition of the site and the dynamic rhythms that drive it.
17.13 Georgie Stephenson, Y4 ‘Born From Ashes’. Influenced by recent effects of deforestation, Sicily‘s dramatic climate has led to numerous wildfires spreading across the region. At the heart of Monte Pellegrino, the project bridges the often blurred boundaries between architecture, landscape and fire. Reflecting the revival of the fire-damaged forest, the project illuminates the potential timber architecture can have in wildfire-prone areas, reimagining the fire to protect and preserve.
17.14 Basil Babichev, Y5 ‘The Proportional Path: Sowing Seeds of Coexistence’. In Sicily, the borghi are villages built in the early 20th century to politically indoctrinate rural populations. Today, many remain in ruins due to decolonisation, tourism and rural marginalisation. This project addresses attempts at reviving these villages as tourist centres by occupying an incomplete viaduct and using salvaged borgo materials that are consolidated to liberate areas of land.
17.15 Panagiota Grivea, Y4 ‘Life in Common: Past and Future Realities of a Ruin’. This project approaches Western Sicily’s fragmented context through the life of Poggioreale, an abandoned town. The proposed re-inhabitation uses urban collaboration, cooperative structures and reconstruction as strategies for communal living in a cooperative housing scheme. The project recognises the cyclical nature of human migration by using movie-making to communicate the town’s past and present realities, as well as alternative futures.
17.16 Giacomo Francesco Vinti, Y4 ‘La Pescheria’. The project entails the design of a fish-storing unit in Palermo’s traditional market. A 1:5 sectional model of La Pescheria’s fish-storing unit demonstrates the key mechanisms and systems involved in fish preservation. At this scale, the elements showcase the true materiality and construction processes involved in a 1:1 structure. The model featured has thus been used to illustrate functionality in real life.
17.17 Amy Peacock, Y4 ‘Palermo Citizen’s Advice Bureau’. This project investigates the potential of knitting as an architectural response to the urban neglect of the Albergheria neighbourhood of Palermo. Using the skeleton of an existing building, knitted structures and enclosures form a centre to help local inhabitants in navigating the legal and bureaucratic systems of Palermo.
17.18 Kevin Poon, Y5 ‘Beyond Surface’. The project investigates the reuse of discarded marble, utilising marble ‘waste’ as a primary building material, and embracing the raw and unrefined qualities of stone. Inspired by photographic work of marble quarries, the design uses remnants and ongoing construction processes to add layers to the architecture. It is presented as timeless groundwork that resembles geological formations.
17.7
17.9
2023
The Dialogical Architect
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
The Dialogical Architect
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
This year PG17 explored Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism and the potential of his philosophy of language and ethics in architecture. Dialogism is determined by the capacity of an author to integrate other positions of self and unresolvable dialogues in their work. Many of our limitations in making a caring, enjoyable and sustainable world, both as architects and as citizens, can be overcome by developing and using creative processes that are truly dialogic.
Architects engage with a vast spectrum of environments and are asked to accommodate an unending array of different desires and needs. Responding to this complex reality, we have become sceptical of monologues and the monologic design narratives that dominate our discipline and profession; instead, we aim to practice as dialogical architects. The dialogical architect fosters an empathic self who attends to manifold perspectives, cultures and histories, even when these are contradictory, and who embodies multiple positions and counter-positions within a single project.
We have sited our projects in Porto and the Douro Valley, responding to a range of individual interests: prehistory and the fossil fuel age; river and coast ecologies; stone assemblages; architectural ceramics; purification in housing; migrating communities; scripting histories; sound in architecture; unfinished building; mental health and the representation of multiple realities; mobile structures; and the life cycles of materials. Each project is research-based and constructs an architectural thesis that is explicitly manifested in the design proposition. The proposed buildings are contextual and interplay with the social and political facets of place. Iteration, experimentation and improvisation are balanced by traditions and continuities.
In addition, this year we developed a one-day drawing project together with students and staff from the Porto School of Architecture, also known as FAUP. Our shared work, called ‘Drawing in Dialogue’, explored how the buildings and landscapes of FAUP, designed by Álvaro Siza, have been populated by multiple intentions and experiences during the last 40 years. We responded to FAUP’s stories – told by the gardener, the carpenter, the engineer, the historian, the architect, the teacher and the student – with numerous hand drawings, the making of a collaborative intersectional topography and a machine learning drawing process.
Year 4
Patricia Bob, Jeff Qu Liu, Heba Mohsen, Nicholas Phillips, Kevin Kai Yin Poon, Thibault Quinn
Year 5
Daeyong Bae, Ceren Erten, Matthew King, Desire Lubwama, Karin Kei Nagano, Vilius Petraitis, Malgorzata Rutkowska, Anton Schwingen, Tia-Angelie Vijh
Technical tutors and consultants: James Daykin, Sophie McCracken, Ioannis Rizos, Jose Torero Cullen
Thesis supervisors: Hector Altamirano, Matthew Barnett Howland, Brent Carnell, Jane Hall, Guang Yu Ren, Tim Waterman, Oliver Wilton, Fiona Zisch
Critics: Jessam Al-Jawad, Nat Chard, Malina Dabrowska, Mary Duggan, Fernando Da Silva Ferreira, Anne Marie Galmstrup, Jonathan Hill, Clara Kraft Isono, Nikoletta Karastathi, Chee-Kit Lai, Alex Pillen, Sophia Psarra, Jonathan Tyrrell, Tim Waterman, Victoria Watson, Izabela Wieczorek
Workshop collaborators: Noémia Herdade Gomes with FAUP staff and students
Additional workshop support: Jose Pedro Sousa, Tim Waterman
Field trip collaborator: Fernando Da Silva Ferreira
Invited speakers: Joanne Chen, Ben Hayes
17.1 Group Work, Y5 ‘Dialogic Cube’. Sixty-four cubes carved to represent stories around Vila Nova de Foz Côa, where the palaeolithic open-air rock art is located.
17.2–17.3 Anton Schwingen, Y5 ‘Stone Operations’. The project investigates stone as a building material and as a vessel of collective memory. Porto is built from stone and rests on a solid granite massif. A new living quarter is constructed by quarrying space into the rock and rebalancing stone on the site. Stone forms an inhabitable geological stratum, serving as the foundation for multi-sited constructions in an ongoing assemblage. It combines inert local geology with nomadic light structures.
17.4 Vilius Petraitis, Y5 ‘Public Works: Performing the Backstage’. The project transforms construction and reconstruction processes into spatial experiences. It features three key elements – the backstage, reuse looms and a cork mason yard – existing at different timescales. The project reimagines the architect as a playwright, crafting dynamic performances of design that respond to the evolving needs of Porto. Through the project, we experience the city as a living, breathing assemblage undergoing perpetual change.
17.5 Matthew King , Y5 ‘Resonating Deep’. The Port of Leixões is expanding and its interests are diverging from those of adjacent communities and ecologies. How can architecture look to dismantle the monologic nature of the port, generating a dialogue between marine life, people and coastal infrastructure? This project looks at the convergence of coastal voices, stitching them together through a language of monolithic spaces and fractal surfaces. Beneath the tide, benthic life is encrusting and sediment is accumulating – processes that the architecture makes visible and explorable. 17.6–17.7 Tia-Angelie Vijh, Y5 ‘You Don’t Live to Work, You Work to Live’. The project intends to create a new and improved way of living for the people of Porto. It explores healthy living conditions through Portuguese textile heritage in conjunction with the current housing crisis. The project takes place in Porto along the banks of the Douro River, focusing on implementing a new housing scheme of white, biomorphic architecture designed as an extension of Porto’s industrial worker housing typology. 17.8, 17.10–17.11 Daeyong Bae, Y5 ‘Traces: Realisation of Deep Time’. The project explores traces in artefacts and architecture as a dialogue between the past, present and future. Inspired by palaeolithic engravings, it focuses on the Matosinhos oil refinery’s regeneration in Porto. During a four-year decontamination phase, the proposed architecture utilises cleaned soil for temporary buildings. These architectures symbolise the end of the fossil fuel era and mark the site’s history. Over time, the fragments of these buildings will remain, reminding us of the site’s past and the transition away from fossil fuels.
17.9 Jeff Qu Liu, Y4 ‘The Bonfim Detachment’. The project builds upon Claude Parent’s theory of the ‘oblique’ to create a dynamically unstable building. It incorporates an oblique economy of materials, promoting decay on the building components’ lifecycles, while perished materials are recycled into new components. The project, situated in the old industrial district of Porto, addresses housing shortages and conflict between locals and tourists through urbanism-centred workshops and repurposing what remains into a new living reality. 17.12–17.14 Ceren Erten, Y5 ‘Self/Other’. The project proposes a wellbeing facility run by a mental health charity in Porto. Catering to people in different zones of the cognitive spectrum, the scheme questions the perceived superiority of the shared reality of everyday life. Exploring societal tensions of experiencing otherness, the project creates a space for interaction between the perceived self and the other. It promotes openness and
acceptance, instead of avoidance and neglect in the context of mental health.
17.15 Kevin Kai Yin Poon, Y4 ‘The River Foundation’. The project challenges the existing large-scale river infrastructure, highlighting the irreversible damage caused by human intervention. Located in Foz Côa, Portugal, the proposal restores the scarred landscape and supports water-quality research. Utilising local materials and traditional techniques, the architecture sits in harmony with its surroundings. The site harnesses energy from the river through a decentralised, microrenewable approach. The project preserves the site’s significance, empowers the community and raises awareness around climate change and water management.
17.16, 17.19 Desire Lubwama, Y5 ‘Fabrica, Porto’. Fabrica takes the methodologies of both architecture and textile design in parallel to create a space with its own specific programme, fitted to its urban context. The project uses the graphical language of garment patterns, symbols and processes from both North African and Portuguese textiles, with space being transformed into structural garments. The dialogue between design control and losing control is explored through tailoring and surface dressing, which play as communicative capacities that inform the identity of the body.
17.17–17.18 Karin Kei Nagano, Y5 ‘Landscape of Excessive Labour’. The autonomous housing intervention in Campanhã celebrates non-standardised building tradition, emphasising expression, improvisation and agency. Situated in an abandoned industrial site, it reclaims embedded labour history. Addressing the global housing shortage, it provides a sustainable, affordable housing scheme for residents, challenging the rigid rhythms of working-class homes under the Estado Novo regime. Through the introduction of flexible fabric formwork and casting, it revolutionises construction methods.
17.20 Heba Mohsen, Y4 ‘Sit Tibi Terra Levis’. The project proposes a settlement and open-air museum on a rural Portuguese hillside. Using schema as a tool and representation as a strategy, architectural forms created from forgotten histories are recontextualised, distorting linearity and carrying characteristics from the original source to a new time. Ideas of singular authorship and the ‘definite’ hand of the architect are questioned as we examine what might happen to architectural practice if we allow self-organising worlds to bloom.
17.21–17.22 Thibault Quinn, Y4 ‘Mind the Gap’. This project proposes the reinstatement of Porto’s abandoned customs railway as a moving market, transporting goods and people in mobile carts which inhabit a framework perched on the Douro cliffside. Transcultural trade is reintroduced to an area where it has been forced out, with a system that also brings the market to new neighbourhoods along the line. An artery of import and export is reimagined with a migratory and reconfigurable architecture that adapts to the city’s social and geological flows.
17.23–17.24 Malgorzata Rutkowska, Y5 ‘The Part and the Whole: Layering Climate Conditions’. The project investigates the preconception of controlling thermal comfort through ceramic material innovations. It proposes a work/live community in a post-industrial site hidden in a backyard behind a bourgeois townhouse in the district of Bonfim, Porto. The city’s forgotten ceramic manufacturing past intertwines with communal living. The residents and visitors can explore spaces –private and public, indoor and outdoor – that create layers of intermediate climatic characteristics.
17.4
17.6
17.8
17.9
2022
Between
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
Between
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
Architecture connects. It makes myriad interconnections between physical matter, systems of knowledge, cultures and experiences – entities that are never fixed but in constant dialogue. Architecture also separates. Yet neat oppositions no longer exist, so our concept of ‘between’ aims to challenge common dichotomies maintained in our discipline: nature and things, local and global, the individual and the collective, the settler and the nomad. To produce a sustainable, fairer and more inclusive architecture, we need to rethink such distinctions.
‘Between’ suggests a spatial and temporal transition, as well as liminality. What happens at thresholds, on borders, in the interval between before and after? An in-between situation can cause friction and discontinuity, but can also be the source of enormous creative potential for new kinds of architecture and new kinds of connection.
We are interested in intermediate structures, hybrid objects and processes. We understand buildings as environments that entangle human conditions, as well as components and services that are themselves in flux. Buildings are physical continuities of matter changing at different rates. What exists beneath them is multifaceted, so our foundations are both literally and metaphorically compromised. Lands, oceans and communities are in transformation. Migration, social health and environmental ethics concern us urgently.
Our projects are always works of adaptation. Learning to design with the material and conceptual remains of situations will prepare us for working sensitively with residues of conditions in the future.
We started the year by living and making at Grymsdyke Farm. This collaborative work required scaffolding the size of our team configurations from two to four and ultimately to 16 students. We drew on and collectively glazed more than 360 ceramic tiles. Together we built a large-scale landscape installation involving found materials on the site and the spatial unravelling of three kilometres of rope. Drawing upon this initial performative work, we then developed individual design proposals on sites of our choice in Milton Keynes. In addition, all fourth year students assembled the Milton Keynes Collective, a collaborative manifesto with pilot design projects, expertise and ideas for the future of a sustainable and dynamic city.
Year 4
Ceren Erten, Matthew King, Desire Lubwama, Karin (Kei) Nagano, Vilius Petraitis, Anton Schwingen, Tia-Angelie Vijh
Year 5
Zhongliang Huang, Rebecca Lim, Polina Morova, Kaye Song, Negar Taatizadeh, Ella Thorns, Alexander Venditti, Janet Vutcheva, Qingyuan (Rubin) Zhou
Technical tutors and consultants: James Daykin, Lidia Guerra, Guan Lee, Jessie Lee, Rachel Pattison
Critics: Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Nat Chard, Hannah Corlett, Murray Fraser, Kostas Grigoriadis, Perry Kulper, Chee-Kit Lai, Constance Lau, Guan Lee, Anna Liu, Petra Marko, Emma-Kate Matthews, Michiko Sumi, Jonathan Tyrrell, Oliver Wilton, Simon Withers
17.1 Group Project, Y4&5 ‘Sixteen’. Collaborative installation and performance carried out in the first term with materials found at Grymsdyke Farm, Buckinghamshire.
17.2 Group Work, Y4&5 ‘An Archaeology of Making’. This assemblage gathers some of the physical work produced by PG17 during this academic year, highlighting a studio ethos that is based on coexistence and the supportive experience of making and doing.
17.3 Ceren Erten, Y4 ‘Waste + Value’. The project proposes a new residential expansion strategy for Milton Keynes using a recycled plastic-block construction system. Critiquing the current cultural misuse of plastic –an extremely long-lasting material – as throwaway, the project explores tensions between disposability and permanence.
17.4 Qingyuan (Rubin) Zhou, Y5 ‘Land Graffiti’. Located at a Roman archaeological site at Stantonbury, a small village in Milton Keynes, the project challenges the public to understand the past as having multiple narratives by designing methods of excavation and reinterpretation. This proposal responds to the authorised heritage discourse that cements the area’s rich archaeological significance and invites the local community to manifest and craft the multiplicity of their history.
17.5 Karin Kei Nagano, Y4 ‘Finding Counterpoint’.
This project offers a counternarrative to the initial 1960s plan of Milton Keynes which, by muffling urban noise, resulted in the absence of interaction between its different communities. Reclaiming rare remaining pockets of public space, the project brings sound to the forefront and envisions its function as an instrument, giving the community a voice and enabling it to evolve.
17.6 Negar Taatizadeh, Y5 ‘Housing Reciprocity’.
The project anchors itself in three thematic subjects: rebuilding, reconnecting and revealing. It proposes a systematic approach towards rebuilding to reconnect the community across generations while revealing the clay material context of this location. The project is fascinated with the liminality of materials and celebrates their impermanence. A transitory architecture is formed, one that promotes connection, reciprocity and care above all.
17.7 Kaye Song, Y5 ‘Double Edged’. A design for a porous and accessible edge to Milton Keynes emphasises its position as a thoroughfare city. A proposal for a green, populated and community-owned distribution park bridges the utilitarian and industrial with the wild and organic, welcoming hybridity and fluidity as essential to the contemporary experience of the English landscape.
17.8 Anton Schwingen, Y4 ‘Theatre of Matters’.
The construction industry is responsible for a large proportion of global CO2 emissions, necessitating a radical change in the way we build. The theatre is a storage and inventory facilitating the shift to reusing building components. It also becomes a space to debate, observe juxtaposition and negotiate the city of the past and the future.
17.9 Zhongliang Huang, Y5 ‘Wayward Growth’. This proposal reinvigorates the industrial ruins of the Wolverton railway works by adapting and reusing the derelict building material while growing a new communal garden. The proposal also contains a workshop and accommodation units for lifelong learning in the arts and sciences.
17.10 Vilius Petraitis , Y4 ‘Between Estate’. The project establishes a shared playing field, which lays the groundwork for a temporary cohousing scheme, weaving communities together while their homes undergo vital repairs. With doubt and delight as design parameters, the project looks at creating an architecture where the building is not an end in itself. Instead, the constructions encourage the continual need for change.
17.11 Matthew King, Polina Morova, Anton Schwingen, Ella Thorns, Y4&5 ‘Quartet’. A device that connects four people by joining couples through an interdependent junction.
17.12 Alexander Venditti, Y5 ‘A Point in Time’. The Point cinema multiplex has been slated for demolition. Rejecting a tabula rasa restart, an alternative future inspired by its cinematic history is proposed, which sees the iconic site transformed into an open-air film stage. The oscillating states of set demolition and reconstruction strip back the veil of cinema and reveal the secrets behind its production, all while filling a gap of cultural identity within the city.
17.13–17.14 Polina Morova, Y5 ‘Softening Milton Keynes’. The centre of Milton Keynes offers an experiential example of rigid living where urban components of the city feel solitary and separate, and where life becomes a series of discrete experiences, clear-cut roles and identities. Within this context, the proposed park becomes a respite from daily life, offering a change of scene where the alienation one feels in the city becomes the poetic alienation one feels in nature.
17.15 Ella Thorns , Y5 ‘Consequential Cognition’. This project designs and interrogates a new foodbased masterplan for the neighbourhood of Oldbrook, Milton Keynes. Criticising the dissonance of our current food system, the architecture processes food and consumption by-products around its users, resulting in consequential awareness.
17.16 Janet Vutcheva, Y5 ‘Quarrying Fluidity’. The project investigates river valley quarrying and proposes a new quarrying technique through which an inhabited hydrocommon is constructed over time. The project offers a new model for inhabiting wet environments, which brings human and ‘more-than-human’ inhabitants together.
17.17 Desire Lubwama, Y4 ‘The Wedding House’. Addressing issues of cultural, historical and ecological sustainability, the proposal is an adaptive space that explores applications of waste plastic, earth and clay to create temporally stable structures in the Tree Cathedral, Milton Keynes. The value of ritual is combined with material processing to re-engage the public and influence the design of these spaces.
17.18 Tia-Angelie Vijh, Y4 ‘MUR MUR’. Set within Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, the project proposes to retrofit and restore the abandoned Block D – once home to the original codebreakers of World War II – into a quantum computer laboratory with exposed dilapidated courtyards. Through the use of historical and fictional text in relation to Block D and Alan Turing, the project proposes a series of adaptations, with the insertion of new courtyards and chambers.
17.19 Rebecca Lim , Y5 ‘Tempered and Timed Minimum Dwellings for Maximum Social Living’. Minimum dwellings, anchored by kilns and ovens for heating, making and sharing, extend Cosgrove Lakes holiday park in Milton Keynes. The post-digital architectural practice of drawing and machine learning critically reconfigures the notion of the conventional dwelling by seeing time and temperature as agents of social interaction. The dwelling is minimised through multiplicities of space but maximised for social exchange.
17.20 Matthew King , Y4 ‘Traces of Rhythm’. The scheme nestles where techno, Neolithic tradition and woodland management converge. By exploring these themes through the notation of cyclical processes, the scheme looks to uncover natural rhythms that bind us to the landscape. By cross-programming a timber yard with a rave site, the architecture becomes a vessel for reassociating young people in Milton Keynes with the landscape, instilling a sense of care.
17.13
17.14
2021
Extended Mind
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
Extended Mind
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
Mind, body and environment is a shared continuum: an integrated reality in which architecture plays a transformative role.
PG17 started the year by visiting the astonishing landscape of Avebury, Wiltshire, with an aim to think about the value of largescale architectural events, human movement, earthen construction, sustainability and longevity. Avebury physically manifests 5,000 years of continuous human history: it includes the biggest man-made prehistoric mound in Europe and the world’s largest prehistoric stone circle, which encompasses a living village. These monumental earthworks were constructed collectively as public theatres for ceremonies. The act of building brought communities together and gave physical expression to their ideas.
PG17 promotes a collaborative understanding of architecture and seeks to nurture future generations of architects who will influence the world differently, precisely because of the pluralistic underpinning of their practices. Creative autonomy is vital but how do we nest it in collective purpose? We seek to amplify the role of the individual in a collective but also the role of collaboration in one’s own imagination and critical thought process.
We have a profound interest in the spaces and experiences we create when we become immersed in the act of design. As an embodied and extended action, design is able to diffuse and transform individual thought: it can distribute the mind to body and hands, offload it to tools and materials and, through these, continuously energise itself, making new and reciprocal connections with other minds, actions and technologies in the world. Design, in this way, becomes shared world-building.
Ethical values cannot be separated by aesthetic values. It would be unfortunate if the potential of mythos (story and mood) was weakened under the instrumentalism of logos (reasoning). In The Periodic Table (1975), the chemist and novelist Primo Levi interweaves materials and human events in a sequence of 21 short stories, each one dedicated to a chemical element, including ‘Carbon’, ‘Gold’, ‘Iron’ and ‘Uranium’. It is in a similar way that this year we all tried to explore the limits and altering states of different resources and the continual interdependence between material and cultural events in time. In accordance with Herman Hertzberger’s view that ‘the world is tired of all that architecture on steroids’,1 many of us chose to work purposefully with fewer means.
Year 4
Daeyong Bae, Zhongliang Huang, Rebecca Lim, Kaye Song, Negar Taatizadeh, Ella Thorns, Janet Vutcheva
Year 5
Pravin Abraham, Ross Burns, Ho (Jackie) Cheung, Thomas Dobbins, Naysan Foroudi, Nikolina Georgieva, Yangzi (Cherry) Guo, Hyesung Lee, George Newton, Benedicte Zorde Rahbek
Technical tutors and consultants: James Daykin, Sophia McCracken, Sal Wilson
Critics: Anthony Boulanger, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Nat Chard, Sandra Coppin, Kate Davies, Beverley Dockray, Elizabeth Dow, Murray Fraser, Maria Fulford, Clara Kraft, Perry Kulper, Chee-Kit Lai, Guan Lee, Anna Liu, Emma-Kate Matthews, Ana MonrabalCook, Shaun Murray, Stuart Piercy, Michiko Sumi, Phil Tabor, Peter Thomas, Robert Thum, Sumayya Vally, Victoria Watson, Oliver Wilton, Fiona Zisch
Circle of Friends: Malina Dabrowska, Nefeli Eforakopoulou, Katherine Hegab, Andreas Müllertz, Jack Newton, Danielle Purkiss, Julia Schütz
Guest Speakers: Alice Brownfield, Matthew Barnett Howland, Joshua Pollard, DJERNES & BELL, Local Works Studio, Studio Elements, THISS
B-Made: William Victor Camilleri, Tom Davies, Donat Fatet
1. Herman Hertzberger (17 September 2020), ‘Letter to a Young Architect’, The Architectural Review
17.1 PG17 ‘Circle’. A collaboration between all 17 students within the unit, where machine-carved oak blocks are brought together to form a single circle. Building upon the idea of community, which has given the Neolithic stones of Avebury, Wiltshire, such presence and importance throughout millennia, each piece denotes the essence and context of our projects. While their sites are scattered across the world, they are all brought together through the act of collaboration, creating a shared continuum. The work embodies our belief that the individual author finds significance and value within a collective purpose, expanded and remembered through time.
17.2 Hyesung Lee, Y5 ‘Extended Heritage’. Exploring a community’s relationship with architecture, ritual and fire, the project proposes a festival within the Avebury Stone Circles, held on the summer solstice, at which temporary structures and human activity revive the circle’s periphery. Repeated acts of burning and re-building challenge the popular, passive understanding of heritage.
17.3 Benedicte Zorde Rahbek, Y5 ‘Tower of Women’. Bringing a new agenda to the London skyline, the project is shaped and informed by historical and present-day female makers of society, arts and architecture. The design is experienced through shifts in time and light, creating an ever-changing scene where women collaborators continue to evolve and impact the design of the building.
17.4 Thomas Dobbins, Y5 ‘Time in Elmet’. A temporal study of the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, undertaken across three scales of understanding: human, material and industrial. Using a performative design methodology inspired by the processes of three local artists, a series of scored landscape explorations suggests a new civic infrastructure and writer’s retreat along the boundary of a village churchyard.
17.5 Nikolina Georgieva, Y5 ‘Of Fells and Thwaites’. The project develops a deep understanding of the anthropogenic landscape, interrogating its formative human and ecological practices. Located within the glacial, volcanic terrain of the Lake District, a wellness retreat distils qualities of the climatological, geological and worked taskscape and the mentally navigated landscape of the region.
17.6, 17.12 Negar Taatizadeh & Kaye Song , Y4 ‘The Fyfield School of Land’. Advocating for a re-engagement with our land, the project proposes a campus for hands-onlearning set within an area of Wiltshire’s farmland, with a 6,000-year history of cultivation. A purposeful system of collaboration creates a dialogue between two designers and their respective buildings, promoting a mindful approach to a landscape and its surroundings.
17.7 Janet Vutcheva, Y4 ‘New Water Meadow’. Responding to the continued ecological degradation of England’s chalk streams, due to the climate crisis, the project proposes an infrastructural water network for restoring their health. It does so by harvesting, storing and draining rainwater, which helps support the ecology’s intricate webs of life.
17.8 Zhongliang Huang , Y4 ‘Garden Uranus’. Located in Dungeness – a former nuclear site on the coast of Kent – the project seeks to support the area’s rich ecology through the establishment of a bird sanctuary. Small buildings and low-rise walls made of local materials establish playful boundaries amongst pools of water and garden equipment, striving to confront the ecological decline caused by human and nuclear power at an architectural level.
17.9 Daeyong Bae, Y4 ‘With the Traces’. The project focusses on how traces of human activity left on built environments commemorate the everyday acts of those
who occupy them. Situated in Avebury, Wiltshire, the proposal redevelops an existing park home to accommodate a more social way of living, attuned to the temporal rhythms of life and death that are so present within the stones of its neighbouring Neolithic stone circle.
17.10–17.11 Ho (Jackie) Cheung , Y5 ‘Duologue Between Islands’. Revealing the lost cultural, social and political connections between a small quarrying village and the metropolitan city of Hong Kong, the scheme examines colonial practices of making and incorporates a material history that is found engraved upon its stoney site, it proposes a sculpting school and space for discussion that hopes to empower its local population.
17.13–17.14 Ross Burns, Y5 ‘Re-peating the Highlands’. This project investigates the potential for a system of environmental stewardship through practical and architectural interventions into the Class 5 blanket peat bog surrounding Corrour Station in the Central Highlands. It seeks to maximise the health of the bog by choreographing the relationship between peat, sphagnum moss, water, sound and human occupation.
17.15 George Newton, Y5 ‘The Public House’. Sited in Palmers Green, London, the project suggests an alternative future for The Fox – a now-deserted pub on Green Lanes, one of London’s longest and busiest roads. Once a key building within the community, a radical idea for urban living is proposed to break away from cellular systems of housing and work, dissolving the binary conditions of privacy within the suburb.
17.16 Pravin Abraham, Y5 ‘Revitalisation of Wisma Damansara’. Found within an affluent neighbourhood of central Kuala Lumpur, the project repurposes an existing concrete office block to create a series of transient shelters and spaces for teaching that serve the city’s marginalised homeless community. The project becomes part of a sustainable solution that promotes public dialogue and interaction.
17.17 Ella Thorns , Y4 ‘Growing Phrontistery’. A transitory space between early learning institutions and the forest, which responds to existing ecological and human cycles in symbiosis with each other. The structure and its population grow as time passes. The building augments the trees’ growth and enables inhabitation between branches, a choreography that follows the harmonies of the forest in correspondence with learning.
17.18 Rebecca Lim, Y4 ‘Avebury Seed Barrow’. Set within the Neolithic and agricultural context of Avebury, Wiltshire, the project proposes a seed bank that re-appropriates the preservative notions of the Neolithic long barrow. It uses a dialogue of design practices between human and machine minds to question the generative potentials of drawing and visual media, highlighting the importance of interpretation within architecture.
17.19 Naysan Foroudi, Y5 ‘The Quad’. Positioned in a single field at the intersection of four competing worlds, the project negotiates the often complex, juxtaposed realities of the Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire. The design of a new civic space creates a dialogue between military, historic, residential and agricultural communities, working within the confines of a square to create an integrated approach allowing for the landscape’s diverse multiplicity.
17.20 Yangzi (Cherry) Guo, Y5 ‘Snowdonia Nocturne’. The project focusses on the transient journey of ascent from the Welsh town of Blaenau Ffestiniog to the site of slate ruins on the mountaintop plateau within a Dark Sky Reserve. It operates around diurnal and nocturnal cycles, and provides retreats for those who wish to restore their circadian rhythm and sensitivity to natural light.
17.18
2020
Prompt Score Ensemble
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
Prompt Score Ensemble
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker
PG17 is an experience-based learning and design environment which fosters the role of autonomy and collaboration equally in architecture, encouraging our students to produce work inside and outside the university, both as individuals and as groups. For us, the connection between architecture and experience not only exists in the relationship between building and life, but is also played out within the process of design itself. The Latin word experimentum reminds us that experiment and experience are twinned: to experiment is to experience through practice.
We are inspired by the ethos of Black Mountain College, where architect Buckminster Fuller, artists Anni and Josef Albers, composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham developed highly influential practices within a non-hierarchical and experimental learning community. We attempt to find an equivalent form of architectural pedagogy today.
While the unit supports individual whole-year projects, we also encourage working in ensembles. ‘Ensemble’ means a mix of separate things, actions and people, together forming a shared whole. For example, this year we stayed in La Tourette, where we produced a large collaborative drawing responding to Le Corbusier and Xenakis’ breathtaking building. Collectively, we turned drawing into an embodied action of site performance.
Accepting that no single governing author or approach can handle the complex environmental and social conditions we face, and recognising that architecture is a composing act, able to synthesise different considerations, we ask what role can an ‘architectural score’ play in enabling design ensembles and polyphonic structures? Scores aim to describe a process; they are works in themselves but also preparatory pieces for influencing further work. Time is the essential element of the score, through which relationships between parts are constructed. Open scores allow us to invent and adapt relations, both temporally and spatially. Just as a musical score can organise sonic space in time, so an architectural score can structure time, materials and relations in space.
The architectural score can unlock new methods of communication, production and inhabitation in architecture, encouraging much-needed slippages between people, materials, tools and ideas. It can mix times past with times future, and human skill with other forms of intelligence, in unexpected ways. Through open scoring, we can associate and disassociate the parts of an ensemble, to create an architecture that while evoking oneness and inclusivity, may also be contradictory.
Year 4
Pravin (Richard) Abraham, Ross Burns, Hoyin (Jackie) Cheung, Thomas Dobbins, Naysan Foroudi, Nikolina Georgieva, Cherry Guo, Hyesung Lee, George Newton, Benedicte Zorde Rahbek
Year 5
Eleni Efstathia Eforakopoulou, Veljko Mladenovic, Iman Mohd Hadzhalie, Ioannis Saravelos, Philip Springall, Harriet Walton
Thanks to our Design Realisation tutor James Daykin and to our consultants Nathan Blades, Sarah Earney, Sophia McCracken, Richard Mildiner, Eric Nascimento
Many thanks to our critics Kirsty Badenoch, Ruth Bernatek, Peter Bertram, Anthony Boulanger, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Nat Chard, Hannah Corlett, Sebastian Crutch, James Daykin, Sean Griffiths, Perry Kulper, Emma-Kate Matthews, Jörg Mayer, Niall McLaughlin, Thomas Pearce, Alex Pillen, Bob Sheil, Emmanouil Stavrakakis, Timothy Waterman, Victoria Watson, Patrick Weber, Simon Withers
Thanks to Laura Mark and Matei Mitrache
17.1–17.2 PG17 ‘Drawing La Tourette’. In January PG17 joined the Dominican community in La Tourette where students drew individually and collectively. This large inhabitable drawing was done collectively on the floor of the dining hall, and measures 3 metres x 5 metres.
17.3 Veljko Mladenovic, Y5 ‘Plum Puddin Island’. In this project, the found object and the landscape are pertinent to the understanding of architecture. Low-lying buildings and playfully-swept roofs are in play with flat field and windswept trees. Historically popular with artists and craftsmen, Thanet is once more attracting creative thinkers. Imagined as a crafts retreat, the programme is comprised of textile and woodworking workshops, a gallery, a tea room and nine residences.
17.4 Philip Springall, Y5 ‘Carlisle Alzheimer’s Foundation’. This project proposes a network which connects individuals in creative practice with individuals at various stages of Alzheimer’s disease. By developing creative partnerships, the pair can engage in meaningful activities to respond to the challenges of personal identity, occupation, responsibility and inclusion faced by those with Alzheimer’s. Situated in the centre of Carlisle, the proposed scheme is designed through creative activities of making, constructing, performing, eating, cooking, wandering, conversing and socialising.
17.5 Cherry Guo, Y4 ‘The Inland Pier’. Located on the seafront of Pegwell Bay, Thanet, this project proposes an ‘inland pier’ with a school that celebrates the craft of stone masonry, whilst exploring the possibilities of stereotomic assemblage. Serving as a mediator between the land and the sea, the scheme aims to create a continuous geology with a series of interconnected chalk passageways and projective spaces.
17.6 Hoyin (Jackie) Cheung, Y4 ‘Reconciling the Terroir: Inhabiting Seaweed’. This project challenges the role of nature in the urban context of Margate. It uses seaweed as a natural material, and integrates it into both the programme and the architectural tectonics to create dynamic interactions between the coast, the building and our sensory experiences within it.
17.7 Eleni Efstathia Eforakopoulou, Y5 ‘Winds of Marseille’. At a time of climate crisis, this project aims to understand the invisible choreography of the natural world as a basis for architecture. The proposal reuses the site of a disused acid factory, situated amongst the limestone foothills to the south of Marseille. It establishes a new settlement for a wave of people forced to leave their homes due to the effects of desertification in North Africa. It follows the site’s logic, organised around the prevailing winds, the sea, and the land contours.
17.8 Ioannis Saravelos, Y5 ‘The Walking School of Stackpole’. This project addresses the sociodemographic issues that face the dispersed communities of Pembrokeshire. It proposes a framework of interconnected walking schools that seek to re-establish the connections between the communities and the landscape. Through the use of novel digital media, the project provides translocational connections between the schools themselves and their local context.
17.9 Benedicte Zorde Rahbek, Y4 ‘The Lido’. The old abandoned lido on the edge between land and sea tells the story of the heyday of Margate as a traditional holiday destination, and the decline which so quickly struck and demolished the town’s livelihood. It holds great emotional value for the people of Margate. This project experiments with a way of developing a transformational language embodying the emotional content to come.
17.10 Iman Mohd Hadzhalie, Y5 ‘Towards the Sea: A Refugee and Conservation Centre for Cliftonville’. This project is set in the Northdown Road conservation area, exceptional for its poverty and population of migrant business owners. The proposal encourages
the further integration of refugees, teaching the skills of conservation of historic shopfronts. Through framing the sea, it gives a sense of nostalgia to the landscape by which refugees have crossed to their new community.
17.11 Nikolina Georgieva, Y4 ‘Mosaic of Earthworks’. By establishing an understanding of everlasting translation in the practices of archaeology and geology, this project proposes alternative ways of reading the land on which we built. The proposal for an archaeological centre on the coast of Stonar Lake, Thanet, engages with processes of soil pigmentation and ground excavations, to shape cultural landscape, growing as a mosaic of earthworks.
17.12 Ross Burns, Y4 ‘The Xenakis Institute’. This project celebrates the multidisciplinary techniques of the prolific architect, composer and polymath Iannis Xenakis. Inspired by his scoring methods and investigations into sound and experience through drawing, the proposal for a research, education and performance facility in the tranquil setting of Domaine de la Tourette, France, is a result of the role of music in its design process.
17.13 Hyesung Lee, Y4 ‘The Waste Archipelago’. This proposal aims to revive a once-ludic Margate by restoring its forgotten spaces. Abandoned buildings of the city become material quarries and the collected waste is reused to manufacture new objects that slot into neglected spaces, creating an archipelago of expanded public islands. Not only playful installations, but resourceful places where further material dérive creates the vibrant network of the Magic Circle of Margate.
17.14 Harriet Walton, Y5 ‘The Village’. This proposal is set in the rural community of Pembrokeshire village of Little Haven. Although tourism provides a large economic boost to the area, the village is losing its heritage and stories. The project proposes an integrated film studio and set of theatre spaces, in which the performance documents the lives of the village. The stories of the settlement become the plot, and the villagers the actors.
17.15 Pravin (Richard) Abraham, Y4 ‘The Chalk Amphitheatre’. Drawing upon Kent’s rich history of quarrying, the idea of excavating the remnants of an abandoned Lime Quarry in the village of Peene was pursued. The project looks at quarrying of chalk as process for shaping the landscape. Resulting in a unique musical ground, excavated into the earth, the proposal pushes Folkestone’s musical endeavours forward.
17.16 George Newton, Y4 ‘Manual’. The Cliftonville Lido is a lost centre of faded tourist industry in the heart of Margate. The resuscitation of this landmark is both an educational and political opportunity. By involving the community in the process of architectural conception, construction, inhabitation, and obsolescence, locals can acquire key trades and design skills, and forge their own space within the shell of the Lido.
17.17 Thomas Dobbins, Y4 ‘The Wantsum Assembly’. Confronting the complex relationship between the ecological and the human, the Wantsum Assembly is a transient citizens’ assembly for the people of Kent, where local environmental policies are created and debated. Funded by the drying of its timber-stacked walls, and disassembled after 15 years, the architecture becomes a physical and temporal embodiment of the discussions that have occurred within it.
17.18 Naysan Foroudi, Y4 ‘The Wantsum Common House’. A new form of architecture, inspired by the process of slip-casting and in tune with the natural rhythm of material accumulation, provides a place of collective gathering and shelter as the region changes. Spaces for conversation and meeting are formed around a series of baked in-situ hearths. Over time, the architecture gives way to a wider community participation, as new heritage trails, village fêtes and practices begin to take form.
17.10
2019
Deep Future, Deep Past
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
Deep Future, Deep Past
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
Our ‘deep past’ is inscribed on our consciousness and holds the key to our modes of perceiving, reasoning and acting within social settings. Even as we wonder about the challenges and possibilities of the far future, we are using cognitive tools which evolved over millions of years. PG17 is interested in the experience of design itself: that is, the design of the activity of design as an embodied action evolving in time and place. It is the very event of drawing and making, whilst being in the midst of it, that we interrogate, enrich and celebrate. Lines tell stories and cross each other as we strive to produce architecture with public meaning.
Mind and environment have evolved side-by-side for millennia. Architecture has not only emerged from this dynamic partnership but, to different extents, has influenced and determined the relationship between our consciousness and surroundings. If architecture is a mediator between a community and its buildings, how can it flourish in a new post-digital social condition? The human mind has not been devised as a discrete, logical computational apparatus, instead, it is an evolved biological network fully immersed in its physical and social environment. To understand our opportunities and needs as architects, we must fully explore this distinction.
This year, the unit investigated mind, community and land within time extremes. Our research and design processes were influenced by prehistory, anthropology, cognitive psychology, geology and emerging climate sciences. We considered animal and plant life, climatic uncertainty, the politics of land and artificial intelligence.
We visited the Orkney Islands – an archipelago of over 70 islands in the north of Scotland – which have been inhabited for at least 8,500 years and were, several thousand years ago, Britain’s centre of innovation. We visited a vast hill covering more than six acres of land, which was thought to be made of glacial debris until, recently, it was discovered to have been made over 5,000 years ago by humans. Such enormous and timeless constructions on the Orkney Islands sit side-by-side with the newest facilities of wind and marine energy resources, stimulating a revived population of people who choose to live there. We worked intimately with this place, organising collective walks and drawing events.
Collaboration can break habits of mind, allowing other ways of seeing to influence our consciousness. Our drawing processes borrowed from modes of collaboration, performance, improvisation and chance in the aleatoric arts.
Year 4 Eleni Efstathia Eforakopoulou, Veljko Mladenovic, Iman Mohd Hadzhalie, Philip Springall, Harriet Walton
Year 5
Nathan Back-Chamness, Luke Bryant, Ossama Elkholy, Grace Fletcher, George Goldsmith, Hanrui Jiang, Rikard Kahn, Cheuk Ko, Alkisti Anastasia Mikelatou Tselenti, Andreas Müllertz
Thank you to Design Realisation tutors James Daykin and Maria Fulford
A special thanks to our critics: Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Nat Chard, Hannah Corlett, Murray Fraser, Anne Marie Galmstrup, Pedro Gil, Agnieszka Glowacka, William Haggard, Tamsin Hanke, Chris Hildrey, Will Hunter, Susanne Isa, Sarah Izod, Matthew Leung, Anna Liu, Emma-Kate Matthews, Dean Pike, Sophia Psarra, Chenhan Wang, Tim Waterman, Victoria Watson, Izabela Wieczorek
17.1 PG17 Collaborative Drawing, Y4 and Y5 ‘Experiencing Landscapes’.
17.2 Nathan Back-Chamness, Y5 ‘Untitled’. Throughout this year-long project, the acts of doing and observing became a working method whereby architecture can be continually conceived and challenged, over thousands of years and within a single drawing.
17.3 Hanrui Jiang, Y5 ‘Fluidity between Land and Sea’. This project is based on the reading of Selkie – mythological ‘seal folk’ in Scotland – tales, which explore ‘fluidity’ within coastal regions. The site – the abandoned island of ‘Eynhallow’ – is investigated through its geographical features and the analogy that sealskin can be regarded as a transition between the land and the sea, and humans and seals. This study of ‘fluidity’ shapes the morphology of the island, reading the sea as a continuation of the land, with the water as only a thin membrane that separates the two.
17.4 Luke Bryant, Y5 ‘A Piece of Landscape’. This new intervention creates connections between isolated Neolithic monuments that were originally part of a processional path 5,000 years ago. ‘A Piece of Landscape’ seeks to interpret the historical sites, as well as engaging with the surrounding environment. Stones from Stromness –a nearby town at risk of flooding – are used to create a new structure; applying Neolithic principles to transport stones from previous communities across the landscape.
17.5 Alkisti Anastasia Tselenti Mikelatou Tselenti, Y5 ‘Orkney Tourism Association’. A series of archaeological studies of the scattered chambered cairns – Neolithic burial monuments – of the Orkney archipelago challenges the conventional understanding of ‘archives’. This project argues that in order to envisage an archive for the islands, the only honest representation is the archipelago itself. The proposal aims to bridge the fragmented temporal and spatial gaps of Orkney, as well as to shed light on its marginalised past.
17.6 Veljko Mladenovic, Y4 ‘Temporal Strata’. Located directly on top of the Ness of Brodgar – a key Neolithic site currently under investigation – this project is a ‘living archive’, and explores architecture as a continual process without an end. ‘Making in time’ is a key theme where, through a dialogue of chance and intent, unpredictability is replicated to manifest an open-ended architecture.
17.7 Eleni Efstathia Eforakopoulou, Y4 ‘Living Geologies’. The romantic and picturesque sceneries that we see today are not static but, rather, are the result of a slow-motion car crash. This project interrogates this violent choreography and has sought to reimagine the landscape as in a perpetual state of change.
17.8–17.9 Ossama Elkholy, Y5 ‘Copinsay’s Dark Uncanny’. Assuming landscape is a living process, this proposal plays out the impact of an imposed quarrying process, using a speculative quarrying tool that surveys Copinsay island’s geological, meteorological, economic and ecological data to inform its movement and digging. It proposes that people manually carve the remaining stone, responding to what has already been excavated, simultaneously observing the unfamiliar ecologies that emerge.
17.10 Rikard Kahn, Y5 ‘Birsay Refuge’. This project seeks to provide a place for visitors to stay on the island of Birsay, accessible at only the lowest point of the tidal cycle. Interweaving itself with the archaeological remains of earlier Pictish and Viking settlements, the proposal provides a place for longing, contemplation and communal living whilst taking refuge on the historic site.
17.11 Harriet Walton, Y4 ‘Bog Queen’. Set in the landscape of Hoy, the sub-function provides a refuge for walkers on the island, made though the excavation of the peat bogs that cut through the landscape. The building hosts a seasonal music festival, whereby material removed from the subterranean peat chambers is assembled into structures above the cuts. The seasonal awakening of the structure is carried out by island residents and visitors during the summer to form a music chamber. In autumn the structure is disassembled and repacked into the main chamber and is preserved for another year in the peat.
17.12 Iman Mohd Hadzhalie, Y4 ‘Slowly Dyeing’. Natural purple dye in Orkney has become increasingly scarce due to the scarcity of the endangered purple flora from which it is made. In response, this proposed mill produces natural dye using a traditional process of fermenting lichen, as an alternative, sustainable solution to using purple flora. The building rejuvenates the abandoned ruin of the Earl’s Palace, Birsay, connecting with the rich heritage of the Orkney archipelago whilst also creating a new future.
17.13 George Goldsmith, Y5 ‘Scapa Flow: An In-Situ Exhibition of Historical Knowledge’. This project explores ideas of exposing the unseen information stored within the islandscape of Orkney, and the amplification of nature and historical knowledge in the landscape. The project suggests a way of combining a museum and habitation with the need to generate renewable energy. The speculative proposal puts forward the idea that the exhibition of historical knowledge in-situ is superior to the removal of items from their context.
17.14 Grace Fletcher, Y5 ‘Stroma Salt Station’. This proposal seeks to regenerate the abandoned island of Stroma through the surrounding sea water and tidal energy of the Pentland Firth. The island has a dichotomous condition whereby the east is dry and fertile and the west is inhospitable and salty. A permeable membrane is constructed along the divide to enhance the existing differences, in turn setting up the island as a salt water battery for tidal energy. The battery accumulates in the centre of the island, in a power station built of salt and gypsum residue.
17.15 Philip Springall, Y4 ‘Leviathan’. The Stromness Maritime University reconnects the people of Stromness with the sea. Stranded whales, which are otherwise thrown into landfill, are transformed from raw material into building components, with each part of the whale utilised for its unique qualities. This whale tectonic combines bone, blubber, baleen, blood and oil into an inhabitable architecture.
17.16 Cheuk Ko, Y5 ‘Dynamic Body as a Measure and Projector for Architecture’. This project explores the conceptual relationship between the body and space, which is not necessarily recognisable on a daily basis unless intentionally examined. Actions, movements and processes are studied to design a farmhouse in Orkney, aiming to reintroduce pleasurable farming that reconnects the body and landscape.
17.17 Andreas Müllertz, Y5 ‘The Sea as a Room’. In this project, the Scapa Flow – a landlocked sea at the heart of the Orkney Islands – has been dammed and drained to reveal a vast landscape of shipwrecks, archaeological sites and scarred terrain. Timber infrastructure emerges from the practice of forestry under the previous water line, carrying boats and timber across the sea of trees.
17.6
17.8
The Protagonist
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
Year 4
Nathan Back-Chamness, Luke Bryant, Grace Fletcher, George Goldsmith, Hanrui Jiang, Rikard Kahn, Alkisti Anastasia Mikelatou Tselenti, Andreas Mullertz, Cheuk Ko
Year 5
Jinman Choi, Ashley Hinchcliffe, James William Greig, Julia Schutz, Rebecca Sturgess, Sam Eu Tan, Krystal Ting Tsai
Thank you to our Design Tutors: James Daykin, Maria Fulford
Thank you to our critics: Jessam Al-Jawad, Peter Besley, Alastair Browning, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Joanne Chen, Hannah Corlett, Will Hunter, Jan Kattein, David Kohn, Anna Liu, Jack Newton, Stuart Piercy, Sophia Psarra, Sabine Storp, Michiko Sumi, Victoria Watson
We are grateful to our sponsors:
Allies and Morrison
James Latham
Stanton Williams
The Protagonist
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
Architectural education is not merely a preparation for professional practice, in which skills and techniques are acquired in anticipation of the challenges of the working world. It constitutes a form of practice in its own right.
We believe that the concept of a seven-year warming-up period is untenable and that it is essential for students to put themselves forward as protagonists in the architectural discussions of their time. They should create experimental forms of practice that stand in a critical and enhancing relationship to the world of building. The teaching studio can test propositions in a critical culture that allows for flexible thinking, inventiveness and openness to failure, in a way which is impossible in professional practice. For this process to be effective, the studio practice must understand the realities of social, political and financial mechanisms, without necessarily accepting them. It is this discourse between the possible and the conceivable that is fertile ground for architectural speculation.
In order to act ambitiously, an architecture student would need to acquire a formidable range of skills from inside the discipline of architecture. A profound literacy in the architecture of the past and its continuing relevance to the future is a cornerstone of our discipline. Architectural plans and sections, for example, embody a way of thinking that belongs only to architecture. They give us our potency and authority among other languages and forms of production.
Unit 17 engages directly in issues that are relevant to the public life of our city now. In London, there has been a looming sense of crisis about the role of the architect and the relationship between construction expertise and public life. The mainstream media have openly questioned the role of architects in the creation of just and well-integrated urban communities. Architects are often seen as the cowed servants and tools of a dominant and predatory capitalist mode of production. They are equally accused of unrealistic forms of idealistic or liberal thinking, at odds with the realities of contemporary economy and construction culture. This alleged balance of powerlessness and impracticality is deeply corrosive to the discipline of architecture. Developers speculate that architecture might die out as a discipline, while architecture schools look to teach new specialisations, often undermining the expert knowledge of architecture itself.
Architecture in London has a fight on its hands. Our students have seen themselves as protagonists in this battle for relevance and influence. They have produced proposals for the area that stretches between Euston Station and Mornington Crescent, each student designing one building while considering the relationships between the site’s housing stock, public buildings, infrastructure, landscape and public space. How can different voices intermix successfully? How can architecture help create a just and equitable neighbourhood?
Fig. 17.1 James William Greig Y5, ‘Euston Terminus’. This project questions the HS2-led widening of the existing Euston Station, proposing instead a dual layer, 24-platform subterranean station, freeing the ground level to provide a large public space back to the city. The station takes on a phantasmagoric quality, creating poignance and significance at the point of arrival and departure into and out of London. Fig. 17.2 Rikard Kahn Y4, ‘Higher School’. The project seeks to define a new vertical school typology for the London Borough of Camden raised above the railway. Publicly shared functions are located at ground level, forming adjacent a new square, whilst private spaces, such as classrooms, are arranged above. The strategy allows the structure to be utilised beyond the typical school hours; a mere 14% of the calendar year.
Fig. 17.3 Nathan Back-Chamness Y4, ‘Euston Train Station’. The station is reimagined as a series of gridded streets with the concourse removed. Instead of going to the platform, the traveller finds an address within a piece of city, entering at street level and descending to the train carriage below ground. The node gives rise to an exploration of subterranean architecture. Fig. 17.4 Julia Schütz Y5, ‘The Drummond Street Weave’. This community proposal seeks to reconnect the people of Drummond Street. Lightweight, transformable timber components and tensile elements form a framework that is inhabited by a variation of spatial qualities. An architecture of changes offers flexibility and non-prescribed space. The principle of opposites acts as an underlying order.
Fig. 17.5 Krystal Ting Tsai Y5, ‘Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience: A Semi-Naturalistic Rat Lab’. The chosen brief is to design a new model habitat concerned with the welfare of rats in a neuroscience laboratory. The proposed research facility design focuses on the development of an evolving rat wall habitat providing a semi-naturalistic environment, around which human laboratory spaces conform. Fig. 17.6 Ashley Hinchcliffe Y5, ‘Ampthill Place: A Co-Housing Model for London’. A model for high-density co-housing alongside the train tracks. Offering a solution for the vast removal of earth by HS2, the housing rises out of clay to form a network of courtyards, intimate paths and flexible modules. Internally, it removes the corridor, proposing split-level circulation interweaving private and communal.
Fig. 17.7 Jinman Choi Y5, ‘Euston Cloud’. Above Euston Station, an adaptable system produces and contains a new model of shared economy, driven by interactive feedback from its inhabitants. Building elements, appliances and furniture are distributed to a range of accommodating spaces by the protagonist. The temporary occupation of these spaces forms a kaleidoscopic field of structure, system and use - a cloud.
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Fig. 17.8 Grace Fletcher Y4, ‘Refurbishing the Towers at Ampthill Square’. Architecture is too often used as a scapegoat for political failure; demolished and replaced at great loss to the community. Instead, 240 residents will return to their homes to find interior courtyards, double-height spaces and collective vertical streets. Fig. 17.9 Cheuk Ko Y4, ‘Innerworlds’. The project reconsiders non-medical spaces in a cancer treatment centre, such as waiting rooms and healing gardens, as part of the healing process. Creating calmness and comfort through thresholds allows patients to temporarily forget what they are going through. Fig. 17.10 Hanrui Jiang Y4, ‘Existent Nonplace’. The project is located on the site of a historic burial ground that has developed rapidly due to its proximity to Euston Station. The proposed HS2 development offers an
opportunity to explore a mixed programme of transport infrastructure and housing, embracing natural light.
Fig. 17.11 Andreas Müllertz Y4, ‘Re-Establishing Euston Grove’. The Euston terminus is re-imagined as a green set-piece in a Nashian promenade extending north from Somerset House. The physical infrastructure takes the shape of a vaulted circus cloister, acting as a threshold between the subterranean platform spaces and a daylit pine forest at ground level.
Figs. 17.12 – 17.13 Rebecca Sturgess Y5, ‘Life of the Tolmers Tower’. On a site with a history of conflict between the community and developers, the provision of a new public square becomes the catalyst for the sequential construction of an incremental tower. The architect resides within the tower to orchestrate an iterative amalgamation of fragments.
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Fig. 17.14 Luke Bryant Y4, ‘Past Best Before’. The project aims to provide a positive new identity for the residents of Ampthill Estate, who experience uncertainty about their future due to the HS2 expansion. The creation of a ‘past best before’ market, selling food that is still good for consumption, offers a cheaper alternative whilst responding to London’s food waste.
Fig. 17.15 Alkisti Anastasia Mikelatou Tselenti Y4, ‘The New Secondary School for Deaf Students in Euston’. The secondary school aims to create an educational environment with internal spaces designed to enhance visual communication through vertical openings and diagonal connections, while an alternative learning method - the peripatetic - is employed to shape the journey through the building. Fig. 17.16 George Goldsmith Y4, ‘A Reinvention of UCL Central Campus’. The proposal suggests
an alphabet of small architectural interventions which extrude through the heavy, domineering façades of UCL’s central campus, creating a dialogue between the faculties and increasing spaces of shared programmes. The new interventions and thresholds establish a coherent material and tectonic identity. Fig. 17.17 Sam Eu Tan Y5, ‘The Euston Ravine’. In challenging the decontextualised spatiality of the London Underground, The Euston Ravine offers the commuter an alternative route down to their platform, emphasising instead the deep physical earth one must traverse through, the transient condition of travelling, and the heurism it has the potential to incur, conflating the daily commute with larger arcs of movement in nature.
2 3 5 7 11 13 17
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
Year 4
Naomi Au, Jinman Choi, James Greig, Julia Scheutz, Mai Que Ta, Sam Tan, Esha Thapar, Krystal Tsai Ting, Torris Kaul Varoystrand, Alexander Wood, Eleni Zygogianni
Year 5
Malina Dabrowska, Juwhan Han, Carl Inder, Vasilis Marcou Ilchuck, Oscar Plastow, Henry Svendsen, Christie Yeung
Thank you to our Design Realisation Tutors James Daykin and Simon Tonks
Thank you to our invited speakers who introduced us to mathematical concepts related to philosophy, design and computation: Adam Beck, Mario Carpo, Sean Hanna
Thank you to Maciej Czarnecki, Edward Denison, Joanna Leman and Gdynia’s Foreign Relations Department for their support during our field trip in Poland
Thank you to our critics: Alessandro Ayuso, Julia Backhaus, Anthony Boulanger, Gillian Brady, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Nat Chard, Claire Chawke, Sophie Cole, Marjan Colletti, James Daykin, Lily Jencks, Anna Liu, Jack Newton, Jessica Reynolds, Henning Stummel, Peter Thomas, Mike Tite, Simon Tonks, St John Walsh, Victoria Watson, Mika Zacharias.
Consultants: William Whitby (ARUP), Hareth Pochee (Max Fordham)
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Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
Unit 17 takes a progressive and experimental approach to architecture that is specific to place and culture. Our work develops through open inquiry. It is founded on the recognition that the architect works both as scientist and poet, being equally engaged in empirical analysis, abstraction, speculation and invention.
Last year, our theme was time, linked with place and history. This year we took a different take on the same subject to explore its more mathematical aspects: periodic and cyclical rhythms, simultaneity, chance and alternating systems in the fabric of our landscapes and urban environments. We explored the spatiality of some of the most fascinating mathematical ideas embedded in nature, inside our bodies, and in the multitude of networks that condition our cities and daily lives.
Mathematical concepts have shaped our perception of the universe and the evolution of the cosmos since the Babylonian era. They influence and explain how animals, landscape, people and politics interact. They model contemporary global systems, commodification, finances, communications, data and workflows, climate, the human brain, social infrastructures, health and population statistics. They condition nature, governance, economy and human experience.
Contrary to the view that sees mathematics exclusively as abstract and the basis of science, we were interested in the role that mathematical structures can play in shaping everyday experiences and the spectrum of human creativity across fields: from natural philosophy, biology and quantum physics to architecture, literature, painting and music. Think about Bach, Theo van Doesburg, Jorge Luis Borges and Ryoji Ikeda; and architects from the Ancient Egyptians to Palladio and Xenakis. Can a contemporary study of mathematics that is not reductive, utilitarian or sacred push architecture to novel directions? One of our questions was to understand architecture’s association with digital mathematics. Avoiding the simplistic acceptance of parametricism on the one hand and its severe criticism on the other, we searched for the spatial, social and aesthetic consequences of mathematical ideas in deeply performative and experiential projects.
Mathematical Forms: During term 1 students produced drawing notations, performative models and large-scale installations exploring mathematical forms influenced by: the Transfinite, PvNP, Calculus, Chaos Theory, Prime Numbers, Combinatorics, Rhythmanalysis, Klein Bottle, Stochastic Processes, the I Ching, Game Theory, weather forecasting and Epigenetics.
Nested Rhythms: We travelled from Cracow, the Tatras Mountains and Warsaw to Szczecin, Gdynia and Gdansk on the Baltic Sea. Students recorded rhythms, whether embedded in urban or rural areas, rivers or social media platforms. They chose sites for their building projects, shifting their attention from mathematical abstraction to architectural proposition.
Fig. 17.1 Malina Dabrowska Y5, ‘Klein Earth Sciences Gallery’, Wieliczka Salt Mine, Poland. An investigation of the mathematical surfaces of a Klein bottle led to analogous constructions using paper-sewn models. The building proposal for a gallery and conference centre, sited at the UNESCO Heritage Site of Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland, suggests intersecting volumes made of salt-impregnated plywood strips and dichroic glass, expressing the intricacy of the double-sided Klein topological surface. The two main chambers of the building interlock with each other and the ground, forming a space which draws the visitor in, blurring the boundaries between the external and internal elements of the structure. The project has been explored through physical models, which test its spatial and light-based qualities in a
variety of scales and typologies of the double-sided geometric surfaces. Figs. 17.2 – 17.3 Henry Svendsen Y5, ‘WaterDATA Centre’, Delta of the Vistula River, Poland. Processing and archiving hidden data that reveals environmental and sociological conditions of the river, the building provides administrative offices for the water management of Gdańsk. Sited on an outlet artificially created to reduce ice jams, the proposal introduces a flood prevention scheme of water reservoirs. During cold conditions, this excess water is misted throughout the building, allowing ice to form around the steel, glass and cable structures. This not only stores excess flood water in a solid form that slowly melts during the year, but also becomes a heraldic physical representation of the river.
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Fig. 17.4 Sam Tan Y4, ‘The People’s Square of Manifestations’, Parade Square, Warsaw. The project begins by exploring the phenomena of chaos theory, which is intrinsic to weather changes, and the notion of a constructed language of digitality as the perceived finite truth of reality. A range of animated configurations of predictive weather data form part of various large-scale immersive installations. The experiential qualities of these initial pieces go on to inform an architectural proposition: a physical display of public opinion across the second largest public square in Europe, overlooked by the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. This uses the chaotic societal impetus of contemporary political public opinion as the driver of its transitory spatiality. Fig. 17.5 Krystal Tsai Ting Y4, ‘Data-Driven Train Station’, Warszawa Miedzeszyn
Station, Poland. The architecture of this data-driven station is inspired by a spatial mathematical language developed through iterative models, drawings and films with ‘reactions’ between numbers. Numbers determine everyday life, in our patterns of movement, commerce, telecommunications, financial and digital transactions. In this project, each number is individually designed while larger numbers are assembled as complex composites of smaller units. The architecture of the station responds when deployable kite-like roofs are thrust upwards as commuters enjoy vertically moving seats. This performative structure is generated by the temporal logic of the station, particularly the time announcements of arrivals and departures of trains.
Fig. 17.6 James Greig Y4, ‘Permitted Impermanence’, Gdyńia Planning Department. A temporary planning workshop plays host to the cyclical, rhythmic creation of fictional versions of the city in an urban site of disputed ownership. The edge interface of the building becomes an instrument through which these rhythms become writ large in the city. Fig. 17.7 Mai Que Ta Y4, ‘Oxygen; Stratifying the Blanket’. The piece communicates the rhythms of the human body. Space becomes an extension of the membrane beyond the edges of an individual. Fig. 17.8 Julia Scheutz Y4, ‘Public Baths’, Gdańsk. The I Ching was explored as a medium of communication and a system developed to act as a carrier of meaning. This investigation led to a change in understanding mathematics and language, drawing further parallels to genetics and
epigenetics, developing the notion of chance-invoked change. Fig. 17.9 Torris Kaul Varoystrand Y4, ‘ Sand Drawing’. The project researches stochastic processes in music and architecture. A series of scores and time-based performative instruments gradually lead to the design of a seasonal hotel and shared public facilities in Gdańsk. Fig. 17.10 Juwhan Han Y5, ‘Towards [Human] Responsive Architecture: The Haunted House’, King’s Cross, London. Starting from a personal experience of being separated from one’s family, the project investigates a real-time design system between Seoul and London where spaces respond to behaviours of people in both places. Through live telecommunication experiments between the two locations, it orchestrates a highly responsive home, away from home.
Fig. 17.11 Jinman Choi Y4, ‘Shared Theatre’, Dunajec River. This experimental theatre, located at the border of Poland and Slovakia on the Dunajec River, is based on structural, spatial and social oscillations that are made possible through its performative architecture. Non-linear movements generated by the audience’s activities on either side of the riverbank activate a moveable floating stage in the middle of the river. Fig. 17.12 Esha Thapar Y4, ‘Baltic Amber Institute’, Gdańsk. This project explores the precise spatiality of human movement, including the residues and remains of a dancer’s movements throughout time. In the building proposal, the ruined walls of Granary Island, Gdańsk, become a place for everyday choreographies, housing workshops, public events and festivals. Fig. 17.13 Alexander Wood Y4, ‘Co-Operative
Agraria’, Malopolska. A collective farming initiative, structured as a new project for the charity Oxfam, provides an architecture for promoting rural agronomy in the Malopolska region of Southern Poland. As land is cultivated for the production of food, the site is modified and constructed to generate its own architecture. Fig 17.14 Carl Inder Y5, ‘FABULA: The Baltic Children’s Story Park’. Informed by the concept of ‘magic realism’ as manifested in ‘The Tin Drum’, the project speculates how similar tactics might be developed architecturally to convert the monumental ‘U-Boat Hall’ and rehabilitate the site by challenging and exploring ideas about space, history and cultural identity through storytelling.
Fig. 17.15 Vasilis Marcou Ilchuck Y5, ‘Chrono–Spaces’, Famagusta, Cyprus. The project explores ‘lived spaces’ as described in the recorded memories of the old inhabitants of Famagusta who have been displaced from their homes since 1974. Collective and individual memories are transformed into spaces to be inhabited by both Turkish and Greek-speaking Cypriots, enhancing their relation with nature, their land and the daily and annual cycles of the seasons. ‘Chrono–Spaces’ explores how an unprogrammed and anticipatory architecture within this ‘ghost’ city may become a new environment for future social and political events. The design is carved into the ground, made by limestone. It evolves from the study of temporal and structural formations of tree rings (dendrochronology), seeking to find analogous manifestations
in the vernacular arrangements of settlements. Fig. 17.6
Oscar Plastow Y5, ‘Sculpting Void: The Allure of Mountains’, Zakopane, Poland. Inspired by the brutalist work of Walter Förderer and the experimental, chance and spontaneity-based methodologies of avant-garde art, this work develops through iterative physical models and a set of sequential drawings that explore interiority and light. The proposal sees an existing mountain hut in Zakopane enveloped by a new building which both has a more contemporary use, yet manages to retain the unique character and political history of the location. Driven by Townscape Principles, the project proposes a sequence of interiors that are in direct dialogue with the surrounding landscape.
Fig. 17.17 Eleni Zygogianni Y4, ‘The New Ministry of Education of Poland’, Warsaw, Poland. The proposed Government Institution for Education is structured as a labyrinthine journey through the pages of a book. The project starts with a series of anatomical drawings that investigate the cognitive functions of the brain, and attempts to find equivalent complex intersections in the plan of the proposed building. Fig. 17.18
Naomi Au Y4, ‘On-Stream Casino’, Niedzica, Poland. Inspired by the puzzling nature of particle behaviour at the quantum scale, the proposed online gambling data centre embodies the ambiguous nature of quantum theory through its everchanging states. Dependent on the steam generated by the gambling activities and the surrounding landscape near Niedzica’s water power station, the building transforms
throughout the seasons. Fig. 17.19 Christie Kwan Yeung Y5, ‘Salt Galleries’, Wieliczka, Poland. The project examines the architectural and social character of the lost wooden Synagogues in Poland, built during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth period and destroyed during World War II. Timber fragments of the synagogues are preserved and displayed in the purifying environment of the magnificent underground salt mines, particularly in the cavities of salt rock layers abundant beneath the town of Wieliczka. This allows for a new form of inhabitation of the precious fragments of these timber synagogues, which were built during the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Taking Time
Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
Year 4
Malina Dabrowska, Ashley Hinchcliffe, Carl Inder, Vasilis Marcou Ilchuk, Oscar Plastow, Henry Svendsen, Christie Yeung
Year 5
Paloma Rua-Figueroa, Cherry Beaumont, Lok Kan Chau, Joanne Chen, Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami, Minghui Ke, Tony Lees, Agata Murasko, Charlie Page, Shirley Tsang, Chenhan Wang
For making our year so stimulating, special thanks to:
Fieldtrip: Kaji-Kinran textile; Mie Prefectural Government; Jetro; Ise Shrine; Takenaka Corporation; Osaka Institute of Technology; Naohisa Kama, Hiroki Kuratani and Shuzo Sumi for generous support.
Critics: Julia Backhaus, Hannah Corlett, Murray Fraser, Jonathan Hill, Takehiko Iseki, Rick Joy, David Kohn, Yeoryia Manolopolou, Jack Newton, James O’Leary, Sheila O’Donnell, Frosso Pimenides, Bob Sheil, Peter Stutchbury, Simon Tonks, Mike Tonkin and John Tuomey
Design Realisation tutors: James Daykin and Lee Halligain with Structural Engineer Tim Lucas from Price & Myers
Year 4 project: Peter Scully, Nick Westby and William Victor Camilleri from B-made, and Bill Hodgson
Sponsorship: Bartlett School, Autumn Down, Bespoke Homes, Insley & Nash, Joseph Waller Fabrication, Pennine Stone and Sasakawa Foundation
Taking Time
Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
Thirteen hundred years ago, two buildings appeared at the opposite ends of the great Eurasian landmass. One is MacDara Chapel on an island in Galway in the west of Ireland, and the other is Ise Shrine in a forest in Japan. Two buildings conceived in entirely disconnected cultures, they show remarkable similarities. The forms and meanings endure as the buildings decay and are rebuilt. Time itself is a significant aspect of their architecture. Both are versions of previous buildings that existed on the site and borrow forms from their now-lost ancestors. But, the buildings also differ significantly from each other: the Christian chapel is built to endure for millennia on its blasted site. Once a timber structure, it is now rebuilt in stone to last until the end of time. The Shinto Shrine achieves permanence by being rebuilt in perfect replica on an adjacent empty lot, taken apart every twenty years.
This year, Unit 17 took the theme of time as its subject and explored it through Landscape, Construction and Dream. Making charged constructions in significant landscapes took us into the boundary between the knowable world and the world of the unsayable.
On our field trip to Japan, we had a tour of the Ise Shrine by the architect in charge of its reconstruction, visited the Kaji-Kinran textile factory in Kyoto and the restoration site of Kofukuji Temple in Nara. We learned skills in joinery workshops from the best woodworkers. Some students made individual research field trips to the snow landscapes of Shirakawa Go, contemporary Naoshima Island and Tokyo.
All students spent the first term designing a ghost building to stand beside the tiny stone chapel in Ireland. It was a freely imagined projection of its lost wooden ancestor. We selected and combined ideas to a singular form. Year 4 spent the rest of the year working solely towards the design and construction of the ghost building on the opposite shore of the MacDara Island. To execute this construction, the students not only developed their design skills but managed cost and programme, applied for planning, detailed, procured and built the project at the same time. The building will be celebrated on 16 July when many visit for the annual pilgrimage day of St. MacDara.
Fig. 17.1 Group Project, Y4, ‘Ghost Chapel’. 1:1 GRC cast piece of external fabric. The concept originated from the natural phenomenon of magnetic forces created by the red granite on MacDara Island. The design reflects compression and attraction by eliminating the stones of the original chapel and constructing its negative. Figs. 17.2 – 17.3 Cherry Beaumont Y5, ‘Structural Negative’. The Ghost Chapel is a structural negative of St. MacDara’s chapel – solidifying the gaps of the drystone construction whilst letting light fill the space where the stones should be. The tides and cows interact with the building on a daily basis, slowly dissolving the saltlick construction, leaving behind a skeletal negative of the chapel on the Atlantic coast. Figs. 17.4 – 17.5 Paloma Rua-Figueroa Y5, ‘The Harbour Carved into Stone: Algae and Fish Market’.
A contemporary fishing harbour and market facility has been created to accommodate local fishermen and the harvest, processing and sale of their products. The architecture responds to the function of spaces, ranging from a heavy presence deeply embedded within the coastal rocks of Connemara, to light, deployable floating spaces. Fig. 17.6 Joanne Chen Y5, ‘Reimagined Factory’. The project raises a critique on the contemporary view of work as compensatory toil rather than self-fulfillment and pleasure. The factory moves away from operations of conformity by manufacturing bespoke home furnishings and decorations in Hammersmith in an attempt to re-engage craftsmanship with contemporary technologies. Each production space is tailored to bespoke stages of the production process.
Figs. 17.7 – 17.8 Chenhan Wang Y5, ‘Morecambe Bay Memorial Landscape’. This project explores the relationship between building and nature in the representation of landscape in Chinese paintings. The scheme combines a radio station with birdwatching facilities. The radio station broadcasts to migrants working in the bay in Chinese and is available across the UK, whilst providing a physical point of refuge. Within the gardens, there are several birdwatching hide-outs that allow visitors to view the migrant bird population of the bay.
Fig. 17.9 Charlotte Page Y5, ‘Between Impermanence’. Daibutsu-den in Nara, 751AD, has been reconstructed several times and is exemplary of Japanese heritage, reflecting the cultural and social processes of Japan. Everything is in a state of flux. The intervention is understood as an audience that
frames moments in time during the temple’s ruination, reconstruction and afterlife. The scenery shifts as the building weathers, the copper Kegon sect vestment allows for visitors, every ‘occasion’ of impermanence is perceived.
Fig. 17.10 Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami Y5, ‘The Jungle School for Displaced Alice’. The unlikely story of Alice being a refugee in Wonderland is transposed onto the site of the Jungle Refugee Camp in Calais in France as an attempt to create a site-specific typology of a formal/informal educational facility for unaccompanied minors. The school is a conglomeration of found materials and furniture, a collage world of accidentalism and fragmentation which create moments of peace amidst the surrounding chaos.
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Figs. 17.11 – 17.12 Agata Murasko Y5, ‘Reception Hall for Mr Midnight of Tokyo’ is a building for an indistinguishable, exhausted and expressionless modern ‘hero’ of Tokyo – a Salaryman. The building sits in a void of Shinjuku Station and is a liminal space between real and surreal, awake and oneiric and diurnal and nocturnal worlds. Figs. 17.13 – 17.14 Tony Lees Y5, ‘Hostel along the old Tokaido’, Hakone, Japan. Time and the elements refine the clay and timber of the forest, until the inhabited building site is transformed through flame. Visitors embark on a collective understanding of how to exist within. The hostel in Hakone is a moment in time; beyond that it represents a kind of cultural remembrance through marks of its own creation that were in turn inspired by Japanese crafts and aesthetic principles, reimagined in new ways.
Fig. 17.15 Lok Kan Chau Y5, ‘Lantau Commune: Das Lied von der Erde’. Cosmos, gravity, mountain, sunset, labour, cotton tree, climate change, bitter melon, sweet potato, storm, ruin, funeral. This is a song of the Earth, a translation of Erh Li’s Transcendental Taoism into architecture. Sited in front of the legally protected but currently threatened landscape reserve on Lantau Island in Hong Kong, it is a place of farming, organising workshops, storing books, providing food and accommodation for long distance hikers. An educational institution, a belief carrier, a horizontal building in a vertical city.
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Fig. 17.16 Shirley Tsang Y5, ‘The Diocese Archive of the Church of Ireland’. Peat bog, peat briquette, bog trains, a lightweight timber structure and brass are used to create an archive for the Diocese. The Church archive complex is composed of a public frontage, concealing the Archive Headquarters, Reading rooms, physical and digital archives beyond, all standing in a garden with interweaving walkways. The archives store items after they are received from the church whereas additional structures hold the historical letter records. The project focuses on reminding hidden histories which should not be forgotten. Besides its powerful presence for the community, the Church Archive also preserves the bog lands from extinction. Fig. 17.17 Minghui Ke Y5, ‘Open-air Kabuki Theatre, Shirakawago, Japan’. The project proposes an open-air Kabuki
theatre for winter performances in Shirakawago. This traditional Japanese performance art is facing a challenge in regenerating itself from dereliction. The historical development of the performance itself is closely related to and shaped by the evolution of the architectural form of the Kabuki theatres. Hence, the proposal aims to connect these traditional forms with the surrounding natural landscape, creating a series of ‘performance moments’ to regenerate the ancient performative art. The movement and melting of the snow in time influences the atmosphere of the performance and becomes an indispensable element in understanding this new type of Kabuki.
Devo Max
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
Year 4
Cherry Beaumont, Jiong (Joanne) Chen, Seyedeh Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami, Antony Lees, Lok Kan Chau, Minghui Ke, Agata Murasko, Charlotte Page, Sze (Shirley) Tsang, Chenhan Wang
Year 5
Emily Doll, Justine Dorion, Heather McVicar, Jonathan Paley, Chris Worsfold
Thanks to our Design Realisation tutors Greg Blee and Lee Halligan, to Ben Hayes for workshops, to engineers Lee Franck and William Whitby and to Nicola Antaki, Sara Shafiei and Ishita Shah for field trip support. Thank you to our critics: Jessam Al-Jawad, Greg Blee, Hannah Corlett, Sandra Coppin, Bev Dockray, Killian Doherty, Nils Feldmann, Lee Franck, Lee Halligan, Ben Hayes, Shahed Saleem, Joshua Scott, Tania Sengupta, Bob Sheil, St John Walsh, Henry Williams
We are grateful to our sponsors Blee Halligan Architects, Entwhistle Gallery, Tiranti and Yorun International
Devo Max
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
The recent campaign and referendum on Scottish independence produced a level of engagement and political debate that is unprecedented in the modern era. We had begun to imagine that political apathy was a permanent feature of our modern democracies. It was striking that very few of the participants viewed themselves as Nationalists in the accepted sense. The discussion was focused on cultural identity, social equality and distribution of wealth. What is clear is that this debate will leave Britain changed forever. More people are likely to ask for regional autonomy and the ability to control funds within their own regions. Some of these regions will have a clear and long-standing identity; but other areas will be linked by new ways of sharing resources and generating prosperity. Britain may well turn into a federation or association of smaller political entities with new ways of competing, cooperating and expressing communal values.
It is evident that the London-centred model of politics and economic distribution has drawn much of the life out of Britain’s great second cities. Lacking economic power and representative status, these once thriving hubs have withered and their architecture has suffered as a consequence. The great German or Swiss cities, operating within a Lander or Federal system, have continued to flourish as cultural capitals of their own regions. Meanwhile countries such as Spain and Ireland have developed strong architectural cultures as a direct benefit from regional distribution of democratic power. These issues remind us that architecture is primarily a public representative art: it has a duty to embody communal values in civic space. Is it possible that, if democratic power is distributed more evenly in the country, new cities might spring up; or forgotten cities might acquire new significance?
We chose Leicester as our site, a modest but also particularly complex city that has the highest ethnic minority population in the United Kingdom for its size. We imagined how such a community in its hinterland would choose to express their social, cultural and political values through new democratic institutions. We looked at how history, resources, technology and landscape can inform design and how social ideas and built outcomes would have a meaningful relationship with each other. We designed individual public buildings within a shared urban plan, asking how architecture might find its vocation as the built embodiment of communal identity.
Nearly 30% of Leicester’s population originates from India. Our field trip combined underdeveloped rural areas in Gujarat and the extremely diverse and populous Mumbai. We saw fantastic temples, ancient subterranean water buildings, and neighborhoods in and around Ahmedabad; seminal buildings by Kahn, Le Corbusier and Doshi; inspiring craft, textile and print workshops; and an entirely different lifeworld.
Fig. 17.1 Unit 17 Group Model, mapping the geography of Leicester. Fig. 17.2 Charlotte Page Y4, ‘The Workers’ Yard: Celebrating Industries’. The devolution of power to Leicester starts a bottom-up regeneration wilfully supported by the local government who give incentives that begin the process of a balanced socio-economic approach to development.
Fig. 17.3 Lok-Kan Chau Y4, ‘School Reconstruction’. Every autumn, the riverside school is rebuilt by children who learn and play through participation as an architectural homage to birth, growth, decay and death. Fig. 17.4 Seyedeh Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami Y4, ‘Leicester, City of Refuge’. Each developmental stage of the project is marked by creating a paper model of the building, unfolding, drawing and re-folding it to create intricately spatial relationships.
Fig. 17.5 Jiong (Joanne) Chen Y4, ‘St Matthew’s Bridge School’, a nursery and educational centre designed to bring young mothers back to education, training and work. The building bridges the divide between St Matthew’s Estate and the city centre. Fig. 17.6 Sze (Shirley) Tsang Y4, ‘Multi-religion Water Ceremony Institute’. The canal is revitalised by the purification of contaminated water, contributing to water ceremonies of each religion. Water and landscape capture the sense of sacredness of different religions. Fig. 17.7 Antony Lees Y4, ‘Leicester Open Gallery: A Stage for Devolution’, an architecture of unfolding and exploratory spaces within a primitive and readable tectonic language. The internalisation of landscape places and orientates the visitor during their meander.
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Fig. 17.8 Agata Murasko Y4, ‘The Grand Leicester Hotel’. The hotel acts as public transitional space between the train station and city centre, embodying the pleasure of journey.
Fig. 17.9 Minghui Ke Y4, ‘Leicester Waterside Student Centre’. The proposal emphasises the footprint of the Great Central Station, the building acts as a hinge between the riverside and city centre. Fig. 17.10 Chenhan Wang Y4, ‘Red Leicester Cheese Market’. The proposal builds on Leicester’s cultural memory, creating a Community Hub which allows visitors to experience the making of cheese. Fig. 17.11 Cherry Beaumont Y4, ‘Magistrates Court within Leicester’s Future Archeological Ruins’. Aluminium is folded into a delicate structure that lightly touches the ground, reflecting both the city above and the ruins beneath. Fig. 17.12 Emily Doll Y5, ‘The Garden of
Assembly: East Midlands Parliament’. The proposal is for a new Regional Assembly building for the East Midlands. The complex is constructed around the individual viewpoint and is designed to be experienced as a visual sequence with the buildings and their gardens variously choosing to conceal and reveal different parts of themselves. The wall surfaces are decorated with frescoes and painted screens that retell the story of the building and its context to the visitor. Politics can be deceptive, and the building willfully deceives: it seeks to separate itself from its direct locality. It exists as a dislocated object, or arrangement of objects, which act to spatially and temporally displace its inhabitants from their context.
Figs. 17.13 – 17.14 Justine Dorion Y5, ‘Leicester Commune’. They are coming to Leicester! The race to become the next ‘UK Metro’ has begun, each city rebranding itself to compete on the global market. Never mind devolution, let us have secession: from a state who functions as guard dog of property rights; from an urban fabric tailored for consumption; from an asphyxiating tangle of rules and regulations marginalising the poor. Bring hammers, saws, nails and all the wood you can find. We are building a place for unsolicited activity, unmediated experience, sublime violence and pointless roaming. No need for architects, planners or regulations; no space for profits, property or authority. We call on all citizens to participate in an action to reclaim their right to a wild existence. Fig. 17.15 Chris Worsfold Y5,
‘Leicester Council of Faiths’. Leicester will soon become the first city in Europe with a white minority population and rising global tensions make interfaith dialogue a pressing issue. This project brings Leicester Council of Faiths, an existing inter-faith organisation, to the forefront of public life. As cities are given more control over their spending, we see Leicester taking a lead role in promoting dialogue between the faiths at a national and international level. Taking the site of the former county council buildings, the proposal is conceived as an arrival space at the end of the city’s pedestrianised ‘New Walk’. The family of buildings is carefully positioned to provide the city with a significant new public realm that provides an informal space for festival and exchange.
Figs. 17.16 – 17.18 Heather McVicar Y5, ‘Devo Local: Leicester Gateway’. Today, Leicester is one of the UK’s most ethnically diverse cities. The project proposes that the nationwide concept of ‘devo max’ be extended locally to give greater cultural autonomy and representative status to the diverse communities that reside in the city’s suburban area. Within the context of this newly devolved and less centralised city a new city centre gateway is proposed. Through the combined programme of a city centre bus terminal, a market hall and a cultural centre, Leicester Gateway aims to bring the city’s different communities together as an integral part of their everyday lives and to promote the expression and understanding of their different cultural identities within a shared public space. Fig. 17.19 Jonathan Paley Y5, ‘Fulfilled
by Leicester’. Tech city to tech nation: a proposal for a new retail model on the site of Lee Circle car park. Placed on Leicester’s heritage conservation list in 2014 and built in 1961, it was the first car park of its kind to be automated in Europe and boasted the largest supermarket in the UK. The e-commerce fulfilment process is blended with the car park’s helical structure to deliver a vertical warehouse, creating a synthesis of the city centre marketplace and the automated mechanics of the out-of-town distribution centres. A network of supplier, trader and civic spaces synchronise with the existing structure, enabling the exchange of products, services and knowledge, ensuring Leicester is better represented and more autonomous in the global internet marketplace.
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The Open Work
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
Year 4
Emily Doll, Justine Dorion, André Kullmar, Jonathan Paley, Paloma Rua-Figueroa, Chris Worsfold
Year 5
Alastair Browning, Joel Cady, Alicia González-Lafita Pérez, Uieong To, William Tweddell, Kirsty Sarah Williams, Mika Helen Zacharias
Thank you to our consultant William Whitby and our Design Realisation Tutors Joseph Mackey, David Hemingway and Anne Schroell
Thanks also to our critics: Matthew Butcher, Hannah Corlett, Mary Duggan, Murray Fraser, Will Hunter, Jan Kattein, Constance Lau, Guan Lee, Sophia Psarra, Peg Rawes, Bob Sheil, Henning Stummell, Mike Tonkin, Victoria Watson
Thanks to Mihail Amariei, Alberto Redolfi, Emiliano Rizzotti, Carlo Ostorero, Alberto Pottenghi, Phil Tabor, and Jan-Christoph Zoels for their fieldtrip support
The Open Work
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
Unit 17 designs contextual buildings that interplay with the social, political and material cultures of specific places. Each project is research-based, aiming to construct an architectural thesis that is explicitly manifested in the design proposition. We are interested in each student’s imagination and original voice, and seek diversity in the work produced by the Unit as a whole: projects complement and sometimes intentionally contradict each other to form a multilayered dialogue about the nature of architectural thought and practice today. Design iteration through drawing and making is a constant activity that we encourage. Stimulating fieldtrips, critical debates through open reviews and tutorials, and an osmosis of ideas and techniques in the studio are vital aspects of the Unit’s culture.
In The Open Work Umberto Eco discusses the role of openness in modern art by asking what it means for authors to understand their work as incomplete, left open to the public and to chance. We see buildings exactly in this way: as ‘open works’ experienced and changed over time. Buildings are exposed to accidents, the environment, myriads different interpretations and modes of occupation. They are vulnerable to decline and collapse, human intervention, extension and demolition. Prescribed programmes often change or become obsolete.
Our degree of openness towards the evolution of buildings over time determines our design approach and eventually the kind of architecture and cities we produce.
This year we questioned architecture’s excessive programmatic specificity, welcoming propositions for buildings that are less ‘programmed’. We explored buildings that have had different purposes over the course of time, gaining quality through enduring, despite changes of use and circumstance. In November we travelled to northern Italy, a place of contradictions that denies any singular or fixed meaning. We visited the Olivetti complex in Ivrea, and buildings by Nervi, Ponti, Terragni, Rossi, Mangiarotti and Grafton Architects among others.
No matter how themes change from year to year, our emphasis is always on the design of buildings as spaces to experience, and as meaningful public artefacts in culture and in history. Excessive metaphors, narratives and other overloaded signifiers are questioned, since our view is that the building should not be explained but experienced. The relationships between ideas, materials, places, environment, political life and the contemporary everyday will continue to preoccupy us.
Fig. 17.1 Kirsty Sarah Williams Y5, ‘Ivrea Natural History Museum’. The building is a celebration of production, a self-making factory powered by the meltwater of the Alps. It is an inversion of the city it occupies, Ivrea – a once notable industrial centre now stagnating. It is also a noteworthy place geologically, sitting at the heart of the most significant morainic amphitheatre in Europe. The project interrogates the relationship between a modern scientific institution using sophisticated digital techniques to reintroduce extinct species, and the inherent nostalgia of such an undertaking. This is done by producing traditional sculpted pieces using digital clay and 3D printing using wax, which is then electroplated. The museum is organised through the concept of time and focuses on the natural world surrounding Ivrea.
Fig. 17.2 – 17.4 Mika Helen Zacharias Y5, ‘Banca di Valdo Fusi’, Turin. The proposed bank is sited in a block of Turin’s Roman Quarter and responds to the urban context by opening views to nearby piazzas which punctuate the city grid, as a space which is open to and effected by public use. The building is experienced through movement across courtyards and along meandering public walkways; meeting spaces are arranged to encourage social gatherings, exchange and chance encounters. Servers containing digital currencies are integrated into the building, giving money a physical presence. The building is constructed of both solid and temporary elements; glass and steel are inserted within a robust stone framework. It becomes a form which is malleable and can be subjected to the programmatic changes that will take place on the site over time.
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Fig. 17.5 – 17.7 Joel Cady Y5, ‘Recording Britain: Chalk and the English Imagination’. This project proposes an art gallery sited in a disused chalk quarry in West Sussex, containing a collection of English landscape paintings made between the World Wars. This period saw the development of an intellectual movement which asserted a specifically English identity through the representation of topography and landscape. Chalk landscapes were a crucial symbol for this movement, and as such were recurring features in the work of painters such as Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious. The year’s work began with detailed research into the geology, art, and the archaeology of chalk landscapes. The design process for the gallery used contextual research, an informed attitude to material culture, and an understanding of contemporary
architecture in rural landscapes to develop a proposal which has a deep relationship with the materials, both imaginative and actual, from which places are made. The proposal carefully adapts the found spaces of the quarry and its relationship with the surrounding chalk escarpment to provide new ‘ways in’, both spatially and imaginatively, to the downland landscape. The gallery buildings, made predominantly from chalk, are inserted into new cuts in the quarry wall, and contain a series of evocative spaces designed to relate the paintings to the landscape around them. This is achieved through a combination of the visual and tactile qualities of chalk, carefully considered routes the landscape, and the charged light of the downs.
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Fig. 17.8 Alicia González-Lafita Pérez Y5, ‘Olivetti Research Centre’, Ivrea. Camillo Olivetti founded the typewriter manufacturer company of the same name in Ivrea, where he and his son Adriano Olivetti developed the industrial city, primarily between 1933-1960. Adriano Olivetti built a city within a city, not only founding the factory to host the production of the typewriters but also providing housing for his employees and social facilities. Many of those projects did not successfully address their context or each other, rather becoming singular objects in the landscape. They were designed prioritising the plan over the section and ultimately over the experience of the building as a whole. The proposed Olivetti Reseach Centre and Cinema Archive addresses and critiques the aforementioned urban condition. The proposed
building is positioned in response to a glazed factory located on Via Jervis, which was designed to bring in light and create a proximity to nature. The proposal acts as a gateway and explores the dichotomy between industrial and rural Ivrea. It is inserted in the hillside, into which it extends with a series of walkways – at ground level, a public square addresses the relationship between the existing Olivetti buildings. The northern façade filters views of the city whilst the south elevation directly opens onto the Evorese countryside. The modification of the landscape and the use of screening blurs these boundaries; the lattice follows the grided pattern of the Via Jervis façades and is overlaid with an Olivetti poster, reiterating Olivetti´s use of architecture in advertising to depict ‘utopian’ life in Ivrea.
Fig. 17.9 – 17.10 Alastair Browning Y5, ‘The Open-Plan’. Mirafiori, Turin. Located in a suburb of post-industrial Turin, once the ‘Fordist world’s most prototypical town’, the project proposes a new university campus sited within the 20m x 20m grid of Fiat’s behemoth Mirafiori Plant (1939). The flexible or ‘generic’ space of the Fordist factory, whilst born out of the necessity for the simplified movement of material alongside a predetermined form of human inhabitation, purveyed from the factory floor across many other built forms and typologies throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
This ‘open-plan’ influenced entire cities, demonstrating its suitability as the ‘nth plan’ of the tower blocks of the urban core, right through to the spaces of consumption that dominate the suburban periphery. The project is positioned
as an exploration into the open-plan, balancing the ‘generic’ with the ‘particular’, interweaving new programmes and functions into the repetitive matrix of the existing concrete frame. The project positions the proposed high-speed railway link between Lyon, Turin and Budapest as a driving agent in repositioning post-industrial Turin within a wider European context. The design focuses on the sectional distribution of the masterplan: workshops, offices, lecture theatres and public squares are situated at ground level, whilst housing, communal facilities, nursery schools and shared gardens inhabit the building’s roof. Occupying a site equivalent in size to the city’s historic centre, the project envisages Mirafiori as a new city quarter articulated by the shifting presence of production, research, commerce and living.
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Fig. 17.11 William Twedell Y5, ‘Casa dei Sindacati’ is the final figure in the reinstatement of Giuseppe Terragni’s Masterplan for Como, the idyllic pre-alpine city. The Casa del Fascio, the formative work of the seminal Fascist architect Giuseppe Terragni, serves as the antonymic counterpart to the proposal. The Trade Union superimposes an aesthetic language of the Ancient Greek Palaesta, to draw on its embodied ideologies. It was key to the development of young Athenians in learning through ‘body practice’ to become a part of the city and crucially naked, thus free and confident to express themselves. The building rises from the city textile, evidencing ruin and remnant seeking ground between formalism and looser, sculptural, tactile forms, in a bid to uncover a way of engaging with architecture in an acutely corporeal manner.
Fig. 17.12 Uieong To Y5, ‘San Giovanni station’, Como. The project is an extension to the border train station to accommodate the Como-Swiss commuters. A primary school and nursery are integrated into the proposal, exploring the live-work nature of the transnational family and the relationship between children and their mobile parents. Envisioned as a journey that resembles the trains, the primary school and nursery are stretched on a long plan with each occupying one side of the parallel structures running along the railway line. This concept is further reflected in the design of the continuous roof whose full length serves as the open ground for children’s imagination and play. Fig. 17.13 left-right: Jonathan Paley, Emily Doll, André Kullmar Y4. Fig. 17.14 left-right: Paloma Rua-Figueroa, Chris Worsfold, Justine Dorion Y4.
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Materials: Ideas
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
Unit 17
Materials: Ideas
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Niall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
Unit 17 designs contextual buildings that interplay with the social, political and material cultures of specific places. Each project is research-based, aiming to construct an architectural thesis that is explicitly manifested in the design proposition. We are interested in the student’s imagination and original voice, and seek diversity in the work produced by the Unit as a whole: projects complement and sometimes intentionally contradict each other to form a multi-layered dialogue about the nature of architectural thought and practice today. Design iteration through drawing and making is a constant activity that we encourage. Stimulating debates through open crits and tutorials, and a critical osmosis of ideas and techniques in the studio, are vital aspects of the Unit’s culture. Field trips play an important role in the development of the work and we invest substantial energy in designing itineraries which include experiencing extraordinary places and cultures.
This year we visited rural and urban Russia to experience how places that physically embody a deep history of the tensions that occur between ideology and building. Our intention was to focus on the complex physical and political role that materials play in the production of architecture.
Materials have shaped architectural ideas throughout history and cultures. They are practical as well as intellectual tools which communicate powerful messages. Specific materials represent unique human values and achievements, and have socio-political meaning. They determine the structural logic and environmental performance of a building, but also the very essence of its space and its relation to experience.
Materials transform and dematerialise over time, creating ambivalences and paradoxes. We are interested both in the truth and fiction of materials: their ability to reveal and also to deceive. ‘To fabricate’ means to make by skill and labour, or by assembling parts or sections, but also to devise
a legend or a lie, to fake or forge a document. We find the idea of material metamorphosis and the ironic potential of fabrication inspiring for architecture today. We explore the extent to which materials can continue to reflect the geography and socioeconomic position of a site and look for material innovation which can transcend the limits of a place responsibly.
In the digital and post-digital era our material consciousness has changed. Virtual media and simulation deny the experience of physicality, biotechnologies change our sense of scale and solidity, and digital manufacture is redefining the building process. Mixing the manual and the digital in hybrid materialities is now the new norm. But in this post-digital era what is the potential of materials beyond just geometric form?
In the beginning of the year the students produced compelling architectural environments that were experienced spatially at large scales and evoked the extreme political and environmental conditions that have shaped aspects of the Russian building stock over time. These works were research-based and asked questions that were further explored in the field trip, where the students eventually found sites for their final building projects. Russia’s vast land, declining industrial monotowns, remote islands and ice-bound wildernesses offered us a wealth of experiences. Our journey began in Moscow through the prefabricated micro-districts, the workers’ clubs and experimental social housing schemes, the churches and heavily ornamented metro stations. From Moscow we took an overnight train through the winter Russian landscape to Petrozavodsk, flying to remote Kizhi Island in Lake Onega, where we explored the extraordinary seventeenth century timber churches of Karelia. Some of us ended our journey in St Petersburg, Russia’s grand ‘window to the west’, with its Baroque buildings, Soviet factories, the constructivist avant-garde neighborhoods, and the Tsars’ lavish summer palaces outside the city. Others made individual
research field trips to the suburban dacha settlements in the hinterland of Moscow, the fortified Kronstadt on Kotlin Island, the port city of Murmansk within the Arctic circle, and the two declining monotowns of Pikalevo and Magnitogorsk, the last one in the inhospitable location of the Ural River deep within the Siberian steppe. These unique field trip experiences were crucial in determining this year’s work.
For making our journey so informed and stimulating we are grateful to: architectural historian Nikolai Vassiliev from Docomomo, architect Inna Tsoraeva and graphic designer Mike Loskov who guided us through Moscow; Kuba Snopek and Eugenia Pospelova from the Strelka Institute; Yuriy Milevskiy from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow; and architects Denis and Katya Panfilova who helped us in Murmansk.
For their constructive criticism, special thanks to: Alessandro Ayuso, Johan Berglund, Peter Bishop, Anthony Boulanger, Barbara Campbell-Lange, Vasilis Constantatos, Bev Dockray, Will Hunter, Guan Lee, Tania Malysheva, Jack Newton, Sophia Psarra, Mary Ann Steane, Mike Tonkin, and Cindy Walters.
Design Realisation tutors: David Hemingway, Joanna Karatzas and Joseph Mackey, with Structural Engineer William Whitby, Arup.
Year 4
Alastair Browning, Joel Cady, Alicia Gonzalez-Lafita, Uieong To, Harry Tweddell, Mika Zacharias
Year 5
Alice Brownfield, Tamsin Hanke, Alexander Reading, Francis Hunt, Shu Wai (Charis) Mok, Ben Hayes, Hannah Sharkey
Fig.17.1 Alice Brownfield, Y5, Public Architecture Library and Kitchen, St Petersburg. The project is situated in Narvskaya Zastava, an area radically replanned in the 1920s as the centre of socialist Leningrad. It studies the ideologies of constructivist architecture and attempts to recharge the idea of the social condenser by considering the role of public libraries and kitchens in contemporary society. Montage is used both to destabilise perceptions and create incidents between the two programmes. Selected fragments of constructivist projects are retained, creating a space that is strangely familiar. Fig. 17.2 (Left to right) Harry Tweddell Y4, Peski Airport, Petrozavodsk; Joel Cady Y4,, Klyazma Nursery School, Moscow; Uieong To, Y4, Collector’s House, St. Petersburg. Fig. 17.3 (Left to right) Mika Zacharias, Y4, Finland Station, St. Petersburg; Alicia
Gonzalez-Lafita Perez, Y4, Catherine’s Portrait Hall; Alastair Browning, Y4, Khrushchev Housing, Petrozavodsk. Fig. 17.4 –17.6 Alexander Reading, Y5, Arctic Research and Political Faculty, Murmansk Technical University. Situated deep in the port of Murmansk, the proposal speculates an alternative version of the Arctic petropolis that Murmansk is shaping up to be. The project suggests a socially integrated approach to Arctic research and discourse, shifting Murmansk beyond the industrial and situating it in a new economic context that is focused on striking a balance with its delicate ecosystem. The architecture is conceived as an urban block, with narrow crevices that penetrate a thick and monolithic exterior to reveal a delicate and environmentally reactive interior, celebrating the movement of water and ice that encases the building.
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through a fish market and fish auction space. Fig. 17.10 – 17.12 Shu Wai (Charis) Mok, Y5, Underground Public Square, Moscow. Moscow has an extensive underground network: the Moscow Metro partly built as a visual propaganda under Stalin, the secret Metro 2, newer metro lines and stations, and many underground rivers that crisscross to form a complex underground maze. The proposal focuses on the area of the Red Army Theater, extending the theatre and its square to the maze space below. Emphasis is given on public space and social interaction rather than efficiency of circulation. In certain parts weather, light and views are brought inside this underground labyrinth making strong visual connections to the sky and the city above. 17.9
Fig. 17.7 Francis Hunt, Y5, Kronstadt Measuring Terminal, Kotlin Island, St Petersburg. By deploying portable microshelters across the frozen sea in Winter this outpost allows researchers to conduct ice monitoring and map stable tourist walking routes to Kotlin’s ruined military islands. As these landscape instruments scratch thousands of pathways leading to the horizon, the project subtly memorialises the thousands of sailors fleeing the massacre of the Kronstadt Revolution of 1921. Fig. 17.8 – 17.9 Hannah Sharkey, Y5, Reclaim Bahrain Reconnecting to the Sea. In response to the accumulating land reclamation that has privatised most of the coast of Bahrain and disconnected coastal villages from their coast, this project seeks to examine how the sea can once again be central to Bahrain, reconnecting Bahrain to its forgotten coast
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Fig. 17.13 – 17.16 Tamsin Hanke, Y5, Magnitogorsk: A study of Stalin’s first and most significant ‘monocity’, which straddles the border between Europe and Asia on the eastern face of the Ural mountain range. Named after the ‘magnetic mountain’ from which its magnetite iron ore came, Magnitogorsk’s existence is entirely built around the now privately owned MMK steel factory, which employs, feeds and infrastructurally supports the whole population of the city. The project looks at the history of the city from its design by Ernst May in 1929 to its current state as the stagnated spatial legacy of a construct deliberately designed to influence society to form a compliant new working class, instilled with the values inherent to a vision of utopia. Through this study, it establishes two main frameworks for the architectural project – firstly the
importance of a financial disruption to the neoliberal capitalism which has replaced the communist economy locally; and secondly the necessity for a balance between top down order imposed as an intervention, and bottom up systems of self propelled change in the city. Through siting a location for the newly signed Russia China Investment Fund, it seeks to explore the potential for economic and cultural diversification within this single employer micro-dictatorship. The design spatially aims to use the mass of charred timber totems to define publically accessible voids beneath a cast iron roof. It plays with the idea of an opaque, primitive language through both analogue and digital technologies in order to try to find an architectural robustness able to both confront the existing condition and shelter a new function in the city.
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17.17 – 17.19 Ben Hayes, Y5, Kizhi Island, Republic of Karelia, Russia. The project proposes an architectural intervention to facilitate the restoration and reassembly of 300 churches onto Kizhi Island in Northern Russia. These churches were once landmarks to their communities, however in contemporary Russia, these fragile, desecrated wooden structures will almost totally disappear in 10-15 years. The remote island of Kizhi is situated on Lake Onega and over time its image has been idealised and commodified as buildings have been relocated onto it. The project proposes a new type of open-air museum, a concept that was originally formed from the desire to preserve architectural heritage and aestheticise the past. This aesthetic approach to landscape grew out of the ideals of nationalism and romanticism, however, as shifting notions of culture and
identity change in Russia, the role of the open-air museum in the future is uncertain. This project challenges how the island has been re-orientated towards the recreation of the ‘aesthetic function’ of monuments and inevitably reflects today’s knowledge and aesthetic values, not those of the times when the monuments were originally built. The proposal addresses two problems: to protect and restore this fragile heritage close to extinction, and to radically redesign the visitor experience. A new restoration facility and open-air museum are proposed to facilitate the dismantling of surrounding timber monuments, their transportation to Kizhi, restoration and final deployment around the island. The landscape is treated as a repository for protected buildings, constantly transforming and challenging existing notions of heritage preservation and production.
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Take It from the Top
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
Unit 17
TAKE IT FROM THE TOP
Niall McLaughlin, Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Michiko Sumi
‘Limit the sprawl of cities’. ‘Use the existing building stock’. ‘Replace, build on top and in-between, but do not expand’. These phrases are increasingly used to argue that the reuse of existing buildings and the restriction of urban sprawl is the new design ‘solution’ for architecture and the city. In a world that struggles to balance the forces of modernity with the current environmental challenges and with the histories and social desires of local places, what are the possibilities and limits of keeping buildings? To choose whether or not to build, what, how and for how long, requires a continuous and in-depth understanding of the physical, social and political realm. To preserve is first of all to find, learn how to actively observe, and collaborate.
The human need to keep and care for objects and places is as important as the urge to create new things. This tension is productive for architecture because it points to the limits of design. What exactly do we want to keep? Buildings? Landscapes? Experiences? Social organisations? In certain cases the continuation of meaning and experience may demand the demolition of buildings more than their conservation. In this context how, when and where can reuse be a radical design action? How can it operate within and against the authority of architecture? And is it ever necessary to make a totally clear start for buildings?
This year Unit 17 explored these questions in relation to Japan where the notion of ‘keeping things’ is cherished and handed over from generation to generation and where the Shinto Shrines are rebuilt every twenty years to symbolize both continuity and impermanence. A year ago the tsunami once again wiped out several coastal cities. How to begin again? ‘Take it from the top’ is what you say in music rehearsals when you restart after finishing or interrupting the previous attempt in order to create an improved or adjusted version. It can be used similarly in architecture to imply a symbiotic process of both keeping and changing.
The students started studying collaboratively different aspects of the Japanese contemporary society, its history and environment. In November we visited Tokyo, Sendai, Ise and Kyoto while many students also travelled to Osaka, Yokohama, Kamaishi, Ishinomaki and Tama New Town. They chose sites to carry out detailed research and develop individual design proposals. Year 4 were asked to experiment in order to open up possibilities for themes that they could bring forward to their final year whereas Year 5 brought their projects into a more complete state. Doubt and the process of constantly working between multiple and sometimes contradictory options were encouraged throughout.
Different interests were aroused during the course of the year but most fall under three main categories: projects based around observations of Japanese society looking at ageing, shrinking populations, primogeniture, weddings, divorce,
pilgrimage, nursery care, homelessness and teenage isolation; projects looking at the impact of natural disasters on buildings, cities and landscapes; and, finally, projects looking at the material processes, innovations and traditions of the local building culture and technology. Students researched the current architectural discourse in Japan but there is not a great deal of formal borrowing in their projects. The writings of Atelier Bow Wow, however, offered them a way into the Japanese society that was not possible through the direct emulation of other resources.
We can now observe that many of the students’ projects present Japan as a culture in crisis where economic, demographic, social and geotechnical factors combine to create a condition of almost intractable difficulty. In all of this they recognise the unique relationship between Britain and Japan in geographical, historic and financial terms. Perhaps that is why Japan is a potent place for us to visit. It is like our own place seen differently. This island off a major continental power with its history of imperialism and isolation is facing questions about twentyfirst century predicaments that we are only beginning to consider.
Our very memorable visit in Japan would have not been possible without the generous hospitality of: Fumihiko Imamura, Abdul Muhari, from the Tohoku University, Tsunami Engineering Department; Kojiro Fukuda and Asako Matsushima from Sendai Tokio Marine Insurance; Inagaki Junya and Yumi Sato from Waseda University; Yoshimasa Yoshida and students from Kyoto University; Toyohiko Kobayashi and Julia Lee from Toyo Ito & Associates; Yoshiko Iwasaki from Atelier Bow-Wow; and Takayuki Kubo from the Mori Memorial Foundation.
Many thanks to our critics: Alessandro Ayuso, Julia Backhaus, Justine Bell, Johan Berglund, Pierre D’Avoine, James Daykin, Shin Egashira, Hiromi Fujii, Peter Grove, Yiorgos Hadjichristou, Maria Hadjisoteriou, Will Hunter, Murray Fraser, Chee-Kit Lai, Brian Macken, Matthew Mindrup, James O’Leary, Sophia Psarra, Joshua Scott, Elle Stevenson, Mike Tonkin, Nikolas Travasaros, Peg Rawes, Victoria Watson.
Design Realisation Tutors: Maria Fulford, David Hemingway and Joanna Karatzas.
Year 4 Consultants: Neil Daffin (Max Fordham Associates) and William Whitby (ARUP).
Year 4: Christine Bjerke, Alice Brownfield, Freya Cobbin, Tamsin Hanke, Ben Hayes, Francis Hunt, Shu Wai Charis Mok, Sash Reading.
Year 5: Pooja Agrawal, Alexandra Brooke, Canzy El-Gohary, Chiara Hall, Katherine Hegab, Louisa Danielle Hodgson, Mathew Leung, Paul Sidebottom, Richard Wood.
Fig. 17.1 — 17.2, Fig. 17.5 Katherine Hegab, Gaming Complex, Extension to Electric City, Shinobazu Pond, Ueno Park, Tokyo. The Gaming Complex reintroduces a proportion of Japan’s Hikikomori to natural light in a video-gaming environment. The building seeks to engage light through the harness and distribution of natural and artificial sources from its surroundings as it responds to Japan’s excessive light pollution. Fig. 17.3 (From left to right) Year 4 projects by: Freya Cobbin, Tokyo Waterworks Bureau, Nihombashi, Tokyo; Tamsin Hanke, Minami-Ku Satellite Tax Office, Kyoto; Charis Mok, Bento Box Production Centre, Tokyo; Alice Brownfield, Civic Forum & Archive, Tama New Town, Tokyo. Fig. 17.4 (From left to right) Sash Reading, Kamaishi Yakusho, Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture; Francis Hunt, House
of Binding, Futami; Ben Hayes, Kamagasaki Union, Nishinari District, Osaka; Christine Bjerke, A Shelter for Divorced Women, Asakusa, Tokyo.
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Fig. 17.4 — Fig. 17.5 Paul Sidebottom, An Agronomic Recovery: elementary school and call centre within a cotton growing memorial landscape, Miyagi Prefecture. Situated on the site of a farming town destroyed by the 3-11 tsunami the project proposes a strategic reconstruction model, confronting the socioeconomic paradox of agriculture in rural Japan. The project responds to the threatened cultural construct of parttime farming families whilst addressing the psychological issue of tsunami children and the importance of the family bond. Fig. 17.6 Canzy El-gohary, A View to Mount Fuji, Nippori Fujimizaka (“slope for viewing Mount Fuji”), Tokyo. The last view of Fuji from ground level is threatened by encroaching developments and residents have consequently set up the ‘Citizens
Alliance to Preserve the View of Mount Fuji’. The building provides their offices and offers an elevated viewing landscape. Fig. 17.7 Mat Leung, Inhabiting Chinatown, Yokohama, Japan. Chinese library, temporary housing and labour centre located at the border of Japan’s largest Chinatown. Fig. 17.8 — Fig. 17.9 Richard Wood, Reassembling The Past, New Kyoto Parliament Kiyomizudera Temple Complex. Situated within the complex of an amassing of ancient temples, the project considers a new technique towards contextual architecture. Reassembled from the component parts of other stultifying timber structure temples, the proposed city hall and chamber offer progression for the city while questioning established preservation principles.
Fig. 17.10 Chiara Hall: Revealing and Concealing the Ise Shrines through Storytelling, Ise. The project is inspired by Japanese narrative scroll paintings. Four stories describe the rituals of different social groups within the landscape: shrine priests, pilgrims/tourists, festival town people and shrine construction workers. The proposal for a public square interweaves these stories and a repair and storage workshop for deconstructed shrine material acts as a screen to the edge of the sacred forest, turning place into a spectacle within the twenty-year reconstruction timescale of the Shinto shrines. Fig. 17.11, Fig. 17.12 Alex Brooke, Sugamo Fureai: Kindergarten and Assisted Living, Sugamo, Tokyo. The scheme seeks to positively address the problem of an ageing population and the breakdown of the traditional family care system
in Japan. Conceived as a series of unfolding screens, interconnecting sight lines and shared spaces for young and old, the building provides a mutually inclusive framework for living. Fig. 17.13 — 17.14 Pooja Agrawal, Song-Dance-Play-House, Tokyo. Within the ephemeral physical environment of Japan, ritual forms a means of continuity and permanence in Japanese culture. These rituals are performative in nature and preserve memories of society. Song-Dance-Play-House, a Kabuki playhouse in Tokyo, forms a seductive permeable framework for social play, celebrating cultural performance.
Fig. 17.15 — 17.19 Danielle Hodgson, Community Kura forms a critical response to the extinct Japanese claywalled kura storehouse typology. In their performance and construction kura are unique to Japan and, as such, offer a particular insight into the relationship between safety and architecture in this country. Historically, the principle reason for the development of these buildings was the unsurpassed resilience to fire, typhoons, and earthquakes that their clay wall construction provided in the safe storage of valuable goods. In addition to this their influence can be recognized much further afield in the areas of city planning, social structure, and the transmission of culture. The proposed design is informed by an original body of research identifying the complex underlying structure of risk perception present in kura.
Through the material characteristics of plasticisation and ossification, inherent in the unfired clay used in their construction, the project reconsiders the material and cultural associations of this historic building type through the programmatic amalgamation of a self storage and emergency evacuation facility for Kitano Shrine Park, Kyoto. The design posits the contemporary use of unfired clay to provide an environmentally responsive and culturally relevant form of protection for the city.
Do Undo Do
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
DO UNDO DO
Architecture is doing and undoing, filling and taking away, showing and masking. It is a way of thinking and an act of communication.
This year Unit 17 developed practices of doing which were continuous, reiterative and critical We made large physical models and performative installations which we occupied in the space of the studio. We produced rooms within rooms, inhabitable objects and relational spaces between projects. Drawing was a supportive and reciprocal activity throughout This persistent process of doing, undoing and redoing was seen as analogous to inhabitation, everyday rhythms, cyclical repetitions, the rituals and irregularities that determine the social life of places
In January we went to Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, to study historic and contemporary situations, woven between old palaces, mosques, souqs, khans, new Kurdish settlements, the modern city, an extremely dry climate and the nearly lost Barada River We travelled through the desert to Palmyra, Aleppo, the Dead Cities, and the castle of Krak des Chevaliers. We saw how the land has been formed by the constant making and erasing activities of previous and contemporary cultures and tried to develop a critical understanding of the manner in which each reiteration of the relation between landscape and human activity has thrown up unforeseeable variations.
This year’s projects are in themselves processes of trial and error They accept contradiction and physically manifest
the gap that exists between desire and outcome, between the previous and the next, the one and the other They express doubt about the new politics and poetics of local environments. Doing again and again is about testing, staging, rehearsing, and shifting your point of view As an architect, you are not outside the thing that you make; you form a part of it and with it you change.
Many thanks to our critics: Jessam AlJawad, Johan Berglund, Anthony Boulanger, Murray Fraser, Olivia Gordon, Rob Gregory, Tilo Guenther, Mohamad Hafeda, Jonathan Hill, Will Hunter, Jan Kattein, Dean Pike, Sophia Psarra, Adam Richards, Felix Robbins, Michiko Sumi, Mike Tonkin, Nikolas Travasaros and Victoria Watson
For her great suggestions and help in Syria many thanks to Anne Marie Galmstrup
Design Realisation Tutors: Simon Bishop, David Hemmingway and Maria Fulford.
Year 4: Pooja Agrawal, Alexandra Brooke Canzy El-Gohary, Chiara Hall, Katherine Hegab Gaafar, Emilie Henriksen, Danielle Hodgson, Mathew Leung, Paul Sidebottom, Richard Wood
Year 5: Matthew Eberhard, Fernanda Fiuza Brito, Yong Lik Lee, James Palmer, Eleanor Stevenson, Emma Tubbs, Georgina Ward, Christopher Wong
Fig. 17.1 Emma Tubbs, Hajj Hotel, Mardje’s Square, downtown Damascus An average of 400,000 Shia pilgrims reach Damascus for the ‘hajj-al-fuqara’ and on their way to Mecca annually each year, after having traversed hundreds of miles in packed minibuses and coaches These crowds occupy the streets as large solid ‘black masses’ on a daily basis but Damascus lacks an infrastructure to support them As an extension of the journey and like a modern day Khan, the hotel allows the buses to enter into and up the building, taking the travellers and their things directly to their rooms Luggage comes into big quantities and is arranged vertically as a screening device Two monolithic shrines are in the center of the circulating ramps, providing the structural core for the roads and two ‘courtyard’ spaces within
Fig. 17.2 Georgina Ward, Serjilla Centre of Nuclear Medicine, Dead Cities, Northern Syria The project lies within a limestone desert where massive stones from collapsed ancient structures litter the ground Placed in this desolate environment is a Centre of Nuclear Medicine, where patients come to be scanned and undergo radioactive treatment for cancer The project considers the idea of a ‘fragile architecture’ in terms of landscape, history, aesthetics and the human condition Fig. 17.3 Fernanda Fiuza, Independent Town Hall, Old Ottoman Prison, Jaffa Jaffa used to be the economic capital of Palestine until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1947 Since then the city has lost its autonomy and has become a dilapidated neighborhood of Tel Aviv The project considers the continuous erasure of the identity of Jaffa, as the Palestinian Arabs have been pushed out
Strategically sited on the boundary of the Jaffa hill, it aims to support new political projects for the local population Fig 17 4 Matthew Eberhard, Al-Hariqa Mall, Old City of Damascus The site is situated at the point of confluence between the ancient walled city and modern Damascus It is named al-Hariqa (‘the fire’) in remembrance of the bombardment by the French in 1924 during the Syrian Uprising against French Mandate control The building is designed along a modern European-style grid in stark contrast to the surrounding medieval-style souqs and alleyways It extends the souq vertically and uses the display of cloths and mannequins as an integral part of the architecture Fig 17 5 Yong Lik Lee, Eye Hospital, Jewish Quarter, Old City of Damascus The project focuses on different uses of light and a variety of micro spaces within a flexible open plan clinic
Fig. 17.6 Eleanor Stevenson, As Salhiyya Women’s College, Sha’laan Quarter of Damascus The College shares its site with a ruined Ottoman House built in the early nineteenth century by the leader of the Ruwalla tribe The building is designed as a backdrop to facilitate three social groups: female rural communities, male family members who require that they inspect the facility before permitting their own female family members to attend, and international scientists Experimental photography is used to explore the relations between architecture, theatricality and staging Fig. 17.7 James Palmer, Rehoused Mixed Use Development, Western edge of Damascus The site is on a fault between the geological regimes of the mountain and the basin of Damascus where the Barada River encounters the new gigantic development for the five star Kiwan Hotel Complex The project takes the Kiwan program and
rehouses it in a set of buildings made by rammed earth and poplar It critiques the generic air-conditioned environment being built next door by proposing an alternative architecture which better considers the local ecology Key: 1: Main entrance, 2: Hotel administration, 3: Staff courtyard, 4: Guest courtyard, 5: Cinema, 6: Internet cafe, 7: Terrace, 8: Intercontinental, 9: Barada, 10: Hotel towers, 11: Conference rooms, 12: Creche, 13: Restaurant, 14: Health club, 15: Hotel tower, 16: Mall Fig. 17.8 Christopher Wong, Language School, Salihiyyah, Northern edge of Damascus A series of large and nearly inhabitable models propose labyrinthine spaces which use ornamentation as a mnemonic device Given Syria’s censorship of foreign culture in the national curriculum, the final project accomodates a pilot programme for language education which will help the country’s recent move towards a services economy
Decay
and Emergence –The Becoming of Cities
Adam Cole, Tilo Guenther, Níall McLaughlin
Dip/MArch Unit 17
Yr 4:
Matthew Eberhard , Fernanda Fiuza, Tony Staples, Emma Tubbs, Jay Victoria, Georgina Ward, Christopher Wong
Yr 5: Tala Akkawi, Justine Bell, Alastair Crockett, Jonathan Horsfall, Katsura Leslie, Tatiana
Malysheva, Thomas Winter
Decay and Emergence – The Becoming of Cities
In 1194BC, 1000 ships beached on the shoreline of Asia Minor and set up camp. They remained there for 10 years before sacking Troy. A temporary city consumed an existing city, and then disappeared.
At the end of the 19th century, the republican Brazilian army relied heavily on former slaves for recruits. Freed a decade earlier, but with no land or wealth, enlisting was a way of escaping poverty and came with the promise of land after service. On returning victorious to the capital, they discovered the promised housing hadn’t been built. So they established an encampment on the hill overlooking what was to become downtown. Many of them had families in tow. Over time the camp became more established as the row over housing provision continued without resolution. Many found work constructing new suburbs of the rapidly expanding city. Rio de Janeiro’s first Favela was born, and so began a symbiotic process that continues still.
This year, the first year in history that more than half of the world’s population will live in cities, the unit considered the emergence of cities in mythical and structural terms. Our field trip took us to Rio de Janeiro. There we studied the relationship that exists between City and Favela, and how the tensions between the two are dissipated once a year by the liminal festival of Carnival. We examined the complex dynamic systems that underpin dense urbanism and explored the historical precedents and the stories we tell ourselves: mythic, poetic and scientific; that allow us to make sense of these constructs.
Niall McLaughlin, Adam Cole & Tilo Guenther
Above and opposite page: Justine Bell, Landfall: the Other Shore.
Top: Tatiana Malysheva, Rochina’s Water: From Chaos to Order. Bottom: Tala Akkawi, Santa Teresa Transport Interchange, Rio de Janeiro.
Jonathan Horrsfall, A Choreographed Architecture in Rio’s Sambadrome.
Top: Alastair Crockett, Rochina Planning Office, Rio de Janeiro. Bottom: Katsura Leslie, Reconstructing Solar de Monjope, Rio de Janeiro.
Thomas Winter, Reconstructing Landscape.
The
Recovery of the Real
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
Dip/MArch Unit 17
Yr 4: Tala Akkawi, Justine Bell, Sigrid Bylander, Alastair Crockett, Lino Egerman, Jonathon Horsfall, Katsura Leslie, Tatiana Malysheva,Thomas Winter. Yr 5: Robert Lunn, Brian Macken, Jack Pannell, Joshua Scott, James Stevens, Mitchiko Sumi, Dandi Zhang.
The Recovery Of The Real
[Thecity]isveryordinary,evenworsethan ordinary.Butthatiswhatitis,andI’mafraid thatiswhatmodernityislikewhenitis fresh. (Jeff Wall)
The city is under constant negotiation; it is provisional and contingent. It is ‘the result of all our labours and errors’. We call it ‘the real’. The recovery of the real in architecture has nothing to do with the pragmatics of ordinary practice. It involves a process of estrangement: stripping an action, a history or a place of anything that appears evident, familiar and understandable in order to arouse curiosity and astonishment about it instead. To recover the real for ourselves we need to discover the shock of it and communicate it through the public language of architecture. We question the extent to which students tend to depend on subjectivity, narrative and the figurative. A building which is truly public allows for a multitude of subjectivities. Close-up a building disappears.
Fieldtrip: Cape Town
Warmest thanks to Tim Allen-Booth, Julia Backhaus, Johan Berglund, Matthew Butcher, Nic Coetzer, Adam Cole, Sandra Coppin, James Daykin, Elizabeth Dow, Murray Fraser, Tilo Guenther, Christiana Ioannou, Katie Irvine, Jan Kattein, Iain Low, Paul Monaghan, Ana Monrabal-Cook, Ben Nicholls, Christos Papastergiou, Dean Pike, Mike Tonkin, Cindy Walters, Victoria Watson.
Niall Mclaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou
This Page Top: Dandi Zhang Calligraphy School , Beijing. This Page Bottom: Robert Lunn Building School, Langa.
This Page Top: James Stevens The Tower of Robben Island. This Page Bottom: Jack Pannell Deconstructing Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
This page and facing page: Michiko Sumi: Timepiece, Reconstructing Robben Island
This Page Left: Brian Macken The Remediation of Philippi Farming
Above Right: Joshua Scott Compulsory Acquisition: Resisting Forced Removals in the Heygate Estate, London.
Facing Page: Joshua Scott Political Geology: South African Land Registry and Claims Court. Project sited in District Six.
The
Absence of the Architectural Object
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
Dip Unit 17
Yr 4:Tom Elliott, Robert Lunn, Brian Macken, Jack Pannell, Joshua Scott, James Stevens, Michiko Sumi, Dandi Zhang. Yr5: David Dickson, Suzanne Gaballa, Christian Holm, Catherine Irvine, Emily Lewith, Jakob Lund.
The Absence of the Architectural Object
Today we take it for granted that we should produce images as part of the process of designing a building and these images usually depict the building as an object. But it is not clear that buildings can be experienced either as images or as objects.
Precisely the effort of design often serves to underline the absence of the architectural object, the impossibility of fully imagining it and the inadequacy of any kind of portrayal. The everyday perception of a building, on the other hand, gradually renders it as indifferent and eventually absent. Although the absence of the architectural object means the absence of its total image, architecture insists to function through a saturated culture of images. Buildings are inspired, copied, produced, propagated and consumed via the image.
What would happen if we had no access to the plethora of images that surround us? What if photography was unknown to us? History tells us about iconoclastic periods of image destruction. Can such events be seen in anyway as potentially liberating from established conventions? What would architecture be in a culture in which all images are not used?
Many thanks to Adam Cole, Alis Fadzil and Lee Halligan.
Niall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou
Above: Christian Holm. Facing page top to bottom: David Dickson, Suzanne Gaballa, Jakob Lund.
Irvine,
All
and
where Toby re-enacts and overlays the multiple events of Queen
Uncle
layers the topography of the existing site with the fortifications of Namur and a field of moments which are navigated by attacks and retreats.
Catherine
Uncle Toby’s Garden
Hallows’ Church
Vicarage, Sutton-on-the-forest. Uncle Toby’s Garden, described in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, is
Anne’s War (1702-1713). Dreaming
Toby’s Garden
Emily Lewith, Reconstructing Dublin: Excavating Finnegans Wake. This spatial translation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake explores the ‘vertical’ narrative of the text and structural techniques employed in its construction. By translating Joyce’s literary use of bricolage, metaphor and contiguous association into material form, Dublin’s historical landscape is fragmented, cast and rearticulated spatially within the archaeological site of Wood Quay.
1. Wellington Testimonial 2. Heuston station 3. St Patricks Hospital 4. Royal Hospital / museum of modern art 5. Guiness brewery 6. St Michan’s Church 7. Four Courts 8. St Marys Abbey 9. Green Street Courthouse 10. Nelsons Pillar 11. General Post Office (GPO) 12. Busaras 13. The Custom House 14. Bank of Ireland / Old Parliament 15. Trinity College 16. National Library / Gallery 17. National Museum 18. Dublin City Library and Archive
Merrion Square 20. Fitzwilliam Houses 21. Fitzwilliam Square 22. St Stephens Park 23. St Patricks Cathedral 24. Christchurch Cathedral 25. Adam and Eve Church 26. City Hall 27. Dublin Castle 28. Beatty library.
Migrations
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Bev Dockray
Dip Unit 17
Yr 4: David Dickson, Paula Friar, Suzanne Gaballa, Christian Holm, Katie Irvine, Emily Lewith, Jakob Lund, Tom Rigley, Yr 5: Candida Correa de Sa, Sarah Gray, Matthew Hill, Sarah Izod, Joanna Karatzas, Brett Lambie, Ben Nicholls, Teresa Warburton, Steve Westcott.
Migrations
In the novel Moby Dick, Herman Melville invented the Pequod as a dream ship to carry Ahab and his crew around the world in search of a phantasmagoric white whale. The Pequod is an enclosed world that is complete in itself. It is a factory, a home, a ship, a machine and a site for myths. The trees that built it grow again, it leaves no lasting mark on the surface of the sea, and it disappears without a trace. This year we asked our students to design their own version of the Pequod.
We traveled north-south down the coast of California. We observed and reacted to the flux all around us and explored how different kinds of migration influence stories, objects, cultures and ecosystems. Migration was also interrogated as a function of the mind (perception and memory), and as something that occurs within the design process itself, a drift between conscious intention and chance encounter. Each student finally produced an architectural proposal for a site and brief of their own choosing. A number of influences from theatre, literature, art, archaeology, and the natural sciences were woven into their projects.
Our warmest thanks to Alis Fadzil for her generous and invaluable teaching in Year 4.
Many thanks to the following critics and consultants for their insight and constructive input: Katherine Bash, Johan Berglund, Neil Daffin, James Daykin, Sarah Earney, Eoghan Given, Agniezska Glowacka, Olivia Gordon, Jan Kattein, Guan Lee, Peg Rawes, Adam Richards, Mark Smout, Andy Toohey, Victoria Watson, Oliver Wilton.
Niall McLaughlin, Bev Dockray and Yeoryia Manolopoulou
Top: Sarah Izod. Bottom: Teresa Warburton.
Clockwise from top left: Joanna Karatzas, Matthew Hill, Sarah Gray, Brett Lambie, Joanna Karatzas.
This page: Steve Westcott.
Top: Candida Correa de Sa. Bottom: Steve Westcott.
and facing
This
page: Ben Nicholls.
Unreal Constructions
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
Dip Unit 17
Yr 4: Candida Correa de Sa, Tim Fieldhouse, Sarah Gray, Matt Hill, Joanna Karatzas, Brett Lambie, Ben Nicholls, Tess Warburton, Steve Westcott Yr 5: Jessam Al-Jawad, Maria Fulford, Jin Mi Lee, Jack Newton, Dean Pike, Kirstie Smeaton, Andrew Walsh
Unreal Constructions
imaginary; impossible or difficult to believe
Dreams combine real and imaginary characters, actions and places to create 'unreal' worlds Stories, anecdotes, scripts and poems link diverse factual and fictional elements to distort our common sense of space and time and construct similar semi-real conditions On the other hand, philosophy and science offer insights about our understanding of the world that are often impossible to grasp and almost dreamlike
Our possession of information, whet her it is fiction or truth, whether it comes from literature or science, constructs a complex condition of knowledge Knowledge furnishes us with confidence and confusion and desire and anxiety about what we can create next How does our contemporary condition of knowledge influence our spatial imagination and critical thinking? What are the new meanings and forms it suggests?
This year we tried to intersec t absurd dreams, allegorical programmes and myths, with an awareness of new theories, processes and materials Placing architecture between desire and knowledge, we tried to explore constructions that are 'unreal' but perfectly meaningful and possible
We visited the Western Cornwall Coast, especially the disused industry of mines around Botallack, and buildings in Prague, Brno, Vienna, Munich and Vals Stud ents chose diverse sites, from remote Cornish landscapes to busy locations in central London
Many thanks to Bev Dockray for her invaluable teaching
Niall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou
This page: Kristie Smeaton, Primary School, Perranporth, North Cornwall
Top left: Kristie Smeaton, Primary School, Perranporth, North Cornwall; right: Jimmi Lee, RNIB Hostel, Levant Higher Bal, Cornwall Bottom: Maria Fulford, Radio Station and Public Foot Path, Smugglers Way, Morvah, West Cornwall
This page: Dean Pike, Camden Town Hall, Camden Market, London
Top: Andrew Walsh, Pendeen Distillery, Cornwall Bottom: Dean Pike, Camden Town Hall, Camden Market, London
This page: Jessam Al-Jawad, Courthouse, Angel, London
Top: Jack Newton, Patination Workshop, Levant Mine, Cornwall Bottom left and right: Jessam Al-Jawad, Courthouse, Angel, London
Emerging and Dissolving Places
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
Dip Unit 17
Yr 4: Jessam Al-Jawad, Samantha Cheong, Maria Fulford, Sarah Izod, Jack Newton, Dean Pike, Kirstie Smeaton, Andrew Walsh Yr 5: Hans Johan Berglund, James Daykin, Sarah Earney, James Harper, Alex Mok, Phillip Obayda, David Ogunmuyiwa
Emerging and Dissolving Places
Cities, buildings, experiences and ideas emerge while others dissolve Places are never still They are dynamic environments that are being constructed again and again throughout history Formed by continuously changing natural and cultural forces of all kinds, places are partly 'becoming' and partly 'vanishing'
In this respect, the area stretching from Canning Town to the London City Airport along the Thames is particularly interesting Environmental, economic, social and chance factors have created a heterogeneous collection of fragments, a disorienting territory between land and water, transportation knots and nature reserves, new manufacturing and abandoned industry, conference halls and flats, people, airplanes, trains and cargo ships, strange sounds and smells Each fragment of this uncanny environment certainly embodies historical and cultural significance, yet the identity of the place as a whole is currently unclear Unit 17 explores the forces of this site, understand its complex material and conceptual state as an 'emerging and dissolving place', grasp the atmosphere of the 'becoming city', and conceive novel ideas for its roles and edifices
Niall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou
Opposite, Sarah Earney This page, clockwise from top left: Alex Mok, Phillip Obayda, David Ogunmuyiwa, James Harper, Alex Mok Overleaf, left: James Daykin, right: Johan Berglund
Ground-Horizon
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin
Dip Unit 17
Yr 4: Amanda Betz, James Daykin, Sarah Earney, Romanos Gortsios, James Harper, Alexandra Mok, David Ogunmuyiwa, Phillip Obayda Yr 5: Naomi Abeliovich, Greg Blee, Olivia Gordon, Susie Hyden, Aoife Keigher, Markus Lobmaier, Anna Pamphilon, Anne Schroell, Michael Tite
Ground-Horizon
Ground is suggestive of the origins of things Its firm presence is the foundation of how we place ourselves in the world It is the resting place of structures and is strongly connected to our ideas of materials and of things It suggests protection and touch To occupy the ground we situate ourselves in a place and our imagination gives the site an identity We are anchored and we can reflect inwards
The horizon is the end of earth It is the limit of our visual perception The relationship between our bodies and the horizon is the basis for our perception of space When we address the horizon we look out, we project beyond ourselves. If ground is things, horizon is ideas, projections and abstraction Metaphorically the horizon represents the limit of our knowledge, but a boundary is also that from which something begins Beyond the horizon there is new ground Our experience of architecture is deeply rooted in a play between the concepts of ground and horizon It is what situates us in the world
Niall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou
Opposite, clockwise from top: Anne Schroell, Michael Tite, Olivia Gordon, Susie Hyden This page, clockwise from top left: Greg Blee, Naomi Abeliovich, Anna Pamphilon, Olivia Gordon, Markus Lobmaier, Aoife Keigher