Diploma 11. Outline and brief timeline 2010/11.
Radical Remodelling As we stand at the brink of the economical abyss, transport development and speculative commercial housing continue to drive urban regeneration. While property values stumble, construction generally proceeds at a rapid pace, in an effort to complete images of cities based on masterplans that are far removed from reality. But when the construction process stumbles, empty volumes of buildings emerge, revealing textural details beneath the urban fabric. These show us the city as a history of architectural erasure rather than growth. It seems that this incompleteness, often accidentally, creates the most successful public spaces and architecture of our city today. Could we take this phenomenon further and improve the city by making it even more beautifully incomplete? Could we remodel the city by taking apart its rigid structure and colliding different objects and programmes, old and new, small and large, temporary and permanent, until the city functions as a collective expression of life? Diploma 11 continues to be fascinated by the pattern of urban change at the peripheries of London. For us these areas are post-‐infrastructural cities emerging within a city – micro-‐cities. Our approach is empirical. Our fieldwork is based on direct observation and sampling as we reread and redraw taxonomies of the urban field. Our experimentation consists of making and un-‐making physical models of the city, randomly combining them to speculate on new forms of urban architecture beyond the given context. Our design objective is to make familiar objects unfamiliar. At the southeast corner of Royal Albert Dock lies a small community trapped between City Airport and the Thames Gateway. Cross Rail and commercial development are leaping in from the west. The DLR extension across the Thames is underway from the south. On the east side the former Beckton Gas Works, the site for the Thames Gateway Bridge, has now been abandoned. Silvertown East was bombed in 1940 during the Second World War and was further demolished in 1987 by Stanley Kubrick during the shooting of Full Metal Jacket. A ferry terminal and its forgotten foot tunnel, the Thames Barrier, a sugar refinery, a rubber factory, a forest of BT satellites, rows of terrace housing, pubs, churches, schools and North Woolwich Station all have uncertain futures. The design brief this year explores the remodelling of Silvertown utilizing the area’s voids through the recycling of its architecture. We will speculate on alternative service facilities for this small piece of the city that appears to be trapped between trains, ships, lorries and airplanes.A city strip bare. Unit 11 has been preoccupied with developing architectural design strategies for the postinfrastructural landscape learning from the ‘inner-periphery’ of London. The unit will continue to learn from the current city topology. We will explore the city’s potentiality of generating responsive urban components and urban environmental unit that responds to the notion of social sustainability. Our tectonic explorations will speculate new composite structures and material organizations that challenge the notion of permanent and temporality, dynamic and static, transformative and accumulative components. Borrowing the notion of reversal urban engineering we will un-make the architecture of the city. Material studies will be made in non-scale, 1:5 and 1:20 detail components, developing a new vocabulary of forming structures as well as textural expressions, mixing digital analysis and usage of inherent material qualities with combined methods of fabrication.
Supplementary investigations this year including: Tokyo workshop on Void Metabolism with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Professor Shigeru Aoki, material experiments at Hooke Park, Revisiting Collage City, Shrinking city with Prof. Grahame Shane and Revisiting Modernism ; The Sainte Marie de La Tourette with Seminars on Fragmentation with Peter Carl. That which we wish to design may represent a spatial anthology of exceptions inherent within the city.
Term 1 Sampling textual details and Re-modelling the city. Objective of this initial phase is to analyze and represent London’s periphery by identifying the complexity of existing service infrastructures. We use composite scale and time base methods to uncover textural details of its sedimentary landscape. We will experiment by combining various excess material production, sub-systems, and gap space and other unresolved details of the city to speculate various unit of urban environment. The field works will begin by sampling of the city details seeing from the point of view of post-industrial / infrastructural context, with layers of existing patterns of material circulation inside the transitory urban condition, There are two types of studies one; field study (urban periphery seen from 3 different scales). Later part of the project intends to experiment by translating these studies into various forms of models in four scales (1:1000, 1:20, 1:1 and Non-scale). Week 1 Project introduction Short exercise: Dismantling Machines in Silvertown. We will survey a series of chose buildings from Silvertown. Making models and drawings and speculate creative forms of Dismantling them. Week 2,3 Contextual field works. City as Taxonomy, read from its details. Sampling textual details from chosen context in three different scales. 1:1000, 1:10 and 1:1 scale. Urban Resource Catalogues of Silvertown . Week 4 Drawing workshop on composite drawings, details and configurations, time sequences and patterns: architectural scale. : city scale. Non-scale models. Week 5 Seminar 1; Silvertown Study Seminar with Hugo Hinsley/ Housing an Urbanism. Seminar 2: Joint session with Design For London, Silvertown Project Team. Week 6 Seminar 3; Shrinking City and Post Collage City with Prof. Grahame Shane. Pin-up: Silver Town Samplings and individual collage proposal (Remodelling Silvertown). Week 7 Revisiting modernist projects and their urban topologies.
Topological analysis of their building types and related fabrication industries. Exemplary buildings visits The Sainte Marie de La Tourette (week 7) Week 8.
Seminar 4; On Fragmentation with Peter Carl.(week 8) Pin-up session. Week 9. Weekend Fabrication workshop at the Hooke Park. Non-scale architectural models. Week 9 Models of urban appliance in multiple scales. Followed by Collage workshop. Week 10 Tutorials. Week 11 End of Term Jury. Week 12 Unit Field Trip during the winter break (date will be informed). Urban Sampling Workshops in the central Tokyo. Workshop 1; Void Metabolism with Yoshiharu Tsumakoto (Tokyo Institute of Technology). Workshop 2: On f2 site. Recycling Concrete Buildings with Professor Shigeru Aoki. Term 2 Design research by making. material experiments at the Hooke Park and the AA workshop. The project at this stage, require individual agenda for conducting research and analysis, experiments working with chosen materials and fabrication principles informed by the model proposals for detail components, Project should propose to modulate operational and spatial variations; analysis and experiments will require documentations not only of its fabrication procedures but also wider technical context in response to the reality of the urban dynamics in the wider notion of the sustainability as means to maintain cultural tolerance. Week 1 Submissions Hand in. Technical Study thesis Pin-up session. Week 2 Design thesis of material study proposals: articulate individual objectives on material experimentations in relationship to design synopsis. Week 3-4 Hooke park session 2. Material research by fabrication.
Week 5 Contextualization of models of urban components in to multiple scales. Speculative scenarios and constructed situations along the existing timeline of Silvertown site. Week 6 Interim jury. Seminars: pin-up presentations of individual design thesis project agendas. Tutorials. Week 7-8 Hooke park session 2 (detail fabrication). Silvertown Remodelling design thesis research. Week 9. TS. Intrum Jury. Week 10. th 4 Year Review. Week 11. th 5 Year Review. Term 3 Final proposals should attempt to demonstrate creative interpretations of complex forces predominant on the working landscape of chosen area in Silvertown and speculate architectural artefacts responsive to the transitional aspect of post-infrastructural urban spaces. Week 1 TS. Hand in. Portfolio jury session to discuss structures of individual portfolios. Week 2 Tutorials. Week 3 Tutorials. Week 5 Final jury. Tutorials. Week 6 Tutorials. Week 7. th 4 Year End of Year Review. Week 8 Diploma Committee. Week 9 External Examiners.