Bartlett Design Anthology | PG21

Design Anthology PG21

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 Sequential

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

2023 (dis)Continuity

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

2022 Finite

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

2021 Uncertainty

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

2020 Multiverse

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

2019 Exchange and Trade

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

2018 Actions, Agents and Buildings

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

2017 ö (Swedish) = ‘Island’/‘Refuge’

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

2016 Import/Export

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter, Tom Holberton

2015 Ambiguous Territories

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

2014 Alternative Inputs

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

2013 Chronometrics

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

2012 Continuous Translation

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

2011 Portmanteau

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

2010 Artificial

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

2009 Interchange – *space/ object/ narrative

Abigail Ashton, Christine Hawley, Andrew Porter

2008 Buy : Sell

Peter Culley, Christine Hawley

2007 Show

Peter Culley, Christine Hawley

2006 Hotel

Peter Culley, Christine Hawley

2005 Liquid Architecture

Christine Hawley

2004 Stay ÷ Time

Christine Hawley, CJ Lim

2024

Sequential

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

Sequential

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

Architecture is often seen as creating final outcomes as an embodiment of an initial diagram or idea. However, this can disguise the sequence of actions and reactions during the design process. When we make, draw or model, each step influences the next.

Large language models, such as ChatGPT, work by simply predicting the most probable next word from the previous string of words. They know nothing but sequences, but by using these patterns they can convincingly explain, narrate and converse with humans. Every sentence unfurls as a succession of probable words, as a form of strange machine intelligence without any ideas of its own. Yet this sequential way of ‘reading’ the world is proving to be a powerful new tool, with the potential to influence how we create the future.

Our perceptual models constantly compare what is sensed to a parallel inner prediction. How something looks and feels, and what draws our attention, is a game of sequential probability. Our shifting focus is in dialogue with the architecture we create and the relative difference between what we see and what we know.

Modern construction relies heavily on systems of standardised parts that are planned in advance. Yet different forms of scanning, sensing and manufacturing could allow construction to be a more agile, continuously reactive craft – one that is more dynamically responsive to materials. This is ever more urgent in a climate crisis that must reuse and repurpose to conserve embodied energy.

This year PG21 students have worked both physically and digitally, between the analogue and the digital, and their process has been a continuous chain of consequences. They have developed their own evolving method that creates, fixes and reacts to itself –embracing operating in the moment, without necessarily knowing the end, or even remembering the beginning.

We travelled to Barcelona, a continuously changing city, and explored various projects by Antoni Gaudí, Enric Miralles, Ricardo Bofill and RCR Arquitectes. Our unit operates a vertical studio culture that combines all years, from Year 2 to Year 5, supporting each student to develop their own unique design approach, and placing a value on the process throughout the whole year.

Year 4

Harrison Maddox, Charmaine Tang, Xavier Thanki, Weitse Wang, Yujie Wu

Year 5

Zijie Cai, Ho Kiu (Jeffrey) Cheung, Ioana Drogeanu, Austin McGrath

Technical tutors and consultants: Tom Holberton, Brian Eckersley (Engineer)

Critics: Julian Besems, Roberto Bottazzi, Pedro Gil, Farlie Reynolds, Elly Selby, Neba Sere, Ben Spong, Jasmin Sohi

21.1, 21.6–21.7 Ioana Drogeanu, Y5 ‘Towards a Non-Universal Architecture: 1:1 Scale Design Through the Lens of VR, AR and AI’. This project challenges the current design methods that are mostly used to create a ‘standardised‘ architecture that is not generally adaptable to each of its inhabitants’ individualities. Utilising VR as a tool at a 1:1 scale, in conjunction with machine learning, this method advocates a shift towards a customisable, ‘non-universal’ approach.

21.2 Austin McGrath, Y5 ‘Latent Cartography’. The Institute of Artificial Intelligence Education employs an innovative crowdsourced methodology, scraping tourist vlogs from the site to capture vernacular experiences. These ‘whispers’ form a hyper-contextual latent space, which is then used to remap a generative AI model, resulting in an architectural design that reflects the voiced sentiments and site-specific narratives.

21.3–21.5 Ho Kiu (Jeffrey) Cheung, Y5 ‘Parque Para Perros Español’. Dogs have been domesticated by humans for a long time, and their hidden talents continue to be discovered. This project adopts a precise framework for dog training, observing patterns while allowing for unexpected moments within the framework. These moments of spontaneity contribute to a co-authorship in building design, serving as a feedback mechanism of the two parties.

21.8–21.9 Zijie Cai, Y5 ‘Vivir la Utopia’. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), founded in 1910, ignited Spanish anarchism. Originally central to the urban development of Barcelona’s Eixample district, the former Can Baró quarry is transformed into a space that captures the spirit of anarchism. The design of the proposed Barcelona Anarchist Memorial transmits historical data from the city to the site using digital translation, offering visitors a dynamic experience and reinvigorating the profound legacy of Barcelona’s anarchist movement.

21.10–21.12 Harrison Maddox, Y4 ‘NEO-XANADU’. In the face of increasing climate instability, this project explores an alternative to existing political-economic structures by adopting a subversive ‘queering’ design methodology. It envisions a radical departure from traditional governance by adopting a fully automated, neo-decadent, ecophilic and metamodern anarchocommunist society. The project acts as a thought experiment to satirically engage in the critique of established architectural and political practices.

21.13–21.15 Weitse Wang, Y4 ‘The Infinity Valley’. The project tackles Spain’s rising energy costs and the demand for energy independence by transforming Barcelona’s Tibidabo into a ‘battery’ with one million cubic metres of water. By integrating pumped storage hydropower with a library and cultural centre, it blurs the boundaries between entertainment and energy infrastructure.

21.16–21.18 Yujie Wu, Y4 ‘Green-GAN’. The project explores generative design and machine learning techniques to facilitate sustainable architecture. It trains conditional generative adversarial networks (GAN, i.e. a class of AI algorithms used in unsupervised machine learning) to generate building layouts coupled with carbon-cost levels. These result from metrics for various materials and domains. By integrating colourcoded carbon-cost mapping into the building design process across multiple scale levels, the system provides real-time visual feedback on the carbon footprint of material choices during the conceptual design stages.

21.19–21.20 Xavier Thanki, Y4 ‘The Dune Catcher’. The project explores encrypting data into a site to address climatic instabilities, particularly flooding in the Ebro Delta. It proposes a ‘dunescape’ that protects the delta by harmonising natural rhythms

within climatic data. It integrates weather sonification to guide sand movement, blending architectural precision with the fluidity of nature. This innovative coastal management strategy transcends mere protection, merging nature and technology into a dynamic landscape.

21.21–21.23 Charmaine Tang, Y4 ‘Paintstrokes of Catalonia’. Inspired by contemporary Catalan politics, nationalism and the Modernisme movement, the project proposes an art restoration museum dedicated to preserving and memorialising artworks lost during the Spanish Civil War. To capture Modernisme’s adventurous spirit, the project explores an architecture made from paintings to celebrate Catalonia’s cultural identity and artistic heritage.

21.6

21.8

21.13

21.14

21.16

21.17

2023

(dis)Continuity

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

(dis)Continuity

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

(dis)Continuity:

1. a state of stability and the absence of disruption 2. the maintenance of continuous action

In recent times through pandemics and economic and social change, we have depended on systems of measurement and feedback to maintain a sense of continuity – keeping economies and society operating in the face of instability. Architecture both adapts to and resists these dynamic forces. Architects find themselves operating within one current system while always imagining and creating future alternatives.

This year PG21 considered continuity and discontinuity. How do we design with multiple systems, that overlay, combine or break? Can architecture sustain and also rebel?

Throughout the year, students were asked to develop their own design process using analogue or digital techniques, physical making, drawing and digital methods. Through their personal research students identified combinations of continuous and discontinuous systems. These included explorations of time, materiality, data and perception. Areas of research were wide and diverse. We encouraged students to draw on personal interests, obsessions or topical subjects to narrow their focus. We celebrate the juxtaposition of a personal approach which might be intuitive and/or highly subjective against data or science that is objective or shared knowledge.

‘Florence is like a town that has survived itself.’

William Hazlitt, 1826

Our field trip this year took place in Florence, Italy, the iconic city of the Renaissance and home to scientific, financial and artistic revolutions. Historically Florence created a great discontinuity in thinking and ideas, but is now a city that is highly preserved and resistant to change. From the 13th century to the early 16th century, one bold experiment in the arts and sciences succeeded another: artists were thinkers and painters were mathematicians. Leonardo da Vinci had a plan for diverting the River Arno and Michelangelo imagined how a mountain could be turned into a piece of sculpture (Eve Borsook, 1981). After the dramatic flooding of Florence in 1966, the city incubated a series of radical design groups including the 9999, UFO, Archizoom Associati and Superstudio – designing discos, guerrilla inflatables, jumpsuits and cities with continuous flows of information such as the No-Stop City and The Continuous Monument

Year 4

Rory Browne, Zijie Cai, Ho Kiu (J effrey) Cheung, Ioana-Maria Drogeanu, Benjamin Faure, Austin McGrath

Year 5

Sebastian Coupe, Neelkanth Depala, Hugo Loydell, Oscar Maguire, Gia San Tu

Technical tutors and consultants: Brian Eckersley (Eckersley O Callaghan), Tom Holberton, Jeovana Naidoo (Atelier Ten)

Critics: Julian Besems, Roberto Bottazzi, Ali Eslami, Naomi Gibson, Kostas Grigoriadis, Melih Kamaoglu, Elly Selby, Jasmin Sohi

21.1–21.3 Oscar Maguire, Y5 ‘Probobli Boboli’. This project explores the potential of using probabilistic simulations as part of a creative process for design, rather than simply a tool for validation. The design process utilises probabilistic models to generate networks for the distribution of material across the site. The project reimagines the Renaissance garden and explores the interplay between man-made design and the chaotic forces of nature, looking into what this suggests about the relationship between architecture, probability and computation.

21.4–21.8 Hugo Loydell, Y5 ‘Reframing Florence’. Taking shape as a frame-making facility serving the galleries in Florence, the project explores the gaze as a tool. Utilising a bespoke eye-tracking headset, the gaze is integrated into the design process. A fixation capture system allows users to compose new architectures based on unique perspectives captured through experiences within the city. The results emphasise the significance of the individualised perspective, not simply the physical form.

21.9 Sebastian Coupe, Y5 ‘Isolotto Weir: Ephemerality on the Arno Riverbank’. Driven by pneumatics and powered by the Arno, the Isolotto Weir is a riverside piazza that morphs and transforms as it responds to pressure flows. Inspired by Florence’s festive tradition and the event architecture of its postwar radical architecture movement, this metamorphic piazza of fluidity and motion contrasts with the historical form of a city stuck in its past.

21.10 Gia San Tu, Y5 ‘Visualising the Intangible’. Up until the 1861 unification of Italy, the peninsula was divided into several different states, each with its own dialect. Today, only one-tenth of the population of Italy speak their regional dialetto. It is within this context that the project proposes the celebration of each region’s dialect, by pointing out similarities and differences between words to educate the younger generation of Italy about endangered languages. The architecture is therefore a collective of dialects translated into geometric forms to preserve the intangible.

21.11 Benjamin Faure, Y4 ‘Il Pellegrinaggio del Galluzzo’. The project finds inspiration in the historical significance of bells in shaping the identity and borders of Florence. In reminiscence of the marble-quarrying methods employed in Carrara, Italy, the intricate Florentine soundscape is translated into meticulously crafted cutting taxonomies. These gestures are then used to investigate the potential for sounds to play a primary role in carving an architecture. Expressed as a museum on a pilgrimage route from the noise-imbued historical gates of the city to the silent Certosa di Galluzzo, a Carthusian monastery in its periphery, the proposal extends the investigation with sound at all scales, from stone to space and building to landscape.

21.12 Zijie Cai, Y4 ‘Cimitero Della Montagna Verde (Chinese Cemetery in Prato)’. Prato, an Italian city known for textiles, has a significant Chinese population of around 45,000 Chinese residents. However, Chinese–Italian social relations have become tense in recent years. The project recreates the Via Pistoiese funeral procession through anamorphic distortions and blending cultures in 3D forms. The proposal extends to the Cava di Figline cemetery and promotes coexistence by offering space for diverse cultural, agricultural, national and religious events.

21.13 Neelkanth Depala, Y5 ‘Re-Dressing Florence’. The project used text-to-image AI technology to create a digital fashion line and architectural design within the city of Florence. The combination of new AI technology and existing fabrication techniques in the fashion and architecture realms has led to the emergence of a unique design approach.

21.14 Ioana-Maria Drogeanu, Y4 ‘To Design Through Gestures (A Cooking Academy)’. This project investigates the potential of virtual reality as a tool for comprehending spatial design across multiple scales. Using augmented reality in conjunction with a projector, the gestures performed by chefs during cooking were traced, scaled and integrated into the design as architectural elements. A TouchDesigner script facilitated the accurate reproduction of these rescaled gestures at 1:1 scale by projecting them onto walls with a delay of 10–60 seconds.

21.15 Ho Kiu (J effrey) Cheung, Y4 ‘The Guild of Plastics’. The project captures gestures from artisans and generates the movement into a 3D form by applying a computational weave inspired by the logic of a Jacquard loom and card. The construction combines the use of welding, sculpting, plastic 3D printing and gilding, bringing together several different craft disciplines reminiscent of the guilds during the Renaissance.

21.16 Austin McGrath, Y4 ‘The Florence Political Forum’. The project delves into the implementation of artificial intelligence in the design process while purposefully exploring the inherently weird, quirky and uncanny nature of near-perfect AI. Through this unique perspective, the project establishes a political education forum in the captivating city of Florence, Italy.

21.17–21.18 Rory Browne, Y4 ‘Scoring Florence’. Scoring Florence is derived directly from the rhythms, cycles and durations of the city. A contemporary art space on the River Arno, the gallery is developed through a reconstructed digital score of the city. The spatial score reflects the rhythms driving Florence. The architectural score is then ‘performed’ by the designer, working directly with time and duration. Scoring Florence suggests architectural scores can become a widespread notational method within the design process, resulting in a highly site-specific and personal architectural response.

21.15

2022

Finite

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

Finite

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

This year PG21 considered the finite.

The past 18 months of accelerated digital development have tested what can be achieved with less material consumption and physical movement. As we return to a supposed ‘normality’, urgent questions remain unanswered. As of 2014, humanity’s global ecological consumption is 1.7 times the Earth’s capacity. Apocalyptic deadlines suggest the world will be running out of sand (20 years), fresh water (28 years), food (18 years) and iron (64 years). Architecture increasingly looks beyond one moment of design to influence material supply chains and consider the entire lifespan of a space.

PG21 were asked to consider different aspects of the finite and the infinite. Can we create inventive architecture by imposing a strict limit on a material, a boundary, on time or perception? When do we use infinite digital space and infinite change to augment the fixed and finite? When do society’s rules create artificial limits and change the ways in which we design?

Architecture that values the finite needs to be created within time. Many systems around us operate as infinite games, with no ultimate outcome, measuring their value through incremental changes. New ways of drawing, modelling and filmmaking can consider architecture as a dynamic process of near infinite change and feedback. The Poincaré disk model, used by M. C. Escher, draws infinite space in a simple circle using hyperbolic geometry. Computer simulations and calculus quantify infinitesimal changes to provide certain predictions from many tiny moments of uncertainty. Fractal shapes contain never-ending patterns that resemble one another across different scales.

The students’ research this year straddled the material and immaterial, the physical and the infinite. They developed inventive design processes that not only followed strict rules of resources, materials and making but also provided architecture that was dynamic, reflective and thoughtful – and made best use of the digital infinite.

We travelled to the Isle of Portland on the south coast of the UK, an area described by Jonathan Meades as a ‘bulky chunk of geological, social, topographical and demographic weirdness’. Here students developed their own highly individual design processes and architectures.

Year 4

Shou-Hui Chen, Emily Child, Sebastian Coupe, Migena Hadzui, Hugo Loydell, Oscar Maguire

Year 5

Alp Amasya, Kiren Kaur Basi, Lewis Brown, Carmen Kong, Rolandas Markevicius, Ajay Mohan, Maria Eleni Petalidou, Samuel Pierce, Zhi (Zoe) Tam, Yat Shun Tang

Technical tutors and consultants: Tom Holberton, Brian Eckersley (Eckersley O’Callaghan), Ali Shaw (Max Fordham) with additional support from Julian Besems, Steve Webb

Critics: Julian Besems, Roberto Bottazzi, Naomi Gibson, Kostas Grigoriadis, Bethan Ring, Jasmin Sohi

21.1–21.3 Rolandas Markevicius, Y5 ‘Synthetic Synaesthesia’. The developments in deep neural networks force us to reconsider the role of references. The project frames this statement through the challenge of establishing synaesthetic links between architecture and music, suggesting that the new instruments offered by machine learning allow designers to play with abstract features systematically. The project proposes the practical implementation of a Pix2Pix general adversarial network, creating common maps between architectural drawings and audio spectrograms and shaping methodologies for formalising relationships between sets of data. Personalised software and data augmentation procedures are developed throughout the project to aid the design of a music school in Portland in Dorset, UK. 21.4–21.5 Alp Amasya, Y5 ‘How to Draw a Hyperobject’. Taking Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects as a starting point, the project creates a drawing system that translates hyperobject principles into architecture. This philosophical approach to high-dimensional systems is spatialised through digital simulations, focusing on the Jurassic Coast of England. The project creates a drawing method performed by the fossils embedded in Portland stone. Looking at the intangible qualities of architecture as a hyperobject, building clusters alternate between multiple options, offering ambiguous boundaries and ever-changing design outcomes.

21.6 Maria Eleni Petalidou, Y5 ‘Unwrapping Heritage: A Garden of Artefacts’. If all the artefacts in the British Museum were returned to their home countries, what would happen to its Bloomsbury building? The project proposes a thematic garden of unwrapped artefacts where one can experience their aura through architecture. The design is based on 3D scans of artefacts taken from the museum. The scanned models are cut, unwrapped and rewrapped to create new spatial forms that generate a landscape that reflects not only the qualities of the artefacts themselves but also the stories behind them. In an era where the digital is merging with the physical, the information behind cultural heritage is a starting point to create a modern pleasure garden of artefacts.

21.7 Oscar Maguire, Y4 ‘Transposing the Courtyard’. Since the 1850s, the Courtyard Societies had been accommodated rent-free in Burlington House in London, a grand neoclassical edifice built from Portland stone. Recently, however, the UK government has decided to start charging rent on the property. This has been increasing yearly at an unsustainable rate so that the tenants must either negotiate a deal, find a new home or perish. This project proposes an architectural solution to their problem, whereby all five societies occupy a Portland stone quarry that is being restored to a natural environment, reversing the historical extraction of material, capital and culture from the area.

21.8–21.9 Kiran Kaur Basi, Y5 ‘A Non-Extractivist University’. Countering the idea of the Isle of Portland as a sacrifice zone, a non-extractivist mindset is adopted to refill a disused quarry with value and contribute to the sustainable development of the island. This is designed using a combination of recursive algorithms and topographic data to generate a highly contextual scheme which is bold in its design, which celebrates the legacy of the island’s stone industry while inspiring its students and promoting mindful extraction.

21.10 Carmen Kong, Y5 ‘Archiving the Jurassic Coast’. Sited on the Jurassic Coast, this project highlights the paradox of conserving an eroding coastline. The coast, the only natural heritage site in the UK, is a geomorphological landscape that encompasses 180 million years of geological history, acting as a natural archive. This project documents the coast through

speculative fossil data; this data is then used as a positive volume, allowing the architecture to mould into the negative space mimicking the coastal processes. As the coastline recedes, the Jurassic Coast is fossilised into the architecture.

21.11 Ajay Mohan, Y5 ‘Between the Line and the Land’. The project speculates upon the spatial polarity between the City of London and the Isle of Portland, developing into an insurgent distortion of a formless landscape via a series of physical navigations undertaken in the City. Once an unwitting product of an exploratory process, the navigational line now emerges as the spatial protagonist of the cliffside site, negotiating between the medium of land, air and sea; the architecture that emerges is alien in nature, a geodetic artefact that dances between the line and the land.

21.12 Yat Shun Tang, Y5 ‘Coastline Infinity’. The project focuses on the World Heritage coastline in southern England and examines its hundred-million-year-old geomorphology. The design of the new Jurassic Coast Fund Centre employs a series of algorithms that represent the dynamic forces of the Isle of Portland.

21.13 Hugo Loydell, Y4 ‘Defining the Architectural Foveal’. Within the scarred landscape of Portland, a proposed climbing research centre explores the agency of the eye’s gaze within space. Through experiments in spatialising foveated level of detail, the fixations and saccades of the eye are utilised to encode spatial narratives and develop new climbing typologies. This serves to reduce the dissonance between the imagined and experienced architecture, the climber and the wall.

21.14–21.15 Samuel Pierce, Y5 ‘YOI Portland: Rehabilitative Landscapes’. Augmented and virtual reality technologies make the world of information visually immediate. The transformative effects of virtual environments are applied to a proposed young offender’s institute on the Isle of Portland whose history is deeply intertwined with the development of the modern carceral system. The project strives for a compassionate, adaptive and therapeutic architecture by providing a wide range of physical spatial conditions which address the specific requirements of the user while further moderating their progression through digital environments. Landscape and architectural devices provide the necessary boundaries between spaces while maintaining a visual connection further articulated through digital augmentation. Agency over their social, educational and visual environment allows individuals to take control of their pathway back into society, cultivating new levels of self-awareness.

21.16–21.17 Sebastian Coupe, Y4 ‘The Stone Organ: A Concert Hall for a Lunar Landscape’. The idea of an environmentally positive stone renaissance runs contrary to an island that continues to suffer environmental degradation at the hands of the quarrying industry. Many within Portland see the preservation of its natural beauty as a crucial element in generating future tourism to the island and condemn the impact of quarrying, while others regard quarrying as fundamental to Portland’s identity. It is within the context of this dialogue that this project utilises the quarrying and stonecutting processes that have defined the island for centuries to create a place of cultural and social significance.

21.18–21.21 Lewis Brown, Y5 ‘Printed Morphologies’. The project elevates desktop 3D printing to a performative art, through iterative feedback systems and reactive drawing practices. The dynamic printer bed acts as a flux terrain that can shift seamlessly between scales, existing in a dualistic state that spans both the geological landscape of Portland and the printed topography of the generative physical model.

21.11

21.10

2021

Uncertainty

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

Uncertainty

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

The mathematician Giovanni Cassini was a pioneer of accurately drawing the universe. In 1679 he produced the first scientific map of the Moon and concealed a tiny figure of a woman in the Bay of Rainbows. No one knows why he hid this fictional maiden within a scientific drawing. Perhaps it was a playful admission of the limits of truth? Despite painstakingly measuring the shadows and smudges of the lunar surface, the drawing still concealed an unknown and uncertain world.

We are living in uncertain times; the Covid-19 pandemic and political instability have shaken our collective sense of the world as relatively predictable. We crave social categories and identities as anchors that make our interactions predictable, surrounding us with shades of certainty. It is easy to live in the echo chamber that is the internet, where algorithms feed false certainty. News and truth are manipulated to group people using confirmation bias, offering the comfort of social categories and a digital environment that reinforces, rather than engaging with, the unfamiliar or ambiguous.

Science offers a different perspective, where the measurement of uncertainty is a vital tool for critical thinking. Quantifying what we do not know is as important as what we do. Artificial Intelligence allows machines to gradually make their dreams converge with reality and create a succinct internal model of a fluctuating world; each iteration creating a new fiction where uncertainties are tested against real data.

Buildings offer the constants of shelter, structure and environment, but architecture often plays and manipulates uncertainties. Every drawing, model and building carries ambiguities through tolerances and translation.

This year PG21 was interested in designs that are not determinate or fixed but are instead uncertain. The unit looked towards the beautiful and eerie landscape of Dungeness on the coast of Kent. Frequently called ‘the UK’s only desert’ – an alternative truth –and ‘the fifth continent’, Dungeness is home to one third of all plant species found in the UK. 30,000 tonnes of shingle are manually relocated there every year to protect the land from the certainties of longshore drift. Strange buildings and military installations and infrastructure have all been created to confront and watch for the unknown coming over the horizon: smuggling, swamps and atomic fission.

Year 4

Alp Amasya, Kiran Kaur Basi, Lewis Brown, Carmen Kong, Rolandas Markevicius, Ajay Mohan, Maria Eleni Petalidou, Samuel Pierce, Zhi Tam, Yat Shun Tang, Qingyuan Zhou

Year 5

Paul-Andrei Burghelea, Thomas Band, James Carden, Shu Min (Michelle) Hoe, Edward Sear

Thank you to structural engineer Brian Eckersley and environmental engineer Alistair Shaw. Additional Support from Julian Besems, Alex Campbell, Maya Chandler, James Potter, Bethan Ring

Thank you to our critics: Paddi Benson, Julian Besems, Roberto Bottazzi, Luca Dellatorre, Naomi Gibson, Calum MacDonald, Sayan Skandarajah, Kat Scott, Jasmin Sohi, Priscilla Wong

21.1, 21.5–21.6 Thomas Band, Y5 ‘Rendering the Dungeness Percept’. The iconic image of Dungeness –a totemic object situated within a barren landscape –is synonymous with the mechanistic production of the architectural photograph. Disseminated by websites such as The Modern House and Dezeen, the imagery shapes our collective understanding of the place, imposing a romanticised fiction upon a working landscape. Dungeness is rendered as a backdrop to the architectural subject: compliant, malleable, representationally inert.

21.2 Edward Sear, Y5 ‘The Continuous Sea-Wall’. A proposal for an inhabitable section of coastline in Dymchurch, Kent. Bordering land and sea, the scheme includes an esplanade, fish and chip shop, arcades and terrace of almshouses. Generative and analogue design processes are applied to a range of coastal sites and programmes around the UK, with Dymchurch selected as a detailed case study.

21.3 Ajay Mohan, Y4 ‘The Denge Quarry Co-operative’. The project subverts the contemporary idea of the curated touristic experience; instead, meaning and purpose are derived from a mnemonic and evolving relationship with the ground. Extracted from a quarry, sand and gravel become entities that require repeated manipulation. Scattered urban artefacts in the desolate landscape begin to act as waypoints towards this new decentralised experimental laboratory.

21.4 Lewis Brown, Y4 ‘Casting Quantum Shingle’. The dynamic shingle landscape of Dungeness is charged with energy, pushed and pulled by geomorphic processes and quantum technologies that populate the flat terrain. An experimental flood-defence architecture is trialled along the coastline, in the shadow of two nuclear power stations. A performative construction sequence utilises uncertainty as a design methodology, harnessing the forces of the ocean and the air to carve inhabitation into the shingle bank.

21.7 Alp Amasya, Y4 ‘The Blue’. A park of film galleries that also offers filmmaker residencies, it is a place of pilgrimage for Derek Jarman, a filmmaker who lived in Dungeness. The project spatialises ‘Jarmanesque’ qualities, architecturally and filmically, that capture the relationship between time and landscape, using blue light as a generative sketching tool. The film park offers a biographical filmic museum for Derek Jarman.

21.8 Rolandas Markevicius, Y4 ‘Parametric Heritage’. By recognising the current preservation and planning policy failures within Dungeness, resulting in growing gentrification and the loss of the local community, new auto-generative methodologies of development are proposed. The project engages with concepts of pattern languages, data mapping and automated architecture towards forming a parametric heritage system for the development of a new regional architecture.

21.9–21.11 James Carden, Y5 ‘Guerrilla Film Festival’. The project speculates on complex issues of ownership in Dungeness. A guerrilla film festival challenges authorship of the filmic medium, relating film to the physicality of space. A versatile landscape, which projects unlimited opportunities through its physical filmic axis, unites all aspects of a festival into a performative procession through the Dungeness landscape.

21.12 Qingyuan Zhou, Y4 ‘=?’. A kindergarten located in Aarhus, Denmark, reflects the dynamic signal generated by a nearby anarchist group to keep active. Drawing similarities between kids and anarchist activists helps the group contest territories enforced by the government.

21.13 Yat Shun Tang, Y4 ‘Duality of Water Systems’. Bathhouse water can be categorised into two types: clean water for bathing and marsh mineral water for hydropower. Waters are carefully arranged with designated routes. The circulation of water is embedded

using a heating and cooling feedback system – water enters different bath spaces at a specific temperature to fit various programmes.

21.14 Samuel Pierce, Y4 ‘The Observer Effect’. In physics, the observer effect is the disturbance of a system through the act of observation. This project explores the potentials of harnessing this disturbance within real-time rendering frameworks that transform measured presence from live Zoom calls and archived footage into form. Conceived as a cultural centre in Brighton, the developed framework presents a unique approach to participatory design through dynamic drawings and models that respond to the user.

21.15 Maria Eleni Petalidou, Y4 ‘DAP (Dungeness Art Path)’. An artist-residency scheme and creative hub interacts and merges with the landscape. Elements such as screens, façades and revolving platforms make use of light, colour and movement. The building volumes grow alongside a new path that gently curves along the shingle landscape. Dungeness’ vast and open terrain make each volume unique in character, creating a continuous, yet ambiguous, spatial experience.

21.16 Kiran Kaur Basi, Y4 ‘RSPB Experimental Habitat Bank’. A hyper-dense habitat bank designed to increase the populations of red-listed birds. Applying principles from Boids theory, the scheme is designed using flocking algorithms to create landscapes, arranged at specific distances, suitable for much-needed nesting and roosting. Algorithms allow the project to be rolled out across the UK, creating habitat banks specific to the site that target particular species.

21.17 Zhi Tam, Y4 ‘Dungeness Seed Bank’. The seed bank protects future biodiversity by storing seeds in vaults and carrying out research in the conservation of plants. Located in Dungeness, the seed bank is situated on a nature reserve between a shingle beach and marsh pits. The design spatialises the satellite view through a series of scripts that explore colour and resolution using a pixel block system.

21.18 Carmen Kong, Y4 ‘Seasonal Museum’. The project translates weather data captured in Dungeness into vectors through digital computation. The museum is calibrated to the seasonal changes of the location and questions conventional linear readings of time within a curated space.

21.19 Paul-Andrei Burghelea, Y5 ‘End-User Experience’. The project explores how to integrate the by-products of social networks into the design process. It uses social network analysis of Twitter to shape the architecture of a fictitious traditional arts community centre, commissioned by The Prince’s Foundation, in the Leamouth Peninsula in London.

21.20 Shu Min (Michelle) Hoe, Y5 ‘A Bird Watcher’s Retreat’. The project is conceived around the idea of framing small precise moments to create a space of timelessness and tranquillity. The design embodies and celebrates the passing of time to offer a place for rich encounters between humans and birds. The humble and low-key activity of birdwatching is transformed into a new experience that pushes the limits of seeing and understanding through its relationship to time.

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2020

Multiverse

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

PG21 Multiverse

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

‘It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone’ 1

Facebook, Google and Instagram now render a highly distorted digital universe where no two people see the same. The algorithms understand our desires and dreams and present to us an echo chamber. Smart devices and AI increasingly manipulate our physical environment but also our behaviour. In a world of deepfakes, multiple realities are defined by what people will believe in, and not just what happened. Yet the multiverses of quantum physics need alternate systems. Machine learning uses adversarial networks to imitate the human experience. The superimposition of multiple cultures and ideas nourishes vibrant cities, economies and art. In PG21 this year we asked how architecture should offer multiple realities: how could it exist across different states, different scales or different perspectives? And in this fluidity, what aspects needed to remain constant and grounded?

We examined Venice: physically challenging and absurd; familiar but unreal. Few cities in history or culture have asserted such a grip on the imagination through their own invisible personality. It has been dreamt about, as much as visited; at times a ‘city of the heart’, sometimes just flooded. Canaletto constructs fake and distorted versions of the city. Italo Calvino explores Venice’s fictitious identities. The International Biennale hosts worlds within worlds across contemporary art, film, dance and music.

We invited students to develop radical spatial proposals through exploratory drawings, models and buildings that created multiple realities. Initially they were asked to identify and explore a ‘grounding’ mechanism – something that could be constant within a fluid architecture, with attributes as diverse as scale, history, an architectural, artistic or literary reference or a constant algorithm. Students investigated the constant erosion of material and time, drew from the rich cultural history of Venice, and the extraordinary physicality of building in a lagoon; with islands that appear and disappear. They explored this attribute through moving drawings, physical models, scripting and animation.

Ideas existed in the physical and the digital, offered alternate realities of perspective, scale and competing algorithms. Resulting in architectural proposals enriched by internal contradictions, that intelligently nourished conflicting audiences, systems and realities.

Year 4

Thomas Band, Paul-Andrei Burghelea, James Carden, Shu Min (Michelle) Hoe, Edward Sear

Year 5

Rahaf Abdoun-Machaal, Kelly Au, Julian Besems, Alexandra Campbell, Maya Chandler, Nicholas Chrysostomou, Qiyu (Jennifer) Ge, James Potter, Bethan Ring, Chengbin Shou, Ziyuan (Oliver) Zhu

Thanks to our practice tutor Tom Holberton, structural engineer Brian Eckersley and environmental engineer Hareth Pochee

Thanks to our thesis tutors Sarah Bell, Roberto Bottazzi, Brent Carnell, Murray Fraser, Abel Maciel, Richard Martin, Robin Wilson, Stamatis Zografos

Thank you to our critics Roberto Bottazzi, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Emma Carter, David Di Duca, Stephen Gage, Charlotte Reynolds, Kat Scott, Sayan Skandarajah

1. Erica Jong, ‘A City of Love and Death: Venice’, New York Times, March 23, 1986

21.1 Bethan Ring, Y5 ‘Algorithmic Compositions in Venice’. This project is an investigation into using image-to-image translation algorithms to create an architectural outcome. The many churches of Venice are used to build datasets that inform the algorithm in order to develop threedimensional buildings from two dimensional information. This method allows for a design that is a mathematical ‘collage’ and visual amalgamation of the architectural history of Venice.

21.2 Alexandra Campbell, Y5 ‘Palazzo di Milioni’. Through manipulation of 3D scans of the historic Caffè Florian, this project seeks to restore Venice’s identity within a post-digital age. The building was developed as a point cloud with an overall budget of 1,450,000 vertices. As a House of Parliament for an imagined New Venetian Republic, adjacent to St Mark’s Square, the distribution of points follows a ‘resolution hierarchy’ based on the significance of the debates within each space.

21.3 Edward Sear, Y4 ‘The Steering Committee’s Capriccio’. This project is a proposal for a new headquarters and debate chamber for the UNESCO Steering Committee of Venice. Four key ‘capriccio’ views have been set out as the heart of the project, defining what needs to occur in the framework of the building as a whole. The capriccio serve dual purposes throughout the project, as both a tool and outcome.

21.4 Nicholas Chrysostomou, Y5 ‘The Floating Procession’. Using loopholes in laws created by Venice’s dependence on water transport, this project proposes a fleet of boats which allow greater autonomy in the way the city is inhabited. The project references processions in the 16th century Venetian Republic as manifestations of the government at the time. The boats follow these processions and configure differently in sites across Venice, making the canals and waterways inhabitable. 21.5–21.6 Ziyuan (Oliver) Zhu, Y5 ‘Epidemic Modelling’. Using epidemic simulation to explore the propagation of spatial qualities, this project develops a unique architectural generative design process for the design of a Global Emergency Operation Centre in Venice, Italy. The system contains a hierarchical structure and a healing/ scarring system to allow design decisions to reflect each agent group. Several epidemic models were tested in the process, including a ‘genetically mutated’ Venetian facade. 21.7 Maya Chandler, Y5 ‘Tempo Torre’. This project examines scales of time within Venice – primarily relating to its many traditions – and frames those rituals as a basis for design. By using live input/live output animation for design generation, the project proposes a clocktower whose constituent parts change at multiple rates of speed; some respond to the centuries-long history of traditions, and others to the real-time activity on the canal, in the campo or within the building.

21.8 Thomas Band, Y4 ‘Fondazione Gucci’. Venice is experienced as a network of isolated image nodes, the intermediate space compressed in its perceived absence. The commercial Gucci Guilty (2016) becomes a tool by which to reveal this distorted city, whilst rewriting memories of occupation by providing a framework for the generation of new narrative experiences. The filmic grammar of Gucci Guilty informs the Fondazione, an inhabitable landscape housing facilities for the production and display of contemporary art.

21.9 James Potter, Y5 ‘Death in Venice’. This project tracks hard data from the cycles of our sleep to develop an architecture which works independently and continuously over time, day and night, with both user and architect. Over 18 weeks of sleep data was used to create an extension to the cemetery island of the Isola Di San Michele, Venice. Through scripting and grasshopper algorithms, a crematorium is formed by the collaging together of both conscious and unconscious states.

21.10 Qiyu (Jennifer) Ge, Y5 ‘Veniscape’. As a performative landscape, Veniscape explores the possibility of feedback systems in architecture by responding to users’ ratings through space transformations. With reference to the social credit system, it is a dynamic landscape with changeable volumes in which floor panels rotate to create water boundaries around stages for performances.

21.11 Rahaf Abdoun-Machaal, Y5 ‘Lagoonscapes: Venice National Park and Marine Laboratory’. Composed of a lacy network of dikes and ponds, the proposed ‘lagoonscape‘ creates a national park for Venetians with indoor and outdoor spaces, in addition to a dispersed marine laboratory dedicated to the research into and harvesting of biochemical and genetic resources.

21.12 Kelly Au, Y5 ‘The Echo: A Music Therapy Centre’. The Echo is a music therapy centre detached from the main hospital in Venice. Through the careful design of each acoustic space, the therapy centre is tuned with a variety of different material and acoustic qualities. The conical roofscape frames only the sky, immersing visitors in the particular sound and light conditions, and heightening their spatial awareness. Due to its location next to the water, the courtyard is designed to flood depending on the tide levels.

21.13–21.14 Chengbin Shou, Y5 ‘Venezianella Castle, Veniceland 2020’. With the assumption that Venice could be saved under the operation of the Disney Corporation, this project creates a Disneyfied castle located at the lido inlet of the Venetian lagoon. The castle, inspired by Marinetti’s 1944 novel Venezianella e Studentaccio, will serve as the monumental entrance to Veniceland. By means of the CycleGAN algorithm, the architecture blends Venetian building façades with Disney cartoon characters.

21.15–21.16 James Carden, Y4 ‘Ministry of Ground’. This project speculates on the importance of materials found in the Venetian canals and their re-appropriation within the lagoon. A constantly-evolving floating terrazzo landscape is formed out of dredged masonry debris, which is cast into square components based around Venice’s digital data as well as site-specific dredged artefacts. Each square is created in the specification of a performance space, which also forms a dredged archive.

21.17 Paul-Andrei Burghelea, Y4 ‘Transcending Gondolas into Architecture’. This project examines the traditional Venetian gondola, looking at its specific geometries, traditional and cultural importance to the city. The project combines the traditional craftsmanship of the few remaining gondola workshops with computational processes to develop a new event space in the northeastern canals of Venice, allowing the gondolas to live on in the form of a functional architectural concept.

21.18 Shu Min (Michelle) Hoe, Y4 ‘Terrain Play.’ Inspired by the Venice Biennale, this project aims to create a landscape that activates the Garden of Eden, a large neglected private garden located south of the island of Venice. The building promotes play unconventionally by creating abstract forms that celebrate the element of risk. It is constructed from a variety of glass to boost the dying craft of glass-making, challenging its materiality to fit the unique performance requirements of the building.

21.19 Julian Besems, Y5 ‘Create Galleries’. This project utilises the principles of recommender systems to produce customised galleries for any given location, leading to 1,297 designs without manual interventions. First, an art collection is generated, corresponding to the visual characteristics of one location, as established by machine learning models trained on Flickr photos of that location. From this collection a gallery is generated, tailored to its site, the collection it houses and its context.

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2019

Exchange and Trade

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

Exchange and Trade

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude 1

We are living through a modern crisis in reason and democracy. The ancient urban life of Athens was a golden age where law, philosophy and art flourished and, subsequently, was mythologised and used as a foundation for 20th-century nation states. In 2019, we find that collective confidence in trade, democracy and truth is fraying. A new digital and global era that promises many freedoms seems to be undermining our instincts. This year, we explored Athens, a city that is both physically and economically at the edge of the EU. Emerging from its recent crisis, this ‘arrival city’ now acts as an entry point for both goods and people entering Europe. The Port of Piraeus, which has enriched the city, both culturally and physically, for thousands of years has been sold for redevelopment to the Chinese shipping company COSCO. It is to be expanded as part of the New Silk Road project, becoming one of the main entry points for containerised goods into Europe; it is already Europe’s biggest passenger port.

Architects find themselves addressing the processes of exchange and trade in many ways. The complexities of making buildings involves exchanges and negotiations with many agencies. On a prosaic level, the machinations of the planning system are a constant source of negotiation. Building regulations and advanced construction technology often require trade-offs and, of course, the ever-present exchange between client and cost often dominates. In Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, Robin Evans considered how things may get ‘bent, broken and lost’ in the process. 2 A contemporary reworking of this theme could be to consider how the digital (the drawing) might translate to the physical (the building). Whilst there are obvious benefits to this process, there are also opportunities for creativity and surprise through intervention and disruption of the processes that are parallel to the ‘mistakes’ referred to by Evans.

This year, we explored what a ‘trade’ might be: where physical movement of goods can create enormous economic opportunity, tariffs or duties, or where people may physically trade great risks to secure basic rights or safety. We looked at the exchange of the physical for the digital and of rights for obligations. We used exploratory drawings, models and building proposals to develop radical ideas on trade, reciprocity and exchange, physical and digital movements through time, balancing behaviours and duties. We investigated the role of architecture in creating or removing these moments in the city to connect physical demands with spatial freedoms and digital behaviours.

Year 4

Rahaf Abdoun-Machaal, Kelly Au, Julian Besems, Alexandra Campbell, Maya Chandler, Nicholas Chrysostomou, Qiyu (Jennifer) Ge, James Potter, Bethan Ring, Chengbin Shou, Ziyuan (Oliver) Zhu

Year 5

Ahmed Al Gamal, Lester Chung, Ching (Jin) Kuo, Alan Ma, Misbah Mahmood, Yu Chen Pan, Oliver Parkinson, Duangkaew (Pink) Protpagorn, Cristobal Riffo Giampaoli, Emilio Sullivan, Minh Tran, Ernest Wang, Priscilla Wong

Thank you to our practice tutor Tom Holberton and structural engineer Brian Eckersley

Thanks to our critics: Paddi Benson, Roberto Bottazzi, Barbara-Ann Cambell-Lange, Emma Carter, Stephen Gage, Naomi Gibson, Mina Gospavic, Diony Kypraiou, Farlie Reynolds, Sayan Skandarajah, Camilla Wright

1. Thomas Paine (1792) Rights of Man, reprinted in B. Kuklick (ed.) Political Writings, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p170

2. Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), p154

21.1–21.2 Oliver Parkinson, Y5 ‘Learning from Raphael’s School of Athens’. Situated upon Pnyx Hill in Athens, this proposition uses photogrammetry as a 2D/3D translation process to derive a new public planning forum alongside its ancient counterpart. This results in a changing civic landscape, which facilitates current planning policies and addresses the lack of organised public debate space for Athenians.

21.3 Yu Chen Pan, Y5 ‘Learning Through Play’. Severe educational inequality in Greece has led to a ‘shadow education’ system taking root. This proposal for a revolutionary Greek school uses architecture as a testing bed to improve the current situation, and challenges conventional ways of teaching by imposing the idea of ‘learning through play’.

21.4 Lester Chung, Y5 ‘Piraeus Archipelago’. Based on cruise schedule data, this redevelopment masterplan for the cruise port of Piraeus in Greece reimagines it as a time-based waterfront urban park. It promotes Piraeus as a new tourist destination created for cruisers, tourists and residents alike.

21.5 Duangkaew (Pink) Protpagorn, Y5 ‘The Casino Garden’. This project proposes a casino with both semi-enclosed and outdoor casino areas. The building contrasts the existing casino typology, making it a tourist attraction for its individuality. The rooftop public park provides green space for locals, creating an exchange between the building, the city and its people.

21.6 Nicholas Chrysostomou, Y4 ‘Passports for Gold’. This homeless shelter in Athens is built using money from Golden Visa Greece, which gives a passport to foreign nationals who invest in Greek property. Buyers select elements from a catalogue and any cost fluctuations are mitigated by adding bespoke additions to base pieces.

21.7 Julian Besems, Y4 ‘Books as Bytes’. This project pursues the development of a software programme that generates a building based on user information, such as a university library where the relationship between books and how they are organised determines the configuration of the shelves, walkways and external envelope.

21.8 Alexandra Campbell, Y4 ‘Scaling Skalisma’. A cross-programming of a bathhouse and community theatre. The spaces in this project explore skalisma (stone-carving) processes and finishes at different scales. Both proposals reference Ancient Greek architecture and use natural stone for construction, building performance and architectural expression.

21.9 James Potter, Y4 ‘A City of Routes’. This project examines Athens as a series of labyrinthine networks, adopting a scheme where drawings become irrelevant, coding replaces lines and time becomes a collection. The building acts as an archive, exhibiting and collecting memories of the residents’ representations of the city, within a series of archival routes.

21.10–21.11 Alan Ma, Y5 ‘The Ruin in the Sky’. This project explores the idea of transforming digital images into a series of 21st-century monumental ruins, aimed at celebrating Athenian heritage. It investigates perverse image analysis methods and their ability to create new, digitally-based, image-generated architectural spectacles.

21.12 Misbah Mahmood, Y5 ‘The Athens of Euripides’. This project uses the playwright Euripides as inspiration, translating literary devices into behavioural, spatial and architectural gestures. Three of the devices – ‘myth’, ‘chorus’ and ‘stichomythia’ – provide the basis for an algorithmic toolkit, which allows for the development of a new architectural vernacular in Athens.

21.13 Maya Chandler, Y4 ‘Kinderkípos’. A new kindergarten for children and their parents in Athens, this project reimagines the Garden of Epicurus – a symbol of the philosophy promoted by the Greek philosopher Epicurus who lived in Athens in 307/306BCE. Those visiting

the site proceed through separate programmatic spaces based on various philosophical subjects: for example, theology, epistemology, ethics and politics.

21.14–21.15 Priscilla Wong, Y5 ‘The Manual to (Un) Archaeology’. This project seeks to re-assess the ways in which we engage with sites and object-deemed archaeology. Through a series of playful material investigations and subversion of archaeological practices, the project proposes an alternative heritage practice where the archaeology and architecture coalesce, mediated by a hierarchy of material language.

21.16 Ahmed Al Gamal, Y5 ‘A Personal Athenian Restaurant’. This project proposes a restaurant and residential quarters for a local chef, based on movement mapping of meal-preparation. It prompts individualistic action as a way to revitalise the city, in response to social issues and a stagnant built environment.

21.17 Cristóbal Riffo Giampaoli, Y5 ‘Inhabiting the Shoreline’. This project proposes a new city hall that addresses social instability through the idea of an ‘open city’, encouraging encounters with strangers through ambiguous edges, incomplete forms and unresolved narratives. It takes the form of a shoreline, where a former marble quarry meets the area of Exarcheia in Athens.

21.18 Ching (Jin) Kuo, Y5 ‘Re-Discover Athens’.

A series of six landmarks that set a new datum to the context of Athens. Individually themed interventions aim to offer a new method of exploring to help locals identify culture and pass down the legacy of the city.

21.19 Rahaf Abdoun-Machaal, Y4 ‘A Bureau for Customs Fraud’. Situated on a rocky islet just off the coast of Piraeus in Greece, the ‘Bureau for Customs Fraud’ is conceived as a series of dispersed programmatic spaces, shrouded by a fragmented shell structure. The design imitates and exaggerates the existing terrain, yet presents an uncanny artificial intervention.

21.20 Chengbin Shou, Y4 ‘New Rovertou Galli Park’. This project is a renovation of a park near the Acropolis which allows visitors to determine the appearance. Exploring the new meaning of sightseeing and human relations in the digital age, it encourages visitors to leave their information and existence in the park.

21.21 Minh Tran, Y5 ‘(St)oc(k)ulus’. The ‘Oculus’ is a stock exchange based on the translation of quantitative phenomena in Athens. The parameters are derived from digital ‘footprints’, the sun and stock movement. The building negotiates pure algorithmic design and the realisation of space at a human scale.

21.22–21.24 Ernest Wang, Y5 ‘The Athenian Shadow Monument’. Visitors work collaboratively to produce and manipulate the shadows that comprise this public, participatory monument. It uses the relationship between Greek gods and man to explore the roles of designer and participant, and interrogates the role of the model in architectural practice.

21.25 Kelly Au, Y4 ‘A House Built in 24 Hours’. As an extension of peculiar building regulations from the 1800s, this project proposes a house that acts as a sundial. Shadows and light over 24 hours choreograph the design, to show the user how the house should be built.

21.26 Ziyuan (Oliver) Zhu, Y4 ‘Athenian Referendum Centre’. Questioning transparency in government building, this project aims to design a debate and referendum centre in Athens that promotes the concepts of ‘I don’t know’ and ‘Change of mind’.

21.27 Emilio Sullivan, Y5 ‘(En)Powering the Polykatoikia’. In recognition of the growing waste management issue in Athens, this project looks to process food waste at a hyper-local level. Three power plants are proposed to process waste and provide amenity and resources to an under-served community in Athens.

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Actions, Agents and Buildings

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

Year 4

Lester Cheung, Ahmed Yassin El Gamal, Ching (Jin) Kuo, Alan Ma, Misbah Mahmood, Yu Chen Pan, Oliver Parkinson, Duangkaew (Pink) Protpagorn, Cristobal Riffo Giampaoli, Minh Tran, Ernest Wang, Priscilla Wong

Year 5

Charlotte Carless, Jack Clay, George Courtauld, Katie Cunningham, Steven Graves, Matthew Mitchell, Yasaman Mohsanizadeh, Arturs Tols, Joseph Travers-Jones, Feng Yang, Anqi Yu

Thank you to our consultants: Brian Eckersley, Tom Holberton

Thank you to our critics: Julia Backhaus, Roberto Bottazzi, Emma Carter, Stephen Gage, Naomi Gibson, Mina Gospavic, Christine Hawley, Francesca Hughes, Diony Kypraiou, Jamie Lilley, Sophie Richards, Sayan Skandarajah

Actions, Agents and Buildings

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

The Fiat Lingotto car factory, built in 1926 in Turin, was the first Futurist building in Italy. Raw materials arrived at its base and processed through assembly lines on each floor. Newly completed cars would race on the banked one-kilometre test track on its roof. The choreographed movement of raw materials and parts flowed through three-dimensional space with precise efficiency and timing.

‘[It had] to be a concrete dress around a productive process, and this had to conceal as little as possible of the flow of the materials’ Maurizio Torchio, Fiat Archive

Lingotto went beyond the simple diagram of factory efficiency copied from Ford, offering a celebration of movement with flair and panache. Millions of Southern Italian immigrants arrived to work, transforming Turin from Italy’s first Baroque capital into an industrial ‘company town’. It became the centre of manufacturing in Italy, twinned with Detroit.

Whilst its focus on speed, movement and the importance of industry made the factory a success, it is a rare example of a Futurist building, made as the movement faded due to its extreme manifesto and uncomfortable political associations. Now post-industrial Turin is reinventing itself as the gastronomic and creative capital of Italy: it produces the finest chocolate and coffee, is the home of the Slow Food movement, and its new Mayor wants to create a weekly meat-free day for the city.

The unit’s first project involved identifying a series of adverbs or actions to study. Through physical or digital data, the students then created their own choreographic agents, and three-dimensional drawings and models that served to translate a vocabulary of intangible qualities into space. These related to the ideas of the Futurists such as speed and movement, environmental qualities of slowness, flavour, smell, or dynamic behaviour from the socio-political context of the city itself.

The unit travelled to Turin. We visited the work of Mollino, stayed in the Lingotto factory, explored the city to find sites for buildings, and ate well. With the right recipe and a precise choreography, a vocabulary of actions was discovered that could be translated into industries of unexpected creativity. We developed digital tactics and conceptual tools that defined frameworks and rule systems to determine new ways of making a contemporary digital and physical space.

The unit continues to be interested in an architecture of event, action and time-based systems: buildings that react and respond, and that reject the tradition of inert and benign architecture that only implies a dynamic through frozen formalism.

Fig. 21.1 Jack Clay Y5, ‘Bounding Bodies’. Corpo Caroli is an asymmetrical building drawn and designed at 1:1 within a limited sphere of vision in virtual reality, exploring exteroceptive, interoceptive and proprioceptive senses. The building is the product of a design method that places bodily sensations as the counterpart to programmatic requirements and establishes a reciprocal relationship between its function as both a primary school and housing for the elderly. Fig. 21.2 Oliver Parkinson Y4, ‘Staging A Hyper Real Italian Market’. The proposal stages and facilitates an idealised Italian open air market within a new public square. It aims to bridge a once segregated and dense piece of city, providing social and economic platforms around new civic structures, all of which retains a typical Italian scenographic

depiction. Fig. 21.3 Steven Graves Y5, ‘Casa Del Fiat: An obsessive exploration of the Fiat 500’. A cult classic that lies close to the centre of Italian identity and culture. Casa Del Fiat is the private residence and archive of Dante Giacosa, the father of the 1957 Fiat 500. The architecture explores the physical geometry, spatial complexity and ground breaking technology that lies within the Fiat 500. Fig. 21.4 Charlotte Carless Y5, ‘The Makers’ Collective’. The project speculates on the shared knowledge of automation creating a post-work society. Technological innovation creates a societal shift from mass production to play. The urban fabric of the city is designed by those who live there. Exploring how automation changes the way we design cities, the project empowers neighbourhoods to design the spaces they live in.

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Fig. 21.5 Yasaman Mohsanizadeh Y5, ‘How Can Language Change The Way We Design Architecture?’. First, second and third generation migrants lack representation in the policies and urban planning agendas of the five star movement, Turin’s incumbent political party. As a result, there are residing social, cultural and political conflicts, further heightened by the lack of communication and use of language between these communities. Fig. 21.6 Anqi Yu Y5, ‘Towards a Slow Town Hall’. We create the illusion of gaining more from speeding up but the truth is that we have become so addicted to rushing that ultimately, we forget what we are truly experiencing. This project sees slow architecture as a philosophy that focuses on the experiential aspects of architecture, where space is considered as a journey instead of a destination. The design

is based on the principle of using architecture as a spatial implement to slow people down by introducing and manipulating elements like pixels, water, wind, light and the view.

Fig. 21.7 Yu Chen Pan Y4, ‘A Slow Movement Institution’. Influenced by the Slow Food movement in Turin, the institution embraces the idea of ‘slowness’ through the choreography and quality of light. It encourages people to do everything at the right speed, to slow down and examine subtle changes as time progresses. Fig. 21.8 Arturs Tols Y5, ‘De-Constructing an Urban Experience’. Designed through techniques of musical arrangement and an industrial building morphology, the Turin Culture Factory is an urban event space that houses film studios, a cinema and open performance areas. Inspired by Federico Fellini’s ethos of observing Italian life in the street, the project aims to bridge different ways of engaging with public space, accommodating local, national and international events. Fig. 21.9 Ching (Jin) Kuo Y4, ‘National Assembly’.

A speculative project based on the current political scene in Italy. The project aims to provide a strong link between the public and their politicians, to establish a democratic example. The building consists of various transformable spaces that accommodate different scenarios, allowing the public to participate and input to the parliament.

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Fig. 21.10 George Courtuald Y5, ‘Regional Council Chambers & Public Forum’. The project takes two recent pieces of government legislation that aim to ‘promote transparency, combat corruption and increase citizen participation’.

Combining Turin’s rich political past with its less well-known magical history, the project explores the parallels between magic and politics, and the tensions, juxtapositions and experiences this might create through architecture.

Fig. 21.11 Lester Cheung Y4, ‘Urban Playground and Sports Complex’. Slow living addresses the desire for a more balanced lifestyle and improved sense of wellbeing. The project aims to reactivate Torino by promoting physical exercise as enjoyment. The project consists of interactive elements that respond to the local weather and manipulate the internal microclimate.

Fig. 21.12 Misbah Mahmood Y4, ‘The Ritual Cemetery of Brave New Turin’. The proposal challenges existing typologies of cemeteries by introducing a new algorithmic distribution system, informed by the cultural funerary traditions of Turin’s population. The cemetery aims to create an awareness of social identity and an acceptance of coexisting cultures; traditional funerary customs are reinvigorated and redefined whilst physical and spatial boundaries are blurred. These notions manifest themselves in a Funeral Marker - an ever-evolving, sculptural landscape that maintains trace and identity.

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Fig. 21.13 Priscilla Wong Y4, ‘A Vegetarian Restaurant for Turin’. The Mayor of Turin has plans to make it the world’s first ‘vegetarian city’. This proposal is an architecture to promote such a scheme. The project is an investigation into the relationship between food and architecture, thus cooking and designing. Fig. 21.14 Ahmed Yassin El Gamal Y4, ‘The Moving Park’. Sited in the heart of Milan’s business hub and in between three major design districts, this project proposes the relocation of Milan’s annual textile exhibition to this focal point in response to the shift of the Chinese textile industry back to Italy. Fig. 21.15 Alan Ma Y4, ‘The Image of The City’. The project takes experimental image analysis techniques to propose new frontier spaces within the large complex city that actively respond to its digital profile by using

social media and crowdsourcing to shape how we perceive our built environment.

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Fig. 21.16 Joseph Travers-Jones Y5, ‘Tour-in Heritage’. The project seeks to re-introduce tourism to the once thriving city of Torino from a key UNESCO World Heritage Inscribed Site that lies at the intersection of the existing tourist infrastructure within the city. A strategic yet considered approach to heritage demonstrates how the architect has the potential to spatialise a new tourism industry by building on the existing heritage and value systems which can be enjoyed by the resident and tourist alike. The project exemplifies how tourism could be used as a device to promote change across the city by establishing a set of design principles that could re-shape the identity of Torino. Fig. 21.17 Ernest Wang Y4, ‘Aerofood and Four Meals’. The project explores how recipes from Marinetti’s Futurist cookbook can be adapted for contemporary context and how

they might inform the design of space and architecture. Although dated, the 1930s cookbook’s instructions and descriptions of food were reinterpreted to suit 21st century dining culture and drawn from to create unique culinary experiences and spaces. Figs. 21.17 – 21.18 Katie Cunningham Y5, ‘Alta Voracita’. (High Consumption) the first project proposes a number of devices at different scales to help members of the NO TAV movement to protest in the militarised zone protecting the construction site of a new high-speed railway which has come to symbolise state wide corruption and the miss spending of taxpayer and EU funds in the country. The second, ‘Maxi Corte’ (Maxi Court) is an industrial-scale courthouse for trying the organised criminal gangs of Europe.

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Fig. 21.20 Minh Tran Y4, ‘Tree of Turin’. Fig. 21.21 Cristobal

Riffo Giampaoli Y4, ‘The Passeggiata Project’. Fig. 21.22

Matthew Mitchell Y5, ‘Mechanical Mediations’. Occupying the factory floor on the site of Turin’s defunct Fiat steelworks, a mechanically actuated landscape of performance celebrates the theatricality of movement and event. Informal stages and pockets of performance space permeate the building with glimpses and phrases of incidental theatre and music, while kinetic sequences and deployable stage elements create unpredictable shifts in performer-spectator relationships.

Fig. 21.23 Duangkaew (Pink) Protpagorn Y4, ‘The Water Line’.

Fig. 21.24 Feng Yang Y5, ‘Gestural Landscapes’. Crossing the Alps is described as a ‘supreme experience’ where the seasons, the weather, the terrain and the body are intensely experienced.

This design project seeks to reinforce the existing pilgrimage route along the Aosta Valley in Italy through a series of architectural encounters in the landscape. They become beacons for passers-by, providing shelter and aid throughout the seasons.

ö (Swedish) = ‘Island’/‘Refuge’

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

Year 4

Jack Clay, Katie Cunningham, Ahmed Al Gamal, Steve Graves, Yasaman Mohsanizadeh, Joe Travers-Jones, Yun Wan, Feng Yang, Anqi Yu

Year 5

Paddi Benson, Jonathan Davies, Eleanor Downs, Eleanor Figueiredo, Aleks Kravchenko, Tom Savage, Katherine Scott, Alexia Souvaliotis, Sally Taylor, Aviva Wang, Camilla Wright

Thank you to our Practice Tutor, Tom Holberton and our Structural Engineer, Brian Eckersley, EOC

Thank you to our critics: Roberto Bottazzi, Mina Gospavic, Stephen Gage, Christine Hawley, Diony Kypraiou, Calum Macdonald, Luke Pearson, Charlotte Reynolds, Sayan Skandarajah, Tony Smart

ö (Swedish) = ‘Island’/‘Refuge’

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

Stockholm is Scandinavia’s largest city, built over 14 islands with 50 bridges, on a greater archipelago of 20,000 islands, where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic Sea. As one of Europe’s fastest-growing urban economies, it has embraced investments in ‘smart’ city networks and open data to develop the world’s second most prolific tech hub and become the startup capital of Europe. Yet this spirit of experimentalism is also made possible due to a certain Swedish isolationism, a position at the northern fringe of Europe, and the mindset of Jantelagen, which prioritises the collective over the individual. The ‘city between the bridges’ also comprises 30% water and 30% protected green space, culminating in a disaggregated city – not only geographically but socially, politically and financially.

In an age where overwhelming quantities of ‘big data’ assert and drive the systems of top-down control and order, the unit considered the potential opportunities of the islands of small data we generate and carry ourselves through daily life in the city. We looked for how these personal digital traces and behaviours might translate to a unique architectural language that informs and alters behaviour.

The year started with the Swedish ‘Stuga’ – this exploits the plentiful land to build simple sparse dwellings where Swedes will seek refuge in the summer months. Often located by water, they are built to a very basic standard where the ritualistic routines of survival – chopping wood, repairs and renovation – offer a counterpoint to the stress of urban life and provide a physical manifestation of the commitment to quality of life. Often passed from family to family, lent by friends or companies, they offer a place for solitude, quiet individualism, and time spent purposefully on selfdevelopment through communing with nature. The students were asked to design a personal retreat space. Taking any signal from their behaviour, movements, or activity, recorded through phones or any other digital and analogue means; they then test its translation into a personal spatial language through models and drawings. Projects were generated from the esoteric observations of routine, the glitches in data, or the disruptive cloud left behind.

The students sited the main building project amongst the islands of Stockholm. They considered the political, legal and economic frameworks as sources of data. They drew on the social, human and environmental factors to explore new methods of forming space, controlling light and testing innovative materials. The unit was interested in the manifestation of these hybrids of immaterial and physical space into outcomes that were resolutely framed as design propositions. From the drawn or modelled language of the first project, they developed larger architectural proposals with detailed programmes, considering when their architecture acted as islands and when it acted as a bridge.

Fig. 21.1 Paddi Benson Y5, ‘Lost [and Found] in Play’. The project constructs a playroom or real-space intervention within a Bartlett studio which relates to, and can stand in for, the remote site – the island of Långholmen in Stockholm. The reclaimed identities of Långholmen are then explored and examined through models of each of the interventions and their relationship to each other in the playroom. The project therefore inhabits two sites; the disused island of Långholmen and the constructed interactive space of play within the Bartlett studio. Each of the interventions is a transitional object within the playroom. Individually, they are informed by, and inform the purpose and identity, of their location.

Figs. 21.2 – 21.3 Alexia Souvaliotis Y5, ‘Stuga’. The ‘Stuga’ exploits the plentiful land to build simple sparse dwellings

where Swedes seek refuge in the summer months. By looking at different images and how they make us feel depending on their colours/captured atmospheres, an architectural language will be developed by breaking down personal photographs of my house into their basic elements in order to create a physical and quantifiable data landscape. These data landscapes, which take the form of waterfall graphs, form an architectural toolkit to be used when designing each element of the Stuga, from the entire roof structure down to each individual floor tile. A set of virtual data is manipulated to become a tangible and physical environment for isolation and refuge. Fig. 21.4 Tom Savage Y5, ‘Can a Video Game Change the Way Stockholmers View their City?’ The city of Stockholm is in the grip of a housing crisis. A new social hierarchy has emerged based not on where one is

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able to live, but rather how long they can live there for. Stockholm’s inner city is gridlocked, with nowhere for new residents to go. Now Sweden’s unique unitary housing model has a twenty-year waiting list for inner-city homes. A new simulation, made using a layered organisational strategy of time-based buildings and infrastructure, is proposed to change a player’s social thinking from a location-based society to a time-based one. Fig. 21.5 Camilla Wright Y5, ‘A (Wiki) Leaking Building’. The Data Institute is a private coding school, server bank and public campus. It seeks to inform the citizens of Stockholm about digital data and draw attention to WikiLeaks concerning Sweden. Using computational methods, WikiLeaks data is encoded within the form and programmatic function of the building such that it both generates and loses

data during its lifespan. WikiLeaks manifest at all scales and materiality, from rock excavation to ‘punch card’ tickets.

Fig. 21.6 Katherine Scott Y5, ‘Archiving the Anthropocene: Architecture in the Age of Man’. ‘The Anthropocene’ has been proposed as a term that describes our current geological age. The masterplan proposed is a forward-facing archive, critiquing the role of architecture in the Anthropocene. The landscape is a Bergsonian simultaneity, with historic geometric traces of architecture on the site re-established as new buildings for the deep future. The built landscape is considered as a process, constantly evolving in the duration of time, with each piece of architecture acting as a piece of data itself. This creates an Anthropocenic archive of ruins for the future.

Fig. 21.7 Sally Taylor Y5, ‘SAD in Stockholm’. Stockholm consists of a recreational island, Djurgården, known as the city’s ‘Green Lung’. This is where people who live in the city go to escape urban life. A clinic and retreat from the winter blues is proposed within a landscape setting for the high percentage of Swedes who suffer from SAD. Using shadow studies to develop the form, the proposed scheme extends out into the Djurgårdsbrunnsviken bay. The proposal includes three key zones: ‘Dawn Clinic’, ‘Seasonal Gardens’ and ‘Winter Workout’, all of which are intended to help reduce some of the common symptoms of SAD. Fig. 21.8 Feng Yang Y4, ‘Teeth + Tea’. This project explored the spatial composition of rituals through model-making. Fig. 21.9 Jack Clay Y4, ‘Frank’s House’. A vessel to investigate the dialogue between freehand drawing

and digital fabrication. Fig. 21.10 Aviva Wang Y5, ‘Beautification Council’s Beautiful Building’. This project aims to challenge the Stockholm Council of Beautification (Stockholm’s Skönhetsrådet) which advises its city planning authority on all local proposals. The council has thirteen members from backgrounds which are mostly unconnected to architecture. Studying these council members as individuals of various ages and backgrounds enables the making of ‘rules’ for each member. These rules are applied to existing site buildings one after another as a metaphorical representation of their meeting, during which they take turns to give advice. The outcome of this process is a controlled yet unexpected piece, manifesting the Council’s unique influence on Stockholm’s urban form.

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Fig. 21.11 Katie Cunningham Y4, ‘Siaröfortet Submarine Attractions and Gotland’s Submarine Dismantling Resort’. The theme of the projects is Sweden’s worsening relationship with Russia and its vulnerable geographical and political position between Russia and NATO. With a weak military unable to put a stop to current Russian acts of aggression, public awareness is the strongest available deterrent. Siaröfortet Submarine Attractions are proposed cruise ship stops along the archipelago. These installations react to trespassing submarines, allowing the users to catch a better glimpse. The main project looks at the potential Russian decommissioned submarines’ relationships to nuclear crisis. It proposes a dismantling facility which deals with the nuclear load, using the recycled material and unspent nuclear energy for leisure and

educational amenities. Its position on the Baltic island of Gotland is of defensive interest to both NATO and Russia.

Fig. 21.12 Anqi Yu Y4, ‘24 Slussen’, a re-masterplan of a disconnected and pedestrian-unfriendly waterfront area in Slussen, a run-down traffic interchange built in the 1930s. As an urban strategy, this project reconnects water back to the existing city fabric and makes the water frontage more accessible to pedestrians by proposing a series of descending terraces and a new facility. As an active public space, this project explores the transformation between physical space and its appearance at night with controlled lighting, through taking the Scandinavian darkness as a canvas and lights as paint. At night, such luminous moments form specific atmospheres, which fit in with the wider night lighting context

in Stockholm. Fig. 21.13 Aleks Kravchenko Y5, ‘Huset på SÖDER’. Influenced by the sociopolitical differences between Kungsholmen and Södermalm (often shortened to ‘Söder’), the project aims to create a new type of town hall to represent Söder. Located on Skinnarviksberget, the design aims to redefine the conservative relationship with the ground. Whilst the space uses in the town hall follow its precedent across the water, the spaces themselves are reimagined. ‘Huset på Söder’ investigates the thresholds between the existing and the man-made. The project has developed to explore the way building and model-making methods create design constraints. Materiality of the project is articulated through the methods of construction, further reflected through model-making method choices.

Fig. 21.14 Eleanor Downs Y5, ‘LET’S PARTICIPATE!’. Participation and the right to the city is investigated through the lens of tracking physical activity and measuring collective engagement. A new civic hall in the centre of Stockholm is proposed as a testing site for a physical manifestation of this investigation. The architectural proposal takes the form of a mechanised building requiring energetic input from participants. How can successful participation be defined and measured? What is a ‘right to the city’ in today’s terms? The new Medborgarhuset is a frenzy of participation, an exploration into the joy of effort. It demonstrates the noble aim of ‘Allborgarratten’ (right to the city) yet hints at more complicated, and perhaps sinister, undertones.

21.15 Yasaman Mohsanizadeh Y4, ‘The Unicorn Incubator’.

Fig. 21.16 Joe Travers-Jones Y4, ‘Return to Sender’.

Fig. 21.17 Steve Graves Y4, ‘Maritime Graveyard’. Fig. 21.18 Eleanor Figueiredo Y5, ‘Glasbruksholmen’. This project seeks to reinstate a lost island in the Stockholm archipelago. The project addresses the paradoxical Swedish desire for both isolation and escape, and permanent connectivity through digital technologies: an environment is created whereby individuals can retain autonomy and find sanctuary within Stockholm’s urban fabric, whilst avoiding state surveillance. The island/enclave forms a reinvention of the bathhouse, providing a base for civic assembly in the heart of the city. It explores how architectural and spatial parameters are interpreted and/or distorted through transparency, reflection

and refraction. Fig. 21.19 Jonathan Davies Y5, ‘Sea Level: A Thousand Plateaus’. This project is a paradoxical attempt to design without autonomy – a proposal and a critique. A series of algorithms provide the framework upon which an urbanism is grown. Set within the Stockholm archipelago, the proposals explore the relationship between design and auto-generation. Raw material is fed through an adaptive system within the dry-dock and ejected into the Baltic Sea, territorialising it as Deleuzian ‘smooth space’. This is gradually punctuated through occupation as the landscape is augmented to provide utility –the process of ‘striation’. The interplay between these two conceptions of space develops a networked urbanism that fosters multiplicity and dynamism.

Import/Export

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter, Tom Holberton

Year 4

Paddi Benson, Jonathan Davis, Matthew Mitchell, Tom Savage, Katherine Scott, Sally Taylor, Yiren (Aviva) Wang, Camilla Wright

Year 5

Maria Filippou, Layal Merhi, Yolanda Leung, Sophie Richards, Samson Simberg, Tomohiro Sugeta, Angeline Wee, Sarish Younis

Thanks to Structural Engineer

Brian Eckersley at EOC; and critics Prof Christine Hawley, Prof Stephen Gage, Dr Rachel Cruise, Sayan Skandarajah, Paul Legon, Ned Scott, Jasmin Sohi, Johan Hybschman, Mags Bursa, Tony Smart, Isaie Bloch, Francesca Hughes.

Thanks to our sponsors PDP London Architects –www.pdplondon.com

import/export

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter, Tom Holberton

Marseille is France’s second city by population. What it lacks in terms of the grand formality of the capital it more than makes up for with its cosmopolitan and colourful complexity, defined primarily by the Mediterranean port condition. Whilst this historical condition has produced a rich social, political and cultural territory there is also now a legacy of poverty, unemployment, social division and crime.

Whilst the social, political and topographical condition of the city as an ongoing framework of exchange was of interest to the unit, we also continued with our project to explore the context of the city in terms of its invisible meta-data and how this, when treated as raw material, can be deployed as a source of invention and speculation for a new architecture. Urban space is increasingly defined by the infrastructures of communications, information and social interaction through new media. However, as these contemporary technologies develop at a rapid pace, the traditional paradigms of physical space become increasingly disconnected and irrelevant. The unit continued to explore how this disconnection can be addressed and new hybrids of hard and soft architecture can be invented and emerge.

The unit considered how such metaphysical data systems can be a creative opportunity for interpretation and inventiveness that might in turn create, and participate in, the cultural and experiential life of the city. Further to which, the slippages, quirks and misinterpretations through translation of such information systems provided an equally rich source for new digital constructs and material outcomes.

The students were asked to identify a system of information or data set and consider how they might deploy this within a design process or strategy. Different strategies were employed, information was derived from sound, temperature, humidity and other environmental origins. Some were based on societal information, human behaviours, communications and new media data sources. Political, economic and legal frameworks were also sources of data utilized. The unit formulated methods and techniques that developed the mechanics of how this data could be translated across software platforms.

The unit is interested in the manifestation of such hybrids of immaterial and physical space into outcomes that are resolutely framed as design propositions; a new morphology of data-driven architecture.

Fig. 21.1 Yolanda Leung Y5, ‘Promo-granate’. Promo-granate is a pomegranate production line and urban park located in Marseille. The project seeks to change the image of Marseille as a drug city and assist the pomegranate trade the same way it did the opium trade in the French Connection in the 70s. In the design project, the nature of different boundaries is associated with different elements of the urban park.

Fig. 21.2 Katherine Scott Y4, ‘Metropole Aix-MarseilleProvence: A New Political Centre for a New Territory’. With the formation of a new territory, binding Marseille to its neighbouring Provençal towns, this scheme proposes a new civic role for this region’s new political hub. Combining the workplace with leisure, a beach acts as a democratic tool to re-involve the citizens into the act of politics. Narratives

investigated the way different people will participate in the scheme and how this can lead to unexpected encounters and exchanges. Fig. 21.3 Tom Savage Y4, ‘L’Immaginaire Collectif De Marseille’. Using French cinema as a tool for investigation, the proposal explores a new marketplace against the backdrop of a central and unofficial district which typifies the perception of the city it is located in. Cinema is used to explore the long-established French love affair with film as a means of self-expression. By distilling and dissecting these films, the proposal recombines their raw data as a set of new cinematically inspired structures, with the aim of creating an enhanced identity for Marseille that can help to foster an appreciation of the unique qualities of the city in its residents.

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Fig. 21.4 Yiren (Aviva) Wang Y4, ‘Calibreur de La Joliette’. The project tests out possibilities of city calibration at a local scale. By defining the Unité d’habitation as an ‘ideal’ modular piece of city, the project is based on comparing the proportion of spaces with different functions at various neighbourhoods and that in Unité d’habitation. As a project commissioned by the Euroméditerranée, Calibreur de La Joliette will not only benefit the local community but also turn Place de la Joliette together with Les Terrasses du Port Shopping Centre into Marseille’s new cultural centre. Fig. 21.5 Marianna Filippou Y5, ‘Marseille Cruise Landscape’. A proposal for a cruise boat terminal in the form of a landscape as an extension of the city of Marseille. The design is based on the circulation routes of cruise passengers entering and leaving the site. Its main

feature is a field of terracotta tiles layering the glazed roof of the proposed structure in order to control direct sunlight. Its materiality directly refers to Marseille’s image as a tiled roofscape and responds to the specific climate of a Mediterranean port city. Figs. 21.6 – 21.7 Tomohiro Sugeta Y5, ‘Translating Collective Portraits of City to Urban Interventions: Imaginary Marseille on Instagram’. Can data from social networks be manifested as physical structure in the city? The focus of the project is to explore the possibilities in designing urban interventions by translating data obtained from Instagram in Marseille. This bottom-up approach informed principles and site strategy, while the project attempts to reinvent civil space through a top-down analysis of sixteen years of minutes at city council.

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Figs. 21.8 – 21.11 Angeline Wee Y5, ‘Un Immeuble Meuble / A Movable Immovable’. Conservation principles, fundamentally based on changing ‘cultural values’, are integrated into written urban planning policy, then translated into built form. This project explores the quirks and possibilities of applying such fixed regulations to material heritage at varying scales, celebrating subjective interpretation of legislation in the name of conservation. Modifying buildings along Marseille’s iconic Vieux Port, it draws from the existing Code du Patrimoine, observations of preservation in the city and other methods of memorial, using algorithmic modelling to create a rules-based design system, representing non-negotiable and, at times, nonsensical application of certain heritage-based planning policies.

Fig. 21.16 Samson Simberg Y5, ‘Marseille Music and Cultural Centre’. Marseille has seen a wave of surveillance cameras being installed across the city with some 1,800 cameras currently in place. Located along a series of unmonitored routes cut hidden ‘corridors’ (a series of unseen, routes cut through the urban fabric of the city, unmonitored by the CCTV network), the Marseille Music and Cultural Centre seeks to re-associate Marseille’s ‘unwanted’ with their city, facilitating the city's alienated musical and artistic heritage whilst responding to the ambiguous and often unresolved qualities of CCTV. Fig. 21.17 Sarish Younis Y5, ‘Rue Des Mosquée’. The spilling of devotees upon the street is a recurring circumstance of overcrowded cellar mosques. The project, situated in the belly of the city, echoes this controversy by

reconstructing a typical street into one of prostration. This recreates the communal conditions between the cultures in an open public platform, conjoining the sacred and secular programmatic acts, as well as extending the dialogue of the known traditional house of prostration. Fig. 21.18 Paddi Benson Y4, ‘Éclat[S] Du Mythe’. The compound identity of Marseille is an inextricable interweaving of myth, reality, seen and unseen – a modernist construct: the industrial revolution, the continuous flux of migration, its colonial past, and the turbulence caused by inequality have all contributed to the creation of a unique image of the ‘phocaean city’. Each of these temporal imprints inherits a modernism that was never finished or achieved, which collectively illustrate the cultural entanglement of past and present Marseille.

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Figs. 21.19 – 21.22 Sophie Richards Y5, ‘The French Connection_Marseille and the Physical Internet’. The project proposes a new legal quarter for the city of Marseille. Using the Hague as a precedent for an international system of law, the International Court of Internet Justice proposed here is a global law court, which would review cases from all continents, using a new system of specialised internet law. The project operates at two scales. At the scale of the city, the project proposes a network of interventions, which fit into the existing fabric of Marseille. The project also works at the scale of a courthouse, considered as a 3D network of time, interaction, separation and process.

Ambiguous Territories

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

Year 4

Marianna Filippou, Layal Merhi, Fernanda Mugnaini, Sophie Richards, Samson Simberg, Angeline Wee, Sarish Younis

Year 5

Jamie Lilley, Calum Macdonald, William Molho, Jens Kongstad Olsen, Francesca Pringle, Charlotte Reynolds, James Simcock

Thanks to our practice tutor Tom Holberton and engineer Brain Eckersley. Thank you to our critics: Rachel Cruise, Stephen Gage, Christine Hawley, Paul Legon, Frédéric Migayrou, Ned Scott, Bob Sheil, Emma Spierin

A massive thank you to Rhys Cannon and Gruff Architects for use of their CNC equipment

We are grateful to our sponsors, Pringle Brandon Perkins + Will

Ambiguous Territories

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

Unit 21 has recently looked at cities that both border the edge of Europe –Istanbul and Tangiers – as well as cities that are very much at the heart of Europe such as Berlin, Copenhagen and London. This year, we chose to look at two cities – London and Helsinki.

Helsinki is very much at the edge of Europe. After Reykjavic, it is the second most northerly capital city in the world, at the edge of the beginning of the northern tundra and the transition from predominantly farmland to forest. Finland only joined the European Union in 1995. Although they were already members of the European Free Trade Association this accession effectively ended their neutral status during the cold war period. Whilst membership of the EU is only one measure of what being part of Europe might mean, it is clear that Finland has had a very different history from the classically Romanesque countries. Indeed, up until 1917 Finland was for 108 years formally part of Russia and before that a Swedish territory. Tensions with Russia inevitably still remain and in recent years the Russian government has made very strong threats to discourage Finland from joining the NATO alliance. Russian influence is very much in evidence through the historic architecture of Helsinki. It is this Russian and Scandinavian history that still puts Finland very much, despite its recent joining of the EU, on the edge of Europe.

This condition of tension, defined by being on a political, geographic and climatic edge, has preoccupied the unit this year. We looked at the context of the city as not just a location for architecture but to utilise the layers of history, political structures, population, ecology and information networks as the motivators for the production of new architectural space. We considered emerging urban digital realms, typically defined by datascapes and invisible networks such as social media, which already organise and define new space and behaviours in the city.

Fig. 21.1 Jamie Lilley Y5, ‘A Masterplan for the Helsinki Metropolitan Area Assembly’ The project explores cartography’s influence on urban form. Helsinki has a rich cartographic heritage and has been born out of political control constructs that have descended from the map. The project explores the physical, social and digital map of the city to discover how these inputs can influence how we masterplan and construct our buildings. A cartographic paradigm was formed to show the cyclical relationship between reality, cartography, architecture and a reconstruction of reality. The proposal employs three historical sociopolitical grid systems that align with the city to construct the assembly masterplan programme. The three grids highlights the hypothesis that the way we map our cities influences how

we plan their futures. Figs. 21.2 – 21.6 Charlotte Reynolds Y5, ‘Uusi Kallio Common and Urban Quarry, Helsinki’. was inspired by the unique geological composition of Finland which has been experiencing continental uplift since the last Ice Age whereby the land is rising up from the sea by 11mm each year. The project is sited in the city of Helsinki, which sits on a rising granite bedrock. The proposal is for the development of a large existing granite outcrop to the north of the city in the rock district of Kallio. Kallio Common establishes a new attitude towards these sites which define the rock district and develop an attitude to these sites whereby the raw granite is exploited as a building material. Through a series of CNC-routed modelling techniques, a taxonomy of cutting and finishing resolutions were developed in line with known subtractive

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granite quarrying and finishing processes. The project exists at various resolutions and could be infinitely reworked and refined over time to develop a site which is dedicated to this natural resource of the city and attracts locals and tourists alike. The Uusi Kallio Common sets a precedent for future development and urban densification in Helsinki by exploiting this under-used material in the Finnish architectural vernacular to date.

located in

is a combination of a hard piece of practical city infrastructure and a leisure facility. During the harsh winters the park stores large amounts of snow, which has been collected and cleared from the city’s streets. This snow is then in turn used to augment, alter and construct a series of possible events and structures. Each year the park can take on a new constellation and contain different programmes – all bound to the temporal nature of snow. During the warmer summer months the melted snow creates a dramatically different set of options as the landscape shifts from solid to liquid in a hyper-saturated reflection of the Finnish climate.

Figs. 21.7 – 21.10 Jens Kongstad Olsen Y5, ‘Hernesaari Snow Dumping Park’. The Hernesaari Snow Dumping Park,

Helsinki,

Figs. 21.11 – 21.12 William Molho Y5, ‘City of Edges: Helsinki Quarried Theatre’. Helsinki granite bedrock has been widely relied on for excavated and underground structures over the last century. Across the city, exposed, raw rock outcrops, act as natural public spaces. The project, at an urban scale, looks at visible granite patches around the peninsula, incorporating an interest for the new machining technologies for granite, to create a network of extracting and designing facilities. The theatre project, based on Harakka island is inspired by the monumentality of abandoned stone quarries. In a first step, a quarry is used to provide material for the workshops. Secondly, the theatre design elements (seating, stages, lobby and bar) are carved into the stone and finally, the furniture elements of the theatre are built in the island workshops. The sea creates a

dramatic and evolving backdrop to a number of stages and an opportunity to expand the performance spaces when the water freezes.

Fig. 21.13 James Simcock Y5, ‘Museum of Inventing Memory’. Our memories are often affected by distorting forces such as the media, political leaders or trauma. The project investigates the World War II Russian bombing raids on Helsinki, spatially translating evidence forensically extracted from wartime photography archives and historical bomb plot maps into a series of architectural mnemonic devices that together form a museum memorialising the Finnish victims. By using objective forensic techniques the museum allows observers to narrate the conflict events with an impersonal neutrality, enabling them to form a narrative untouched by distorting forces, allowing visitors to resist the fragility of remembering.

Fig. 21.14 Calum Macdonald Y5, ‘Exceptive Laws’ seeks to reconceptualise architectural legacy in Finland by (re)

contextualising Finnish architectural development from 1917-2015 within its legislative, cultural, historical, corporeal, linguistic, and corporate conditions of the time. It continually rethinks what the role of the architect and architecture at large is within the notion of the sovereign. The underlying theme was to challenge traditional pre-juristic historical and theoretical lines of argument centred on nature, site, and environment, and expose them to the more systematic and enduring forces of modernism, which transformed Finland throughout the 20 th century. By using bio-political argumentation, that is, a complex system of analysis of state power with explicit regard to the body, it sets to survey, analyse, and propose novel ways of understanding the oversimplified geopolitical relationships between people,

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land and architecture by honing in on the cultural, legislative, and spatial idiosyncrasies of the Finnish constitution.

Fig. 21.15 Sarish Younis Y4, ‘Barbican Playhouse’. The Barbican Playhouse is an expression of moments, illusion, movement and order. It holds performances which capture the essence of these moments in performance and programmatic format. Puppetry is a performance type that gives an illusion of life in something that is far from it. Such illusion is only achieved through how the puppets are ordered and mechanised in to capture movement that gives a sense of life. The Barbican Playhouse is a platform which not only holds performances at different scales, but also creates a space that reveals the making of performer’s puppetry. This gives the public deeper understanding of what lie behind the doors of a Playhouse.

Fig. 21.16 Francesca Pringle Y5, ‘Reinventing Winter in Helsinki’. Due to Helsinki’s location, summer days are long with up to 19 and a half hours of daylight. Helsinkiers spend the summer island hopping in the archipelago south of Helsinki. However, for four months of the year the archipelago freezes over making the islands inaccessible and there are as few as six hours of daylight. Much of the outdoor culture lies dormant. The project aims to interject a new masterplan in to Helsinki, creating 33 catalyst zones which provide high salinity, non freezing waters for water sports and synthetic day lighting zones. The architectural strategy of the catalyst zones was generated by manipulating ice profile data from the Baltic Sea into 3D forms using a geometry translation system and 3D scanning to generate the building façades.

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Fig. 21.17 Marianna Filippou Y4, ‘Constructed Microclimates’. The project originates from the circulation patterns of commuters and their response to different weather conditions. A water harvesting system, stepped landscape at platform level and a forest of columns which fill the platform and direct circulation are included. The proposed building will control extreme humidity levels and use harvested water to produce steam as an ephemeral material, enclosed within steam rooms, where commuters can benefit from its healing qualities.

Fig. 21.18 Sophie Richards Y4, ‘A Political Enclave’. Inspired by 15th century coffee houses, the proposal looks to create a political hub, investigating the role of sound within political systems, creating an illusion of transparency and equality through an architecture that is descriptive of sound, which can

encourage and manipulate debate. Fig. 21.19 Angeline Wee Y4, ‘The Offline Park’. The proposal responds to the superstylised imagery and language of the Metropolitan Railway’s ‘Metro-land’ housing campaign which sold suburban London as healthy, ‘rural’ and ideal for the dream lifestyle, but its centre as cramped and ‘urban’. This project aims to subvert these understandings of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’. The inflated landscape of the Offline Park is suspended over the Barbican platforms forming an idyllic country escape within the centre of the city and returning the Barbican to ‘rural’ arcadia. Fig. 21.20 Jamie Lilley Y5, ‘A Masterplan for the Helsinki Metropolitan Area Assembly’.

Alternative Inputs

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

Unit 21

Alternative Inputs

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

Year 4

Jamie Lilley, William Molho, Jens Kongstad Olesen, Francesca Pringle, Charlotte Reynolds, James Simcock

Year 5

Emma Louise Carter, Naomi Gibson, Wai Hong Hew, Yu Chien (Wendy) Lin, Risa Nagasaki, Simona Schroeder, Sayan Skandarajah, Tess Martin, Antonina Tkachenko

Thank you to our Practice Tutor Tom Holberton and Engineer Brian Eckersley

Thanks to our consultants and critics: Peter Cook, Rachel Cruise, Stephen Gage, Christine Hawley, Tom Holberton, Luke Pearson, Godofredo Pereira, Nick Tyson

Physical change in the contemporary city is inevitably slow. Building stock has a slow turnover and such change is measured in decades or even centuries. However, there are other systems and forces at work in the city that are fast changing and far-reaching in their impact. Communication technology, information systems and networks have a much more profound impact on us now than traditional architectural space. This year Unit 21 continued to investigate how these fundamental influences can motivate and initiate new architectural space.

Long-established building techniques still predominate and the processes of advanced industrialisation are still very limited within much of the building industry. The Unit recognises that advanced techniques of digitised fabrication will change this and we relish the opportunities that are implicit within these realms. Whilst this lag in technology and the economies of scale which preserve the current situation remain, the Unit continued to speculate on how such futures could emerge.

Urban space is defined evermore by invisible systems of force, action and event. Contemporary technology such as datasets and networks of communication and information are one such system. But there are also the invisible forces of a political, cultural and economic nature which can be identified. In addition there are environmental systems of both natural phenomena such as weather, and artificial systems which have outputs as varied as sound, smell and pollution. The Unit continued to develop new tools to represent and interpret such systems. In particular, we investigated methods of representation that reflect the slippage and distortions that occur between these translations from drawing to building; and these methods and processes were treated as a creative opportunities that both developed and represented new models of architectural space.

The Unit initially embarked on a three-week drawing investigation. This exercise was both about identifying an invisible system of organisation or communication within the city, and inventing a method of drawing to represent this. Both then became generators for the year’s work. We then visited the city of Copenhagen to look at reclaimed lands and egalitarian societies. Year 4 worked on a project for the redesign of the ‘Scene and Heard’ theatre in Somers Town, Camden, which they later used for their design realisation. Both year groups worked on projects in Copenhagen, for differing timescales.

Fig. 21.1 & 21.6 Tess Martin Y5, ‘Cruise Copenhagen’. Cruise Copenhagen aims to improve the currently unsustainable and parasitic relationship between the cruise industry and the city through the provision of a new port-side experience and two inner-city destinations for cruise passengers, residents and tourists alike. Fig. 21.2 Yu Chien (Wendy) Lin Y5, ‘Copenhagen Exchange School’. The scheme aims to revitalise Christiania by attracting youths back into the area with the Exchange School’s barter skill classes, self-built student accommodation and interactive learning spaces. The architectural language is based upon three behaviours that are central to the realisation of this scheme from conception to building construction and usage. Fig. 21.3 Wai Hong Hew Y5, ‘Museum of Cartography / Reconstructing Copenhagen’. Fig. 21.4 William Molho Y4,

Somers Walls, London, A series of stills were extracted from ‘Somers Walls’, a filmed continuous elevation of Somers Town Boundaries. Fig. 21.5 Risa Nagasaki Y5, ‘Time-Based Landscape: Bridging, Floating, Staging Copenhagen’. The project extends the city of Copenhagen, bridging the harbour. The landscape transforms with seasons, tides, and operas.

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Fig. 21.7 Jens Kongstad Olesen Y4, ‘A Record of Change’. A Radiographic perspective. Redevelopment plan for a local community theatre in Somers Town. Incorporating the previous life cycles and history of the existing building in the new design proposal. Fig. 21.8 – 21.9 Charlotte Reynolds Y4, ‘The Pocket Park Prototype’, Copenhagen. Setting out a precedent for government funded ‘pocket parks’ to provide public space in designated vacant urban plots under 5000sqm, responding to the artificial construct of the city. Manipulation of the existing artificial land produces a series of incremental and ‘unfinished’ parks across Copenhagen of which certain elements will be inherited by future site development. A language of excavation and relocation of earth allows the site mass to remain constant throughout.

Fig. 21.10 Antonia Tkachenko Y5, ‘Copenhagen Arts Terrain’. Exploration of an architectural language derived from mobile experiences of the urban fabric. This approach is employed in revitalising a disused railway terrain in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro into a vibrant terrain dedicated to local arts initiatives. Architectural space is derived from a series of moving viewpoints and frames, such as the railway carriage. The proposal forms a dual relationship with the users, engaging with both the global and neighbourhood speeds and timescales.

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Fig. 21.11 – 21.14 Sayan Skandarajah Y5, ‘Curating an Egalitarian Territory’, Copenhagen. Responding to the geopolitical and archaeological slippage between territory and equality in Copenhagen, the project seeks to define an exclusivity in architectural identity through the proposal of an emergent nine-square enclave in the heart of the city. Using egalitarian principles of order, distribution and composition, six architectural interventions and their associated infrastructures are defined, containing at their scale the principles and vocabulary of the enclave as a whole. The project thus reflects the tensions of the inevitable territorial exclusivity of a society that is founded upon principles of equality.

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Fig. 21.15 – 21.16 Naomi Gibson Y5, ‘The Performing Ground of Fragmented Identity.’ This proposition uses the microcosmic act of performance and the socio-spatial qualities of stage typologies to re-imagine local activities and transform the socio-political tensions of Nørrebro, a culturally diverse district of Copenhagen. Centered around and based upon two sites of local collective memory – the void site of Jagtvej 69 and a deconsecrated corner of Assistens Cemetery – locals are invited to meet and explore ‘other’ both peacefully and agonistically, and to celebrate local heterogeneity. Fig. 21.17 Simona Schroeder Y5, ‘Building for the Invisible: Rethinking the Concept of Danish Asylum Centres’. Transforming the Folkets Park in Copenhagen, it becomes a user-driven urban park for asylum seekers and citizens of Copenhagen alike. The

landscape also performs as a community centre uniting the neighbourhood. Various activities encourage a social and cultural exchange between the participants regenerating the area and integrating asylum seekers. Fig. 21.18 Jamie Lilley Y4, ‘Semiotics’. An investigation into the creation of an alternative street scape. The symbology of a street is depicted through plotting the longitude of the signs origin against of the street datum. Fig. 21.19 Emma Louise Carter Y5, ‘Better Building: The Incremental House’. The proposal discusses the beneficial development of floating incrementally built family houses.

A house begins as a small, structural service core that is developed over time through the addition of timber plug-in spaces chosen, manufactured and constructed at a time that suits each individual household financially and socially.

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Chronometrics

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

Unit 21 Chronometrics

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

Mercatorial projection is a translation between the curvilinear geometry of the surface of the earth and a two dimensional – or flat – projection. It is a deliberately false system that preserves the angles and meridians of the earth but presents it as a digestible tableau from which we can easily orientate ourselves. Since the creation of this geometric system in 1569 we have been conditioned to understand the world in this way; and it is ironic that after the world was largely established as spherical in the 15th century we have had such a predominantly ‘flat earth’ view since. Prior to the invention of satellite GPS; the dilemma between these two systems is exemplified by the history of the marine chronometer and the struggle to develop improvements in error correction (i.e. Harrison and the story of longitude).

This year the Unit continued to investigate such systems of slippage and distortion in the context of the translation between drawing and building. We developed a chronometric architecture that asked how you might represent time based and dynamic spatial systems or environmental datasets.

Panorama

By its very nature a panorama is artificial. It is a false view constructed from a series of views, which would ordinarily be unattainable with our natural cone of vision. In project one the Unit was asked to construct or draw a proposal that was optically panoramic or responded to a particular panorama of their choosing. They were asked to consider the scale of the panorama – for instance was it micro-scale rather than the conventional macro view? It could heave been a panorama of a normally hidden landscape or re-interpretation of what a panorama might be within contemporary culture. This first project was viewed as a tool to investigate initial ideas on the panoramic and the artificial, and how one might take these ideas forward into the year’s work.

Pavilion

Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens in Cornwall is a garden that has only recently opened to the public. Amongst other sculpture pieces, it houses two of only five site sculptures by James Turrell in the UK. Turrell is one of the key references used by Robin Evans in his essay ‘Translations from Drawings to Buildings’ which the Unit drew inspiration from last year. Evans describes such translations as having the capacity to ‘get bent, broken and even lost on the way’ and this continued to preoccupy the Unit.

Tremenheere is located in Penzance and looks out onto Mounts Bay and St Michael’s Mount; there is a 25-mile panoramic view out of the garden stretching from the Lizard Point to Lands End. The garden at Tremenheere is the work of one man who, over a fifteen-year period aided by a JCB, has remodelled and planted the new landscape that is apparent today. Whilst the scale of this undertaking and its obsession is reminiscent of the work of Simon Rodia in constructing the Watts Towers in LA, it is a project that is bedded in the history of the artifice of the English garden. In the manner of Stourhead it is a purely synthetic construct, shrouded in the picturesque. However it is an exotic scenario as the diverse global planting makes use of the warm microclimates found in Cornish valleys.

A series of new buildings are planned for the garden. The first, a visitor centre with a restaurant and shop, has just been completed. The next building planned is for a pavilion and this was the subject of the first building project of the year. It was a live project. The Unit held an internal competition and the intention was for Tremenheere to build the winner. Alex Gazetas project was chosen and he will be in discussions with Tremenheere and the local planning department shortly. This project was used as the basis for the fourth years Design Realisation document.

Tangier

In the New Year the Unit visited Tangier. It is an extraordinary city due to its geographic position. On the very edge of Africa and immediately adjacent to Europe it is a key portal between the two. Tangier looks inwards to the fast developing continent of Africa; and it looks outwards to Europe as a major trading partner. It is also at the gateway to the Mediterranean and is at the heart of an expanding shipping economy (both touristic and trading). Its ports are developing rapidly to cater for this. Historically, Tangier is obviously a densely layered culture with long traditions of both European and Arabic religious, political and mercantile systems. It is also more recently a draw for artists and writers and filmmakers. The Unit developed urban strategies and programmes based on their earlier chronometric research.

The fourth year also had the privilege of being invited by Kengo Kuma to participate in a competition to design a retreat in a rural area of Japan. Eight university teams were invited from all over the world.

Thank you to our critics: Professor Christine Hawley, Dr Rachel Cruise, Tom Holberton, Costa Elia, Godofredo Pereira, Professor Stephen Gage, Jonathan Kendal, Professor Peter Bishop, Theo Sarantoglou Lalis, Charlotte Bocci, Dr Neil Armstrong

Design Realisation Tutor: Tom Holberton Unit Structural Engineer: Brian Eckersley

Unit 21 would like to give a special thanks to Tom Holberton and Dr Neil Armstrong for their support this year.

Year 4

Emma Carter, Naomi Gibson, Wai Hong Hew, Yu Chien (Wendy) Lin, Tess Martin, William Molho, Risa Nagasaki, Joseph Paxton, Simona Schroeder, Sayan Skandarajah, Antonia Tkachenko

Year 5

Alexander Gazetas, Sarah L’esperence, Shogo Sakimura

ashtonporter.com ashtonporter.net

21.2 Sara L’Espérance, Y5, Medina Parasite, Tangier. Inspired by the contrast between the tight, dark and winding streets of Tangier’s Medina and the light and whimsical roofscape, the Medina Parasite seeks to bring public life to new heights as a hovering, expanding parasite in and amongst the roofscape of the old city. Developed as a flexible structure, the proposed parasite acts as a ‘base’ for future expansion as the need for public space increases. Moments from this base have then been re-appropriated elsewhere within the Medina as scale-shifted versions of their original function. These scale shifts not only change in size and orientation, but in their function as well: a lookout turns into a compressive prayer chamber, a dark stairwell into a viewing platform, thus recalling previous memories of past experiences.

between opposing city conditions as well as between the foreign and local communities.

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Fig. 21.3 Sayan Skandarajah, Y4, Restituted Territories, Tangier. Spatial and temporal exchange is explored at the Tangier Medina wall; a threshold

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Fig. 21.4 Antonina Tkachenko, Y4, Performative Flooding of Tangier Interzone. Proposed fluctuating levels of water flood the hyper-textural landscape and create a series of formal and informal performance spaces, bridging the boundary between the Medina and the Port. Fig. 21.5 Sayan Skandarajah, Y4, Restituted Territories, Tangier. Spatial and temporal exchange is explored at the Tangier Medina wall; a threshold between opposing city conditions as well as between the foreign and local communities. Fig. 21.6 Simona Schroeder, Y4, Tangier Roofscape Theatre. Bringing the tourists and travellers into the ‘horizontal Medina’ and creating spaces for communication with the people of Tangier. Fig. 21.7 Wai Hong Hew, Y4, Tangier Folklore Museum. The Folklore Museum exhibits and documents the oral tradition of sharing stories, culture and

experiences of the Tangerines. A series of momentary experiences are intentionally composed and then spontaneously connected to one another to indicate a design and program that is intriguing, imaginative and story-like, and to complete the history of the Medina wall with the integration of the design as a wall façade. Fig. 21.8 Tess Martin, Y4, The 6-Hour City: A Cruise Tourist Bubble for the City of Tangier. The development of the cruise tourist bubble proposes a reform of the way cruise passengers experience the city, and the way the city presents itself to the cruise industry, ultimately by changing the power / profit relationship between city and cruise company.

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Fig. 21.9 Risa Nagasaki, Y4, Pixelated Topography, Cornwall: shift of focus and blurring the boundaries. Fig. 21.10 Yu Chien (Wendy) Lin, Y4, House of Wisdom, Tangier. Tangier’s public library is built as a continuation of the ancient Medina wall and introduces tourists (penguins) to Tangier’s modern culture through subtle movements of the digital structure revealed at intervals. Fig. 21.11 Tess Martin, Y4, The 6-Hour City: A Cruise Tourist Bubble for the City of Tangier. The development of the cruise tourist bubble proposes a reform of the way cruise passengers experience the city, and the way the city presents itself to the cruise industry, ultimately by changing the power / profit relationship between city and cruise company. Fig. 21.12

Emma Carter, Y4, A [Cornish] Tropical Landscape, Cornwall. SpringTime - Carved microclimates choreograph seasonally

responsive routes through the landscape and provide optimum conditions for tropical plants to thrive all year round. Fig. 21.13 Joseph Paxton, Y4, Tremenheere Kinetic Pavilion, Cornwall. The pavilion’s design focuses on the interstitial zones created between the kinetic roof and the natural landscape below, providing perpetually transgressive states of opacity through multiple layers of ever-changing configured light modules.

Fig. 21.14 Emma Carter, Y4, B[r]eaching Tangier, Plage Municipale. Respectful interjections into abandoned and disused public spaces along the beach front in Tangier, aiming to rejuvenate an undeveloped and leftover area of a currently evolving, yet stagnant, city.

Fig. 21.15 Shogo Sakimura, Y5, Heterotopic Triarama, Cornwall. Framed views across the horizon are altered by a shifting landscape, which reflects and camouflages architectural moments. Fig. 21.16 Alexander Gazetas, Y5, Light Cloud Pavilion, Cornwall. The form of the pavilion has been derived from light levels across the site in Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, which were mapped and turned into point cloud data. This was then used to form the ‘cloud-like’ roof ceiling, floor, lighting, screening and structural elements. The intention behind the competition-winning pavilion is to manifest the world of hidden information into physical form. Fig. 21.17 Naomi Gibson, Y4, The Unreliable Narrator’s Stock Exchange, Tangier. Like the guides and verbal tales that permeate Tangier, the Unreliable Narrator’s Stock Exchange is illusory and

contrary, designed to disorientate visitors and never reveal the full story. It distorts and manipulates the trade and economic information created within it, questioning the boundary between fantasy and truth, presenting a false picture of the economic health of the city. Fig. 21.18 Joseph Paxton, Y4, [Hydrodynamic] Landscapes of Liminality, Tangier. The Masterplan insertion deals with thresholds of old and new in the city of Tangier, creating a multilayered event of kinetic oscillations, fluctuations, fragmentary vision and perceptions of space, this is explored through the drawing of technological and experiential datascapes.

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Ensure image ‘bleeds’ 3mm beyond the trim edge.

Continuous

Translation

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

CONTINUOUS TRANSLATION

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

“To translate is to convey. It is to move something without altering it. This is its original meaning and this is what happens in translatory motion. Such too, by analogy with translatory motion, the translation of languages. Yet the substratum across which the sense of words is translated from language to language does not appear to have the requisite evenness and continuity; things can get bent, broken or even lost on the way.”

Robin Evans, Translations from Drawings to Buildings and Other Essays (1997)

It is inevitable that buildings will be constructed increasingly by factories, machine tools and other automata. However, as with traditional building methods, it is not inevitable that those buildings will also be architecture. The unit has sought to investigate and speculate on how such processes will ensure an outcome that is architecture.

The use of emerging digital technologies means there is an opportunity for the construction industry to move from its current, predominantly 19th century mode of operation, to one of super-industrialisation. In the last 50 years the role of the architect has been eroded and compartmentalised within the increasingly specialised fields of the construction industry. By understanding and developing the relationship between software (representation) and hardware (building), the architect is in a position to reclaim their role as both initiator and master builder. More importantly, as the architect will have a potentially more direct relationship between the drawing, production and the building there are new sets of creative opportunities and tactics to investigate and invent.

One of the key themes the unit focused on is the translation from software to hardware. In its simplest terms this might mean the translation from digital representation to physical object. However, the unit posited the idea that this may be an overly deterministic and simplified operation; we were therefore interested in the spillage in the system, in the same way that Evans refers to getting bent, broken or lost. It is possible that this mistranslation is a by-product of the processes you invent or it is a deliberate aim to re-contextualise or distort data. Equally, we welcomed the idea that these processes are not linear and self-contained. As always, we encouraged a layered approach which could just as easily incorporate analogue, visceral, political, environmental and cultural inputs; in any case we expected a hybridised approach which would allow for tactics of assemblage.

After the empowerment of Renaissance painting through perspective a new language Unit 21

of techniques was developed to nuance and manner the work. For example, sfumato was used to soften edges and to create the illusion of depth and chiaroscuro was the use of strong dark and light contrast to again further heighten the sense of perspective. There were also other techniques such as the cartoon (or large paper drawing) that allowed the transfer from sketch to canvas or plaster surface. This year the unit attempted to invent new terms and/or behaviours for the process of translation that has an equivalent contemporary status that sfumato or chiaroscuro has to perspective.

Further to which, as such historical techniques were deeply analogue they were both unrepeatable and one-way. The unit has considered how, using digital translation, the process could be reversible and interchangeable. In other words can we translate from digital to physical and back to digital to introduce a feedback into the process? In this way a building can be both dynamic (or animate) and responsive.

The unit continued to develop the idea from previous research that the city is treated as a landscape of data that can be harnessed and transformed onto a generator of architectural language. This year the city landscape under observation has been Berlin; a city of the 19th century, broken and reconnected in the 20th century and currently struggling to establish it’s identity for the 21st century.

Unit 21 would like to thank our critics: Prof Christine Hawley, Prof Stephen Gage, Dr. Rachel Cruise, Tom Holberton, Godofedo Pereira, Narinder Sagoo, Tim Furzer, Luke Pearson, Peg Rawes.

Design Realisation Tutor: Julie Stewart. Unit Structural Engineer: Brian Eckersley

Year 4: Ka Lai Kylie Chan, Alexander Gazetas, Sara L’Espérance, Risa Nagasaki, Gordon O’Connor-Read, Shogo Sakimura

Year 5: Qing Gao, Mina Gospavic, Eleanor Hedley, Tia Randall, Yeung Piu So, Yi Su, Chun Ting Gabriel Lee, Anthony Smith, Sophie George, Ayaka Suzuki

Fig. 21.1 Sophie George, Opportunistic Geometries, The project tests whether bespoke digital methods can be used in a political and provocative way. It questions levels of chance and control within a design project and uses methods that embrace indeterminate outcomes. A new Federal Constitutional Court of Germany is proposed in Berlin on a site formerly occupied by the Berlin Wall. A single module of the Berlin Wall was modelled and scanned using a homemade 3d scanner. The homemade scanner contained nuances and inaccuracies, producing areas of slippage in the resulting 3d mesh. These areas of slippage, or ‘opportunistic geometries’ were used to design the key spaces of the new Court. The challenge of the project lay in combining these opportunistic geometries with the functional requirements of the Court.

Fig. 21.2 – 21.5 Mina Gospavic, Berlin Artspark, This project seeks to inquire what the civilian’s image of the city is — using the film and photographic image as synonyms of subjective experience - to identify the qualities of repetitive and cyclical daily movement through Berlin, and subsequently how this can act as a strategy to design an alternative architectural proposal for the city. At the intersection of two subjective experiences, lies the architectural intervention of an Artspark which extracts the geometries from these views structurally and spatially into a landscape of performance areas, outdoor galleries and public spaces.

Fig. 21.6 — 21.9 Yeung Piu So, Karl Marx Allee Monument, “Perhaps spectators walking along the existing monument in Karl Marx Allee (KMA) is similar to the way Robert Smithson toured the monuments in New Jersey. However, not many of us can be as sensitive and imaginative as he did to read those monuments allegorically. Perhaps, we don’t even want another Smithson to read the future KMA and say this is “a kind of self-destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur.”

Accommodating more than 2,000 apartments, the present KMA deserves positive regeneration. Interacting with the existing Stalinist architecture built from 50s to60s, the proposal will be an anti-nostalgic scheme. Rather than being haunted by the unproductive nostalgia, it will mark the end of the GDR power, and transform it

into a new park of possibilities by translating the existing motifs along the boulevard. To stop the unproductive and even dangerous nostalgia of the citizen, like the mother in the film Goodbye Lenin, the project made use of architecture as a tool to help people understand the condition of memory and their history. Meanwhile, it will regenerate the area as new urban recreational hub, putting emphasis on the present livelihood.”

Fig. 21.10 Yi Su, Pina Bausch’s Dance School, This dance school is equipped with special studios for practicing specific emotions in Pina Bausch’s dance, and provides the audience with different viewing experiences for each studio according to the particular emotion in it. The dancers’ and the audience’s viewpoints are crucial in experiencing the building. A subjective strategy is applied in the design process, which relies on the designer’s understanding from extracting emotions from Bausch’s dance till transforming the emotions to dance studio design. Fig. 21.11 Tia Randall, Die Engelbeckengärten, The Engelbeckengärten, a community agricultural gardens was designed to provide the infrastructure that enables a social framework to be developed by the local residents and users, over time. Within the landscape, we

find objects of intrigue and invention, that allow for the manual manipulation of processes within the gardens. Users become physically entwined with the site, their constant presence and activities are required to animate and continue to develop the form of the proposal. At the same time, the individual objects of invention themselves create intimate event experiences with their users. Their language of inherent movement evokes curiosity in those who find them. Once the user has discovered their workings through child-like investigations, the enjoyment of the experience perpetuates their use.

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Fig. 21.12 Ayaka Suzuki, Place-Making, An investigation into the eviction of the collective housing residents in Berlin, the chain reaction of protests, with live uploads of videos and comments online is translated into the unfolded expression of the event. Fig. 21.13 Sara L’Espérance, Urban Playground, The Urban Playground was designed to challenge the typical understanding of the playground’s role in an urban context and redefine it as a space where ‘play’ can encompass all urban dwellers, not simply children. Fig. 21.14 Qing Gao, The Museum of Domesticity, Metamorphosized from historical maps of Cockfosters in each decades, the evolution of suburban morphology is encrypted in the roofscape of the Museum of Domesticity. 3-d scanning of typical domestic items provided further materials with which

to construct the galleries. Fig. 21.15 Eleanor Hedley, The Theatrical Landscape, This project has sought to define an architecture of the view. This has been explored via the three characteristic viewing techniques displayed by the protagonists of Richard Wagner’s opera ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’: empathetic, fragmented and unified viewing. Fig. 21.16 Chun Ting Gabriel Lee, Place-Making, “We have attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, of finally becoming one” — André Breton. A series of analogue photographic experiments to explore the idea of superimposition of spaces, time and scale.

Portmanteau

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

PORTMANTEAU

Istanbul is the only major city that straddles two continents. This geographical split is the first and most obvious of a multitude of cultural, political, religious, social and historical layers No single description or account can adequately describe the city.

‘At this point I could no longer tell if I was in Byzantium, Konstantinopolis or Istanbul I realised that I made a trip where I traversed three civilisations and three periods at the same time. But this city with three names and three histories was in fact still the same I thought that it was perhaps not coincidental that amidst the city walls, bearded church fathers had discussed to the point of exhaustion the secret of the trinity, that is how “one thing” could be at once “one” and “three” ’ Umberto Eco

This year, the unit continued to explore the idea of collage as a means to construct the city. It is as likely that the material of any such collage is defined by the lost geometry of an earlier incumbent as it is the physical material of a new object or the multitude of wireless information and hidden systems. Illusion and composition of the physical and the mimetic have continued to be a preoccupation within the unit

The unit was initially asked to ‘construct’, ‘make’ and/or otherwise design a portmanteau; this was a 4-week project and acted as a precursor to the

Fig 21.1 Sarah Bromley, Theatrical Pleasure Ground, Located on the old site of the great Byzantium Cemetery in Istanbul A series of models exploring the physical and non-physical create a time-based landscape The landscape comprises theatrical machines that are split into three time-based categories: Automatic, Reactive and Interactive Each of the categories relates back to one of the three 18th century travel writers that instigated my year ’s work: Gerard de Nerval, Mark Twain and Edmondo de Amicis Fig 21.2 Sarah Alfraih, Museum Of Identity, Situated in Istanbul the Museum of Identity is an architectural intervention that is proposed to be built along the parameters of previously defined ‘Portals’ that investigate the spatial considerations of identity production Here, the city of Istanbul becomes a site for the exploration of a philosophical inquiry into place which

field trip Students constructed their portmanteau from information gleaned from remote or mediated versions of the city, that were based on received notions that predated their experience of Istanbul.

The remainder of the year was spent pursuing and developing the ideas generated by the portmanteau and sites in Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul.

For further information on the unit visit www unit21 ashtonporter net

Unit 21 would like to thank our critics: Prof Christine Hawley, Prof Stephen Gage, Prof Colin Fournier, Godofedo Pereira, Tom Holberton, Narinder Sagoo, Charlotte Bocci, Holly Lewis, Dr Rachel Cruise

Year 4: Mina Gospavic, Chun Ting Gabriel Lee, Tia Randall, Yi Zoe Su, Ayaka Suzuki Year 5: Sarah Alfraih, Oliver Bawden, Beatrice Beazley, Alicia Bourla, Paul Broadbent, Sarah Bromley, Naomi Bryden, Costa Elia, Maiia Guermanova, Paul Legon, Roger Molina-Vera, Lucy Paton

questions the very way in which we locate ourselves within it Once we recognise that space and social relations are made through each other, we can ascertain that the production of identity becomes central to spatial discourse

Fig 21.3 Alicia Bourla, Floating Library Istanbul

A floating library for women and children, the Library celebrates the need of women for social encounters outside of the household Fig 21.4 Lucy Paton, El Malecon

Reanimación Cuba is in a transitional phase Assuming that it is transforming into a free-market economy, it is inevitable that there will be increased foreign investment and construction With little development over the last 50 years much of the urban fabric is in a dilapidated state

Proposed is a Regeneration project for the Malecon, the seafront boulevard of Central Havana On 9 sites left void from collapsed or demolished buildings community-based projects celebrate Cuban culture, and create a transitional architecture that prevents the Malecon becoming a characterless strip of hotels They aim to reanimate the ‘City’s Living Room’ and provide new facilities to stimulate

community regeneration Fig 21.5 Paul Legon, City Hall Istanbul This work focuses on creating an architectural Portmanteau of Order and Disorder by using anamorphic techniques Each anamorphic construct conceals its organising geometry from all positions appearing abstract and disordered except from a unique invisible coordinate where the ‘eccentric observer ’ is able to discover the hidden order/system

Figs. 21.6 – 21.10 Costa Elia, The Istanbul Pogrom Museum

This year ’s work has been an architectural investigation into a particular event in Istanbul’s history the Istanbul Pogrom, a large-scale riot directed against the minorities of the city that took place on the 6 September 1955

This event forever changed the demographics of the city, transforming it in the following 50 years from the traditionally multicultural site it was, to the relatively monocultural city it is now The major proposal of the year was for a museum dedicated to the event based on the island of Buyukada off the coast of the city centre This island was the former religious centre of the lost Greek population of the city, and the site that the museum is based on is the first piece of confiscated land returned to the Greek Church since the event The project began with the design of five exhibits, 3D forensic reconstructions

of particular spaces of the pogrom as shown in the photographs (Exhibits ‘B’ and ‘C’ shown in Figs 21.7, 21 8) Five exhibition halls were then designed around the exhibits to allow visitors to assume the photographer’s position and view these exhibits framed exactly as they appear in the images (Figs 21.6, 21.9, 21.10) Furthermore, visitors are guided around the exhibits in particular ways to allow them to gain new perspectives on the reconstructions that aren’t shown in the photographs and in the process are ‘framed’ themselves in particular ways The intention of the project is to give the Pogrom a new relevance to modern society, through the questioning of what ‘objective’ evidence whether forensic, or photograhpic can really be constituted as

Artificial

Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter

Dip/MArch Unit 21

Yr 4: Sarah Alfraih, Beatrice Beazley, Alicia Bourla, Sarah Bromley, Naomi Bryden, Costa Elia, Maiia Guermanova, Paul Legon, Tomo Ogata, Lucy Paton

Yr 5: Sarah Brighton, Vivian Wing Man Chung, Tom Elliot, Zachary Keene, Laurence Mackman

Artificial

Villa Aldobrandini is not set to one side of its garden, it is at its centre; the villa is treated as an optical instrument for the viewing of the garden. The view to the water theatre is composed by the framing of the loggia and doorway, a trompe l’oeil outer door and a reflective glazed inner door. Although it is intended to view onto and frame an external Arcadian vision of landscape, the garden is as synthetic as the painted door. There are many example of this synthetic nature, whether it be the Romantic English rural landscape, such as Stourhead in Wiltshire, or the ever-shifting Jones Beach in Long Island, New York. This year, we asked Unit 21 not just to develop a world of the purely synthetic but to investigate the collage of the more subtle layers between the various readings of the real, the physical and the mimetic. Furthermore we asked that students not think of this as a landscape or as an extra-urban setting, but that the context should be overtly urban. The city was their playground.

Unit 21 established sites in Greater London, and identified and responded to systems of interaction, by calibration and re-reading, and establishing new systems which responded to the context. They considered how a system works as an ecology and in particular, how it behaves in terms of co-operation and symbiosis. We travelled to China for our field trip.

Abigail Ashton & Andrew Porter Clockwise from top: Paul Legon, Constructed Shadows; Maiia Guermanova, A Hydropark, Canning Town; Tom Elliot, Supposed Urban Space, Bethnal Green; Naomi Bryden, Tripartite, Lea Valley

Top: Sarah Brighton, A Data Landscape, Greenwich Bottom: Naomi Bryden, Tripartite, Lea Valley

Top left: Sarah Alfraih, Mobile Productive Landscapes Top right: Zachary Keene, A Filmic Mall, Hong Kong Middle: Paul Legon, Constructed Shadows Bottom: Sarah Brighton, A Data Landscape, Greenwich

Top: Tom Elliot, Supposed Urban Space, Bethnal Green

Top: Sarah Bromley, Issac Waltons Walk, Old River Lea Bottom: Zachary Keene, A Filmic Mall, Hong Kong

Costa Elia: Three Dimensional Boundary, Tottenham Hale

Interchange – *space/ object/ narrative

Abigail Ashton, Christine Hawley, Andrew Porter

Dip/MArch Unit 21

Yr 4: Zak Keene, Sarah Brighton, Laurence Mackman, Andrew Walker. Yr 5: Carrie Behar, Katie Walmsley, William Aitken, John Lawlor, Bilal Malik, Chein Chin-Yin, Carolina Razelli, Raphaela Potter

Interchange - *space/ object/ narrative

An intertwining set of themes ran throughout the programme this year, it will (in essence) involving reading the city, interpreting place and constructing narrative. The project sequence is aware of, and responsive to, all aspects of environment.

Three areas of London are offered, each with a particular character, they have a life that is both dynamically of the moment and a hidden history with ghostly memories of the past. The observer must paint a picture of this place, a poetic interpretation of context.

Thanks to Julie Stewart

Christine Hawley, Abigail Ashton and Andrew Porter

Clockwise from Top: Carrie Behar, Sopot Beach Spa; Will Aitken, Willesden Market and Scout Camp

Above: Katie Walmsley, House Theatre. Opposite Page Top Row: Sarah Brighton, Anamorphic Pleasure Garden; John Lawlor, Productive Landscape; Zak Keene, Greenway Follies: The Ghosted Cooling Tower of Abbey Mills Pumping Station.

Second Row: Bilal Malik, Urban Calligraphy; John Lawlor, Productive Landscape; Will Aitken, Willesden Market and Scout Camp; Laurence Mackman, Kinetic Garden; 3rd Row: Chein Chin-Yin, Old Kent Road Lido. Bottom Row: Will Aitken, Willesden Market and Scout Camp, Sarah Brighton, Anamorphic Pleasure Garden, Zak Keene, Morphing Tidal Funhouse.

This Page & Facing Page: Katie Walmsley, House Theatre.

Buy :

Sell

Peter Culley, Christine Hawley

Buy : Sell

What constitutes a sale? What defines value? What are the implications of trade on an architectural proposition where ‘faux’ products and illicit sales sit uncomfortably alongside carefully regimented and audited procedures of transaction?

In 2007, the exchange of non-essential goods reached an all time high, with Sotheby’s and Christie’s reporting sales of over US$300 million in a single week. But 2007 also saw £12 billion of the value of the stock market wiped and another £1bn withdrawn from customers of one bank in a single day; 2008 now threatens with the cry of ‘credit crunch’.

Responding to the brief, students quickly developed their own territory of transaction, outlining the buyer and seller roles and the delicate balance developed in the process of establishing a sale. Work reflected the shifting power of a ‘deal’ and developed a view on currency as a vehicle. The ‘purchase’ varied, from a tangible object, a concept, an emotion.

Students were expected to develop a view of commodity in the 21st century and the perceived value of built space in its language, materials and cultural significance.

We explored an architecture of negotiation, of risk, of shifting value.

Christine Hawley and Peter Culley

Yr 4: Chih-Yin Chien; John Lawlor; Bilal Malik; Carolina Razelli; Katie Walmsley.

Yr 5: Nicolas Lundstrom; Owen Jones; Benjamin Lee; Krishma Shah; Charlene Shum; Tumpa Husna Yasmin;

This page: Nicolas Lundstrom, Pigeon Racing Loft Development.

Clockwise from top: Nicolas Lundstrom, The Feather Factory

The Wapping Shoe Castle; John Lawlor, Yellow Steam Chamber; Chih-Yin Chien, Model of The Shop of Smell; Bilal Malik, The Arrival of the Dragons.

Top: Carolina Razelli, Contemporary Art Gallery in the City, exploratory cross-sections. Bottom: Owen Jones, St Thomas’ Opium Refinery.

Show

Peter Culley, Christine Hawley

Dip Unit 21

Yr 4: Owen Jones, Nicholas Lundstrom, Krishma Shah, Charlene Shum, Jasminder Sohi. Yr 5: Doug Hodgson, Emma James, Jimmy Kim, Claire Metivier, Stavros Nissiotis, David Storring, Kai Ming Wong.

Show

We start the year by studying one of the world’s largest and most unusual museum collections. The objects Henry Wellcome brought together range from the ancient to the magical, from the religious to the scientific. Beautiful, mysterious or bizarre, they all illuminate the history of human beings.

In 2003 the Quay brothers created a short animation to document the extraordinary assemblage and simultaneously reveal an extremely beautiful yet odd inner cosmos of things. “The film suggests the idea that all passionate museum visitors know to be true: that the objects become even more interesting after the last visitor has left the gallery.”

This collection has been the subject of translation and this year we are asking that you consider the notion of display, how to show ideas, imagination and mystery. This can be interpreted through a number of different media and it should fundamentally challenge the notion of how you ‘show’.

What is your show? Our starting point is the physical object, the alchemic potion, the magic ritual but the exercise does not need to be confined. The year will develop through investigation of a single scene of particular personal interest into a carefully considered brief for an architectural strategy. You will be encouraged to look at specialized and distorted techniques of exhibition, theatre, and lighting design through drawings, models and film.

Christine Hawley and Peter Culley

Top: Kai Ming Wong. Middle left: Krishma Shah, Astronomy Centre, Mill Hill, sectional perspective through floatation chamber and exhibition room; right: Doug Hodgson, an investigation into ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, by JG Ballard. Bottom: Owen Jones, UCL corridor, black and white photo from Lost Negative

Top: Kai Ming Wong. Middle: Doug Hodgson, section through Dr. Travis’s residence and the M5. Bottom left: Owen Jones, briefcase scene, black and white photo from Lost Negative; right: Claire Metivier.

This page, top to bottom: Krishma Shah, music box movement model – hand rotating in plan; Nicholas Lundstrom, process montage of installation; Stavros Nissiotis, Control - Randomness / Casino Game 21 / Dice & Card Table / 1.1 Installation; Casino - Vienna / Exclusive Salon hosting Game 21 / Sectional Perspective / scale 1.50.

Clockwise from top left: Charlene Shum, The Courtyard Hotel; Emma James, cakes and bread transported around the building animate; Jasminder Sohi, sectional perspective of tea house & museum; Emma James, dance in a static form, perspex model; David Storring, Gabriel Prokofiev’s String Quartet No.1 - a translation of the second movement; A Symphony in the City - social housing, Hommerton, London; Jasminder Sohi, ground plan of tea house & museum

This page: Jimmy King. Top: ‘Show’, a maquette about stamps as a parcel. Bottom left to right: view through glass into basement workshop, a relief model, glass, paint, ink, collage; entrance staircase to exhibition space

This page: Jimmy King, Wiener Werkstatte Glass Museum, Vienna, Austria, view looking north showing glass façade

Hotel

Peter Culley, Christine Hawley

Dip Unit 21

Yr 4: Ronan Friel, Doug Hodgson, Emma James, Poppy Kirkwood, Claire Methivier, David Storring, Kai Ming Wong Yr 5:Salim Amir, Imran Jahn, Arati Khanna, Vimal Mehta, Dora Sweijd.

Hotel

Derivation - hôte, French - to host

The notion of a 'place to stay' goes back to ancient colonising societies moving through fixed strongholds with 'pit stops' along key routes Hosting 'travellers' for finanicial return originates from the earliest 'business' travel along trading routes often where harsh climate would require a particular level of protection Early records show some form of hostelry in major towns Religious institutions have also traditionally provided 'board and lodging' for those requiring a 'safe house' or simply to top up incomes from land, benefactors etc

Some hotels have had 'residents' who remained by choice or otherwise as semipermanent guests, sometimes for convalescence or escape Often writers will cite a particular period or piece of work as owing to time spent at someone else's convenience

The hotel has come to define a class and section of society according to its design and styling Hotel types are often based on pre-selecting the appropriate type of visitor - budget hostels, boutique, motel, no-frillsbusiness, designer, classic opulent, art, airport, love, resort, capsule, conference / casino - and this style is generally represented in external appearance, public spaces and advertising - its image Once inside the chosen environment, like airline seating, overt class related terminology is emphasised fo r room types - 'economy', 'standard', 'deluxe', 'super deluxe', 'penthouse', 'king suite' - this adds motivation to 'upgrade' and flout personal betterment Understood social protocols are often tested and morphed on crossing the hotel boundary .

Christine Hawley and Peter Culley

Top: Ronan Friel Bottom: Poppy Kirkwood

Clockwise from top left: Kai Ming Wong, Claire Methivier, Doug Hodgson

Facing page: Arati Khanna This page, top: Emma James; bottom: Salim Amir

Top: Vihmal Mehta Bottom: Imran Jahn

This page: Dora Sweijd

Liquid Architecture

Christine Hawley

Dip Unit 21

Yr 4: Arati Khanna, Stavros Nissiotis Yr 5: Jonathan Ashmore, Lucy Evans, Kostas Grigoriadis, Tom Holberton, Anthony Lau, John Oliver, Sang-Kil Park, Anthony Smith, Ursula Thompson, Dennis Tsang, Alex Tucker, Lawrence Wong, Louise Yeung

Liquid Architecture

Van Leeuven's 'Springboard in the Pond' explores the human relationship with water from a variety of viewpoints: social, religious, artistic and philosophical Much has been written and designed that relates form to water, but this unit explores the notion of liquid architecture

Our contemporary relationship to water falls broadly into two categories The first is functional – its consumption is vital as is its use in irrigation, transportation and cleansing The second is for leisure and decoration – the pool, the pond, the lake However, this elementary summary fails to capture the conceptual potential that is both symbolic and functional.

Water's iconic status embraces both spiritual and metaphoric supremacy and bourgeois banality Zumthor's Bath House at Vals is a sepulchral experience of water, light and aroma Ludwig Leo's Hydraulic Pumping Station in Berlin is a piece of expressionist engineering Water can more generally be used as a symbol of metamorphosis, water becomes steam, mist, cloud, wave From Ovid to the present day, water is the element through which change of form is depicted

The design proposals undertaken utilise water in a number of different states (liquid, solid, vapour) and its latent and dynamic energy are exploited Traditionally, water is contained and allowed to flow for specific functions These proposals explore a range of utilisation and interpretation – an architecture that is liquid

Christine Hawley

Clockwise from top left: Jonathan Ashmore, Lucy Evans, John Oliver, Jonathan Wong, (group project) Anthony Smith + Sang-Kil Park

Clockwise from top: Alex Tucker, (group project) Anthony Lau + Dennis Tsang + Louise Yeung + Dennis Tsang, Ursula Thompson, Kostas Grigoriadis Overleaf: Tom Holberton

Stay ÷ Time

Christine Hawley, CJ Lim

Dip Unit 21

Yr 4: Jonathan Ashmore, Lucy Evans, Gregoriades Kostas, Tom Holberton, Anthony Lau, John Oliver, Sang–Kil Park, Ursula Thompson, Dennis Tsang, Alex Tucker, Lawrence Wong, Louise Yeung

Yr 5: Grace Craddock, Pedro Alejandro Gil, Doris Lam, Grace Ng, Mark Shaw, Adam Whitlock Wood

Stay ÷ Time

A fascination of cities over time is that they tell stories about people, the way they lived, worked and what they felt was important Whether it is poetry and myth, technology and finance, the cultural fabric is built into architecture one layer over the next, generation after generation

The project this year is concerned about the reading of context, but perhaps not in the most orthodox sense Our location is Penang in Malaysia, an erstwhile trading port on the historic spice routes to the east This small island city reflects its rich cultural past from early Indian civilisation to that of the Portuguese, Dutch, British and later the Japanese military occupation of World War 2 Like many cities of occupation, those that came left their legacies The colonial imprint announces its origins clearly, but the interwoven material style of the Chinese and indigenous Malay community provides a more subtle backdrop The multi-cultural histories are like continuously interwoven threads, seen in the buildings and landscape, recorded in literature, and lived out in everyday life

The programme is for a place to stay It may include some of the traditional components of the hotel, but a wider and more poetic interpretation of ‘stay’ is explored – a place to observe, listen or read; a place that reflects the environment, sensitive to its context but, at the same time, making a sharp, direct and tough statement for the future

Christine Hawley and cj Lim