Architecture & Historic Urban Environments MA
Modules Issues in Historic Urban Environments Module Co-ordinator: Dr Eva Branscome Design Research for Historic Environments Module Co-ordinator: Hannah Corlett Surveying & Recording of Cities Module Co-ordinator: Colin Thom, Survey of London Histories of Global London, 1900 to the Present Part II (Optional) Module Co-ordinators: Prof Ben Campkin and Dr Clare Melhuish Design Practice for Historic Environments Module Co-ordinators: Hannah Corlett and Sabine Storp Dissertation/Major Project Module Co-ordinators: Dr Edward Denison and Hannah Corlett
Kaunas, Lithuania. Location of the Architecture & Historic Urban Environments study trip for 2018, the European Year of Cultural Heritage. Photograph by Junyuan Yan
Architecture & Historic Urban Environments MA 2019 Programme Director: Dr Edward Denison Welcome to the annual exhibition of work from The Bartlett’s Architecture & Historic Urban Environments Master’s degree. The programme pioneers a fresh and critical approach to architecture and historic urban environments. Students examine cities from around the world, beginning with one of the most exciting of all: London. Working alongside historians and researchers from The Survey of London team, students learn the processes of urban surveying, recording, mapping and analysis alongside urban strategies and key issues concerning cultural heritage. In tandem with developing a robust theoretical and practical understanding of sites, students have the opportunity to develop their own design practice, thinking creatively about how historic urban environments might thrive, rather than just survive in the future. This year, students have investigated where change, whether deliberate or accidental, marks our cities. Cities, architecture and objects mutate over time, previous existences remain, but are threaded, over-sailed or injected with the new. Materials also have their own life. Damage, dirt and decay often change form, feel and function. Kintsugi, the Japanese technique of fixing broken ceramics with gold, is a way to turn something imperfect into something precious. It is a practice that is part of a wider Japanese philosophy, wabi-sabi, which sees all imperfect and incomplete things as possessing a beauty of their own. Wabi-sabi also appreciates irregularity, asymmetry, transience and damage. Students have identified a mark, whether physical or intangible, made upon the city of London. The original form is understood and respected, the drivers and manifestation of the change embraced, but something inherently new is created and celebrated out of the transformation. As with the philosophy of kintsugi they have treated breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
Students 2018-19 Matei Alexandru Giorgio Badalacci Nefeli Christidi Han Dai Aikaterini Foutaki Rui Huang Samuel Langley Zhangheng Liu Fatma Onsiper Tian Pan Yudan Pan Androniki Pappa Samidha Pulsakar Fritz Strempel Maria Belen Suarez Teran Selin Yalkut Junyuan Yan
Design Practice for Historic Environments In this module, students develop their own design proposals for either reusing and reshaping a chosen site or producing a broader design strategy for an urban environment. Towards a City of In-Between Androniki Pappa The in-between realm is formed in the poetic moments of junction or tension between contradicting situations in the urban landscape. Exploring the opposite concepts of private and public in the area of Exmouth Market, not as two clearly defined adjacent opposites, but as a layering of more or less permeable spaces, such in-between qualities are revealed. The spatiality of these places can represent a spatiotemporal experience that becomes the operating principle of a network of places, a ‘city of thresholds’. Those spaces of encounter are the alternative to a culture of barriers, a culture that defines the city as an agglomeration of identifying enclaves. The project forms an empirical study, exploring how the memory and habituality of these spatial qualities transform and distort our perception of public and private realms and as an extension of the city as a whole. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the way that he constructs the image of the city in fragments, the project points towards a city of in-between through
Site axonometric and intervention models examining thresholds, by Androniki Pappa
redrawing the portrait of the area. Initially, walking is used as a method to recognise the area. Three walks are held regarding the familiarity with the place: a wander, a walk and a visit. The outcome of each is a Nolli-style map of private and public perception, only instead of black and white, shades of grey are used. The bigger or smaller changes among the colours of the maps highlight areas where perceptions of privacy change depending on habituality. These areas are the fragments or moments of in-between. They inform the collection of elements of different scales and characteristics. The project then explores how memory and experience, that are not always scalable and linear, affect the image of the city. In the juxtaposition of these elements that are not normally found together, new irruptive truths are produced. The elements are taken out of their physical locations to be explored through their characteristics and relationships, using the methods of mixing, projecting and scaling. This exploration resembles the ways that our minds construct space through memory. Finally, the new portrait of the city is created, firstly by re-drawing the city as a new ground of in-between moments, and then by highlighting and activating these moments, testing and stretching the relationship between private and public.
Surveying & Recording of Cities
Keeling House: A Social Housing Innovation Katerina Foutaki Keeling House was a sincere attempt to create an environment where the community spirit of the East End might live on, even after the demolition of the traditional terraced streets. Denys Lasdun had prepared this systematically. He looked at the terraced slums his flats were to replace to understand the specific community he was designing for. Through interviews and studies of the traditional terraced street life, the architect came up with a design that tried to incorporate the key elements of the past in a contemporary structure. In his book Architecture in an Age of Scepticism, Lasdun stated: ‘The buildings are related to other buildings which may be close in space, however far off in time but they do make stylistic concessions to the past. I look for a substructure from the past and try to transform this in modern terminology’.1 In an interview he also mentions: ‘These were people who came from little terraced houses or something with backyards. I used to lunch with them and try and
understand a bit more about what mattered to them, and they were proud people… And as a result of these contacts I didn’t have flats. I said no, they must have maisonettes, because this would give them the sense of home.’ 2 The qualities of East-End terraces which Lasdun attempted to recreate included the two-storey layout of the terraced house, and a mixture of private balconies with semi-public access decks equivalent to a front yard. For this reason, instead of flats he used two-storey maisonettes as a building component of his cluster blocks and placed them on top of each other to create each block. In contrast with conventional slab blocks, there are no long, closed corridors. Instead the access to the dwellings is through balconies in each of the wings. By arranging the four blocks across each other in an appropriate distance, Lasdun hoped to encourage communication between neighbours. The areas around the lift were communal ‘drying areas’, where residents could meet and chat so that the previous backyard of Bethnal Green is to some extent recreated. In this way, Lasdun sought to give residents a sense of place and belonging and to preserve the neighbourliness and community they were used to in their old homes.
Ninth Fort, Holocaust Memorial, Kaunas, Lithuania. Location of the Architecture & Historic Urban Environments study trip for 2018. Photograph by Junyuan Yan
1. Denys Lasdun, Architecture in an Age of Scepticism (Auckland: Pearson, 1984) 2. Lasdun quoted in Municipal Dreams https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com, 2014
Through a series of lectures, seminars, practical workshops and walking tours of London, this module teaches students how to document urban historic environments in social contexts.
Dissertation/ Major Project Guided by their specialist supervisors, students draw upon the work carried out over the course of the year to produce an original research project in the form of a dissertation, design proposal, film, artwork, gallery installation or digital scripting. Ad-dressing the Landscape: Research into Systematic Landscape Variations on Stowe Gardens, Stourhead Gardens and Villa D’Este Gardens Matei Alexandru Supervisor: Sabine Storp The project started as an exploration into the formed landscape, the garden, often imagined by the likes of Capability Brown as a natural land formation that is, in actuality, heavily influenced by the human imagination. In consequence, the question raised is: To what extent can new landscapes be imagined, learning from previous historical examples and subsequently abstracting them into ‘new’ terrestrial formations? Throughout my research process I look into the historic appearance and importance of the British landscape garden, but also form a parallel between other land formations, both past and present, that influenced and were
Photographic mapping of terrestrial abstraction, by Matei Alexandru
influenced by it. One important factor was the Italian garden, which directly or indirectly – mostly through paintings – influenced the vision of the English landscape. The thesis also looks into present occurrences and the pragmatic and idealistic historic link formed between the past and the present, thus exploring the positioning of the garden into the world and the relationship formed between the ground and the skies. To research this, I looked into the writings of James Corner. A second layer of enquiry is formed by the differences in understanding the landscape through personal and standardised forms of surveying and measuring, such as the metric system and the measuring of things according to different body parts. Finally, intended as inhabitable space, a link between the two-dimensional plan of the garden and the historic mode of dressing (the pattern) is emphasised. This process leads to a patterned system of understanding the subject at hand. In consequence, the design output extrapolates abstract forms from both English and Italian gardens (Stowe Gardens, Stourhead Gardens and Villa d’Este) in order for systematic landscape variations to be made possible.
Design Research for Historic Environments In this module, students investigate contemporary architectural solutions, urban conditions and social, economic and cultural practices, and propose creative interventions that challenge, reinterpret, reuse and enhance the historic environment. Wabi-Sabi Matei Alexandru, Nefeli Christidi, Androniki Pappa Wabi-Sabi is embodied in the street markets of London; a celebration of historic ritual and a field for temporal social and spatial connections between different communities. During the market’s operation, the street is a vessel of colour, a kaleidoscope of bodies, smells, sights, sounds and cultures, creating a performative act, which leaves its marks on the street when the market is over. Similarly, the mark of the street’s nightlife, welcomes the early sellers and visitors in the morning; both create the story of the street, formed by more permanent and temporal scars. After identifying the elements that compose the market’s image: people, constructions, intangible elements (sound, smell, colour) and time, this research focused on recording them all under the spectrum of movement. Hence, the creation of both the shortand the long-term marks ‘take shape’ as a performative act, which draws inspiration from stage design. The work is an understanding of the success of markets to inform how to apply this learning, going forward as designers, to alternative situations and applications.
Dynamic model, emulating the grain of market occupation, by Matei Alexandru, Nefeli Christidi, and Androniki Pappa
Critics The programme welcomes regular panels of critics from mixed professional backgrounds. Thank you to all of this year’s critics: Prof. Peter Bishop Professor of Urban Design, The Bartlett Chris Boyce Founder of Assorted Skills + Talents Shumi Bose Director of Exhibitions, RIBA; curator and writer Phil Coffey Founder of Coffey Architects Sandra Coppin Founder of Coppin Dockray Matt Driscoll and Jack Hosea Founders of Threefold Architects Martyn Evans Creative Director U+I; Deputy Chair LFA; Developer Prof. Murray Fraser Professor of Architecture and Global Culture, The Bartlett
Iulia Fratila Senior Urban Designer, Fletcher Priest Architects Daisy Froud Founder of AOC; Interpreter of places Wayne Head MD at Curl la Tourelle Head Architecture Rory Hyde Curator of Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism, V&A; Curator and writer Murray Kerr Founder, Denizen Works Tarek Merlin Founder, Feix&Merlin Architects Joe Morris Founder, Morris+Company Alexandra Steed Principal, URBAN; Landscape Architect Guang Yu Ren Winner of the RIBA President’s Medal for Research 2017 Max Titchmarsh Founder of MAX Architects
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