Introduction

Architecture Art and Design after Unity Learning from Siena The Values of Formation and the Formation of Values

The work in this publication celebrates the work and achievements of the Architecture, Art and Design students of the University of East London. All of this work seeks to explore ideas around sustainability as a shared theme for this year. This book is by necessity the briefest assembly of many ideas, the briefest glimpse into our unfolding of knowledge and values. It assembles our experimentation that is playful yet underpinned by deeply held values. All of us have been amazed at the way the students and staff have maintained such excellent and exciting project work within the constraints of the Covid outbreak. I would congratulate you all on this achievement. This introduction looks at the secular values underpinning the creative process and how they shape our environment and our lives. I consider how values arise out of close inspection and understanding of societal need. In this sense I suggest that we adjust our existing values and create new values based on need and an assessment of the human condition. We will look historically at how societal issues in Siena led to the formation of values around Common Good to guide the development and evolution of their society. We will also look at two contemporary issues which have given rise to new values to guide our own society. In this way we consider how the secular values of the future grow out of our careful understanding of the needs of our society. We look at how change in the values of the creative process leads to new lives and forms new cultures. We will challenge our everyday

experience and understanding of values as permanent and fixed.

Thinking about values and the creative process, I was interested to read Hisham Matar’s novel A Month in Siena which explores the small city-state of Siena as a microcosm of artistic thinking in the 14th Century.1 Sienna is built along a ridge with two principal public spaces, the surrounding buildings of which provide a deep insight into the values of Sienese citizens in the 14th Century.

Firstly, the Piazza del Duomo lies with the Duomo Cathedral along its edge. The Annunciation by Duccio di Bouoninsegna (1311) is an altar piece originally situated in the Duomo, now on display at the National Gallery here in London. The painting uses a description from the Gospel according to Luke to portray the Angel Gabriel visiting Mary. Duccio depicts the Angel and Mary in the same way and to the same scale, this equivalence indicating a perceived balance between spiritual and everyday life.

Secondly, just a hundred yards away lies the Piazza del Campo, a large fan-shaped space with the Palazzo Pubblico (seat of government) providing a stage to this urban theatre. I am indebted to Hisham Matar’s writing for introducing me to Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s The Allegory of Good Government (1338), a fresco adorning the walls of the Sala de Novei in the Palazzo Pubblico (Fig. 1). Matar describes Lorenzetti’s depiction of the values of good government represented across several rows of seated figures. Wisdom is seated at the top alongside Faith, Charity and Hope. Below, Common Good is flanked by the virtues, with Justice, Peace, Fortitude and Prudence on its left, and Magnanimity, Temperance and Justice on its right. These figures rule over, and interact with, the citizens, magistrates and military who are depicted below. Viewing this scene in tandem with Duccio’s Annunciation, we have an explicit portrayal of the secular and religious values of the citizens of Siena. It is interesting that these values based around Common Good were literally embedded in the Art, Design, and Architecture of the city-state, assisting both the formation of their society and culture, and our understanding of it six centuries later.

But what of our values?

It can be argued that many of our current concerns, such as equality, are no more than the expansion of justice depicted in Siena. There are, however, two new aspects of the human condition that we need to address today that are absent from the values of Sienna: our relation to the machine, and our relation to sustainability.

The expansion of our knowledge of the world and civilisation presents new challenges and a need to reassess, and perhaps replace, existing values. Here in the UK our industrial revolution began in the 1750s and we are still aligning ourselves to the impacts of the machine (and now machine intelligence) in our Art, Architecture and Design. At UEL we have been growing and developing our strength in digital fabrication with the expansion of our digital workshops and the introduction of hybrid working. These new facilities will have important changes in the expression of Art, Architecture and Design as students and staff

experiment with this new technology in project work and research. For example, our partnership with Tongji University in Shanghai has led Isaie Bloch and a group of students to design Confluence, a communication installation which uses digital fabrication as a methodology of form finding.2

Our relationship to and understanding of sustainability is much more recent. In the UK the first scientist to use the term “Ecosystem” was Arthur Tansley in 1935.3 This is not altogether surprising due to the Enlightenment legacy of categorisation encouraging the breakdown of scientific study into smaller and smaller elements. The reversal of this thinking and the recognition of the need to understand the relationships between such elements was a breakthrough for thinking and our civilisation.

The next important step came with the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act which introduced government protection to Nature Reserves.4 At this stage it was obviously thought that the protection of isolated areas of the earth’s surface would be sufficient. The publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962 revealed the threat posed by industrialised agriculture and changed the scale and implications of the threat to nature.5 The gradual expansion of this thinking to include oceans, air quality and climate clarified that protection was needed for the earth as a whole, not just isolated areas. This thinking has accelerated in recent years, with the UK government declaring a Climate Emergency in 2019, and the forthcoming 2021 UN Climate Change conference in Glasgow aiming to outline specific emissions targets. These governmental and international responses indicate the emergence of sustainability as a fundamental issue to which we must orient our society. The key question is thus where the figure of sustainability will sit in the fresco of 21st Century good governance. The implications of this new value on the education of Artists, Architects and Designers is fundamental. Going forwards all students will need to address sustainability in aspects of their project work and research. Our studios are realigning to the associated new core skills and content and this is already manifest in project work and research. Pollution Pods by Michael Pinsky is a good example of this thinking.6

More generally, I am also very grateful for the support given to us by many sponsors and practitioners. In particular I would mention Maria Segantini and Carlo Cappai for organising our international lecture series on the theme of Water. I would also like to thank the practitioners who contributed to the national lecture series including the Student Society lecture series, the Detour Ahead Art Lecture series and those who visit for crits and reviews. These lectures have considerably enriched the thinking that drives our work. In particular I would mention Professor David Porter who lectured on the Continuity and the work of Neave Brown. I would like to thank the students who have assisted with these societies including the president of the student Architecture and Design Society, Kathlyn Pagador, and the other members of the committee including Robert Venning, Georgia Hoggins, Rafael Ives, Riberiro Fischer, Federica Guarini, Guilherme Bressaneli, Ridwan Salman and Laila Rose Kricha.

We are also very grateful to the practitioners who have been mentoring students and offering placements on the RIBA programme and on their own account. In particular we mention Sir Robert McAlpine and British Land for their continued sponsorship of the excellent Broadgate student competition. In particular I would note Charles Horne and Jeff Tidmarsh for their excellent support and expertise in leading the competition.

At the core of our teaching philosophy is the relationship developed between staff and students and the play of the design process. Students are taught one to one, in small groups, in studios, workshops and lecture halls, and now online. Our project work follows a systematic pattern of setting aims and values, investigation, experiment and innovation. I would like to thank all the staff and students for their excellent work this year and for adjusting to the Covid crisis with such energy and skill. I congratulate all our students and staff for their project work undertaken in such difficult circumstances.

Lastly, I would like to congratulate those students leaving us and wish them every success. Siena teaches us that we need to understand and embed our values in our Art, Architecture and Design to enrich our lives and to allow our successors to understand our thinking and actions. I am reminded that our word University

derives from the Latin Universitas meaning whole or community. Please stay in touch with us. I hope in your professional life you will be able to learn from Siena, be able understand the values of the past, and play a part in forming the new values of the future. Through harnessing history, research and innovation, you will fulfil your own potential and the potential of our new century.

Carl Callaghan BA (Hons) Dipl RIBA Head of Department Architecture and Design

Notes

1 Matar, Hisham. (2020) A Month in Sienna, pp.16-17. UK: Penguin.

2 Bloch, Isaie. (2021 - work in progress) Confluence, with Tongji University Shanghai China.

3 Eco system. The term “ecosystem” was first used in 1935 in a publication by British ecologist Arthur Tansley. Functional Ecology 1997 11, 268–271.

4 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949. This was an Act to make provision for National Parks and the establishment of a National Parks Commission; to confer on the Nature Conservancy and local authorities’ powers for the establishment and maintenance of nature reserves. https://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/12-13-14/97/contents.

5 Carson, Rachel. (1962) Silent Spring, USA: Houghton Mifflin.