Bartlett Design Anthology | UG1

Design Anthology UG1

Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1)

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 Mud City: Bioregions, Ecotopes and Atmospheres

Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

2023 Common Ground: Effective Use of Land

Rosie Hervey, Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

2022 Common Ground

Rosie Hervey, Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

2021 Down to Earth

Amica Dall, Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

2020 Alba Gu Bràth (Scotland Forever)

Amica Dall, Toby O’Connor

2019 Binary

Mads Hulsroy-Peterson, Eleanor Lakin

2018 Flux

Mads Hulsroy-Peterson, Elie Lakin

2017 Fulfillment Centres

Jon Lopez, Hikaru Nissanke

2016 Invisible Infrastructures: the unHousing of Science

Francesca Hughes, Gergely Kovács

2015 Living Patterns: Housing

Sabine Storp, Patrick Weber

2014 Civic Spectacular

Holly Lewis, Sabine Storp

2013 Undercurrents

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite

2012 Groundswell

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite, Joerg Majer

2011 Digital Dreams of a Floating World

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite

2010 Architectural Transmutations and the Forgetting of Air

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite

2009 Palimpsest

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite

2008 Déjà vu

Max Dewdney, Penelope Haralambidou, Chee-Kit Lai

2007 Allegory

Penelope Haralambidou, Eduardo Rosa

2006 Illuminations

Penelope Haralambidou, Eduardo Rosa

2005 Equinox – Navigating Time

Penelope Haralambidou, Eduardo Rosa, Sabine Storp

2004 Real Fictions

Penelope Haralambidou, Eduardo Rosa

2024

Mud City: Bioregions, Ecotopes and Atmospheres

Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

Mud City: Bioregions, Ecotopes and Atmospheres

Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

UG1 investigates the processes of natural and local material construction. We work on developing timelines, settlement structures, building types and material strategies that respond to a specific ‘ecotope’: a distinct landscape condition.

This year we investigated and interpreted the specific conditions of the River Roding in Barking, East London, focusing on tectonics and atmosphere in the design of future-proof dwellings. What could our cities look and feel like if we embrace and celebrate our urban rivers and clay-rich ground?

Earth can be made up of many things, including clay, silt, sand, gravel, stone, chalk, not to mention waste from construction and industrial processes like concrete, glass and chemicals. Earth components can be processed and combined with an infinite variety of other ‘natural things’ like plants, timber and mycelium, plus animal and insect by-products.

However, the subsoils where most potential earthen building materials are found also support topsoils. Through important practices like regenerative land management, it is now understood that about 25% of biodiversity lives in our soils – and that they are the largest terrestrial store of carbon. What is the new architecture that springs from a critical and creative attention to this incredible resource?

We began the year with a programme of physical experimentation, combined with an ambitious collective precedent study of 24 earth-related buildings, in collaboration with our sister unit Y3S3 at the University of Cambridge. In the course of site identification and analysis, we gained first-hand experience of river catchment maintenance through a day of reed harvesting with the charity Thames21.

On our field trip to Brussels, Paris and Lyon we visited historic, modernist and contemporary places, buildings and practices, including a tour of the landmark building Victoria with architecture collective 51n4e, and a workshop with earth experts BC Materials.

From this collective knowledge base students launched their individual projects and have developed a great diversity of inventive and meaningful design investigations, ranging from the sensitive repair and rearticulation of existing council estates to the conception of bold new typologies for new ways of living on a variety of town-centre, industrial and wildlife sites.

Year 2

Sofia Erpici Del Pino, Pia Greenway, Trent Jack, Stella Ladanyi, Louisa Neal, Alexandra Pantouli, Abisola Rutter, Yi Mun (Kristy) Yu

Year 3

Beatriz Goodwins

Banuelos, Hannah Simon, Alessandra Villanueva

Technical tutors and consultants: Tom Davies, Nicholas Jewell, Wei Lim

Critics: Anastasia Glover, Rosie Hervey, Olivia Neves Marra, Hugh Queenan, Tim Waterman

Partners: Unit Y3S3 at the University of Cambridge

Sponsors: Thames21, Land & Water at Rainham, Rochester Square in Camden, Panopus Printing, Earthborn Paints

Thanks to Jan Opdekamp and Jasper Van der Linden

1.1 Hannah Simon, Y3 ‘A Light Touch for the Symbiocene’. The project explores how locally sourced light earth materials can be used to improve and transform a housing estate in Barking and Dagenham to meet today’s and tomorrow’s needs. Its structural and material strategy shows how a traditional interwar London terrace can be remodelled to deliver medium-density housing that accommodates a wider range of household sizes, while also introducing much-needed social and environmental connections. To stimulate participation and agency, it adopts a ‘case study’ approach with one pilot street featuring an urban room as the starting point, which can be replicated by residents across London and beyond.

1.2–1.3 Pia Greenway, Y2 ‘Beckton Levels’. The project proposes a home for the elderly on the Barking side of the River Roding and a children’s education centre across the river within a nature reserve. A new raised pedestrian route across the river connects the two sites, addressing the threats to biodiversity and many species caused by the current sprawling public paths. The home for the elderly and the children’s centre are designed to be soft, comfortable and warm environments made from natural materials and bathed in sunlight. This creates a calm, secure and peaceful space connecting the residents and visitors to the site’s natural beauty.

1.4–1.5, 1.7 Alessandra Villanueva, Y3 ‘Navigable Native Nexus’. A four-span undulating timber bridge provides the Barking community with a new access route to a nature reserve across the River Roding and beyond East London. To ensure continued maintenance and care, carpenters and their families are provided with a new settlement with homes, gardens and workshops as part of the new route across the river. Utilising the prevalent local materials, such as reeds for railings and building insulation, the project fosters a more connected and sustainable urban environment, emphasising the significance of community stewardship in maintaining and preserving our built environment.

1.6 Beatriz Goodwins Banuelos , Y3 ‘Wattle and Daub in a Modern Existence’. Located on a former industrial site in Barking, the project uses sustainable materials and building practices to reinvent affordable housing. Using prefabricated wattle and daub cassettes as a contemporary construction material, the project re-envisions the ideals of farms: practising sustainable agriculture and living within nature despite the industrial surroundings; promoting resource efficiency by growing the building’s own materials and having allotments on site; and bringing communities of families together through communal activities and cluster living, thus enabling a better quality of life.

1.8–1.10 Alexandra Pantouli, Y2 ‘On Thresholds, Climate and Delay’. This project envisions a town square on the bank of the River Roding, complemented by a public living room, a laundrette and homes of different sizes. Embracing the notion of thresholds, the design bridges the current gap between land and river, integrating the houseboat residents into the wider Barking community. While delaying the flow of rainwater to avoid flooding, the proposal also slows down the everyday life of the residents and passers-by. This new place encourages them to engage positively with their built environment and each other, as well as fostering a deeper connection to the river itself.

1.11–1.12 Trent Jack , Y2 ‘How to Grow Heirlooms’. Harts Lane Estate is an old heirloom with a questionable legacy. This project inserts a fragmented ceramics hub into the leftover spaces to address the issues of cramped use, monoculture and asbestos-contaminated soil. A kiln sits at the physical heart of the space, becoming a fiery rallying point for a blossoming cooperative. A café and laundrette complement it as extended living rooms

for this new community, promoting social activity and personal safety, day and night. Residual soil from the ceramics processes is layered across the estate, forming new safe ground for residents to play and garden on, re-establishing authorship in a space that previously seemed to be built against them.

1.13–1.14, 1.16 Abisola Rutter, Y2 ‘Barking Water Retreat’. The project integrates advanced clay tube filtration systems into the River Roding, London’s most polluted river. This design provides a cleaner habitat for the river’s ecosystem and cold water swimming pools for human visitors, seamlessly converging the realms of ecological remediation and recreational repose. The architecture also filters sound, such as bird songs and the river’s flowing water, by providing areas with obscured views and amplified auditory experiences. Housing for scientists and visitors serves as a threshold between the natural environment and the built landscape, with views focused on the water.

1.15, 1.17 Yi Mun (Kristy) Yu, Y2 ‘Layers of Care and Repair’. Located on the banks of the River Roding in Barking, the project provides affordable self-build housing for families who have agreed to build and maintain their own homes and wider communal areas using shared tools and materials available for free near the site. This ongoing relationship transforms the site into an intermediate public space that pedestrians can use as they like, depending on the tidal river, which floods part of the site daily. Expressing construction processes that respect the surrounding natural environment as much as possible, the project proposes a new form of selfmaintaining architecture.

1.18, 1.21 Sofia Erpici Del Pino, Y2 ‘Growing a Community’. The programme consists of an evolving journey, where two buildings, their inhabitants and a lush forest gradually grow in size and diversity, starting with plantations, a crèche, a kitchen and a workshop. Offering affordable, flexible and partly communal housing, the units within the building feature doubleheight ceilings and mezzanines, which residents can extend to expand their homes in the future. Inspired by the Chinese Fujian Tulou, the material strategy proposes hyper-locally sourced rammed earth and timber from the home-grown forest, ensuring resilient maintenance and use for future generations.

1.19 Louisa Neal, Y2 ‘Marsh Island’. Embracing a riverside condition, the project proposes an elderly home that enables residents to engage with local biodiversity, including the site’s vast birdlife. Most elderly homes are more hotel-like than home-like, lacking individuality and a sense of ownership for the residents. Inspired by villages and towns and how they create communities, this project proposes a building that gives care home residents pride in their living space and direct access to nature. The surrounding landscape is flooded to restore its pre-existing wetland, creating a resilient, beautiful and calm peninsula for the residents, surrounded by reeds and birds.

1.20 Stella Ladanyi, Y2 ‘Palimpsest, Layers of History in Barking’. A palimpsest is a type of manuscript that gets reused many times, bearing visible traces from earlier use. The programme focuses on celebrating and preserving Barking’s own rich palimpsest while creating new memories too. The activities include performance, collective storytelling and a communal kitchen encouraging Barking’s diverse community to share their cultures through food, memory and rituals. The organic shapes of the new buildings sit within the grid-like framework of the existing structure on site, creating a layered composition with a main ceremonial route leading to the adjacent River Roding.

2023

Common Ground: Effective Use of Land

Rosie Hervey, Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

Common Ground: Effective Use of Land

Rosie Hervey, Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

Buildings are typically made upon land and crucially (though we may sometimes forget) from land. Creating buildings involves the formation of new land in various ways. In the context of the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis, what kinds of architecture emerge when we investigate the most effective use of land?

Working towards a decarbonised future means using less resources and less space. If we adhere to this agenda while trying to preserve human resilience and enjoyable qualities of life, we must make every square inch we build work ten times harder. How can we lose the slack and maintain generosity? How can we make space and lose carbon?

This year UG1 have been investigating the design of effective, hardworking, mixed-use thresholds, rooms and buildings as the keys to unlocking radical arrangements for an urban block in London. Continuing our interest in designing for change over time, we have studied and imagined new kinds of layered and shared space in the particular context of Walworth Road, paying attention to shifts of use and microclimate according to daily and seasonal rhythms. While studying the area’s rich history and present, and engaging with current socially-oriented projects on the ground, we have worked across the scales of neighbourhood, room and body.

With each student developing an individual brief and architectural response, proposals imagine a future in which locally sourced and spatially intelligent architectural interventions radically contribute to our global future communities and ecosystems alike. Through experimentation with timber and clay, we have taken time to understand and engage with material properties and investigated how the sourcing, processing, assembly and finishing of materials can generate an architectural language that embodies ideas of effectiveness, coexistence and care.

Our field trip this year in southern England focused on Flimwell Park and the Woodland Enterprise Centre. Here we worked with expert foresters, makers and architects to understand how to design with local timber. We engaged too with ceramics by visiting the incredible factory of Darwen Terracotta in Blackburn and the studios of Rochester Square in London. We also participated in workshops facilitated by B-made which focused on the interplay between manual and digital methods and tools.

Year 2

Lucy Ayres, Mason Cameron, JoshuaJefferson Celada

Flordeliz, Delphi Fothergill, Jillian Mak, Caitlin McHale, Sneha Parashar, Iolo Rees, Jessica Richard, Sofie Stiekema, Lola Wilson, Min Yoo

Year 3

Sofia Forni, Gabriella Peixouto Bandeira Da Silva, Alara Taskin

Technical tutors and consultants: Ewelina Bartkowska, Martyn Carter, Tom Davies, Sienna Griffin-Shaw, Oli Haden, Danny Harling, Steve Johnson, Ben Lee, Wei Lim, Sharmada Nagarajan, Frankie Nowne, Josh Piddock, David Saunders, Jon Wilson

Critics: Joey Augustin, Chris Burman, Diana Cochrane, Tom Davies, Anastasia Glover, Jeremy Leach, Luke Vouckelatou, Rufus Willis, Sal Wilson

With thanks to the students of UG7 for our design co-reviews

Special thanks to: Walworth Garden, Walworth Living Room, Rochester Square, Darwen Terracotta, Flimwell Park and the Woodland Enterprise Centre

1.1, 1.4–1.5 Gabriella Peixouto Bandeira Da Silva, Y3 ‘Walworth Forest Garden’. The project investigates the adaptive reuse of a building fronting 60m of high street. Having identified a lack of ‘in between’ spaces in the neighbourhood, where people are free to linger or pass through, the proposal transforms the existing structure into a large semi-enclosed public garden. A space of great civic generosity is created by demolishing some of the hollow clay block floors and reusing them to form façades, seating and other elements. The refined façade and sweeping roof allow for urban furniture to be set in playful atmospheric conditions, creating a resilient city shelter which is empathetic to the public.

1.2–1.3, 1.24 Caitlin McHale, Y2 ‘Liberating Walworth’. Reconnecting the energetic Walworth Road with its former inhabited industrial yards and the recreational gardens behind the high street, this pilot for a series of community-funded projects carves a new courtyard for everyday community life into an existing urban block. A tessellation of buildings employing charred timber and thatch construction provides space for activities which are seasonal or require rented premises, creating a new multifunctional zone for residents to connect.

1.6–1.7 Iolo Rees, Y2 ‘Sleep’s Geometry’. Between the high street and railway line, a sleep clinic is set within a small forest and a series of gardens structured using slate stacks and a publicly accessible sheltered pathway. Here clinicians can empower patients to take control of their sleep across a range of open-air and enclosed sleeping spaces. Investigating adaptive reuse through the poetics and practicalities of material properties, the project formulates a highly sculpted and elemental environment which questions institutional assumptions and aesthetics around hygiene and comfort.

1.8 Sofia Forni, Y3 ‘Carter Place Creative Club’.

Responding to the redevelopment of Walworth Town Hall, the project investigates the performance of everyday life, transforming a supermarket car park into a new urban composition including homes, a theatre and a multi-use creative space. A focus building using straw construction and playing with chalk-white atmospheres provides a space for young entrepreneurs, an after school club, a community kitchen and a public living room.

1.9 Lucy Ayres, Y2 ‘Walworth Road Children and Parent Community Centre’. Investigating adaptive reuse, the premise retains the existing building where possible and only demolishes materials where necessary for connection points to the proposal, which tessellates with the first floor and roof. This creates a low carbon composition of timber framing, parquet flooring, existing 1950s brick and recycled woodchip and plaster interiors. Tiled walls reflect sunlight into the lower north-facing interior spaces, leading to a generous roof terrace offering a rare wide view over South London.

1.10 Sneha Parashar, Y2 ‘Towards Coexistence With Nature’. Sited in the Lea Valley, the project begins by adapting a concrete flood relief channel and carving out meanders for a new marshland. A two-phase building project reacts to the landscape in the form of a stilted timber structure with a flexible textile roof which accommodates a shift from industrial to monastic uses and where the migration of the environmental envelope welcomes willow trees into the building line.

1.11 Min Yoo, Y2 ‘The Walworth Community Kitchen’. Through the adaptive reuse of a supermarket building, the project provides space for small groups to come together and prepare meals, produce and products, encouraging the reuse of surplus foods to reduce waste and lower costs. Six main spaces are provided: a kitchen, fridge, restaurant, classrooms, terrace and garden –all for communal use. The kitchen speaks to its urban

context through its long, curved façade, which echoes the vertical rhythms of the surrounding architecture and bounces sunlight into the building and street.

1.12 Jillian Mak, Y2 ‘Walworth Community Centre’. Refurbished, partially demolished and re-clad with clay tiles, a large existing high street building is transformed in terms of function, energy efficiency and appearance, instilling a welcoming atmosphere and sense of civic pride through moments of spatial generosity and material atmosphere. Working playfully with programmatic connections and adjacencies, activity spaces are woven together, including a climbing wall, dance studios, study rooms, sheltered outdoor spaces and a courtyard garden.

1.13–1.14, 1.22 Lola Wilson, Y2 ‘Walworth Yard’. Inspired by the cottage industries that once occupied backyards and mewses, the project uses craft, both physically and metaphorically, to comment on wider social issues such as empowerment, law and the environment in the form of a centre for timber-based crafts. While the proposal’s shape sensitivity works around the existing building and yard space, the steam-bent timber façade demonstrates the technical skill and versatility of British timber species as both a craft and an architectural material.

1.15–1.16 Jessica Richard, Y2 ‘Walworth’s Family Centre’. The project proposes a building and urban intervention that brings people of all ages, religions, races, genders and sexual orientations back to the area. A rammed earth family centre and planted play street create a genuinely diverse and positive environment. The centre provides free childcare and counselling, enabling parents from all types of families to pursue an education or career if they wish.

1.17–1.18 Mason Cameron, Y2 ‘Bringing the Southern Light’. Animating spaces to reflect light and colour through material craft, the project enables a new Latin-American plaza to be illuminated with life, within climatic and seasonal UK conditions. An expansive and flexible hub of culture and celebration is created for Walworth’s diverse community on a ground floor made from brick and textiles, radiating colour and light while enabling on-site market workers to live in co-housing on the higher levels sheltered by hemp and thatch.

1.19–1.20 Delphi Fothergill, Y2 ‘Housing Connection: Civic Building Blocks’. Working with courtyard and street typologies, a playful composition of modular units of homes and bricks is set within the existing context, creating a new network of urban spaces and a diversity of thresholds between public, semi-private and private conditions. A new common ground of orchards, shops and workspaces is established through the phased transformation of an existing supermarket and car park. On the floors above this, an intergenerational co-housing typology affords opportunities for individuals to form relations through common social interactions.

1.21 Joshua-Jefferson Celada Flordeliz, Y2 ‘Active Walworth’. The project reforms a patchwork of alleyways, railway arches and playgrounds into a network of connected public spaces. A multi-sport building sits above and around this, inviting people of all ages and abilities to enjoy physical activity. The large-format timber building takes a prominent square form and plays with layering, transparency and sculpted voids, creating long views while activating nearby squares and streets.

1.23 Sofie Stiekema, Y2 ‘Walworth Community Kitchen and Garden’. Responding to the cost of living crisis, the project reclaims a supermarket car park to provide a landscape of allotments with buildings which play with the typology of the greenhouse. The main focus building integrates timber frame and rammed earth construction to create a symbiotic set of environmental conditions celebrating subtleties of thermal delight in architecture.

1.8 1.9

2022

Common Ground

Rosie Hervey, Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

Common Ground

Rosie Hervey, Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

By the 2080s London’s sea level is expected to have risen by between approximately 45cm and 1m. In the meantime many of our current flood water management assets are ageing or already at capacity. Simultaneously there is huge pressure on local authorities across London to provide more space for housing and commerce.

How do we embrace environmental issues such as fluvial and surface water flooding? How do we balance the needs of wildlife habitats, industrial estates and residential communities?

This year UG1 has been practising how to design for change over time. Exploring architecture as a process rather than as a product, we experimented with guiding and framing change across a wide range of physical and temporal scales.

Now more than ever, architects need training to work with confidence in situations of deep uncertainty. Together we questioned what it means to build with resilience and generosity, designing a locally integrated landscape vision that unlocks, shapes and preserves a piece of land in the Lea Valley for the next 150 years or more.

We moved through six chapters: Relief, Ground Up, Resilience, Generosity, Comfort and Narrative. In the process we considered proposals from the extraction of raw materials with which projects are made to the wider ecosystems and economies in which they are and will be situated. We developed designs both through landscape and structural strategies and material and interior studies. In each case we thought through the perspectives of imagined users and established a dialogue between our proposed landscape vision and the comfort of a good room.

Our investigations have been informed by seminars and workshops led by architects, planners, scientists and local stakeholders, including a field trip to the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales. These events have encouraged students to engage with the need for diverse and inventive collaboration to tackle the climate emergency.

Across three sites in the Lea Valley, shared with a parallel set of third-year Cambridge University undergraduates, students developed individual briefs and responded with grounded and ambitious design proposals. They investigated intelligent relationships between factories and workspaces, urban wetlands and willow plantations, testing the resilience of their proposals through potential future scenarios at a variety of scales.

Year 2

Fatemah (Sean) Abkhou, Arnold Freund-Williams, Zuzanna Jastrzebska, Shouryan Kapoor, Mikaella Konia, Riya Mamtora, Elina Seyed Nikkhou, Jerzy (George) Szczerba, Amelia Teigen, Yerkin Wilbrandt

Year 3

Yu (Colin) Cheng, Rupert Rochford, Barbara Sawko, Yuqi (Sunny) Wang

Technical tutors and consultants: Paul Allen, Joe Barton, Dieter Brandstatter, Aurimas Bukauskas, Philip Christou, Jonathan Cook, Emaad Damda, Deborah Eastwood-Hancock, Nigel Gervis, Lee Heykoop, George Horne, Oskar Johanson, Gemma Manache, Quentin Martin, Christine McLennan, Simon Myers, Jez Ralph, Ian Russell, Patrick Shannon, Sarah Thomas, Tom Ushakov, Chris Watson, Paul Wood

With special thanks to Cody Dock and Margent Farm

Critics: Julia Backhaus, Alice Edgerly, Anastasia Glover, Ben Hayes, Stefan Lengen, William MarrHeenan, Jane Wong

With thanks to UG5, UG6 and Cambridge University Y3S3 students

1.1–1.2 Zuzanna Jastrzebska, Y2 ‘Grain Valley’. How can a compromise be struck between industrial development, nature and human settlements? The project answers this question with a factory that is designed to be part of the ecosystem, rather than an individual object. Instead of taking the form of a production building, the factory is designed as a thatch mountain, a harmonious and permanent installation on the site’s hilly landscape, uniting the area’s industry with the contours of the Lea Valley.

1.3–1.5 Rupert Rochford, Y3 ‘Conversing with Wetlands’. Setting a precedent for the wider Lea catchment, the project proposes the selective removal of a concrete flood relief channel, embracing flooding to generate wetland creation and rewilding, which the architecture both frames and adapts to over time. This landscape strategy offers a more sustainable approach to flood defence within the valley, seeking to protect metropolitan sites along the course of the river as the climate emergency worsens. This goes hand in hand with a phased building strategy which integrates rewilding with the migration and evolution of human use, in this case converting a plastics factory to a conservation and education facility.

1.6, 1.11 Arnold Freund-Williams, Y2 ‘Arts and Crafts in the Lea’. The Lea Valley is a landscape that has been shaped over time by natural and human forces. As a place of rich biodiversity and deep industrial heritage, the project invokes the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement, investigating William Morris’s statement that ‘Wherever nature works there will be beauty.’ The project sets out a series of small-scale artisanal workshops which enable and encourage flexibility between indoor and outdoor spaces. The buildings themselves are designed to be embedded within the natural world, with a structure and material palette directly shaped by nature.

1.7 Yu (Colin) Cheng, Y3 ‘Undulation, a Vista’. The project focuses on achieving the optimal design solution for a sustainable glass-processing factory. A carbon calculator and a customised script are the main design tools. The embodied carbon of the structure was monitored carefully and its subsequent design iterations were evaluated before finalising the proposal. Relying on sustainable and locally sourced materials such as UK-grown timber and rammed earth, the core ambition of the project is to imagine a new relationship between human society and the natural world, starting from the present and specific industrial context.

1.8, 1.16 Riya Mamtora, Y2 ‘Natural Soap Factory’. Based in an area heavily damaged by its past and current industrial activities, the project applies a socio-bio-centric vision of buen vivir, investigating a reciprocal relationship between our health and the environment we live in. The building, whose function is to clean the surrounding soil, water and air while manufacturing soaps, will encourage a new way of production: one which considers its environment and sees making as a community activity and not something driven by money or individuality. The philosophy can also be applied more broadly to encompass more than factories and more than production. Design investigations examine how the building’s function might develop through its conversion into a food hall which also values local production and care for the environment.

1.9 Amelia Teigen, Y2 ‘The Glass Compass’. The project considers adaptation over time, shifting from a recycling centre to a dance college over a 150-year timeframe. A central glass tower provides a landmark or ‘compass’ for the community in Enfield, guiding people towards the River Lea to appreciate its presence and not just pass it by. Public and private spaces are intertwined through generous circulation spaces, allowing both the

community and the private users of the building to enjoy the internal atmosphere. The landscape strategy within which the building is integrated includes new bodies of water, extending the depth of the river edge into the industrial urban grain and working sensitively with the existing topography and light industrial urban grain.

1.10, 1.18 Mikaella Konia, Y2 ‘What if the Earth Runs Out?’ Initially occupying and adapting an existing brick warehouse, the project investigates the slow excavation and subsequent densification of the area, using earth from the site to develop a rammed earth factory. The project anticipates that space above the industrial sheds will eventually be used for residential units. As a showcase for how rammed earth could be used for large multistorey buildings, the project tests the construction methods and details required for resilience in shifting weather conditions.

1.12, 1.20 Shouryan Kapoor, Y2 ‘Common Ground: Tools of Porosity’. The project addresses the underlying issues affecting the Lea Valley on a wider scale: extreme land prices, overwhelming housing needs, threats of flooding and the economic squeeze on small-scale businesses. Set in a flood-receptive landscape strategy which broadens and encourages movement across the river, the proposed rammed earth structure accommodates both housing and workspaces, with generously top-lit workshops filling the centre of the deep plan and housing occupying the perimeter, capitalising on the beautiful views of the valley.

1.13 Jerzy (George) Szczerba, Y2 ‘Plant Factory’. Acting as a spatial filter, the project uses materiality and building orientation to gently control the internal conditions of temperature, humidity and light to make an ideal environment for growing orchids. The plants travel slowly through a sequence of spaces in the linear plan, with public cafes and viewing stations allowing people to observe different stages of the orchids’ growth as they meander between internal and external spaces. The longer-term strategy includes the gradual accumulation of residential edge buildings, hand in hand with the phasing of orchid production into a communal garden.

1.14 Fatemeh (Sean) Abkhou, Y2 ‘Stacking CLT’. The project provides a new piece of landscape infrastructure that enables the growth of the area and ensures that residential development is carried out sustainably. Occupying the tidal mudflats, a new willow plantation provides the bank with stability while providing raw materials for the fabrication of cross-laminated timber (CLT) structures using materials sourced on-site.

1.15, 1.19 Elina Seyed Nikkhou, Y2 ‘Poplar Boat Yard’. Located in the lower River Lea, the project encourages London’s reconnection to its industrial history and its waterways, as well as providing much-needed infrastructure for those living on the waters. Since the decline in industry, London’s waterways have become home to many; however, these boaters have long been neglected and mistreated. The project gives a public face to the boating community and provides communal space for the maintenance and upkeep of their boats.

1.17 Yuqi (Sunny) Wang, Y3 ‘Dye in the Lea’. The project addresses the vast amounts of pollution caused by the fashion industry. A programme of phytoremediation is initially employed to eliminate existing industrial soil contaminants. These plants then form the ingredients for natural fabric dyes that are created on the premises and subsequently filtered, before re-entering the surrounding waterways. Instead of creating entirely new structures, the project utilises the existing bricks found on-site, developing wrap-around façades that capture the sun’s ultra-violet rays to aid the factory’s dyeing and drying processes, while also forming an infrastructure of industrial-scale display.

2021

Down to Earth

Amica Dall, Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

Down to Earth

Amica Dall, Margit Kraft, Toby O’Connor

Can the way we build and the way we think about building and belonging to a place change how we inhabit the Earth? Politicians and pundits continue to predict that the future will belong to the knowledge worker, yet the present remains stubbornly physical. Although many of our imaginations are increasingly committed to the virtual, we carry them around in bodies that require food, warmth, affection, shelter and a planet that sustains conditions for life.

Construction remains a deeply physical practice involving vast logistical networks made of pits, mines, furnaces, warehouses, ships, trucks and rails, all focussed on the transformation of the subterranean into the superterranean and of sludge and rocks into the city and the rest of human material culture. Even the most humble of commercial materials is touched by hundreds of hands on its journey from source to site.

This year, UG1 stayed connected to this reality, with a strong emphasis on working with our hands. Taking a firmly material approach to the questions of site, survivability and belonging, we worked experimentally with a palette of three materials –earth, timber and stone – on a set of small underused sites, selected from the Mayor of London’s Small Sites x Small Builders programme.

We began by building a collective knowledge base of materials across a range of scales, from the body to the planetary, and developed skills in ways of making that are possible within a domestic environment using locally sourced materials. Students developed their own lines of design research to think about how, as architects, they can use materiality to create connections with a particular place – a sense of being at home in the world and with each other – and focussed on finding strategies, methods and treatments that are geared towards more sustainable, local and cyclic forms of building.

Individual briefs for specific sites were developed in relation to Grow, a community organisation based in London. Grow are currently creating a new urban farm in North London as an educational and cultural resource. The farm will be a place of direct embodied learning and shared endeavour.

Aiming for materially nuanced, sensitive and inventive responses to simple spatial requirements, the projects were developed to provide collective facilities within existing urban frameworks. The students engaged with established social infrastructures while creating new and transformative possibilities for the people that occupy them. The projects uniquely respond to their site but are connected by a collective aspiration to develop a deep and detailed understanding of what buildings are, where they come from, how they are made, how they feel to occupy and how they interact within their urban context.

Year 2

Dominik Do, Irene Entrecanales, Arnie Freund-Williams, Gabe Fryer-Eccles, Barney IIey-Williamson, Moe Kojima, Lim Wei Lim, Leo Osipovs, Flavia Scafella, Jerzy Szczerba, Yerkin Wilbrandt, Henry Williams

Year 3

Ahmed Al-Shamari, Megan Hague, Jacqui Lee, Poon Pairojtanachai, Wenxi Zhang

Critics: Sarah Alun-Jones, Noemí Blager, Eddie Blake, Ben Bosence, Alice Casey, Freya Cobbin, Jonathan Cook, Matthew Dalziel, Aude-Line Dulière, Alice Edgerley, Fran Edgerley, Anthony Engi Meacock, Christina Fraser, Luke Freedman, Ambrose Gillick, Anastasia Glover, Aidan Hall, Eleanor Hedley, Rainer Hehl, Gabu Heindl, Rosie Hervey, Summer Islam, Robert Kennedy, Noel Kingsbury, Louis Lupien, Quentin Martin, Ryan McStay, Ana MonrabalCook, Jasmine Pajdak, Roz Peebles, Amy Perkins, Kester Rattenbury, Chloe Revill, Guglielmo Rossi, Camille Sineau, Giles Smith, Steve Webb, Emily Wickham, Penny Wilson

1.1–1.2,1.22 Lim Wei Lim, Y2 ‘In the Ruins We Make’. Serving as a community-run extension of Grow, the project connects people with the natural world by finding the ‘sympathy of things’. The main buildings include a makers’ workshop, a furniture-upcycling centre and a farm-to-table school. In the spirit of thinking through making, the project is self-built and treats the existing urban fabric with care, employing incremental construction and reusing existing structures and locally salvaged materials. Temporary sub-structures allow for a state of ‘open completion’, celebrating the act of building and making.

1.3–1.4 Megan Hague, Y3 ‘Soil Remediation Centre’. The project is a pilot scheme for the research and maintenance of the soil beneath us. Carefully selected perennial flowers and grasses are cultivated to absorb pollutants like lead, arsenic and cadmium, that clean the site over time. Over a phased construction programme, the plants are harvested and combined with lime plaster to make an infill wall panel system. Anticipating future flooding, the site’s ground level constitutes a wetland garden with an array of brick structures, giving access to upper levels of long-span timber construction.

1.5–1.6 Ahmed Al-Shamari, Y3 ‘Wapping School of Seafood’. Referencing Wapping’s historic connection to the River Thames and the sea beyond, the project encourages direct and diverse access to nature and facilitates a range of activities for children and young people. Activities include sailing, rowing, fly fishing, the construction and maintenance of boats and fishing nets, and cooking and food production. Materials from the site are recycled and are integrated as part of a timber construction system to create an elegant, phased and flexible net-zero carbon building.

1.7–1.8 Moe Kojima, Y2 ‘Wapping Hill’. The project brings circular economy principles into everyday focus by processing Wapping’s waste textiles, paper and food under a publicly accessible and farmable mountainshaped roof. The journey from garment to ash of a Japanese Edo period (1603-1868) kimono inspires the overlay of two layers of circulation. An ‘industrial route’ visually celebrates the re-purposing of waste, and a ‘green route’ facilitates the direct experience of urban farming.

1.9–1.10 Henry Williams, Y2 ‘The Model Allotment’. A standard ten-rod allotment adjacent to the New River Path. The project is a practical tool for residents and the wider public to learn about gardening and food production. A flexible building of a barn-like typology, with a deliberate simplicity and legibility of construction, speaks in practical and imaginative terms to the agricultural history of Enfield, North London, and the potential for future adaptation and renewal.

1.11 Yerkin Wilbrandt, Y2 ‘Peace House’. The project responds to Grow’s values on children’s mental health and wellbeing to provide a playful and naturally built environment for yoga, meditation and mindfulness, set amongst the trunks and canopies of existing trees. The research for the project included experiments with timber, focussing on sourcing strategies, processes of production, treatments and finishes, and the testing of structural and textural possibilities.

1.12–1.13 Poon Pairojtanachai, Y3 ‘Project Camp: A centre for low-carbon life skills’. The project seeks to extend Grow’s children’s curriculum by providing a diverse and practical learning experience, foregrounding ecological systems and connections over time and place. To encourage collaborative and experimental forms of making and urban stewardship, the project creates a reciprocal relationship between a weekly and seasonal programme of activities. The construction of a series of buildings responds directly to specific site conditions, including layout, form, phasing, flexibility and materiality.

1.14–1.15 Arnie Freund-Williams, Y2 ‘Palmerston Forest School’. The project transforms an underused and awkward site, adjacent to the North Circular, into a set of outdoor rooms to form an accessible, self-contained and densely planted micro-forest environment for local nursery and primary school children. A series of small-scale buildings arranged in relation to the forest provides shelter from bad weather and space for tool storage, kitchens and toilets. Impact on the ground is minimised by playful stone foundations and elevated timber structures dressed in shingles above.

1.16 Gabe Fryer-Eccles, Y2 ‘Portobello Cookery School for Sustainable Urban Living’. The project proposes an urban cookery school and kitchen garden that teaches families from local schools to economically source, grow and cook nutritious food. Responding to the physical conditions of the site, the principal building is set into a slope and surrounded by a courtyard of gabion retaining walls. The material approach focusses on natural, sustainable and recyclable materials, including timber frames infilled with stone and construction rubble, internal clay render and floors of end-grain timber tiles.

1.17 Jerzy Szczerba, Y2 ‘A Warm Place for Notting Hill’. The project proposes a greenhouse-covered city farm on a disused rail embankment between Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road, West London. Responding to the goals of the client and the needs of the local community, an immersive series of spaces encourages exploration from the street context. Different climatic zones provide direct engagement with the cultivation of fruit and vegetables found on Portobello Market’s stalls and restaurants.

1.18 Dominik Do, Y2 ‘Portobello Forest Playground’. The project challenges the privatisation of outdoor green spaces along Portobello Road, West London, and proposes a green pedestrian shortcut and a loose-play forest playground. Timber, rammed earth and gabion construction methods create soft, warm and light-filled rooms, generous balconies and bridges. The proposal balances and integrates the needs for a kindergarten, cafe and bar, treetop route and forest pathway.

1.19 Leo Osipovs, Y2 ‘Farm in the City’. The project proposes a hydroponic urban farm and open kitchen, designed for agricultural education. Timber, stone and reclaimed materials are used to create large-span spaces and bridges across the three main areas of the site. The generous scale of the rooms allows space for gardening and dining. The layering and division of space is inspired by the phantasmagorical paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, such as The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490–1500).

1.20 Wenxi Zhang, Y3 ‘Grow Country Skills Training Camp’. The project aligns with Grow’s ambition to give all young people better access to nature and proposes an urban venue for learning outdoor skills, such as camping and mountain climbing. A landscape of planted hills and terraces flow around buildings constructed using reclaimed brick, stone and timber.

1.21 Flavia Scafella, Y2 ‘A Kitchen Garden for Portobello’. The project supports an alternative approach to food and nature in an urban context. Local primary school children are provided with outdoor kitchen space, workshops and a playful terraced landscape where they can be close to nature and actively learn about how things are made. Driven by a rigorous material approach, the design explores the tactile, structural and aesthetic qualities of hyper-local materials like reclaimed brick, timber and earth.

2020

Binary Amica Dall, Toby O’Connor

Alba Gu Bràth (Scotland Forever)

Amica Dall, Toby O’Connor

The locus of architectural thought has always been the building, and the building as a complete object with a logic, rhythm and sensibility of its own. Since the mid 20th century, this view has shifted towards an understanding of architecture in the context of the city, centralising a concern for things like infrastructure, complexity and growth.

We are at a point where we must make another profound shift – not only in how we build, but how we think, expanding from the urban to the territorial, from the limits of the city to the limits of the planet. We need to think critically, openly and fearlessly about our role in the world, and we must become ever more polymathic, able to mediate information from an ever more diverse set of sources and think on radically expanded timeframes.

This year, we have been exploring what it means to be sited and specific while thinking in a planetary context, learning how to balance genuinely long-term thinking with the responsibility to respond to pressing contemporary needs.

Glasgow is the biggest city in Scotland, and one of the largest in the UK. In the late 19th and early 20th century the population was well over a million, as people moved to work in shipbuilding, iron works and textile industries. Now there are about 600,000 people, with another half a million in suburban and new town developments in the wider metropolitan area, most of which were built in the late 1950s and early 60s. Glasgow is a rich, sometimes chaotic-feeling city. Large-scale industrial infrastructure remains in the dense urban centre, and huge tracts of vacant land break up some of the densest residential areas in the UK. The historic West End includes the art school and a diverse, fluid and relatively wealthy community, whilst the more static, working class areas in the North and East remain some of the most marginalised in Europe.

Embedded research across multiple trips to the city and its wider territories, has enabled students to choose their own sites and develop their own briefs, engaging with a range of conditions and scales from Parkhead in the East End to the western shores of the Firth of Clyde through material experiments and exploratory drawings. Our projects start from the careful consideration and adjustment of existing situations, variously rewilding, reforming, recycling and remediating from the ground up, with designs for residential and community buildings, nursery and play spaces, rehabilitation and research facilities, construction education centres, motorway theatres, urban forests and farms (and sawmills and factories therein), and more... all springing from a situated and expansive sense of deep care.

Year 2

Conor Hacon, Guiming He, Rhiannon Howes, Barney Iley-Williamson, Angharad James, Zeb Le Voi, Asya Peker, Michael Rossiter

Year 3

Rory Cariss, Samuel Dodgshon, Gabriel Healy, Mabel McCabe, Ben Murphie, Ellen Nankivell, Punnapa (Poon) Pairojtanachai, Thomas Richardson

Special thanks to Anthony Engi-Meacock and Giles Smith

Thank you to Agile City, Seyi Adelekun, Roo Angel, Baltic Street Adventure Playground, Eddie Blake, Valentin Bontjes van Beek, George Bruce, BarbaraAnn Campbell-Lange, Will Copper, Alison Crawshaw, Will Davies, Pierre D’Avoine, Experimental 7 (AA), First Steps Future Skills, Mark Gavigan, Ambrose Gillick, Alexandra Gomes, Jamie Goring, Paloma Gormley, Aidan Hall, Winston Hampel, Summer Islam, Tom James, Harry Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Margit Kraft, James Kwang-ho Chung, Nicolò Lewanski, Jon Lopez, Lola Lozano, Taneli Mansikkamäki, Quentin Martin, Neil McGuire, Ryan McStay, Aram Mooradian, Hikaru Nisanke, Rob Morrison, Kester Rattenbury, Simon Rix, Philipp Rode, Davide Sacconi, Irénée Scalbert, Nick Seaton, Kaye Song, Helen Teeling, Onur Teymur, Matina Theodoropoulou, Patrick Ueberbacher, James Ward, Martin Wecke, Emily Wickham, Abigale Wilson, Milly Wood

1.1, 1.11 Conor Hacon, Y2 ‘Construction College, Glasgow’. A construction college in Glasgow’s East End, underneath an existing cattle shed. The project attempts to produce and communicate a reciprocity between three subjects – construction, care and the city – and is framed by the question: What reciprocal object-tools can manifest a complexity, enabling us to act out, physically and mentally, the larger patterns we are in a fold with?

1.2 Asya Peker, Y2 ‘The Govan Early Years Centre’. This building project forms part of scheme to rewild an abandoned graving dock, attempting to enable a sesnitive reframing of perceptions of the area as a place for young children and parents to engage with the with the natural world and their (post)industrial history. Providing care for children aged 18 months to five years in a fully accessible building, the designs make a virtue of a challenging site by employing multiple circulation routes including a 48-metre ramp, weaving between insulated and permeable spaces for learning and play.

1.3–1.6 Gabriel Healy, Y3 ‘Forest Living’. The project articulates a forestry/housing scheme that could be replicated on alternative sites, where local natural materials are used to construct communities. Postindustrial Glasgow has been subject to rushed decisions which have torn apart social fabrics. Informed by explorations in the art of joinery, the project promotes a more nurturing approach, where a community can develop organically through generations, encouraging a culture of environmental education centred on the inventive reuse of waste products.

1.7 Guiming He, Y2 ‘Botanic Laboratory and Garden at Cloch Point, Gourock’. A small-scale research hub for the University of Glasgow located 40km west of the city centre on the Upper Firth of Clyde. Functioning as a facility for testing different growing conditions for plants, with the aim of improving life and wellbeing in Glasgow, the project has been developed through aesthetic and strategic considerations, including the employment of lowembodied energy materials to minimise environmental impact in both a local and planetary sense.

1.8 Michael Rossiter, Y2 ‘2-8 Landressy Street’. This project is a pilot scheme for infill housing to be owned and managed by Hawthorn Housing Co-operative as it expands to the east of the city, using vacant or derelict land (VDL) to redensify east Glasgow. The proposal comprises six family homes with kitchens overlooking a shared garden. The façades celebrate Bridgeton’s architectural history and the interiors are designed to be generous and legible. The project challenges UK housing standards and sets an example for urban redensification through the characterful development of VDL.

1.9–1.10 Rory Cariss, Y3 ‘Landressy Gardens: Social Co-Housing for Bridgeton’. This project consists of a social co-housing scheme and a series of communal infrastructures intended for use by both residents and the wider community. The scheme seeks to utilise shared resource as a means of encouraging social cohesion, and acknowledges the agency people deserve in relation to the physical fabric of their homes. Technologies used in its construction encourage and facilitate the easy maintenance and adaption of residences over time.

1.12 Angharad James, Y2 ‘How to be invisible: Rewilders’ Residence, Cowal Peninsula’. The proposal is framed by a wider speculative scheme: that the Scottish Government would endorse the rewilding of the West of Scotland in order to reduce carbon impact through the regeneration of the Caledonian Forest. The Cowal Peninsula, an hour west of Glasgow, would act as the pilot site. By translating the relationship with the landscape that rewilding promotes into a set of design principles, the project attempts to explore how architecture can embody wider ideas around ecology and land use.

1.14 Mabel McCabe, Y3 ‘Village for Children, Bridgeton’. Most cities are accidentally designed around adults. But what happens when you put children at the forefront? In tackling this question, the proposed housing scheme consists of multiple-sized apartments, employing playable thresholds and generous balconies, while also reproviding the functions of an existing single-use low-density medical centre and incorporating a large play space between blocks, allowing for parental oversight and vibrant connectivity to the adjacent highstreet.

1.12–13 Zeb Le Voi, Y2 ‘Parkhead Mental Health Centre’. The project propses a mental health clinic with onsite crisis housing for 16-25 year olds. Organised around two courtyards, the scheme offers an intermediate environment, bridging from a permeable street-side condition to a formal institution. The project seeks to address the treatment gap between diagnosis and hospital inpatient care or medication, and attempts to open up awareness of mental illness and wellness for those undiagnosed within the community. The design is informed by Stefan Linden’s thesis ‘Healing Architecture’ whereby the building should promote and encourage social interaction, normality and dignity within a free and open atmosphere.

1.15 Rhiannon Howes, Y2 ‘Horticultural Therapy Centre at Barmulloch, Glasgow’. In the context of post-industrial north Glasgow, the project proposes a horticultural therapy centre that contributes to the rewilding of Barmulloch’s brownfield sites – providing healing for both the people and the land. Inspired by the threshold of the walled garden, the project blends built and natural in a series of spaces that guides the healing process, easing patients into the surrounding landscape by gradually re-orientating according to its features.

1.16–1.18 Ellen Nankivell, Y3 Migrating/Making Ground: A New Settlement for a Flood Risk Community.’ The proposal is framed by the brief, whereby a radical new Scottish government takes a long-term approach to anthropocenic induced flooding. Within the first five years of a 100-year timeframe, a new settlement is built to stimulate the migration of a threatened low-lying community away from the ever-rising waters on the Firth of Clyde. The pilot site acts as a prototype or springboard for future settlement, utilising adaptable timber spaces and landscaping for water management, exploring how architecture in an age of climate change can withstand, embrace and enable changes to unfold through time.

1.19–20 Samuel Dodgshon, Y3 ‘The Charing Cross Theatre’. The project examines the M8 urban motorway in Glasgow, exploring its environmental impacts and planning its effective closure. Within this framework, the Charing Cross Theatre develops a precedent for how a set of closed motorway cuttings and flyovers in central Glasgow could be physically recycled and tied back to the city in cultural, programmatic and spatial terms.

1.21–1.23 Thomas Richardson, Y3 ‘Bridgeton: An Urban Agricultural Community’. Bridgeton, in Glasgow’s East End, is a ‘food desert’ and suffers from high unemployment, low life expectancy and a lack of essential community services. The project envisions a community-led agricultural transformation of the area, through the introduction of farming to low-density, car-dependent housing estates, offering employment, reducing food poverty, and improving biodiversity through stewardship of the land. Key to residents’ essential agency in this process will be the development of skills in farming, food preparation and construction. ‘Phase 1’ focuses on the construction of a new market, bakery and mill within a former shopping parade, seeding the wider regeneration of the area’s neglected high street. The transition sees Main Street as the new centre for community life: offering a space for industry, education and exchange.

2019

Binary Mads Hulsroy-Peterson, Eleanor Lakin

Binary

Mads Hulsroy-Peterson, Eleanor Lakin

This year, UG1 pursued an architectural agenda driven by the concept of ‘binary’ in the broadest sense of the word: an architecture that is generated by the tension between diametric extremes or two polaropposite states.

On a micro scale, we are inspired by the innate and embodied behaviours of materials, pre-determined by molecular, cellular or even atomic compositions; whilst on a macro scale, site-specific extremes, such as environmental conditions, cultural relationships or human psychology trigger design responses. The collective behaviour of pixels in digital matrices or components in mechanical processes inspire a machine architecture, where binary inputs inform predefined outputs.

Our work inherently evolves and adapts, and is thus heavily contextualised within a certain place and time. The existing condition, construction, occupancy and even the post-occupancy phases of our proposals are all key considerations throughout our design development. We nurture a design process where the speculated is swiftly realised throughout the design process, and where the making, testing and prototyping of scaled or 1:1 components of our proposals are examined, both physically and digitally, to be re-imagined on site as part of the built whole.

We started the year by identifying moments of binary within a site on Canvey Island in Essex. We designed and made physical devices, installations and small building proposals that responded to our observations. Responses included a ‘biomimetic sanctuary’ that heals the polluted landscape beneath it; a smuggler’s bothy, with a skin that responds to solar inputs, to camouflage or reveal the shelter at specific times of the day and year; and a dystopian fairground ride, where the track and vehicle work collectively to create an analogue, spatial and musical machine.

Following our site trip to Berlin, we applied the knowledge gained to develop highly resolved building proposals, which embodied the essence of the early binary investigations. Proposals included a ‘Freedom of Speech Centre’ that explores the city’s relationship to freedom of expression, the building’s façade becoming a physical embodiment of the manifesto spoken within; ‘Landscape of Glimpses’, a radical self-expression club inspired by Berlin’s underground culture, incorporating a melting wax façade and fibreoptic arrays; and a ‘Field Recording Museum’, which draws on Berlin’s historical and cultural relationship with monuments and their immortalising of the past, by recording and playing back intangible audio moments found within the city through the textures in the fabric of the building.

Year 2

Temilayo Ajayi, Bengisu Demir, Defne Kocamustafaogullari, Yue Yu

Year 3

Alp Amasya, Issariyaporn Chotitawan, Elizabeth Day, Jiana Lin, Faustyna Smolilo

Partners: AKT II, Bare Conductive, BlindPig, Jason Bruges Studio, Piercy & Company

Consultants and critics: Stefan Dzisiewski-Smith, Stephen Gage, Anam Afroze Hasan, Kirstine Jaeger, Daria Jelonek, Tetsuro Nagata, Christine Peters, Danae Polyviou, David Shanks, Guy Woodhouse

1.1–1.2, 1.16 Alp Amasya, Y3 ‘The Landscape of Glimpses’. Inspired by the hedonism of the Berlin underground, ‘The Landscape of Glimpses’ is a radical self-expression club, which challenges and erodes the boundaries of societal norms. Over time, the semi-subterranean building merges the public space above with the hidden depths of the club below, through its semi-translucent melting-wax façade and fibre optic arrays.

1.3 Elizabeth Day, Y3 ‘Climate Centre’. Located in one of the most polluted areas of Berlin, the ‘Climate Centre’ aims to both cleanse and purify the local environment, as well as inform and educate visitors in sustainable living. An array of self-grown, perforated mycelium fins filter prevailing air currents of pollutants, and also support a series of pod enclosures that accommodate both public and private laboratory and educational spaces. The biodegradable mycelium ‘pixels’ are grown on site and are, therefore, easily replaced once expired.

1.4 Yue Yu, Y2 ‘Disaster Follies’. This project proposes a series of emergency follies situated on the seawall at Canvey Island in Essex. By exploring the outcomes of an extreme condition – the detonation of 1,400 tonnes of explosives onboard the wrecked ship, SS Richard Montgommery, that ran aground in the Thames Estuary in 1944 – the follies collectively act as a warning and defence system to protect local residents.

1.5 Defne Kocamustafaogullari, Y2 ‘Techno Realm’. This project commemorates the euphoric era of 90s Berlin and the drive for escapism that the city, at the time, encapsulated. The building transforms from day to night, reconfiguring from a museum to a music venue, incorporating the layered and repetitive nature of electronic music in its mechanical character. The tunable acoustics in the dynamic ceiling, the energy harvested in the wall-mounted solar reflectors and the phosphorescent way-finding device, are key ways in which the building adapts itself to perform.

1.6 Issariyaporn Chotitawan, Y3 ‘Smuggler’s Bothy’. This proposal imagines Canvey Island as an underground gateway to London. Tracking the journey of present-day smugglers, it proposes a series of shelters sited at key locations along the route. By exploring the concept of camouflage, each unique bothy is concealed within its distinct landscape and is only revealed to the smuggler at their angle of approach and at a particular time of the day.

1.7, 1.10 Alp Amasya, Y3 ‘Spydoscope’. This project diffuses the distinct boundary created by the flood wall on the beach-front on Canvey Island, connecting the two contrasting and extreme landscapes on either side. The covert viewing device is directed towards different views and ultimately creates paranoia and division amongst the communities on the island.

1.8 Issariyaporn Chotitawan, Y3 ‘Loneliness Recreational Creative Hub’. The ’Loneliness Recreational Creative Hub’ has rated Berlin as one of Europe’s most difficult cities to settle in, and looks to help integrate visitors and provide opportunities for interaction. The proposal’s reflective ‘limbs’ extend out into the adjacent park, inviting people, light and images of the surrounding landscape into the social space within. Reflective satellites at various locations within the park rotate to ensure light paths are directed into the building at all times of the day.

1.9 Defne Kocamustafaogullari, Y2 ‘The Toxic Ride’. Located in the so-called ‘oil-land’, ‘The Toxic Ride’ is a dystopian fairground ride whose track and vehicle work collectively to create an analogue, spatial and musical machine. The unsettling experience amplifies the contradiction of the toxicity and joy that characterises Canvey Island.

1.11–1.13 Jiana Lin, Y3 ‘Field Recording Museum’. Drawing on Berlin’s historical and cultural relationship with monuments and their immortalising of the past, the ‘Field Recording Museum’ aims to record and play back intangible audio moments found within the city. A network of textures integrated throughout the circulation and exhibition spaces of the internal fabric of the building create sound vibrations when played.

1.14 Faustyna Smolilo, Y3 ‘Crabbing Shack’. Located in the Thames Estuary off the shore of Canvey Island, the ‘Crabbing Shack’ uses the traditional activity of crabbing, local to Canvey, to integrate new communities. Its architecture takes inspiration from fishing apparatus, gently adjusting to the natural levels, tides and buoyancy of the water to accommodate various activities within the space.

1.15 Faustyna Smolilo, Y3 ‘The Freedom of Speech Centre’. Located close to the Luther Bridge in Berlin, ‘The Freedom of Speech Centre’ affirms the city’s affinity with freedom of expression, providing a platform from which views can be shared and learnt. A matrix of copper-façade pixels transforms with patination so that the building becomes a physical embodiment of the manifesto spoken within. Copper pixel sizes vary, each size relating to a key view, thus ensuring that the message is discernible from the outside as well as within.

2018

Flux

Mads Hulsroy-Peterson, Elie Lakin

Year 2

Christopher Collyer, Imogen Dhesi, Wan Feng, Zhongliang Huang, Yixuan Lu, Agnes Parker, Baldeep Sohal, Maya Whitfield

Year 3

Gunel Aliyeva, Nur Mohamad Adzlee, Liana Buttigieg, Ela Gok, Margarita Marsheva, Jolanta Piotrowska, Giselle Thong, Jun Yap

Thank you to our consultants and critics: Stephen Gage, Kirstine Jaeger, Marie Munk, Tetsuro Nagata, Danae Polyviou, Richard Roberts, Sabine Storp, Viktoria Viktorija

Flux

Mads Hulsroy-Peterson, Elie Lakin

This year UG1 examines an architecture which is able to sense, interpret, adapt and respond to an identified altering or evolving situation –an architecture which is in a constant state of flux. We are inspired by forms that can mutate, materials that can record, and technologies with embodied behaviours that perform; all tools that alter in state in response to changes within a condition.

Our work is heavily contextualised within a certain place and a certain time. The consideration of the physical context at both macro and micro scales, as well as the design life of our proposals, has been critical to our thinking. The existing condition, fabrication and construction phases, as well as occupancy and even post-occupancy phases, are all key considerations throughout our design development. Making is a key part to our iterative design process. We nurture a design process where the drawn and speculated are swiftly realised through the making, testing, and prototyping of scaled or 1:1 components of our proposals, to be re-imagined onsite as part of the built whole.

We started the year by identifying, observing, recording and mapping an identified flux within a site close to The Bartlett. We designed and made physical devices, installations and small building proposals that respond to or enhance the experience of a flux. Responses include an interactive mirror that extends views around corners, personal space protectors, selfperpetuating wax timing devices and closed-loop localised leaf-shredding devices. Following our site trip to Lyon we applied the knowledge gained from our first project to develop highly resolved building proposals. The proposals embodied the essence of the ‘flux’ investigations and thus evolved, responded or adapted over time either to situations or to the behaviours of occupants or those who passed by. Proposals include a Hydrological Research Centre which is in a constant state of renewal as it harvests its own building material from the two rivers it is located close to, and a bakery which acts as a timing device as it responds to the specific location of the sun for the key stages of the making of bread.

We have been keen to describe how our proposals have changed over time so have looked to represent transitions in both drawing and built form. Our technical understanding of the proposals has been key, thus leading to part-realising the speculated form through making, testing, and prototyping.

Figs. 1.1 – 1.3 Jolanta Piotrowska Y3, ‘Temple of Wood’. A compagnonnage house, school and workshop allow the woodworking students of Lyon to explore and experience the hidden potential of timber. This project considers the evolution of the building as a whole from fabrication to occupancy, exploring the potential for the reuse of the concrete formwork for other parts of the its construction and use. Fig. 1.4 Gunel Aliyeva Y3, ‘Restaurant Pomme de Terre Lyonaise’. This restaurant and research facility aims to celebrate the refined potato cuisine that Lyon is famous for. Fig. 1.5 Giselle Thong Y3, ‘Earth to Earth’. The architecture of the this Trappist monastery echoes the repetitive daily cycles of the cheesemaking and brewing processes taking place within the building. The decaying rammed-earth building

exhibits the memory of its users through its materiality. It requires continual renewal to prevent it from degrading and returning back to the ground.

Figs. 1.6 – 1.7 Ela Gok Y3, ‘Transferring Warmth: A New Language School for Lyon’. Exploring language as tool for integration and heat as a tool for social interaction, the school teaches and promotes the French Language whilst also providing a public hub for community gatherings. The public space around the building uses heat and communal fireplaces to attract people to congregate. When heated, embedded thermochromatic pigment within the building’s fabric causes the building to ‘glow’ in the hours of darkness. Fig. 1.8 Liana Buttigieg Y3, ‘The Karate House; Altering Perceptions of the Art and the Self’. Exploring the connection between French and Japanese cultures, the building aims to return the practitioners of this art to traditional karate practice. Phase change materials embedded within walls and

windows provide the public with glimpses into the journey of the practitioner. Figs. 1.9 – 1.11 Zhongliang Huang Y2, ‘Fight Club’. Drawing on observations of an underground tension within French society, this proposal aims to create an underground space for the citizens of Lyon to alleviate stress through physical combat.

Fig. 1.12 Nur Mohamad Adzlee Y3, ‘Rhône and Saône Learning Centre’. Located at the confluence of the two rivers, the Learning Centre acts as a river-specific climate change laboratory and educational facility. The building harvests and fabricates its own building material from the sediment of the two rivers; its architecture therefore reflects and exhibits the characteristics of two distinct rivers and their journeys. Fig. 1.13 Jolanta Piotrowska Y3, ‘Temple of Wood’. A compagnonnage house, school and workshop allow the woodworking students of Lyon to explore and experience the hidden potential of timber.

Fig. 1.14 Christopher Collyer Y2, ‘The Leaf Shredder’. Mass leaf collection in London parks is ironically costly in carbon and labour, despite its intention to benefit the city’s environment. The leaf shredder device is a proposed localised solution to the absurdity of this mass leaf collection. Fig. 1.15 Baldeep Sohal Y2, ‘#notme’. Inspired by the #metoo movement, the device tests the acceptable limit of personal space encroachment in different situations. The device transforms from a skirt to personal space protector in response to perceived threatening behaviour from those around. Fig. 1.16 Liana Buttigieg Y3, ‘The Second Space’. Exploring the idea of providing assurance and transparency within the public realm, the interactive installation visually connects two distinct spaces. Upon the approach of an observer the responsive mirror rotates to

reveal the hidden spaces beyond. Figs. 1.17 – 1.18 Agnes Parker Y2, ‘A Series of Time Machines’. A series of specialised analogue clocks explore concepts of time, duration,repetition and rhythm through sound, the movement of light and the transformation of materials. The final version is a selfperpetuating cyclical candle, which chimes hourly to signify the passing of time. Figs. 1.19 – 1.20 Nur Mohamad Adzlee Y3, ‘The Wind Machine’ The Wind Machine visualises the abundance as well as the complexity of energy within the environment. The device translates wind energy to motion, creating wind mappings, each distinct to a particular time and location.

2017

Fulfillment Centres

Jon Lopez, Hikaru Nissanke

Year 2

Gunel Aliyeva, Daniel Boran, Sarah Jones, Dagyung Lee (Eeda), Vincent Lo, Gabriella Watkins

Year 3

Ella Adu, Richard Aina, Natasha Blows, Clementine Holden, Dustin May, Edie Parfitt, Karina Tang, Connie Tang Koon Cheong

Thank you to:

Miraj Ahmed, Mick Brundle, Matthew Butcher, Paul Cowie, Pierre D’Avoine, Max Kahlen, Chee-Kit Lai, Taneli Mansikkamäki, Sabrina Morreale, Douglas Murphy, Luke Olsen, Elena Palacios Carral, Colette Sheddick, James Taylor-Foster, James Ward

Fulfillment Centres

Jon Lopez, Hikaru Nissanke

A few miles east of London, where the Thames begins to snake its way out to the ocean, sits a bewilderingly banal landscape of flood plains, docklands, sheds, landfills and light industry. Our unit was interested in the relationship between all of this, with particular focus on the ties between landscape, modernity and labour.

Students began the year in East Tilbury, an unlikely modernist utopia on the marshes of Essex. It was built by the Czech shoe maker Tomas Bata in the 1930s to provide housing and social infrastructure amongst a set of vast, hulking factory buildings. Since the factory’s closure, the development and its subsequent decline is registered in the collective memory of its inhabitants and former employees. Students devised responses to the current state of the town, picking over the physical and ideological ruins of modernity. These first projects were structured around the idea of preparing and remaking the ground in anticipation of an incoming development.

That incoming development was another bookend to the 20th-century capitalist project, the big shed. Responding to Amazon’s plans to build a large distribution hub in Tilbury, the unit was interested in the shed as a representation of an immediate, untapped and unchecked ecosystem which is rapidly defining large parts of the UK. Behind their anonymous façades lies an almost endless array of objects and processes, yet decisions about their operation, use and siting has largely bypassed the architect.

The principal project for the year was thus to confront the contemporary relationship between private enterprise and state, and between individual and community. Using the framework of a Section 106, (the mechanism through which developers and landowners are required to mitigate the impact of large development), students were asked to appraise, critique, refine, confront or wholly reimagine how such a large building might meet the context via a more humane reworking of the land. Plurality of programme was encouraged, and projects sought to express how the big shed might be stitched into the town and landscape beyond, or were considered as new, large (ex)urban interiors. The rising threat of automation loomed over many projects, as students tackled what the new routines and rituals of labour might be in this landscape. We sought to examine a non-nostalgic reading of what a relevant craft and construction might be, exploring through drawn and physical constructions a new material expression for Tilbury.

During the year, the unit travelled to Rome in the footsteps of Piranesi. We observed and surveyed the city from antiquity onwards, to better understand its continuing ability to shape our contemporary cultural imagination.

Fig. 1.1

Edie Parfitt Y3, ‘Robin Hood Gardens Ruin’. A drawing exploring the mythology of landscape and modernity, whereby an imagined section through the central mound of Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens details the making of a landscape formed from the demolition and excavation of the site’s previous constructions. Figs. 1.2 – 1.5 Dustin May Y3, ‘Reconstructing the Fragment’. This project proposes the sampling of Tilbury in a non-hierarchical manner to uncover its latent beauty and potential. Situated in opposition to the idea of regeneration through a singular landmark building, the proposal seeks to encourage investment in the area by implanting pieces of social infrastructure amongst the existing housing stock. The houses are carefully surveyed, then selectively deconstructed to create a new patchwork of

interiors across the town that cater for local needs. Programmatic juxtapositions are accommodated via an architectural language of cutting and fragmentation.

Fig. 1.6 Richard Aina Y3, ‘Landscape, Industry and Culture’. In response to the closing of the Bata factory in 2005, the project seeks to renew two of the buildings on the site by inserting a series of performance spaces that bridge the gap between them. This new theatre extends out into a reworked marsh landscape, which anticipates potential flooding of the site by acting as a flood defence. Figs. 1.7 - 1.9 Edie Parfitt Y3, ‘Tilbury Civic Spine’. A new civic route is proposed along an existing A-road that separates the town of Tilbury from its port. A new town hall of sorts is imagined, strung out along the road, responding to the needs of commuters and locals alike. The existing passages of vehicles and pedestrians are augmented and intertwined to create a complex network of spaces and surreal interactions between the two. The proposal

acts as a conduit for the traffic to pass freely along the road, but it also seeks to encourage lateral movement and interaction between the various ‘islands’ of Tilbury, with the aim of stitching the town and its inhabitants back into its surroundings.

Fig. 1.10 Sarah Jones Y2, ‘Thames Causeway’. Façade study for a building and landscape to collect and display the archaeology of the Thames. Figs. 1.11 - 1.12 Gabi Watkins Y2, ‘East Tilbury Catacombs’. A new network of burial chambers forms a new ground condition for East Tilbury, connecting the former community hubs of the old factory town. These new spaces are envisaged as a series of urban interiors that accommodate both the ceremony of death as well as the routines of everyday life. Excavated earth from burial and construction is used to form the aggregate for an expanding collection of structures and rooms above ground that connect back to this subterranean world. Fig. 1.13 Natasha Blows Y3, ‘The Institute of Copying’. Responding to regional plans to transform the Thames Estuary into a hub for creative

technologies, this project proposes a meticulous copying of the most iconic of the Bata factory buildings. This notion of copying is intended as a critique of the desire to be contextual, given that the original building was such an alien imposition on the landscape. Contained within the new copy is a series of workshops, studios and public spaces for East Tilbury, which is envisaged as a new creative centre for the county.

Figs. 1.14 – 1.16

Clementine Holden Y3, ‘Appliance Archive’. Situated adjacent to the new Amazon fulfilment centre and conceived of as an extension to a suburban cul-de-sac, this project imagines a new archive of domestic appliances. Part museum, part landfill, the proposal aims to collect and display an ever-growing repository of material culture. Internal walls are constructed from cast in-situ expanded polystyrene blocks which function as both display niches and ornamentation.

Fig. 1.17 Karina Tang Y3, ‘Knee-Deep’. A collection of minimal dwellings built on the floodplain surrounding the Amazon distribution shed to cater for seasonal shifts in the work force. To maximise profits, Amazon’s labour model works on a direct relationship between number of employees and the number of things sold: the higher the demand, the more people they

hire. This can mean an extra 3,500 workers are needed at peak times. During the off season, the units function as student accommodation and are clustered into small groups and communities around a collection of larger community rooms and facilities. The proposal thus responds to pertinent questions about the diminishing security of employment, the nuclear family and the ‘home for life’.

2016

Invisible

Infrastructures: the unHousing of Science

Francesca Hughes, Gergely Kovács

Year 2

Richard Aina, Seowon (Sharon) Change, Nikhil Cherian, Wai (Tiffany) Chong, Olga Karchevska, Divesh Mayaramani, Kevin (Hyun Sik) Yoon

Year 3

Hoi (Christy) Chan, Jack Cox, Lucca Ferrarese, Jack Leather, Xiao Ma, Nihal Tamang, Rachel Yemitan, Yinong Zhang

Thanks to our Technical Tutor Matthew Wells

Invisible Infrastructures: the unHousing of Science

Francesca Hughes, Gergely Kovács

In contrast with the positivism of science, architecture is often cast as ‘knowledge’. But what, we might ask, of architecture’s periodic positivism, or of the scientist’s quiet wielding of knowledge? Mechanical objectivity, the view from the machine – Nagel’s “view from nowhere” – is still a view from somewhere. Falsely revered as an uncorrupted preserve of the rational, fetishized or treated with suspicion, architecture’s relations to the domain of technology are not simply complex but also complicated. In the architect’s many seminal flirtations with the authority of science – think of Le Corbusier’s love song to the sleek autonomy of the aircraft – we often find that what is being addressed is precisely not science, rather a desired something else that technology has become a cipher for. Simply put, from Konrad Waschmann to Greg Lynn, when architects say they are talking about technology, they are usually not.

With this in mind we started our own talking this year with the Science Museum, a conversation we shared with some 34,118 technological artefacts in their Wroughton Large Object Store, each a mute witness to the convolutions of progress and obsolescence. Focusing on the objects that belonged to their Physical Infrastructure Collections, the essentially invisible systems that underpin architecture and urbanism (gas and electricity distribution, sewerage and sanitation, transport and telecommunications, civil engineering and construction) we exploited architecture’s ability to strategically mediate not only between the scale of the object and the vast scale of the infrastructural, but also between the domain of culture and the domain of science: both conceptual 'infrastructures' of thought in themselves.

What emerged from this mediation is a curious set of microinfrastructures, architectural proposals that in the addressing of essentially infrastructural questions perform a reterritorialisation of scalar jurisdictions. Rather than unconsciously hook up to the infrastructural they resist and subvert its requirement to conform: Rachel voluptuously exposes the intersection between our fear of shit and the designed failure of infrastructure. Nihal questions both the trust in the machine and idealization of the natural in the purification of the water we daily drink. Lucca’s catalogue of seminal failed construction details takes us to 1970s Boston where the failure of a glazing detail notionally rewrites the space of risk in the shadow of the John Hancock Tower. Kevin returns Tesla and Edison’s AC versus DC battle, science at its quintessentially most irrational, to Holborn Viaduct, the nascent site of electrical infrastructure. Jack C treats Alberti’s perspective as our ultimate infrastructure of spatial distribution and, in the footsteps of Palladio’s Vicenza experiments in virtuality, reconfigures the city as theatre fly-tower. Meanwhile, Jack L locks himself in Wroughton and unravels the infrastructure of the object store to its ultimate conclusion: the entropic endgame of obsolescence.

Figs. 1.1 – 1.2 Nihal Tamang Y3, ‘The Engineering of Purity’. Central to the idea of infrastructure is the fiction of efficiency and its control, not least over the natural. This proposal is a micro-infrastructure that interlaces machined and natural water purification systems between St Thomas’ Hospital and the Thames. Both purification systems are a measure of time. Here fluctuations in the tidal cycle produce spillovers and the mingling of different water bodies. Within this engineered landscape the same pool is sometimes pure and sometimes foul, confronting Londoners with their fear of the river. Only the system’s logic revealed through its full set of iterations lends order to what appears disorientating and disorderly.

Fig. 1.3 Jack Leather Y3, ‘Decay by Design: the Archive of the Never Lost'. As the Science Museum moves the entire

contents of its Blythe House store to join the store in Wroughton, where it will double the footprint of objects, this project asks: what is the endgame of the archive? When is a technological artifact obsolete in its archival life also? The ‘Archive of the Never Lost’ harnesses and amplifies the decay agents in the Wiltshire landscape to accelerate the entropic degradation of the terminally obsolete artifact. Deploying an array of macro and micro decay delivery infrastructures (weather-catchers, cold-bridges, drainage prevention details) the landscape houses a set of pavilion-like tombs customised to the artefacts they must destroy.

Fig. 1.4 Jack Cox Y3, ‘Teatro Viale - the City as Fly-Tower’. Palladio and Scamozzi’s extraordinary experiments in virtuality, manifest in Teatro Olympico’s extruded streets whose false perspective notionally projects into Vicenza’s fabric, remind us that the virtual was once not simply digital, nor simply dumb.

‘Teatro Viale’ similarly treats Vicenza as its fly-tower – this time literally. In pursuit of Josef Svoboda’s Total Theatre of ‘psycho-plastic space, elastic in its scope and alterable in its quality’ this proposal, with its infrastructure of rails and grip men, physically cuts, edits and relocates elements of the cityscape as performative actors in themselves. As street and theatre merge within this new theatrical corporeality the public is never quite sure which side of the proscenium arch, the invisible ‘skin’ between artifice and the real, they are on.

Fig. 1.5 Lucca Ferrarese Y3, ‘Perpetual Monument to Failed Details’. Ronan Point’s H2 joint, which not only brought down half of the tower but also 1960’s high rise-housing in general, illustrates the power of the failed detail to rewrite the city. This anti-monument to Hancock Tower proposes a public space of risk in which the spectacle of erratically failing gaskets and falling glazing can be observed as it is endlessly reharvested, recast and resituated on the façade only to fail again. The staging of perpetual failure and its denial of completion interrogates architecture’s uneasy relations to failure, not least in its more heroic moments. Fig. 1.6 Rachel Yemitan Y3, ‘The Authorship of Shit: Sewage and Seduction’. Some things prefer to remain anonymous. When the Thames Tideway tunnel is complete it still won’t stop raw sewage overflowing into the

river on a regular basis. This scatalogical archive exploits the strategic indeterminacy of authorship and waste in order to confront the city with its horror of effluent by stealthy seduction as the overflow inflates a voluptuous riverside palace of shit. Fig. 1.7 Richard Aina Y2, ‘Robert Fludd’s Balloon Burst Chamber’. This typological parody treats the technology of particle collision/observation chambers (cloud chambers, bubble chambers) as belonging to the same tradition as Robert Fludd’s 1617 memory theatre: a space whose surfaces are able to serially record and delete (or forget) the events which they contain: Here, the pantomime gesture of bursting an ink-filled balloon whose splatter is registered by Fludd’s rusticated masonry. Fig. 1.8 Kevin (Hyun Sik) Yoon Y2, ‘The Housing of Infrastructure’. As we become increasingly reliant on battery

powered devices this project revisits the case for D.C. electrical supply via a speculative rewriting of space in two historic sites central to Thomas Edison’s failed endeavour in his battle with Tesla’s A.C.: Pearl Street’s now demolished 1882 Power Station in central Manhattan and the palatial substructure of Holborn Viaduct – Edison’s trial location for the first electrical infrastructure. The first is notionally reconfigured using Aron’s Clock Meter in which two pendulums measure time and consumption, only to clash if there is a surge in the latter; the second, using the continuous measure of a conveyor belt of traders orbiting an internet exchange for optimised dealing from their D.C. underworld.

2015

Living Patterns: Housing

Sabine Storp, Patrick Weber

Year 2

Yangzi (Cherry) Guo, Úna Haran, Karolina Kielb, Tobias Petyt, Calvin Po, Ngai Lam (Michelle) Wang, Meng (Tony) Zhao

Year 3

Annecy Attlee, Uday Berry, Naomi De Barr, Thomas Cubitt, Alice Hardy, Rikard Kahn, Robert Newcombe, Oliver Parkinson

We would like to thank Samson Adjei, our technical tutor, for his support.

A big thank you to our critics: Shumi Bose, Matthew Butcher, Mollie Claypool, Gonzalo Coello de Portugal, Rebecca Fode, Jamie Hignett, Johan Hybschmann, Carlos Jiménez Cenamor, Inigo Minns, Tim Norman, Emily Priest, Safia Qureshi, Peg Rawes, Matthew Springett, Rae Wittow-Williams and also to Florence Bassa, Jamie Hignett, Alan Ma, Aiko Nakada, Timmy Whitehouse and Emily Priest for sharing their work with UG1

For their amazing support, special thanks to Shamsul Alam from Camden Council and Momota Kathun from the St Pancras Estate Tenancy Association, Dr Caroline Newton from The Bartlett DPU and Boonserm and Paula Premthada from Bangkok Project Studio

Living Patterns: Housing

Sabine Storp, Patrick Weber

In his book A Pattern Language (1977), Christopher Alexander catalogues altogether 253 patterns in architecture. Each pattern, or (architectural) element is described as itself and in the context of a bigger system –architecture. They are presented as ‘prototype solutions’ to common problems. The work is based on his earlier work, The Oregon Experiment (1975). In it, communities were encouraged to get more involved in the shaping of their ultimate environment and the architecture they inhabit. This resulted in a community encyclopedia, offering sample solutions to specific issues. According to Christopher Alexander, architecture only exists to solve human problems.

London’s population has grown by a million since 2001, the fastest ever rate in the history of London. All these people need somewhere to live. Current predictions forecast that an additional 809,000 new homes are needed by 2021 to meet ever-growing demand in London. This works out as an additional 115,500 households a year, or 9630 a month, or 321 new homes per day. Unless these figures are achieved, house prices will rise to an unaffordable level, the prosperity of the city is in danger, key services will have to be cut because keyworkers are unable to afford to live or commute from where they live to where they work. Combined with ever-growing restrictions on where new developments can take place, restrictions on building on flood plains and destroying green belt land or areas of natural outstanding beauty, an aversion to living in high rise developments, and other local interests that seem to be adversely affected, this creates a problem that seems impossible to resolve.

In term 1, our students worked with the St Pancras Way Estate in Camden to develop ideas to transform communal spaces and to initiate a positive change in the use of the public spaces by introducing small-scale architectural interventions. This was followed by an excursion to Bangkok. Students explored the canals (klongs) off the beaten track to discover how the informal approaches of living in this city allow communities to knit tightly together. In the final stage, our students speculated and (re)invented new housing typologies and ways of living in the dense urban context along the Regents Canal in Kensal Town and Ladbroke Grove. The projects include a variety of different living concepts along the canal: communal living, self-build initiatives, housing for the elderly, co-housing typologies, shared housing for young mothers, and new buffer housing on top of the local supermarket for tenants evicted from demolished estates in the area.

Fig. 1.1 Calvin Po Y2, ‘Outposts’. This proposal seeks to decentralise the community hub by creating distributed, outposts of ‘community’ that can be adapted according to the resident’s needs using standard scaffolding parts. Fig. 1.2 Tobias Petyt Y2, ‘Tree Housing’. Inspired by tree houses, the project is sited next to the canal, emulating tree houses both in structure and ideal, creating a diverse escapist tree community in the skies. Fig. 1.3 Karolina Kielb Y2, ‘Shared Housing for Single Parents’. The building accommodates single young parents. The shared housing scheme allows young parents to learn from one another within the shared open space and a surrounding public space. The building allows inexperienced parents to learn, socialise and share the same experience whilst living together. Fig. 1.4 Meng (Tony) Zhao

Y2, ‘Start-Up Incubator’. The project is a collective home/office for startup entrepreneurs; it’s a building which combines commercial working spaces and communal living spaces together. Fig. 1.5 Annecy Attlee Y3, ‘Party Line’. The project responds to the dual crises of housing and water supply in London. The project is also driven by an interest in infrastructure. With ambiguous ownership and confrontation between neighbours, the party wall is readapted to emphasise the individual’s role as a part of an interconnected system to encourage harmony.

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Fig. 1.6 Robert Newcombe, Y3, ‘Sainsbury’s Buffer Housing Cloud’. Providing temporary accommodation for social housing evictees and homeless people, a cantilevering lattice suspended above the supermarket building in Ladbroke Grove blurs into the context of the canal and gasholders, framing flexibly configured inflated housing units. Fig. 1.7 Alice Hardy Y3, ‘I Heard it on the Washing Line’. Using the balcony as theatrical platform, the project aims to intervene with the current uses and bring a fun alternative which would spark subtle interaction between residents in the estate whilst providing practical uses for the balconies through a series of frameworks and attachments. 1.6

Fig. 1.8 Yangzi (Cherry) Guo Y2, ‘Willesden Halfway House’. The project proposes a housing scheme providing short-term accommodation for ex-inmates of Wormwood Scrubs Prison who would find themselves homeless immediately upon their release. Fig. 1.9 Úna Haran Y2, ‘Hot Housing’. A housing scheme aimed at elderly residents which incorporates commercial horticulture into their everyday lives. Located beside the Grand Union Canal, the housing project uses barge freight to transport stock for sale. Fig.1.10 Ngai Lam (Michelle) Wang Y2, ‘Housing for XL Families’. This scheme aims to house very large families, who are underprivileged and underrepresented on this extra narrow and long site. Each unit is connected to the next, creating a continuous flat that can potentially fill up the length of the site.

Fig. 1.11 Annecy Attlee Y3, ‘Party Line’. Typical plan of housing units in Kensal Rise. Fig.1.12 Naomi De Barr Y3, ‘The Arable Housing Project’. The project aims to be self-sufficient and forms a landscape that educates people about food production. There is forced intimacy and coexistence between people and the surrounding landscape. The environments created assist the growth of produce and create comfortable environments for those who live there.

1.13 Rikard Kahn Y3, ‘Housing By The Metre’. The aim of the project is to provide homes for first-time buyers currently unable to get on the housing ladder. Housing units are sold ‘by the metre’; residents buy what they can afford initially and then extend their living space incrementally as they develop socioeconomically. Residents are provided with a basic ‘core’ dwelling to which extended elements can be attached when needed. The homes can grow, reduce and adapt incrementally over the lifetime of the individual residents, resulting in unique housing units bespoke to the homeowners. Fig. 1.14 Oliver Parkinson Y3, ‘Hydro Hydraulic Habitation’. A mixed-use high density housing scheme built on the anticipation of future flood risk to our built environment. The scheme embraces rather than barricades against water, utilising the redundant

canal network as a future asset. The narrow high-rise typology floats on a series of pontoons, all of which are constructed as modular components. These pieces can be constructed along the canal systems as far as Birmingham, enabling the scheme to be rolled out onto flood zones, subverting our current attitude towards living near water. Fig. 1.15 Oliver Parkinson Y3, ‘Mind The Gap’. The intervention makes use of the unused spaces or ‘gaps‘ found in St Pancras Estate in Camden. A steel frame made from scaffolding tubes forms the basis of the structure, orientated in different positions to suit three specific functions: a book-swap reading room, cycle repair stand and a chicken coop. 1.16 Rikard Kahn Y3, ‘Housing By The Metre’.

Fig.

Fig. 1.17 Alice Hardy Y3, ‘Lots Leftover’. A strip of leftover space in Kensal Town, 6m wide and 160m long, traditionally unsuitable for a dense residental development. A thin steel spine runs the length of the site, providing access and a structural framework for various unit typologies to attach to.

Fig. 1.18 Calvin Po Y2, ‘Inhabitated Kilns’. The project proposes housing for a community of ceramic artists that grows around an abundant natural resource: the local London clay found under the site. The design attempts to address key issues of how to maximise the use of the London clay in construction, how to allow artists to have self-built indviduality alongside their living and working spaces, and how to do so in high density in the context of Kensal Town. Fig. 1.19 Uday Berry Y2, ‘Kensal Rise Farmlands’. A working and living housing model that

integrates bovine farming with a multiple housing scheme. The project aims at creating a new community of urban farmers who are able to earn a livelihood through farming on site. The housing complex aims to bring the countryside into the city through series of green roofs forming pastures for cattles.

Fig. 1.20 Thomas Cubitt Y3, ‘Baby Boom Town 2035’. Set in 2035, Baby Boom Town is a multigenerational housing development along Harrow Road where 60% of its units are assigned to the elderly. Large access corridor’s provide additional storage and open areas which the flats can expand into when the residents have guests. This aims to create a situation where the elderly remain socially engaged and a close interaction is established between all the neighbours.

2014

Civic Spectacular

Holly Lewis, Sabine Storp

Year 2

Florence Bassa, Nicola Chan, Pui Quan Choi, Christopher Dembinski, Mouna Kalla-Sacranie, Alan Ma, Tobias Petyt, Cara Williams

Year 3

Alexandria Anderson, Jessica Clements, Jamie Hignett, Aiko Nakada, Emily Priest, Claire Seager, Joe Travers-Jones, Timmy Whitehouse

Special thanks to Samson Adjei and to our sponsors, Pho, Once Milano Linen and Viaduct Furniture

Thanks to our consultants and critics: Nicola Antaki, Kyle Buchanan, Margaret Bursa, Mollie Claypool, Rebecca Fode, Oliver Goodhall, Caroline Newton, Luke Royffe, Peg Rawes, Patrick Weber, Jonas Zukauskas

Thanks to our hosts in Hanoi: National University of Civil Engineering, Vietnam Urban Planning and Development Association, Vo Trong Nghia Architects, Tran Yen The and The Son Nguyen

Civic Spectacular

Holly Lewis, Sabine Storp

Unit 1 is interested in architecture as a force for collective good in the city. Our projects intend to provoke discourse and thought through social endeavour and spectacular interventions.

We began the year by investigating London’s designated ‘Opportunity and Intensification Areas’. These are places of financial growth and numerous development opportunities, but also of displacement and infrastructural pressure. Our design proposals for these sites sought to reinvigorate forgotten spaces and realise the latent civic potential of underused sites. Throughout the project we produced a series of publications in order to communicate our ideas to wider, non-professional audiences.

Whilst rapid, the pace of urban change in London is still vastly outmatched by that of Asia’s large cities. For our second project, we focused on the impacts of such change on the inhabitants of Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city. Rapid urban growth and increasing development pressure is leading to greater competition for land use in Hanoi. In particular this threatens urban agriculture, which in Hanoi currently meets nearly 75% of the city’s food demand. Conversion to non-agricultural urban uses presents a dilemma to Hanoi’s inhabitants: balancing food security and affordability against profit. This rapid population expansion also puts pressure on the city’s infrastructure, open spaces and cultural heritage.

Our projects make proposals to address these issues by making creative responses to the economic, cultural and social dynamics of the city. The outcomes combine low cost, small-scale projects, dexterous medium-scale architectural interventions and ambitious large-scale visions for the future of Hanoi.

Fig. 1.1 Jamie Hignett Y3, ‘Non_Civic Centre’. Provides essential services for non-registered citizens such as clean water and biogas produced from the waste of the nearby wholesale market, and social services such as access to microfinance, the Internet and meeting spaces for local grassroots democracy groups. Fig. 1.2 Florence Bassa Y2, ‘Red River Community Building’. A nursery and workspace for the community, with floating emergency towers providing clean water, food and medicine in preparation for floods. The rooftops are cultivated and a natural filtering system cleans water, creating a marshy landscape around the nursery.

Fig. 1.3 Pui Quan Choi Y2, ‘Diabetes Medical Centre’. Rapid urbanisation has caused changes in Vietnamese lifestyle and diet which has in part has led to a rise in Type 2 Diabetes.

The design of the building was inspired by the Cu Da noodle village where sheets of noodles are hung all around the village, influencing the idea of a layered façade and thin structural columns. Fig. 1.4 Nicola Chan Y2, ‘Street Vendor’s Retirement Home’. A retirement home for Hanoi’s street vendors; the building provides a safe haven for this banned community where the architecture is informed by the livelihoods and methodologies of Vietnamese street vending. Fig. 1.5 – 1.7 Alexandria Anderson Y3, ‘The Hanoi Institute of Utilities’. The institute presents a model for sustainable and exciting development, proposing a research and experimental playground for modular, rotationally moulded systems which aim to facilitate architecture and infrastructure; building on sustainability and the potential of Hanoi’s future growth.

Fig. 1.8 Alan Ma Y2, ‘Community Garden in Homerton Park’, model. The main canopy acts as a central hub with movable units that can be transferred to Homerton University Hospital for patients and staff, and also as a learning activity for children. The back of the garden will be turned into a lavender field bring a piece of the countryside into the city. Fig. 1.9 Cara Williams Y2, ‘Honesty Jam Factory’, Ridley Road Market, Dalston, model. The building collects leftover fruit and vegetables. During the day jam is produced and stallholders are given free tea and breakfast. Fig. 1.10 Aiko Nakada Y3, ‘The Wedding Tent Construction School’. Teaching students the craft of building temporary bamboo pavilions for wedding events, as well as treating bamboo in the traditional Vietnamese fashion. The building allows flooding to replenish

the groundscape for the new season of weddings. Burning old wedding tents breathes life into new bamboo during the smoking process. Fig. 1.11 Jessica Clements Y3, ‘Communal House for Lost Communities’. A modern version of a Vietnamese communal house, which serves political, economic and social functions. An overgrown green cafe structure seeks to provide not only a solar and acoustic barrier but also to connect the inhabitants with their rural heritage. Fig. 1.12 –1.13 Timmy Whitehouse Y3, ‘Village on Long Bien Bridge’, drawings. Repurposing the Long Bien Bridge to create an elevated village for the floating migrant communities of the Red River. The project fosters the ideas of user initiated development and is implemented though an adaptable kit of parts, consisting mainly of bamboo elements.

Fig. 1.14 Christophe Dembinski Y2, ‘Hanoi Physio Centre’, drawing. In response to growing problems of air pollution, constant excessive noise, a lack of green spaces and a culture of health and exercise, the proposal attempts to create a safe haven for physical therapy, using locally sourced materials to create a comfortable environment that will be a significant asset to the underserviced community who mainly work very physical jobs. Fig. 1.15 Joseph Travers-Jones Y3, ‘Exemplary Urban Farm’, drawing. The building tests the existing farming conditions on the floodplain of the Red River. The project operates as a site of agrotourism and aims to utilise the rise in floodwater to irrigate farmland with filtered river throught the building favruc and plants. The building showcases the process of filtering to the Vietnamese population and the

travelling tourist also demonstrating how poisonous water can be used to drink and grow edible, healthy food within modern urban cities Fig. 1.16 – 1.17 Claire Seager Y3, ‘The Coffee Street Rehousing Project’, drawings. The scheme is an alternative housing prototype which relocates Hang Hahn or Coffee Street into a high rise social housing scheme that promotes community, tradition and the street identity. The scheme allows for growth as the number of residents increases, this is done at a personal household scale through the architectural upgrade of the home using prefabricated coffee plastic as a building material. Expansion also occurs at a larger scale, through the addition of extra housing units.

The building is a housing prototype for relocating former residents in the de-densification of the old quarter of Hanoi.

1.18 Emily Priest Y3, ‘Child Islands’, model and construction drawings for the ‘colour tower’. Prior to the implementation of a play street, the colour tower can be constructed by neighboring parents and children in order for it to become the heart of each temporary street party. The tower’s main structure is reassembled at each festival, whilst its cladding remains personal to each potential child island school. Once completed, the tower becomes central to the new playground, distributing bunting, paint and streamers; reclaiming the child’s right to play.

Fig.

2013

Undercurrents

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite

Unit 1 Undercurrents

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite

2013. Digital technology has irreversibly percolated into everyday architectural practice. Yet architects face a series of paradoxes: the gap between drawing and making has never been smaller, but the distance between the architect’s hand and the final object has widened; although computation offers a platform for inexhaustible – and often uncritical –form-making, digital drawing techniques are still based on an antiquated monocular understanding of space, forgetting the ‘other’ eye; and the latent potential of material innovation and craftsmanship remains hugely underexplored.

Moreover, whilst the young moguls of Silicon Roundabout seem to have harnessed technological undercurrents to stimulate meaningful social change – at the same time as turning a healthy profit –young architectural innovation can appear to be weighed down by bureaucracy, overwhelming competition from developers or big practice, and the on-going recession.

Can a productive rethinking of technology unlock architecture’s current stalemate? And how can architectural education prepare the young architect facing these ground-breaking shifts in digital technology that are reshaping the profession?

This year Unit 1 is looking for a gear shift: one that sees architects crossing the entrepreneurial skills of speculative business startups with the cutting edge technical knowledge of software engineers. A redefinition of the profession that seeks to tap into digital undercurrents and which uses inventive homegrown technology as a trigger for new spatial ideas to create buildings that affect positive change. A quiet revolution perhaps.

Meanwhile, we are told that we are in the midst of an Olympic honeymoon. Britain, or more specifically London, is suddenly renowned for embracing multiculturalism and diversity, it excels in sport and is spreading legacy wealth to impoverished regions. A powerhouse of cultural achievement, nourished

on the generosity of approved multinational sponsors. Mother London finds herself in uncharted waters of positivity.

But was not long ago, when the media had declared London a war zone swamped by BBM-powered youth on the rampage for widescreen TVs, Air Max Ones, and bottles of Evian… the narrative of London could be seen to be at a kind of uncomfortable tipping point.

This year Unit 1 will employ technological innovation in search of the magical and the common, the rebellious and the new in our own back yard, here in London. We will look for the forgotten places that we have read about in books and seen in films and propose a future for our city that is not controlled by big banks or corporate middle management and is also resistant to the threat of teenaged mercenaries. We will take our city back.

Seed

The first project, entitled ‘Seed’, is the design of a speculative pavilion for London.

The pavilion, a longstanding architectural typology commonly associated with English landscape follies, saw a rise all around London before and during the games. Within the Olympic park, pavilions became architectural manifestations of corporate sponsorship – the closest that architecture comes to a spatialised logo.

Seed questions the presumption that the pavilion is a temporary, cheaply built installation serving a corporate message. It can be sculpturally experimental or a choreographed event; preserve wildlife habitats or experiment with surprising materials such as chemicals or air; try to generate revenue or further growth; last for the long term or blossom momentarily; carry a political message; consist of a field of components; or exist in physical and digital realms simultaneously. While embracing the pavilion’s decorative and playful nature – often

perceived as superficial – we propose cutting-edge structures that not only dazzle but also educate, become vehicles for research and encapsulate a critical architectural position. Our Seeds tap into the undercurrents of the city and perform strategic ‘revelations’.

Venice Biennale

In preparation to our second project, also based in London, and continuing our search for new architectural ideas we visited this year’s Venice Biennale, a hub of talent and innovation from all over the world.

In Venice and Vicenza we visited buildings, which at the time of their conception and construction were only possible due to their authors’ speculative use of ground-breaking technologies: visual and representational; material and structural; as well as promoting social innovation in accordance to the humanist revolution of the Renaissance.

Boom

The second project, entitled Boom, focused on the Lea Valley, a physically and socially fluid region, which exemplifies London in a state of becoming. The two sites of the most recent traumas –Tottenham Riots and Stratford Olympics –sit within a short seven-mile stretch of the city. Rich in industrial history and biogeographic diversity – even with the deterministic addition of the Olympic Park – this part of London is rapidly transforming, driven by strong undercurrents while its future is hanging in the balance.

Whereas Seed aims at affecting localised change in a highly speculative, fast and experimental way, Boom is the design of a small- or medium-scaled public building which seeks to ‘take root’ in the context in which it is located and draw on cultural, physical, economic, social and historical particularities. In Boom we aim to ‘cultivate’ the technological invention of Seed – the architectural prototype – towards an individual architectural

language. The Unit was joined again by Levitate Architects for the Year 3 Technical Study and by Picture Plane for architectural visualisations. We also collaborated with architectural entrepreneurs ScanLab to explore the creative potential of the 3D scanner.

Unit 1 is underpinned by a stimulating and nurturing studio environment, where we foster a strong collaborative ethos. We encourage students to be experimental, creative and independent designers, each with their own unique architectural voice.

We would like to thank our critics: Ben Addy, Alessandro Ayuso, Greg Blee, Mark E. Breeze Alastair Browning, David Buck, Matthew Butcher, John Cain, Rhys Cannon, Michele Carrara, Luke Chandresinghe, Emma Cheatle, Ming Chung, Kate Davies, Jo Dejardin, Max Dewdney, Murray Fraser, Stephen Gage, Spencer Guy, Ryan Hakimian, Christine Hawley, Jonathan Hill, Adrian Lahoud, Chee-Kit Lai, Joerg Majer, Ana Monrabal-Cook, Tim Norman, Luke Pearson, Sophia Psarra, David Roberts, Eduardo Rosa, Tim Sloan, Amy Thomas, Kenny Tsui, Nick Tyson, Cindy Walters, Victoria Watson, Andrew Whiting and Paolo Zaide.

Year 2

Laurence Blackwell-Thale, John Cruwys, David Flook, Gregorios Kythreotis, Abigail Portus, Ellie Sampson, Saskia Selwood, Elin Soderberg

Year 3

Benjamin Beach, Carl Inder, Pavel Kosyrev, Matthew Lyall, Martyna Marciniak, Isabel Ogden, Jasper Stevens, Corina Andra Tuna

Fig. 1.1 Elin Soderberg, Y2, Student Accommodation, Carpenters Estate, Stratford, fragment of long section. A series of allotment-like individual gardens, private rooms and shared spaces are elaborately interconnected using a system of soft ‘knitted furniture’, which are supported off harder structural surfaces. Fig 1.2 – 1.3 Abigail Portus, Y2, Reservoir of Sound, Walthamstow Reservoirs, roof model and interior perspective of stage. The Reservoir of Sound music venue straddles the threshold between two large North London reservoirs. As water levels change between the bodies of water, two ‘curtains’ of perforated brick are made to slide past each other, signaling the beginning of a performance. Fig 1.4 Carl Inder, Y3, Eel Kiosk and pirate TV transmitter, Bromley-by-Bow, Model. The project recognises the diminishing influence of pirate

broadcasts on counter-cultural discourse due to the progression of digital technology. A complex tidal ‘Fyke Net’ construction serves to both capture Eels, which are then prepared and served in a small kiosk, and to camouflage a pirate TV transmitter. Fig 1.5 Martyna Marciniak, Y3, Temple of Water, Shadwell Basin, Axonometric cutaway drawing. Situated on a series of terraces which step down to the Thames, a sequence of mysterious, ever-changing pools serve to disconnect bathers from the city. The journey culminates in full immersion into a warm, malleable pool that floats within the Thames itself and is composed of unique phase-change materials. The building rapturously dissolves the boundaries between the city and the river, the physical and the real.

Fig 1.6 Pavel Kosyrev, Y3, Biomimetic Bus Station, Tottenham, conceptual ideogram. Challenging the apparent banalities of waiting for a bus, the building celebrates the behavioural quirks of passengers and marries them with fluctuations in local environmental conditions to create a slow moving yet highly tuned site-specific environment. Fig 1.7 – 1.8 Ellie Sampson, Y2, Sainsbury’s Community Centre, Hornsey, long section and front elevation. Anticipating the impact of a new supermarket on Hornsey Lane, the project imagines an alternative future for the site, where a section 106 agreement requires Sainsbury’s to provide onsite community facilities. The project explores a series of complex juxtapositions that might result from the merger. Fig 1.9 Isabel Ogden, Y3, Robotic Cancer Treatment Centre, Homerton, perspectival section. The facility houses

cutting-edge surgical robots that reduce the physiological impact of invasive surgery. Conceived as a ‘carer’ and through the manipulation of different forms of light (gamma, x-ray, daylight) the building is strategically organised to speed up the process of recovery. Fig 1.10 David Flook, Y2, ELUTech, Stratford, axonometric. The East London University Technical College marries an existing Building and Crafts College with a new research facility for UCL. Exploring themes of displacement, copying, repetition and the uncanny, ELUTech is designed in two mirrored parts, where the plan of one building is replicated in the section of the other.

Fig 1.11 Laurence Blackwell-Thale, Y2, Pixel Pool, Tottenham, ground floor plan. The Pixel Pool is a sequence of swimming pools that give the swimmer a heightened experience of each stroke in relation to the bodies of water they move through. Set in the strange post-industrial landscape of the Lea Valley, the pools enable a new kind of wild swimming. Fig 1.12 Corina Andra Tuna, Y3, UCL Learning Centre, Carpenters Estate, Stratford, exploded axonometric. The new Learning Centre seeks to simultaneously dismantle the brutalist post-war architecture of the Carpenters Estate and the institutional structures of UCL. A new ‘porous’ architecture is proposed that is ‘open’, linked-in with its surroundings, and allows spatially interconnectivity between local groups and the university.

Fig 1.13 John Cruyws, Y2, ‘The Law’, Tottenham, cross-section. Addressing new worrying trends in public prosecution that emerged during the 2011 riots, the Magistrates Court—located on the site of the burnt-down Carpet-Right Store—acts as a new interface between the judiciary, police, press and public.

Fig 1.14 John Cruyws, Y2, Tottenham Hale Koban, Tottenham, axonometric views. Taking the police as the client—and in response to the 2011 riots—a deployable police station seeks to improve the image of the police whilst ‘maintaining the peace’ by stealth. Fig 1.15 Benjamin Beach, Y3, Self-build housing, Carpenters Estate, Stratford, construction sequence of housing module. Designed in resistance to UCL’s planned redevelopment of the Carpenters Estate, the project imagines an alternate future for specific, current residents where

customisable self-build housing and ‘sweat equity’ is used as a catalyst for community empowerment.

Fig 1.16 Gregorios Kythreotis, Y2, GUILD, Retail Bridge, Stratford, axonometric cutaway. Linking into the proposed ‘Greenway’, a new bridge is conceived as an inhabitable link between the Carpenters Estate, the proposed UCL Stratford campus and pedestrian traffic flows. The building incorporates 3D printing technologies both into the programme and fabric of the building. Fig 1.17 Jasper Stevens, Y3, New Tottenham Town Hall, Tottenham Green, bird’s eye view. A new Town Hall situated in Tottenham Green aims to make politics accessible, giving the town hall back to the citizens of Tottenham. The institution reconfigures familiar physical materials such as Portland stone and brick into the public realm, but also creates an online presence, whereby space can be remotely ‘curated’ in response to the specific spatial needs of the occupants.

Fig 1.18 Matthew Lyall, Y3, This is not a (Show) Home, Bromley-by-Bow. The Lower Lea Valley is part of the Thames Redevelopment Area and is due for large-scale redevelopment in the coming years. The project explored how, in these landscapes, architectural representations gain significance when used to advertise developments, pre-sell apartments and actually construct buildings. A ‘holographic show-home’ is proposed whereby ceiling-mounted holographic plates can be arranged to simulate studio, 2-bed and 3-bed apartments within a black-box environment. The installation itself ascends the building construction as work progresses, incorporating the view into ‘the sell’. The use of holography blurs the distinction between 2D and 3D representation and serves as an enigmatic and marketable advertising device.

2012

Groundswell

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite, Joerg Majer

Unit 1

GROUNDSWELL

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite, Joerg Majer

What do we mean when we talk about the ‘ground’, the ‘earth’, or the ‘site’? The landscape is often seen technically, as a geothermal territory containing mineral resources, a place we clear to build upon, a biogeography where we grow food, or a spiritual realm where we bury the dead. In eighteenth century English landscape design, the manipulation of the ground represented a mastery of the environment, a harmonious nature constructed pictorially from a distance. Since the 1970’s, Environmentalists have viewed the natural world deferentially as a balanced system to be preserved in equilibrium. As such we have come to idealize the landscape in a condition of controlled stasis.

Located at the edges of several interdependent worlds, Iceland sits in an unstable shifting ground, prone to unexpected swelling that is neither strictly subarctic nor Northern European. Fuelled by myth making and folklore it is also a young, volatile nature where hills are formed in a matter of weeks, a geologically active land being continually rewritten. If architecture is a reflection of the physical, cultural and social territories it occupies, then how do we respond to such lands that are in a state of ‘becoming’? Can an architecture exist that is in a constant state of flux, one that is able to reflect and interpret these powerful geological transformations at a human scale? Iceland can also be seen as a microcosm of the world in 2012. Two recent traumas – the economic collapse of 2008 and the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud – have scarred and isolated the island. Once a nation of bankers, the future of the 300,000 inhabitants hangs in delicate balance; it is unable to bail out its banks, its accession to the EU is in doubt and its arable farmlands are in ruin. The country is responding by pioneering ways in which to become self-sufficient economically and socially. It is forging new ground through the crowdsourcing of a new constitution and is developing home grown technological industries. This new frontier of invention and rebirth requires radical modes of occupancy, innovative new materialities and technologically smart methods of producing and maintaining buildings that are also carefully embedded within the identity of Iceland. This year we speculated on Iceland’s future as a means of understanding and constructing our own.

In the first project entitled ‘Fuel’ we studied Reykjavik and Iceland from afar. Each student identified a fuel and used it as a driving force for the project. Their definition of fuel was expansive or specific but was rooted in site specific research: geothermal or seismological energy, magma, a traditional foodstuff such as Hákarl, a ceremony, a ritual, a Nordic sport or an Icelandic saga, or a strange wonder such as the northern lights, lava fields, thermal lagoons, the midnight sun, ash plumes, glaciers, turf houses, dance music, maritime mythologies, geysers, or volcanic activity.

In November we visited Iceland where students deployed their speculative devices. We immersed ourselves in Icelandic culture and developed a critical understanding of the Icelandic psyche. The second project entitled ‘Phenomena’ was sited in or nearby Reykjavík. Guided by the intuitive findings of the first project and personal observations in situ, students designed public buildings that respond to socioeconomic needs of Iceland’s inhabitants, are fuelled by site specific phenomena and develop a critical attitude to the environment. The aim was to develop architectural prototypes that not only contemplate current economic and cultural shifts but which are also inspired by the otherworldly, such as the mythic world of the Sagas or the strange natural phenomena of the Aurora Borealis. We harnessed the latent forces from within the island and used them to conjure new atmospheres; we invented new homemade political landscapes and conceived new ways of living, a ‘groundswell’ of architectural ideas.

The unit is underpinned by a stimulating and nurturing studio environment where we foster a strong collaborative ethos. We encourage students to be experimental, creative and independent designers, each with their own unique architectural voice.

We would like to thank our critics: Alessandro Ayuso, Laura Allen, Kyle Buchanan, Luke Chandresinghe, Emma Cheatle, Kate Davies, Richard Difford, Professor Murray Fraser, Professor Stephen Gage, Tom Ebdon, David Garcia, Ruairi Glynn, John Goodbun, Spencer Guy, Professor Christine Hawley, Damjan Iliev, Professor Jonathan Hill, Alex Holloway, Johan Hybschmann, Luke Jones, Jan Kattein, Julian Krüger, Hugh McEwen , Will McLean, Ana Monrabal-Cook, Alexandros Mykoniatis, Tim Norman, Caireen O’Hagan-Houx, Frosso Pimenides, Dr Sophia Psarra, Charlotte Reynolds, Sarah Shafiei, Tim Sloan, Catrina Stewart, Matthias Suchert and Dr Victoria Watson.

Year 2: Chiara Barrett, Leo Boscherini, Katie Cunningham, Tom James, Daniel Scoulding, Nicholas Warner, Anthony Williams, Laura Elizabeth Young

Year 3: Nichola Czyz, Joseph Dejardin, Matthew Lucraft, Samuel Storr McGill, Anna Lisa McSweeney, Harriet Middleton-Baker, Angeline Wee

Fig. 1.1, Fig. 1.3, Fig. 1.5 Samuel McGill, Kvosin Music Technology School, interior view. An intelligent facade system utilises resonant frequencies to regulate the building’s solar strategy. When frequencies are passed through free-hanging vertically stacked transparent plates, sand is made to vibrate across their surface casting dynamic shadows across the central hall. Fig. 1.2 Nick Warner, Fishing Summer School, Lake Ellithavatn. Section cutaway interior view. The building straddles the lake’s flood defence and is organised around a central conical chamber that allows the traditional Icelandic Evening Wake to occur beneath the stars. Fig. 1.4, Fig. 1.6 Laura Young, Blooming Phytoplankton Canopy, Future Farming Research Centre, University of Iceland campus, Hàskòli Islands. 1:1 working prototype and visualisation. A

tessellating roof component – based on the principle of Hooke’s Law – periodically fills with phytoplankton. Green chlorophyll pigment in the fluid harnesses sunlight during the day and releases energy at night allowing the building to reduce its energy consumption.

Fig 1.7 Daniel Scoulding, Culinary Community Centre, Hafnafjordur. Perspective drawing. Influenced by the unusual Icelandic delicacies such as puffin, sheep’s head and rotten shark meat, the building imagines a food production and distribution centre for traditional Icelandic foodstuff. A timber roof structure manipulates air flow to facilitate the smoking process. Fig. 1.8 Leo Boscherini, Hafnarfjordur Thermal Baths. Ground floor plan. Located in the coastal volcanic landscape south of Reykjavik, bathers first enter elevated changing rooms above the water’s edge, before returning into a sleek sunken building that merges with the strange black landscape.

Fig. 1.9 Joseph Dejardin, HQ for the Commission for Trade and Cultural Development, Reykjavik Old Harbour, cross section through central atrium. The building is conceived as a kind of ‘Cloud Palace’ that will act as a catalyst to the growth of Reykjavik Harbour as a Logistical Container Port. The project interweaves three separate programmes – a Data Centre, a Government Department and a new public garden using Leonardo’s double helix staircase as an organising mechanism that spirals through the building. Fig 1.10 Tom James, Film School, Kvosin, section through cinema. A series of perforated screens that carefully control light entry, encases a complex series of interlinking interior spaces. The building acts as a vessel capable of holding light within its rock-like body.

Fig. 1.11 — 1.14 Angeline Wee, Basalt Fabric Parliament, Lake Tjornin. Interior cutaway sections. Interior cutaway sections. Following the ‘pots and pans revolution’ of 2009, the proposal imagines a new kind of People’s Parliament for Iceland. The building is constructed from an ingenious new material ‘Basalt Fabric’, that is imagined as a new national material symbolising Iceland’s independence.

Fig. 1.15 Anthony Williams, Ossur Bionic Research Centre, Grafarvogur Lake, South bank. Site Plan. 80% of the world’s prosthetics are designed and manufactured in Iceland. The building acts as a new research centre for the Ossur Corporation. A ribcage-like form winds along a single contour on the edge of the lake.

Fig 1.16 Anna Lisa McSweeney, Primary School, East Reykjavik. The school is a prototype for a new Icelandic pedagogy rooted in storytelling and the natural environment. The ground becomes the site for learning, with the dynamic roof system acting as a place for dreaming. Fig. 1.17 Katie Cunningham, Resomation Centre, Geldinganes Island. Ground Plan. The funerary building is separated into two structures, one where the first burial ceremony is carried out and the other where the wake is observed and Funeral Ale is consumed. Fig. 1.18 Harriet Middleton-Baker, New Co-operative Bank and Expo, Reykjavik Old Harbour. Model photograph. Responding to the Financial Crash of 2008, the Bank and Expo acts as an initiative to connect re-capitcalised Icelandic Banks to small businesses. Fig. 1.19 Chiara Barrett, HQ for Green

Activists, Kvosin. Long Section. A large space-frame holds a series of vessels, each containing one of Icelands many green activist groups. Occupy Reykjavik, Saving Iceland and the Grapevine Newspaper jostle for position with each expressing their different aims through choice of material and structural form.

1.19

1.18

Fig. 1.20 Nichola Czyz, Digital Library and Data Centre, Seltjarnarnes. Model photographs of roof. The project imagines a future scenario where physical books within a library become redundant. The building operates at the scale of the landscape, creating its own micro-climate, and at the scale of furniture; with locally heated desks regulating the thermal environment. Fig. 1.21 Matthew Lucraft, Icelandic Forestry Commission, Úlfarsárdalur, East Reykjavik. The Forestry Commission building imagines the beginnings of the afforestation process in Iceland. The impact of climate change has meant that Iceland’s history as a barren, hostile environment is slowly reversing; with marginal temperature rises, and rising CO2 levels creating desirable conditions for Birch tree growth. The project explores how a new self-sufficient

industry might emerge and what the potential affects on the psyche of introducing forests to a sea-faring nation might be.

2011

Digital Dreams of a Floating World

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite

D I G I TA L D R E A M S O F A F LOAT I N G WO R L D

The Japanese term ukiyo or ‘floating world’ describes the pleasure-seeking urban lifestyle of the 17th century Japanese capital Edo, the antecedent of modern Tokyo Ukiyo illustrates an impermanent, evanescent existence, one that appreciates fleeting beauty in nature and the realm of entertainments and which is divorced from the responsibilities of the mundane and the everyday Accordingly ukiyo-e, or ‘pictures of the floating world’, is a genre of famous wood-block prints of the same era. Early ukiyo-e depicted enchanting urban scenes of Edo’s red-light district, inhabited by kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers and geishas, but later period prints evolved into complex descriptions of Edo/Tokyo as a dreamlike realm, where human occupation, weather, landscape and constructed environments were entwined.

Today Tokyo is the largest metropolitan economy and the most densely populated city in the world Although suffering from serious environmental and overcrowding problems, the city retains its appreciation of the ephemeral and the transient: a floating world immersed in a sea of electronic media, described by Arata Isozaki as ‘hazily flickering like fog’ Digital technology also gives form to a phantom-like future city, which Isozaki imagines as airborne, underground, or on the ocean’s surface; a superimposed virtual city that coexists with, but also counteracts and contradicts, the real

Inspired by the cultural and pictorial nuances of ukiyo, and through a focused study of Japanese culture, this year Unit 1 explored the boundaries between reality and dream and the relationship between technology, habitat and the senses The aim was to conceive new ways of designing, drawing, building and occupying by challenging the assumptions of time and space, which form the basis of Western aesthetic and constructed environments

While in Tokyo we became immersed in the technologically enhanced rhythms of the city. We critically questioned the role technology plays in shaping the citizens’ physical urban experience of the city and how this affects attitudes towards the environment and the relationship with the past

Marrying traditional techniques and materials with new technological inventions, the unit’s work addresses socio-economic issues experienced by the city, and offers speculative glimpses to the other side of the future

The earthquake of March 2011 has not been directly addressed in the students’ work, as the scale of the trauma was so unfathomable and overwhelming We would like to thank all of the kind people of Tokyo who guided and helped us on the field trip especially Souhei Imamoura and offer our warmest wishes to them for the future.

Year 2: Charles Dorrance-King, Samuel Douek, Ashley Hinchcliffe, Ting-Jui Lin, Lauren Shevills, Marcus Stockton, Nicholas Warner, Nadia Wikborg

Year 3: Luke Bowler, Alastair Brownings, Emily Doll, Ryan Hakimian, Frances Heslop, Ashleigh James, Joanne Preston, William Tweddell

Fig. 1.1 Charles Dorrance-King, Electromagnetic Interference Installation Fig 1 2 Nadia Wikborg, Memory Theatre and Market, Shimokitazawa Model

Fig. 1.3 Lauren Shevills, ‘Way of the Tea’ Installation

Fig. 1.4 Nick Warner, Tsukimi (moon festival) Installation

Fig. 1.5 Marcus Stockton, School of Visual Arts, Film and Gaming, Chuo, Tokyo Bay Long Section

Fig 1 6 Brook Lin, Fish Laboratory and Bath House, Harajuku Model Fig. 1.7 Sam Douek, Foreign Residence Advice Bureau/Visa Application Centre, Ichigaya Plan

Fig. 1.8 Emily Doll, National Map Library, Ueno Park Long Section Fig. 1.9 Joanne Preston, Love Hotel and Post Office, Shibuya Cross Section Fig 1 10 Ashleigh James, Forest Wedding Island, Tokyo Bay Fig. 1.11 Ashley Hinchcliffe, River Revival Institute, Nihombashi Long Section Fig. 1.12 Luke Bowler, Cloud Banks in Tokyo Triptych

Fig 1 13 Ryan Hakimian, Retirement Community, Ueno

Axonometric views Fig. 1.14 Frances Heslop, Department of Urban Agriculture, University of Tokyo, Kanda Long Section Fig. 1.15 Alastair Browning, Haneda Virtual Cemetery, Tokyo Bay Model with digital projection

Fig 1 16 Harry Tweddell Centre of Bodu and National Spiritual Development, Shinjuku Model

2010

Architectural Transmutations and the Forgetting of Air

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite

BSc Unit 1

Yr 2: Muhammad Muhsin Abd Rahman, James Bruce, Alicia Gonzalez-Lafita, Jonathan Holmes, Frederick Lomas, Tess Martin, Charlotte Reynolds, Aimee Salata, Yr 3: Laura Brayne, Robert Burrows, Joseph Gautrey, Eleonora Hadjigeorgiou, Amelia Hunter, Adrienne Lau, Alexander Holloway

Architectural Transmutations and the Forgetting of Air

This year, unit one was inspired by the scientific changes during the period of Enlightenment, when techniques used in alchemy gave way to modern science. Air’s significance as a ‘spirit’ was fundamental in alchemical practice, but this was slowly forgotten as empirical methodology became prominent in the eighteenth century. We saw the ‘forgetting of air’ as the point when matter became measurable and controllable, and ultimately lost its ethereal dimension. The first exercise, the alchemist’s laboratory, was a focused study of the work of alchemists and early modern scientists of that period, such as Robert Fludd, Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday.

To test our alchemical prototypes we visited an emblematic modern city: Chicago, otherwise known as the ‘windy city’. We asked whether the Western economic model for expansion is prone to erase the idea of site and collective memory and whether the pre-modern concept of air can inform new architectural interventions that respond to the city’s extreme urban environment and future needs. We sought an architecture where micro and macrocosm were entwined: We studied chemical processes, aerodynamics, electromagnetic fields, explosive reactions, allegorical symbolism, light and colour theories, and designed buildings that test new radical materials, focus on change and transformation and revert the forgetting of air.

Penelope Haralambidou & Michael Tite

Top: James Bruce, Salt Baths, Ukranian Village, Chicago Second row: James Bruce, Robert Hooke’s Window, St Helens Church, Bishopsgate Third row: Alicia Gonzalez-Lafita, Hooke and Newton Rivalry Chandelier, Council Chamber, Royal Institute Bottom: Alicia Gonzalez-Lafita, Blues Bar and Record Market, Maxwelll Street, Chicago

Clockwise from top left: Robert Burrows, Fish Market and Restaurant, Camden; Robert Burrows, Goose Island Brewery, Goose Island, Chicago; Charlotte Reynolds, William Perkin Purple Dye Room; Charlotte Reynolds, Onion Wallpaper Factory and Printworks, Goose Island, Chicago; Adrienne Lau, Chicago Film Institute, Jackson Park, Chicago; Adrienne Lau, Monument to Monument, Eastcheap

Top: Amelia Hunter, Meteorological Research Institute, University of Chicago Second row (left to right): Amelia Hunter, Cloud Barber Shop, City of London; Laura Brayne, Perfumery and Liposuction Clinic, Spitalfields Middle right: Laura Brayne, New Deal Community Medical Centre, Uptown Chicago Bottom (left to right): Eleonora Hadjigeorgiou, Rehabilitation Centre for the Destitute (Street Art Refinery) South Loop, Chicago; Nursery and Bingo Hall for Tate & Lyle Factory, Silvertown.

Clockwise from top left: Frederick Lomas, Luke Howard Weather Machine; Meteorological Research Centre, Lake Shore Drive, Chicago; Aimee Salata, Little Roomers Library, Loop; Tess Martin, Wallgreens Drugstore, North Loop; Jack Holmes, Graceland Cemetery Crematorium, Chicago; Jack Holmes, Faraday Ferrofluid Memorial, Highgate Cemetery; Tess Martin, Nicholas Culpepper Orrery, Spitalfields; Aimee Salata, Air Movement Responsive Kite Field

Top, middle and bottom right: Alexander Holloway , plan, section and model of Chicago Board of Trade, Recycled Materials Exchange Bottom left: Alexander Holloway, Electronics Recycling Facility, Shoreditch

Top, middle and bottom right: Joseph Gautrey, model views of Sir Isaac Newton Research Institute, Cambridge. Left: Joseph Gautrey, Chicago Fire Department and Training Academy, Near South Side.

2009

Palimpsest

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite

BSc Unit 1

Yr 2: Yuan Gao, Rebecca Lane, Ka Man Leung, Stefanos Levidis, Thandiwe Loewenson, Kirsty Williams, Mika Zacharias Yr 3: Olivia Crawford, Alisan Dockerty, Daryl Fitzgerald, Satori Nakanishi, Rida Qureshi, Catherine St Hill, Anthony Whittaker, (Rain) Ya-Chu Wu.

Palimpsest

Resulting from scraping clean and reusing the parchment on which it is written, a palimpsest is a manuscript concealing several layers of overlapping text. Many historical works, which were considered lost, have been miraculously revealed embedded in other texts, most famously the Archimedes Palimpsest, which was discovered in Istanbul in 1907. Furthermore, the term palimpsest is used in forensic science in relation to material clues revealing the sequence of events at a crime scene, and in psychology to describe the erasing of memories in the subconscious.

Inspired by the physical and psychological metaphor of the ‘palimpsest’ unit one defined an architecture which is sensuous, tactile and tectonic, but also atmospheric, ephemeral, and enigmatic.

We studied layered spaces, composed of multiple overlaid ‘scripts’ forming a meaning greater than the sum of their component parts; haunted spaces, when a distinctive contrasting atmosphere trails the physical materiality of a place; repressed spaces, purposefully concealed or veiled in habit; weathered spaces, where the patina of time creates an accrued effect of erasure and enigmatic spaces, where missing links produce diverse interpretations.

And we asked, how can we design buildings that exist in time? Can a reading of sites with deep-reaching history inspire designs that resonate far into the future?

The focus of our investigation was Istanbul, the city as palimpsest, constructed as a thick tapestry of interwoven layers.

Penelope Haralambidou and Michael Tite

Clockwise from top left: Thandi Loewenson, Local Newspaper and Printing Press, Tarlabasi; Satori Nakanishi, Kurdish Pirate Radio Station; Yuan Gao, Feed the Horse, Children’s Game; Satori Nakanishi, TRT TV Station, Taksim Square; Rebecca Lane, Turkish Folk Music Machine; Olivia Crawford, Spa and Turkish Bath, Aldgate.

Clockwise from top left: Ka Man Leung, Magic Mirror Chandelier; Mika Zacharias, AubergineMachine; Kirsty Williams, Seismology Research Station and Library, Balat; Ka Man Leung, Pigeon Post Office, Balat; Kirsty Williams, Hagia Sophia Suitcase.

Clockwise from top left: Anthony Whittaker, Istanbul Film Institute; Ka Man Leung, Pigeon Post Office, Balat; Daryl Fitzgerald, Fishmongers and Restaurant, Kings Cross; Olivia Crawford, Swimming Pool, Ortakoy; Mika Zacharias, Turkish Cookery School, Karakoy.

Opposite top: Alisan Dockerty, Mackerel Smoke House, Shoreditch. Bottom: Alisan Dockerty, Water Ecology Institute, Bigli University.

Opposite clockwise from top left: Cate St.Hill, Writers’ Hotel, Bloomsbury; Rida Qureshi Electronic Music School, Kuzguncuk; Daryl Fitzgerald Sinking Theatre, Karakoy; Stefanos Levidis, Sinop Boatyard and Cafe, Karakoy.

This page clockwise from top left: Cate St.Hill, Library for Turkish Literature; Rain Wu, Women’s Community Centre and Domestic Violence Clinic, Balat; Mika Zacharias, Turkish Cookery School, Karakoy; Rain Wu, Birthing Centre, Maida Vale

2008

Déjà vu

Max Dewdney, Penelope Haralambidou,

Chee-Kit Lai

BSc Unit 1

Yr2: Gregory Barton; Jane Brodie; Alexandra Critchley; Tamsin Hanke; Imogen Holden; Thomas Kendall; Nur Md Ajib; Dhiren Patel; Olivia Pearson; Chi Ian Philip Poon. Yr3: Ioana Barbantan; Alicia Bourla; Alice Weng Sam Iu; Luke Jones; James Purkiss , Amy Louise Sullivan-Bodiam; Daniel Swift Gibbs.

Deja Vu

The term deja vu, French for ‘already seen’, describes the feeling of having sreviously witnessed a new situation, or visited a new place. A compelling sense of familiarity usually accompanies the experience of deja vu complemented by a sense of eeriness and strangeness. This previous experience is frequently attributed to a dream, although occasionally a conviction it genuinely happened in the past prevails. Deja vu, also known as paramnesia (from the Greek para, parallel and mneme, memory), has been described as ‘remembering the future’. Inspired by the unsettling psychological experience of deja vu, this year Unit 1 attempted to define the traits of an ambiguous architecture fluctuating between familiarity and the uncanny. We studied: identical spaces, posing questions of authenticity between an original and its copy; illusory spaces, where an extensive span hides in the restricted physical dimensions of a smaller room; repetitive and mirrored spaces, appearing multiplied within each other; inverted or reversed spaces; covert spaces, purposefully concealed or veiled in habit; and delayed spaces, when a distinctive atmosphere trails the physical experience of a place. The focus of our investigation was Venice, the prototype of a city deja vu, existing within the experience of every other city.

Penelope Haralambidou, Max Dewdney and Chee-Kit Lai

Clockwise from top: James Purkiss, Thomas Kendall, Daniel Swift Gibbs.

Clockwise from top left: Luke Jones, James Purkiss, Gregory Barton, Ioana Barbantan, Alexandra Critchley, Alice Iu, Thomas Kendall.

Clockwise from top: Thomas Kendall, Tamsin Hanke, Imogen Holden, Alicia Bourla, Amy Sullivan-Bodiam, Olivia Pearson

Top left and bottom: Luke Jones. Top right: Daniel Swift Gibbs.

Top: Daniel Swift-Gibbs.

2007

Allegory Penelope Haralambidou, Eduardo Rosa

BSc Unit 1

Yr 2: Katherine Cannon, Benjamin Dawson, Wanyu Guo, Daniel Hall, Jay Morton, Alastair Stokes, Ashmi Thapar, Afra Van’t Land, Joey Wegrzyn. Yr 3: Byron Bassington, Amanda Bate, Philip Cottrell, Costa Elia, Stephanie Gallia, James Hughes, Lucy Paton, Anthony Staples, Spencer Treacy.

Allegory

From Plato’s philosophical parables to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘allegorical appearance’ of the Bride, allegory- a structure of thought where a secondary meaning hides behind narrative and story telling- exists throughout history not only in literature but also philosophy, science, art and architecture. Departing from the modernist aphorism ‘form follows function’, Unit 1 seeks to define design traits for an allegorical architecture, where form can also follow fiction. To capture this symbolic potential of buildings, and following last year’s successful experience with animated/time-based architectural representations, we continued merging the boundaries between drawing, modelling, film and collage.

The focus of our investigation was Mexico City: a place contrasting between the mythical floating city of the Aztecs and the everyday contemporary life of one of the most densely populated cities in the world. We studied the city first from a distancethrough its representations in literature, art and film- and then close up starting from the city’s heart: Zócalo.

Penelope Haralambidou and Eduardo Rosa

Top: Daniel Hall. Middle: Wanyu Guo. Bottom: Anthony Staples.

Clockwise from top left: Joey Wegrzyn; James Hughes; Philip Cottrell; Anthony Staples; Amanda Bate.

Clockwise from top left: Alastair Stokes; Katherine Cannon; Byron Bassington; Lucy Paton; Ben Dawson.

Clockwise from top left: Afra Van‘t Land; Joey Wegrzyn; Ashmi Thapar; Jay Morton; Lucy Paton; Stephanie Gallia.

This and facing page: Costa Elia.

2006

Illuminations

Penelope Haralambidou, Eduardo Rosa

BSc Unit 1

Yr 2: Victoria Bateman, Sheila Clarkson Valdivia, Helen Floate, Adam Holland, Christopher Lees, Janice Lee, Tia Randall, Chris Thompson, Natalie Tsui, Simon Walker, Bethany Wells. Yr 3: Sulawan Isvarphornchai, Keiichi Matsuda, Geraldine Ng Cheng Hin, Sanaa Shaikh, Laura Smith, Jemima Tatel.

Illuminations

Architectural drawings do not merely render spatial concepts communicable, but also shape imagination. They set the necessary vocabulary and syntax for the conception and articulation of ideas and their limitations make some spaces not only difficult to draw but unimaginable. This year Unit 1 sought to capture architecture's hidden dimensions through 'illuminations': animation techniques that range beyond orthographic projection and merge the boundaries between drawing, modelling, film and collage. Such techniques corresponded to, and cultivated three main areas of exploration in the unit: light, duration and narrative as underlying subtexts for design.

Unit 1 defined an architecture that detected, revealed and linked fragments of spatial narratives and provided a fertile ground for the production of new ones. Our studies and interventions spanned from everyday London to the extraordinary physical and mythical landscapes of Iceland.

Penelope Haralambidou and Eduardo Rosa

Top and bottom right: Adam Holland. Bottom left: Natalie Tsui.

Top and middle: Christopher Lees. Bottom: Simon Walker.

Top: Victoria Bateman. Middle: Sulawan Isvarphornchai. Bottom: Helen Floate.

Top left and middle: Geraldine Ng. Top right & bottom right: Janice Lee. Middle right: Tia Randall. Bottom left: Sheila Clarkso n.

Clockwise from top left: Sanaa Shaikh, Bethany Wells, Chris Thompson.

Top and middle: Keiichi Matsuda. Bottom: Laura Smith.

2005

Equinox – Navigating Time

Penelope Haralambidou, Eduardo Rosa, Sabine Storp

BSc Unit 1

Yr 2: Jenna Al-Ali, Josephine Callaghan, Veronique Geiger, Cristina Gerada, Damian Groves, Geraldine Holland, Azusa Murakami, William Trossell, Rae WhittowWilliams Yr 3: Kraisupa Ont Asvinvichit, Samuel Chong, John Craske, Oliver Goodhall, Maxwell Mutanda, Joshua Scott, James Stevens, Gemima Tatel, Alia Tohala

Equinox – Navigating Time

Unit 1 explores dense urban conditions, this year focusing on architecture’s inherent cycles, natural and man-made We revisited celluloid representations of London by interpreting, re-plotting and projecting them We looked into cyclical representations of space, exploring cinematic (re)constructions, revealing imperceptible seasonal shifts, identifying periodic revolutions and fostering nostalgia of the unknown We drew inspiration from personal experiences and everyday rituals, from seasonal events that are collectively commemorated or repressed and from brilliant memories of past glories Porto – its caves, sober stone architecture and reflection on the still waters of the Douro – was the site for our final interventions

Penelope Haralambidou, Eduardo Rosa and Sabine Storp Clockwise from top: Oliver Goodhall, James Stevens, Maxwell Mutanda

Clockwise from top: John Craske, Samuel Chong, Maxwell Mutanda, Alia Tohala, Oliver Goodhall, Kraisupa Ont Asvinvichit, Joshua Scott

Overleaf: John Craske

2004

Real Fictions

Penelope Haralambidou, Eduardo Rosa

BSc Unit 1

Yr 2: Ruth Allan, Marcus Brett, Margaret Bursa, Emily Keyte, Imogen Long, Mary Ann Ofunne Oganwu, Itai Palti, Andrew Scrace, Paul Twynam, George Wong Yr 3: Tom Foulsham, David Gouldstone, Nicole Mokwe, Tim Norman, Lucy Pengilley, Shankari Rajanavanathan, Adeline Wee, Matthew Wilkinson, Lydia Xynogala

Real Fictions

Spaces are determined not only by their physical spatiality, but also by the permanent or ephemeral narrative structures their occupation creates Historical accounts, personal experiences and everyday rituals merge with fictional representations to build a composite perception of a place Events that are collectively commemorated or repressed, brilliant memories of past glories, accidents and catastrophes that leave physical and mental scars, or fantasies and aspirations for the future, are influenced by and give birth to legends, myths and stories communicated verbally or represented in literature, cinema and the arts

Unit 1 seeks to define an architecture that detects, reveals and links fragments of spatial narratives and provides a fertile ground for the production of new ones This year, our studies and interventions take New York and Manhattan as a laboratory

Penelope Haralambidou and Eduardo Rosa

Opposite, clockwise from top: Matthew Wilkinson, Adeline Wee, David Gouldstone, Tom Foulsham This page, clockwise from top: Lucy Pengilley, Lydia Xynogala, Tim Norman, Lucy Pengilley, Shankari Rajanavanathan, Nicole Mokwe