Design Anthology UG13
Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1)
Compiled from Bartlett Summer Show Books
Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1)
Compiled from Bartlett Summer Show Books
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 Cut it at the Table: An Architecture of Consumption
Laurence Blackwell-Thale, William Victor Camilleri
2023 Agritecture
Maria Fulford, Jörg Majer
2022 The Vibes Are About to Be Immaculate
Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger
2021 Something Missing (and Almost Alive)
Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger
2020 In Decision
Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger
2019 Registrations in the Feral Ground
Tamsin Hanke, Ralph Parker
Laurence Blackwell-Thale,
William Victor Camilleri
Laurence Blackwell-Thale, William Victor Camilleri
If materials, sites and narratives are ingredients, architecture is the food, and its inhabitation is the feast day. The food/architecture metaphor is abundant with promise and adaptation, enabling us to become chefs of space, with the workshop as our kitchen. Consciously playing with the delineations of this metaphor, the studio's methodology allows programme, spatial inhabitation, performance and entropy to play out through shifting arrangements of architectural assembly.
UG13’s outlook hybridises the material with immaterial, haptic fabrication with ephemeral experience. Driven by a relentless pursuit for all things exquisite, the unit explores iterative and collaborative processes at the cross-section of performative architecture, landscape sensibility and workshop prowess. This principle allows us to work at the junction between the analogue and digital, where three-dimensional fabrication techniques are combined with precision drawing methods, yielding designs that convey their spatial logic and experiential qualities through careful detailing. The studio is therefore not driven by a sense of any end result, rather arriving at a point of proposition through rigorous testing and sensitive appraisal.
The architecture of consumption is an exercise in relocating resources. Assemblies are metabolised elements of a previous whole; energy is transferred from one vessel to another, levying a new potential rather than reverting to base materials. Our definitions of consumption are deliberately varied and vast, its role in architecture encouraging us to question material cycles, embodied energy, wastage and reuse.
Like the making of a meal, consumption is a performative process where materials change state and form, an experience which should be enjoyed and rendered visible, both to educate as well as encounter. We savour the tactility of the object and the ceremony of the method; a metal connection informs the timber frame, a skin is invited to join the assembly, and the architecture makes contact with the ground. Ingredients may be materials, narratives or cultural influences. Once assembled, these arrangements are then interrogated, inhabited and fundamentally consumed.
So please, join us for dinner.
Year 2
Hannah Bailey, Rosina Hooper, Juliana Orlenok, Elliot Woolard, Yuhan Wu
Year 3
Beau Beames, Ilia Cleanthous, Hsiang-Yu (Sean) Fan, Serena Haddon, Laura Maczik, Duncan McAllister, Kai Pentecost, Bryan Png, Julia Rzaca, Aleksandra Tarnowska
Guest Design Critic: Tamsin Hanke
Technology Tutors Year 3: Anja Kempa, Jack Newton
Technology Tutor Year 2: Sal Wilson
Digital skills: Pete Davies, Jo Johnson, Amy Kempa
Making consultancy: B-made
Critics: Kirsty Badenoch, Tom Budd, Ian Chalk, Nat Chard, Florence Hemmings, Colin Herperger, Jo Johnson, Elin Eyeborg Lund, Robin Mather, EmmaKate Matthews, Ashwin Patel, Farlie Reynolds, David Shanks
13.1, 13.5 Ilia Cleanthous, Y3 ‘Ungdomshuset 66’. The project revives the historical landmark Ungdomshuset (’the Youth House’) in Copenhagen, known for its rich legacy of activism and community engagement. The building reimagines and reconstructs a series of integrating architectural fragments from the original structure, creating dynamic, multi-functional spaces which honour the site’s legacy while serving contemporary community needs.
13.2–13.4 Bryan Png, Y3 ‘The Copenhagen Moving School of Conservation’. An emphasis on architectural innovation, sustainability and conservation in Copenhagen sets the context for the project. Situated between the existing conservation sites at the Børsen and the Nationalbanken, the proposal explores the integration of a school-cum-worksite. This positions itself as part of the restoration timeline, allowing continued occupation, alternative educational spaces and a fluid outlook towards building permanence.
13.6–13.7 Aleksandra Tarnowska, Y3 ‘Distilling Memories’. This building improves the quality of life of people with dementia by curating sensory experiences, primarily olfactory, to help individuals maintain their cognitive skills for as long as possible.
13.8–13.9 Kai Pentecost, Y3 ‘How the Earth Shapes You’. This therapy centre addresses Copenhagen’s inadequate support for PTSD psychiatric care. Situated on an ex-military island, pattern-making and fabric tailoring inspire an architecture of active healing and exposure therapy.
13.10–13.11 Laura Maczik, Y3 ‘The Wind Catcher’. This project harnesses and accelerates air speed through wind tunnels, which inflate balloons set within the building form. The released air then ventilates the building and is also used to shield nearby marine ecosystems through sonic bubble curtains.
13.12 Serena Haddon, Y3 ‘The First Frame is an Excavation’. The project questions inhabiting archaeological dig spaces based on a mothballed development site in Southwark. The ground is reopened, allowing archaeological dig ‘furniture’ to be shifted to provide new opportunities to read and re-read the multiple histories of a blurred ground condition.
13.13–13.15 Hsiang-Yu (Sean) Fan, Y3 ‘Museum for a Migrating Dune’. Situated next to the moving lighthouse at Rubjerg Knude, in the Jutland peninsula in Denmark, the project acts as an archive and instrument that measures the movement of shifting dunes using intricate, incrementally sheet-formed façades.
13.16–13.18 Beau Beames, Y3 ‘Reading Light’. Emerging from the sea and the sand, the project is inextricably linked to site conditions through the use of glass as a hyper-local articulation of fluid motion and saline caustics. The building is an architectural instrument derived from and set within the sea, fragmenting the shoreline while creating spaces that form an intimate relationship with the water.
13.19–13.21 Duncan McAllister, Y3 ‘Never Ever Forever’. The project focuses on the intermediate construction phase of the building’s timeline. Typical construction equipment such as cranes and tarpaulin are employed as permanent fixtures. Structural precariousness is used as a method of highlighting the liminal state of the building under deconstruction, using equipment such as acro-props and fragile handmade ropes as load bearers.
13.22 Hannah Bailey, Y2 ‘A Stage for the Storm’. Situated on the northern tip of Denmark by Old Skagen, an existing house is battered by storm winds and waves. A new building enwraps the old, protecting, enclosing, mediating and accepting the sea. During storms, an influx of water becomes both a performative experience
and an instrument for recording and analysing environmental conditions.
13.23–13.24 Julia Rzaca, Y3 ‘The Astral Mechanics of Celestial Architecture’. The City of London has a rich history with the astral, allowing a new building to create inclusive environments for both the art of astrology and the science of astronomy. The project examines how ornamentation can be used for structural purposes, thus making it not just an aesthetic choice but a necessity within the architectural typology.
13.25–13.27 Yuhan Wu, Y2 ‘A Circus of Subversive Performances’. The project investigates how circus acts transform architecture, questioning the conventions between performers and space, creating an architecture that fosters intimacy between spectators and performers. This is achieved through meticulously crafted ‘skins’ that both obscure and unveil, facilitating subversive observation and teases of voyeurism.
13.28 Juliana Orlenok, Y2 ‘A Deceitful Civic Structure’. Set in Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiania, the project explores how the police, narcotics pushers and local residents can be physically manifested within the design and occupation of a civic building. Its programme provides meeting rooms, preparation spaces and a debate chamber for discussing local area issues, while cuts and precise angles create visual transparency as well as hidden areas.
13.29 Rosina Hooper, Y2 ‘The Observer’s Set’. Sited in northern Denmark, the project is a voyeuristic film set designed to interrogate the notions of cinematic and temporal spectacle through the lens of the camera. The architecture creates an aspect ratio where the unaware are filmed and the aware remain hidden, so that the building itself becomes a stage for a performance of spectacle and voyeurism.
13.30 Elliot Woolard, Y2 ‘Ballonparken Logging Company’. In response to developments in the area and the destruction of the forest, the community of Ballonparken in Copenhagen begin to inhabit the forest and care for it. Their building is hidden from observation by remaining disguised within the existing tree canopy, below which an architecture becomes part of the woodland ecology. It uses trees as structure, increasing biodiversity and providing sustainable lumber to the local community through balloon logging, community workshop sawmills and composting zones.
Maria Fulford, Jörg Majer
Maria Fulford, Jörg Majer
‘The inevitability of total urbanisation must be questioned, and the countryside must be rediscovered as a place to resettle, to stay alive; enthusiastic human presence must reanimate it with new imagination.’
Rem Koolhaas, Countryside: A Report (Köln: Taschen, 2020)
If we are truly heading towards near total urbanisation, where does that leave the countryside? UG13 is interested in ruralism and the challenges and opportunities that this environment provides in the 21st century. The countryside has undergone seismic changes over the past 100 years through mechanisation, agrochemistry, land management, mass migration and new types of industry emerging. Despite these changes, rural environments are woefully underrepresented and misunderstood; it is time to shift our focus and examine the potential of this fertile territory.
Agriculture is broadly defined as the production of food and fibres through the explicit selection and husbandry of plants and animals. Ever since the first human settlements, architecture and agriculture have been dependent on one another. This year, as we experience food shortages caused by conflict, climate change and globalisation, UG13 looked to re-examine our relationship with agriculture and the countryside.
As a starting point, students were asked to plant a seed of rural conscience into the city by designing a monument in the form of a speculative structure, installation or device which might serve both humans, animals and plants.
For our field trip we travelled to the German state of BadenWürttemberg in Southern Germany to visit the fertile territory of the Black Forest. Until the middle of the 19th century much of the region was populated by small subsistence farming, carved out of the forest over centuries. Today Germany is one of the largest producers of agricultural goods in the EU; its farming is predominantly carried out by agribusiness consortia that cover vast territories.
It was François Cointeraux, a bricklayer from Lyon, who coined the term ‘agritecture’ as the cross-fertilisation of agriculture and architecture. He was an advocate for the countryside until his death in 1830 and sought to reunite building and farming skills. In their final build projects students were asked to design and cultivate their own ‘agritecture’ based on their research.
UG13 students are encouraged to be anarchists in the manner of Russian geographer Peter Kropotkin, who mused that ‘Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilisation’. In this sense, students need to collaborate and cooperate while simultaneously building self-reliance and independence.
Year 2
Beau Beames, Diego Carreras, Sophie Siney
Year 3
Lorenzo Angoli, Sarah Bibby, Amy Daja, Magdalena Herman, Shiwei Lai, Jatin Naru, Chisom Odoemene, Luiza-Elisabeta Oruc, Izzy Watson, Fangyi (Erica) Zhou
Technical tutors and consultants: Simon Beames, Tom Budd, James Green, Miranda MacLaren
Thank you to our critics: Kacper Chmielewski, Matt Driscoll, Tamsin Hanke, Sarah Izod, Carolyn Jackson, Philip Joseph, Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Tim Norman, Caireen O’Hagan, Christopher Page, Matthew Page
Special thanks to Niall Hobhouse at The Drawing Matter Collection, Shatwell Farm
13.1, 13.6, 13.26–13.28 Jatin Naru, Y3 ‘The Stories in the Shadows’. As an ode to folktale collections of the Brothers Grimm, this project speculates an architectural revival of their philological tendencies in the depths of the Black Forest. An outpost for literature students of a nearby university, the building acts as an embodiment of the ‘Naturpoesie’ they study within, hidden in the shadows of the trees. It is synecdochic of the surrounding forest: dramatic monumentality is placed alongside individual retreats for literary introspection. Writings are inscribed into the pinewood walls, transforming the building into a literary archive unto itself.
13.2, 13.20–13.22 Magdalena Herman, Y3 ‘Die Zuckerrübe’. This diabetes and research centre is located outside Basel, Switzerland, providing care and treatment facilities while simultaneously performing experimental methods of insulin manufacturing using yeast and E. coli bacteria. The building materiality has its basis in sugar production waste products, utilising beet pulp, molasses and other materials to create various internal atmospheres.
13.3, 13.12 Diego Carreras, Y2 ‘Formosity’. A hikers’ retreat and fish farm situated in a remote part of the Black Forest, Germany. The vernacular design is inspired by the unspoiled beauty of the nearby glacial waters. The project enhances the hiking experience by capturing the essence of nature using found materials from the site and respecting the surrounding natural environment. The lakes and forest act as the foundation of the kitchen; visitors can dine from menus of foraged ingredients, such as fish and mussels unique to the area, as well as local mushrooms and herbs.
13.4, 13.5, 13.23 Sarah Bibby, Y3 ‘Shifting Spaces: Dementia Dwellings’. Inspired by the traditional agricultural practices within the Black Forest, the project is centred on a series of garden walls, combining a goat farm with a housing scheme for dementia sufferers. The building explores what it means to be lost, recognising the deterioration of the allocentric mind during the progression of dementia that removes one’s sense of place. The project seeks to reintroduce a sense of place by designing egocentric experiences. The wall becomes central to the residents’ understanding of the scheme, acting as a way-finding device that emerges and dissolves into the landscape to allow residents to wander through framed views and landmarks, experiencing the topography of the orchard.
13.7, 13.13 Beau Beames, Y2 ‘Preserving at Plaw Hatch Farm’. The site is a small biodynamic farm situated at the junction of agriculture and forestry. Fermentation and smoking preserve the farm’s produce in a performative process, celebrating our connection to agriculture and the seasons, with the building enclosing a space for performance and communal celebration. The spaces are surrounded by impermeable and permeable elements of filigree steel and solid clay. The metal’s simple form conceals poetic structures clad in clay which is dug, fired and glazed on site.
13.8–13.10 Amy Daja, Y3 ‘The Salt House’. Bathhouses are an integral part of German culture. This project proposes a bathhouse based on the ancient principles of Roman baths and features columns that harvest minerals to grow salt crystals from geothermal water. The resultant material has health benefits as well as providing a rich and atmospheric experience tailored to the various climates found within the building.
13.11 Sophie Siney, Y2 ‘Flies to Feathers’. Mudchute Park and Farm is an urban working farm on the Isle of Dogs. The proposal utilises pill-box bunkers found on site to provide the urban population with a place to engage with and enjoy agricultural farming practices. It features a black soldier fly tower which produces enough larvae to
feed London’s growing chicken population, a biofuel generator and a pancake house.
13.14–13.15 Luiza-Elisabeta Oruc, Y3 ‘Milking of the Bees’. This respite and treatment centre for Parkinson’s disease is located deep within the Black Forest, Germany. The building is developed around the process of extracting bee venom to treat Parkinson’s sufferers. The project also analyses the centrality of bees to agriculture, medicine and visual culture. The sounds, smells and rich materiality of the insects are harvested to treat the afflictions of the disease, while spatially, a symbiotic relationship between patients and bees is explored. The form of the building draws inspiration from the ‘Orgelfelsen’, a large rock formation adjacent to the site, which was explored through a series of rock portraits and digital collages.
13.16–13.18 Izzy Watson, Y3 ‘Lunarcy Settlement’. Set in a valley in the Black Forest, this farming commune shares a deep-rooted obsession with the moon. The farm is an anthropomorphic machine maintained, expanded and worshipped by its inhabitants. The inhabitants are a mix of ‘romantic’ thinkers, concerned with aesthetics and ‘classical’ thinkers concerned with the function of parts composing the whole. Towering mirror machines target circular moonlight towards the site to control work and play at the farm.
13.19 Shiwei Lai, Y3 ‘A Thousand Screens’. Cherries hold a special place in many cultures as a celebratory fruit, symbolising joy, abundance and the arrival of spring. The proposed café and bakery provide the town of Baden-Baden with a place to enjoy Black Forest gateau within a large cherry orchard. Recycled waste cherry wood, paper screens and ceiling lanterns create an atmospheric space for celebrating this classic cake.
13.24–13.25 Lorenzo Angoli, Y3 ‘Conserving Monastic Practices’. The monastic architecture in this project establishes a centre dedicated to botanical exploration and research, focusing particularly on Hypericum Perforatum (St John’s Wort) and its production in the form of oil and liquor. The building capitalises on the region’s abundant rivers, utilising them for irrigation and research purposes. Embracing an architectural language that reflects monastic traditions, the building provides an environment conducive to both education and contemplation.
Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger
This year UG13 learned from the disruptive creation of couture to develop a new process of architectural design.
Couture is the highest echelon of an industrial process. It offers a forum for goods beyond those which are wearable, saleable and practical and is set apart just sufficiently from the realm of the real world to exist entirely for the purposes of inspiration. Couture can interact with the cultural present in a way that is immediate, responsive and reciprocal, allowing it to benefit from advances in technology and cultural thinking.
Students were asked to research cultures of innovation –defining couture not as a contingent of fashion, but rather as a method of creative production that is present in all disciplines, from the sciences to landscape and across the arts. We are interested in the particularities of this mindset, including the people, their influences and contexts. We are also curious about how ideas around innovation are communicated through drawings, images and descriptions, as well as by the final pieces themselves.
For our field trip, UG13 travelled from York to Berwick-uponTweed via Lindisfarne. We explored a range of architectural projects and works of innovation including aviation, sculpture and landscape. Projects have been sited both in locations from the trip and from around London, varying in scales from the expanse of the flooding causeway at Lindisfarne to tight urban sites in Camden. Each project was developed with a rigorous respect towards architectural convention and an adventurous approach to spatial and aesthetic assumptions,
We see opportunity in the type of innovation which looks at where culture might be able to move towards, rather than remaining where it is. We are interested in the elements that go into making an environment of true innovation, driving culture forward and advancing our thinking on what is possible.
UG13 helps students to find a way of working that drives them as individuals – one that can be sustained beyond the limitations of a graded project. We encourage students to find agency through clear and confident decision-making, and to explore and communicate complex ideas of architecture and design through simple architectural programmes.
Year 2
Chuhan (Paris) Feng, Edmund (Flurry) Grierson, Veronika Khasapova, Adam Klestil, Po (Tate) Mok, Peter Moore, Luiza-Elisabeta Oruc, Roland Paczolay, Fangyi (Erica) Zhou
Year 3
Bogdan Botis, Daniel Collier, Shyem Ramsay, Zhelin (Simon) Sun, Ying (Sunny) Sun, Peixuan (Olivia) Xu, Chan (Antonio) Yang, Ron Zaum
Technical tutor and consultant: Syafiq Jubri
Critics: Sam Davies, Niki-Marie Jansson, Madhav Kidao, Patch Perez, Kevin Pollard, Dan Pope
13.1–13.4, 13.8–13.10 Peixuan (O livia) Xu, Y3 ‘Sweet Simulacra’. A chocolate workshop and museum transforms York’s confectionery history into sweet simulacra. Challenging Baudrillard’s view that the hyperreality of digitalisation loses its original meaning, the building intends to create an architectural hybrid of digital fabrication and analogue crafting, bringing back the driving force of desire.
13.5–13.7 Po (Tate) Mok, Y2 ‘The Nautilus’. The project is intrigued by the form of bone structures and how nature is predicated on the idea of ‘design’ – the correlation of structure with function that lies at the heart of the molecular nature of life. Through continuous exploration of bone and skin, aesthetic and material implications begin to present themselves in a newfound awareness of transparency, translucency and the exposing of structure and backlit forms.
13.11–13.15 Daniel Collier, Y3 ‘Children/Factory’.
This project explores the definition of the sublime as the perception of danger from a place of safety. A primary school acts as a safe environment through which the industrial processes that support us can be viewed by integrating factories directly into the school, separated from the pupils by a thin, semi-permeable membrane. The project also acknowledges England’s transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy for this new generation of children. Steiner schools were originally set up as a response to the industrial revolution and looked to reconnect with a way of life situated in the landscape sublime. In the post-industrial West, they now have the opportunity to reconnect children with both the landscape sublime and the industrial sublime.
13.16 Ron Zaum, Y3 ‘4 Orsman Road’. The project is situated at 4 Orsman Road, a creative hub located in Tuscany Wharf, overlooking Regent’s Canal and surrounded by studios. The notion of scenography and creative spaces that reshape architecture’s purpose allows for the development of stone shell housing and a variety of flexible spaces for lectures, galleries or shows.
13.17 Roland Paczolay, Y2 ‘Duality of Absence’. The project bridges the gap between the deceased and the living through the use of dualistic philosophy. Duality pertains to a view of life which accepts the tension and paradox of human existence. The union of opposing forces is translated into a monumental architectural language which invites mourners in while impressing on them the importance of life.
13.18 Peter Moore, Y2 ‘More than Just a Post Office’. The Royal Mail has its roots as a bespoke courier service for the monarchy. As it expanded, it held onto its royal origin in its design and aesthetic. The postal system was at the forefront of industrialisation, and during this time, through beautiful craftsmanship and engineering, the Royal Mail was in its prime as a cultural and political symbol. The project questions the current march towards efficiency by proposing a romanticised, ornamented post office that revels in the luxurious. It seeks to be more beautiful and more designed than it needs to be – placing great importance on aesthetic pleasure.
13.19 Chuhan (Paris) Feng, Y2 ‘An Invitation to See My New Nose’. The project – a consultation hub sited in Harley Street, London – is inspired by the history and surgical procedures of plastic surgery. The main design motif in the project is a building that pretends to be a landscape, interrogating the challenge of harmoniously merging natural and man-made together in the surgery. It treats the vast plain site by digging into the ground and building upon it to create a raised landscape that hugs the sunken building. It questions how architecture can be surgically constructed.
13.20 Shyem Ramsay, Y3 ‘The Urban Ecology Sanctum’. The project is located in Millwall Park on the Isle of Dogs, and consists of an ecotherapy centre with accommodation and public allotments. The construction of the timber truss structures explores the iterative design of the roof and the connections of timber joints, forming an organic appearance.
13.21 Ying (Sunny) Sun, Y3 ‘Slipping into Fantasy’. The project explores the intimate relationship between architectural features and their inhabitants. It proposes a water park and holiday centre for people to relax and unwind, providing visitors with the opportunity to explore their subconscious fantasies in an obscure, intimate and illusionary environment. Located in Brighton, the building sits along the seashore. Unique structural spaces are created to allow building inhabitants, architectural elements and the site’s landscape to playfully engage with each other. This can be experienced through a series of designs, from the changing rooms to the water slides.
13.22 Fangyi (Erica) Zhou, Y2 ‘Breaking the Dogmatism of Learning’. The project, a new co-learning centre situated on the bank of the Lee Navigation in the vibrant neighbourhood of Hackney Wick, seeks to investigate future possibilities of learning by triggering constant curiosity in the learning process. The building provides a series of interrelated educational spaces, ranging from large lecture rooms to small individual studying units. The key motif of the design is to maximise the encounters between interdisciplinary activities by creating three tiers of discovery: looking at, looking through and looking past.
13.23 Luiza-Elisabeta Oruc, Y2 ‘The Repository of Childhood Imagination’. The project is an investigation into curiosity and imagination and looks at how adults can experience feelings of childlike excitement within architecture. Located next to the V&A Museum of Childhood, the building is an example of how embracing play can lead to unleashing creativity and imagination. The project invokes a sense of comfort and nostalgia, being equal parts familiar and fantastical, as well as a sense of discovery and curiosity in the unknown.
13.24 Edmund (Flurry) Grierson, Y2 ‘This is Going to Make Some Noise’. This project accommodates a new state-of-the-art wind tunnel testing facility in Middlesbrough, a post-industrial town in North Yorkshire. Middlesbrough is being simultaneously destroyed and rebuilt to enable the town’s ‘levelling up’. Wind sculpts the space, creating acoustic blocks between rooms that generate both privacy and intimacy. The architecture also considers complex team dynamics within elite sports, with the premise that not all teammates are team players.
13.25 Chan (Antonio) Yang , Y3 ‘Performing for the Surveillance Society’. As surveillance becomes more and more prevalent, inhabitants of the town hall continue to act out choreographed, regimented performances for the consumption of the observers nested within the voyeurs’ corridors that circulate throughout the building. In contrast, inspired by the current counter-surveillance design movement and its material influences, the project also illustrates how the inhabitants of the public circuses would rebel against this dominant voyeuristic system.
Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger
This year, students looked at the nature of limitation and the cultural importance of occasional impossibility. Sometimes limitations manifest themselves as a tiny absence borne from an impossible script in the rendering engine. Sometimes it is an entire masterpiece that fails in the last round of fundraising. We are interested in the instances when limitation has been met with nonchalance, where the absence has been so completely considered that the yet-made project has become fully alive.
Students investigated unmade projects that have become, through persistence, no less whole than those that have been built, acted or shot. These works often contribute more actively to a genre as they attempt to realise a feat that is technologically, culturally or ethically ahead of their time. They must work harder to convince and answer questions of validity and possibility.
Nimbly and with persistence, students sought to construct a journey to achieve an invented vision. The development of the projects included the invention and construction of the site as a digital environment. This may be borrowed from reality or a found or invented narrative, and is ultimately communicated with exacting precision and utter belief in its existence. Students worked to consider a continuously growing range of cultural influences beyond architecture to find and build upon opportunities for insight.
In UG13, we help students to find a way of working and line of enquiry that drives them as individuals, which can be sustained beyond the limitations of the graded project. We encourage students to find agency through clear and confident decision making, and to explore and communicate complex ideas of architecture and design through simple programmes.
Year 2
Cosimo De Barry, Leonard Ide, Natthasha (Ying) Jintarasamee, Veronika Khasapova, Krit Pichedvanichok, Josef Slater, Zhelin (Simon) Sun, Yen Ting, Fangyi (Erica) Zhou
Year 3
Grace Baker, Selin Bengi, David Byrne, Zijie Cai, Alfie Gee, Ruoxi Jia, Mariia Shapovalova, Martins Starks
Technical tutors and consultants: Sam Davies, Patch Dobson-Pérez, Egmontas Geras, Syafiq Jubri, Sonia Magdziarz, Kevin Pollard
Critics: Nat Chard, Sam Davies, Freddie Hong, Madhav Kidao, Freddie Leyden, Kevin Pollard, Javier Ruiz Rodriguez, Simon Withers. A special thanks to Mark West
13.1 Alfie Gee, Y3 ‘My Partner, A Ghost’. An architecture that refuses a passive and static life, preferring instead the world of dolls and ghosts: bodies looking for life and lives in search of bodies. These studies explore the limits of sympathy and revulsion and their blurring into an architecture of punishment.
13.2 David Byrne, Y3 ‘Entrance to the Referenced Heterotopia’. Analysis of Mark Fisher’s work on cultural hauntology – a concept that considers how the present is affected by the metaphorical ‘ghosts’ of lost futures –leads to an exploration of referencing and plagiarism in popular culture. Through investigations of designers and their modes of referencing, the design produces a bewildering experience in which one can dissect and explore the references and precedents held within.
13.3 Josef Slater, Y2 ‘In Praise of the Berceuse’. Drawing initial inspiration from capsule hotel typologies, this project proposes a hotel that acts as a lullaby, while emphasising and manipulating the relationship between users and workers. Sited in Camden, the project considers how a capsule hotel might function in a London setting and comments on the obscuration and actualities of labour within society.
13.4–13.5 Leonard Ide, Y2 ‘Relocating Smithfield Market Tenants’ Association’. The proposal allows for the Smithfield Market Tenants’ Association – the trade union representing the market’s working body – to compromise on forced emigration, due to the expansion of the city’s financial centre, and relocate to a new site. The building takes on a defensive stance, acting as an anchor for Smithfield’s legacy.
13.6–13.9 Martins Starks, Y3 ‘Playce’. An inner London kindergarten provides children growing up in small flats in Haggerston a chance to roam freely and explore their urban surroundings. Through the application of parametric simulation techniques, a new mode of kinetic architecture is proposed, allowing the corridors of a school to transform into an immersive game world. 13.10–13.13 Mariia Shapovalova, Y3 ‘Blurring Performance’. The project is a performance space and gastronomy centre located at Trinity Buoy Wharf, the confluence of the River Thames and River Lea. The building negotiates the interaction between the performance and gastronomy space, questions the depth of space and architectural boundaries, and modifies how an audience transitions into a performance and a performer relates to the stage.
13.14 Alfie Gee, Y3 ‘My Partner, A Ghost’. A ballet school haunted by ghosts sits on the water’s edge at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London. Both host and occupant, the school dances in partnership with its students, provoked by their inhabitation and provoking in return. Applying animation as the main design process, both literally and conceptually, the school proposes a cohabitant architecture. A stage is an empty floor but the dancer’s posture can transform its resonance. This ballet school is an architecture for animists, not automata.
13.15–13.17 David Byrne, Y3 ‘Queering Vauxhall/ Disrupting Normativity’. Through the production of heterotopias, interior spaces allow for the experimentation and production of novel Queer identities, away from the homo and transnormative modes of identity produced through exterior surveillance.
13.18–13.20 Zijie Cai, Y3 ‘Dream at Trinity Buoy Wharf’. The film industry has developed various techniques and devices to describe the dream in visual terms since cinema’s invention. The hotel provides an architectural departure from the reality of urban life into the dream space of its interior. The project defines dream as the distortion of reality and challenges the physical constraints of architecture to propose a personal dream through digital media.
13.21–13.22 Ruoxi Jia, Y3 ‘Soft Immersion: Hotel in the aesthetic’. Drawing from the aesthetic movement in Britain (1860–1900), a hotel complex is proposed to investigate an artist’s formal softening approaches. The hotel intends to cure urban melancholy with recreation, bathing and landscape fusions onsite.
13.23 Grace Baker, Y3 ‘Decommissioning Fear Towards a Post-Nuclear Future’. Capitalism has normalised destructive forces. The global effects of climate change now outweigh the catastrophic risks associated with nuclear power. The proposal analyses the fears of past disasters and weaves a narrative of suggestions for a more harmonised and sustainable world, as a way to cultivate acceptance of future green technologies.
13.24 Cosimo De Barry, Y2 ‘Nourishing the Culinary Underbelly’. A restaurant in St James’s, London takes on a labyrinthine form of subterranean kitchens and bars. The intimate site allows for the underground world of chefs to flourish in the heart of central London, while appealing to a clientele seeking exclusivity and hedonism.
13.25 Krit Pichedvanichok, Y2 ‘Broadway Terminal’. Responding to the world’s gradual transition to electric vehicles, the project takes as its focus the longer time period required to refuel an electric car. The typical five-minute pit stop for petrol cars is reimagined and re-purposed to become a multi-purpose hub for car enthusiasts and passing drivers to utilise and unwind.
13.26–13.27 Selin Bengi, Y3 ‘Architecture as Landscape’. The building design envisions a new Farringdon Station in London, embodying a sense of adventure and the unexpected contrasted with the inherent order found in nature. Many repeating and interwoven habitats within the building reveal themselves along circulation paths and create a sense of dynamism. The new station turns the daily commute into a calming and inspiring experience as one moves from the alluvial forms of the ground floor to a dwarfing canyon, and into the nooks of the cavernous library that reach the vast valley of the Crossrail terminal, 30 metres below ground.
13.28 Natthasha (Ying) Jintarasamee, Y2 ‘The Next Phase of Trinity Buoy Wharf: A performative stage of its own’. A project that uses performance as a tool and understands it as a form rather than something that is a performance. It features a designer’s flagship store that focusses on the experience of the building’s users, and the building itself, to recreate performance.
13.29 Yen Ting, Y2 ‘On the Rocks and Under the Sea’. A hotel that explores the coastal character of the Broomway, a public right of way over the foreshore at Maplin Sands, off the coast of Essex. The architecture ties together notions of tide, changing sea levels, danger and accessibility. Parts of the building are allowed to flood and the presence and proximity of the sea is felt throughout.
Herperger
In UG13 this year, students began the year by looking at how decisions are made and experienced, both creatively and culturally. We were most curious about the potential of the interstitial period of time, when a decision has been made but the outcome has not yet formed. It is in this territory that the decision and its consequence are most fully able to be experienced, nuanced and understood. This much we knew at the outset: the ability to act decisively is valuable to move work forward with a pace and intensity that allows for continued learning within its development. Decisive acts empower us to make progress.
The process of making the decision and acknowledging its authorship of the terrain in which work emerges suggests an opportunity to test our intuition and identity as creative practitioners, helping to discover an individual methodology that will outlast a single year’s education. Decision-making is a skill that we practice throughout our lives. We develop our context, deepen our intuition, and yet as architects we remain free to adjust our mind in response to an outcome we did not expect. We must learn over time to identify opportunity, discover research and yet know when to trust intuition and simply jump into the dark.
The unit travelled to Portugal – to Lisbon and Porto – to understand how a contemporary European society approaches architectural progression culturally, and to consider the inherent value of existing decisions, or in this case buildings, in relation to future ideas. Students ventured to understand the foundations on which new ideas are built – and how young firms in Portugal are working decisively to make exciting new definitions, both in the cities and in rural areas. Buildings have been sited between these two cities.
In UG13, we value work that, although often simple in its programmatic and verbal description, is delightfully complex in its architectural proposition and inventiveness. Achieving clarity is firmly respected within our experimental and explorative agenda. The unit is proud to nurture a challenging environment of experimentation in the as-yet-unknown, where students feel supported and equipped to take the chances required to achieve the exceptional. Work is made in which the particularities of individual insight, interest and methodologies are embedded directly within the pieces and buildings.
Year 2
Ling Fung (Grace) Chan, Ioana-Maria Drogeanu, Zicong (Charles) Liang, Rebecca Miller, Kun (Anna) Pang, Sirikarn (Preaw) Paopongthong, Sharon Tam
Year 3
Maciej Adaszewski, Dinu Hoinarescu, Dilara Koz, Ziwei (Philip) Liu, Jingxian (Jacquelyn) Pan, Kehui (Victoria) Wu, Yujie Wu, Suzhi Xu
Thanks to our technical tutors and consultants Sophia McCracken, Sam Davies, Sonia Magdziarz, Minh Tran
Thank you to our critics Alessandro Ayuso, Shawn Bailey, Matthew Butcher, Jun Hao Chan, Freddie Hong, Nina Jua Klien, Syafiq Jubri, Madhav Kidao, Luke Lupton, Zach Pauls, Patch Perez, Kevin Pollard, Mark West, Simon Withers
13.1–13.4 Ziwei (Philip) Liu, Y3 ‘A School for Ages 3-7, Lisbon’. Using the bounds of a school, the project is an attempt to exploit a certain bodily expression. It is located in the landscapes of Botanical Garden of Lisbon. Children are allowed to interact in a liberating and protective environment. As a speculative exploration into the realms of unbound imagination, it is ambiguous whether the architecture houses the body, or the anatomy governs its structure. In the shadows of the wondrous landscape, comes the wrenching skeleton with a bustling scene of play; lurking through the layers of amorphous skin is the curious Principal; and from its undulating shell rises the unfettered playground for the little beings.
13.5–13.8 Jingxian (Jacquelyn) Pan, Y3 ‘The Wayfarer, Som das Virtudes, Porto’. A waterpark design inspired by a study into the relationship between humans and music created through band jamming, applying this practice to one’s own interaction with architectural design. The project challenges the stagnant quality of architecture, by applying the ideology of band jamming to the design of a water park, and to create experiences within a piece of architecture that only exist in the very present moment.
13.9–13.10 Dilara Koz, Y3 ‘ Existential Subdivisions of Peripheral Space: A House Model for Four Generations, Porto’. Multigenerational housing, more popular across the Eastern hemisphere, presents itself as an opportunity to secure the development of an area, preventing further slum typologies such as the Ilhas that exist in the historic centre of Porto. The compactness of four generations living together is dissolved through a variety of threshold conditions across the spaces of dwelling. With each generation, there is a gradual progression from the private living space to the communal, explored through the spatialisation of the threshold (wall) that traditionally divides spaces within architecture.
13.11–13.12 Sirikarn (Preaw) Paopongthong, Y2
‘ Pastelaria of Play: Culinario Ludico, Lisbon’. Bridging the notion of precise inquiry and creative play, the culinary school and pastelaria serves as a space where the nomadic lifestyle takes over, to be engaged by the space through ones own tentative thoughts. Aiming to enhance the realm of a cultural culinary creation, architecture acts as a way of secondary rule-making.
13.13 Maciej Adaszewski, Y3 ‘ Instituto Dos Vinhos, Porto’. An architectural proposal for boutique winery, situated on one of Porto’s signature steep hills, adjacent to the Douro river. Central to the vision of the building is the intersection between private, industrial side of a wine-making facility, hospitality areas for wine tasting events and representative function of the object. During the day, surfaces of this proposal bask in Portuguese sun, allowing natural daylight to reach areas of industrial production. After the sun sets, light from within the winery illuminates acts of inhabitation, revealing itself in a form of natural projections to be witnessed by outside bystanders.
13.14–13.15 Suzhi Xu, Y3 ‘ Estudo de Deformacao –A Second-Hand Market, Porto’. As a common norm, a piece of furniture is deactivated when there is an absence of contact between it and the user. This project finds ways to utilise the nature of deactivation to form new connections with pre-owned materials, redefining and extending its boundaries. The crisis of abandoned housing in Porto provides an opportunity to look at unused furniture and other properties in this way. The proposal redefines the original purpose of collected materials through re-valuation and re-activation.
13.16 Kehui (Victoria) Wu, Y3 ‘Casa de Amplificação, Porto’. This project is a purpose-built venue for the experience of live performances, tailored specifically to the genre of rock music. The building seeks to counter the notion that environments in which amplified music is
performed do not need to be specially designed, instead arguing that the architecture of a venue has significant impact on the gig experience.
13.17 Ioana-Maria Droganeu, Y2 ‘ Breathing Inside the Womb, Lisbon’. This surrealist exhibition space and hostel explores a way in which the idea of the womb, our first home, can be introduced in the building design by using inflatable structures. These structures create a constant exchange between the interior and the exterior.
13.18 Zicong (Charles) Liang, Y2 ‘An Art Centre for the Youth of Porto’. This project proposes an art centre: a community and a platform for students and young art lovers to learn art, perform art and exhibit their achievements to the public in Porto. The building presents a vision to rejuvenate the cultural life of the city that suffered from a lack of funding during the financial crisis.
13.19 Rebecca Miller, Y2 ‘ The Love of the Land, Lisbon’. The project is a chapel and auditorium with supporting facilities, referencing the changing agricultural landscape of Lisbon. Inspired by cartographic, agrarian and animist attitudes to landscape, the natural world and their uniquely spiritual qualities, this non-denominational chapel will allow for spiritual reflection within the urban city and highlight the spiritual, more ephemeral features of landscape.
13.20 Ling Fung (Grace) Chan, Y2 ‘Shelter of Who You Are, Lisbon’. This hostel is a response to a brief of confronting people’s self-cognition in a dynamic and interactive sensation exchange. It gives priority to the way in which people respond to each other in a space, and attempts to explore this through architectural proposal. Level changes are used to create spontaneous social interractions across light-filled wells.
13.21 Yujie Wu, Y3 ‘ The Decadents and New Nature; A Hotel for Golden Visa Applicants, Lisbon’. On a cliff surrounded by exotic trees, the hotel is trying to blend into the surrounding environment through blurring the boundary between manmade and nature, inside and outside. The building’s moving elements also incorporate with nature to make the building alive.
13.22 Kun (Anna) Pang, Y2 ‘Carving Flesh and Stone, Lisbon’. As large cities such as Lisbon continue to develop and urban populations rise, our civilisation is becoming more and more disconnected to the cities we inhabit. Thus the aim of the bathhouse is to explore how marble carving could be modernised in order to carve modern, fluid forms, dematerialising the monolithic identity of stone to allow for a nonverbal dialogue between the visitors and the architecture; creating a sensory oasis in the heart of the busy city.
13.23, 13.25 Sharon Tam, Y2 ‘ Biblio[TECH], Lisbon’. Located near the port of Lisbon, this tech startup office embodies the concept of fragility and encourages socialisation. As a response to the Portuguese Financial Crisis, the provision of co-working spaces contributes to the city’s steps to economic recovery. While the design of a fragile workspace intends to motivate entrepreneurs through eliciting their vulnerabilities, the programme as a business agglomeration serves as an anti-fragile safety net for them to grow their businesses. The form of the building challenges structural lightness and heaviness, material thinness and thickness.
13.24 Dinu Hoinarescu, Y3 ‘ Portuguese Short Film Festival, Lisbon’. On the peak of the old neighborhood of Alfama, overlooking Lisbon, lies the new site of the Portuguese Short Film Festival organised by the Art Institute of New York. The role of the film festival programmer and director is taken by the architect through camera direction and wayfinding using light and the existing topography. The key aspect and driver of the project is the duality of the everyday use of the building in contrast to the glamorous festivities of the film festival.
Tamsin Hanke, Ralph Parker
Our inquiry into landscape this year leaves aside the picturesque and the garden for the wilderness, the feral, and the visceral engagement of ground, depth, space and body, found through adventure. We are the new explorers, registering the ground afresh. We are the transcribers of its strange histories, those who listen for its peculiar resonances, the keepers of its countless time and cartographers of its unholy dreams. We are intrigued by the human desire for conquest and the search for an improbable and previously impossible relationship between man and ground. Architectural opportunity lies in the spatial idea of this relationship – how we discover adventures and mark territory.
Charting a path towards an archaeology of future architectures that have an inexorable correlation with the terrain, we find new ground hidden in old landscapes. We create works as spatial registrations into the landscape; interventions borne of congruences, syncopations, phase shifts and alignments, dualities, ciphers and sequences across the vast stratification of place and people, where strange and meaningful architectures coalesce. What discoveries can we draw from an infinitely stratified landscape, to then be modulated and refigured into architectural action?
The unit favours the ‘making’ of ideas and space because physical production carries with it a degree of difficulty that allows the work itself to speak back, as it is fashioned through its subtle procession of successes and failures. We value work that – although often simple in its programmatic and verbal description – is delightfully complex in its architectural proposition and inventiveness. Achieving clarity is firmly respected within our experimental and explorative agenda. We nurture a challenging environment of experimentation in the as-yet-unknown, where students feel supported and equipped to take the chances required to achieve the exceptional.
This year, we have purposefully sought out difficult places set in challenging landscapes, to stimulate inventiveness in response to those landscapes, and to achieve propositional clarity not subservient to, but in balance with it. The projects engage with a swathe of sites uncovered on an ascension across Europe; from the glimmering sea level of Gaudí’s Barcelona, via Ledoux’s sublime salt works, the historical grain of ancient Lyon, the susurrating vine-clad shores of Lake Geneva and upwards, into the echoing footholds of heroic Alpinists at the high roof of the continent.
Year 2
Rory Cariss, Herui Chen, Andrew Cowie, Henri Khoo, Oscar Leung, Seng (Aaron) Lim, Diana Mykhaylychenko, Konrad Pawalczyk, Theo Syder
Year 3
Vasily Babichev, Vladyslav Bondarenko, Alys Hargreaves, Yu-Wen (Yvonne) Huang, Maria Jones Delgado, James McLaughlin, Arina Viazenkina
With thanks to visiting tutor Colin Herperger and technical tutor Sash Scott
Thank you to our critics: Nat Chard, Olivia Forty, Syafiq Jubri, Perry Kulper, Javier Ruiz
13.1, 13.19 Alys Hargreaves, Y3 ‘In Conversation With: A Glacier’. Set within the scar of a rapidly retreating glacier, the climate convention centre establishes an international space of collective discussion for the long-term catastrophe and short-term states of crises that are symptomatic of climate change. Consisting of a lecture theatre, an assembly hall, libraries and accommodation, the building addresses the need for soft and hard discussions linked to the pace and syntax of conversation. The architecture has a spatial temporality translated through the process of slip-casting.
13.2 Yu-Wen (Yvonne) Huang, Y3 ‘Swan Lake: An Immersive Theatre Hotel’. Inspired by Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre productions, the public spaces of this boutique hotel transform into performance stages at designated times of the day. The architecture is the manifestation of performance as built pieces in space. An alternative approach to data-driven designs was explored by alternating between digital technology, 3D printing and traditional building methods, such as sand casting, and interpreted a contemporary adaptation of Swan Lake. The integration of structural and environmental building performance with theatrical productions, tests the intermediate boundaries between structure, form and function.
13.3 Arina Viazenkina, Y3 ‘The Institution of Dreams’. Taking inspiration from Carl Jung’s dream theories, this project aims to materialise a dreamlike experience in a proposal for a public walkway in Tring Park in Hertfordshire. The design of the walkway is based on the novel Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
13.4–13.5 James McLaughlin, Y3 ‘The Theatrics of Paper’. This project creates visual moments of performative disruption within a theatre, whereby the audience is presented to itself, blurring the boundary between performance and reality. The building mirrors and divides these brief moments of objectification and voyeurism by layering the typologies of theatre and set production. Paper elements of the architecture and the stage are cast within the various programmed spaces, further subverting the role of the audience into having an active involvement with the theatre’s development, expansion and deterioration.
13.6–13.7 Vasily Babichev, Y3 ‘The Creature in the Arveyron River’. A proposal for an arts institution that fosters environmental responses to Mer de Glace, a melting glacier in the French Alps. As the glacier ‘weeps’, the building clings to the land with its tears.
13.8–13.9 Maria Jones Delgado, Y3 ‘The Harbinger of the Storm’. Born from the myth that dragons pre-empt and cause storms in the Alps, this botanical garden and seed bank research facility channels extreme weather into the building to preserve specimens threatened by the glacial retreat happening parallel to the site.
13.10 Andrew Cowie, Y2 ‘Post-Work Re-Education Centre’. A proposal for a community centre in Lausanne in Switzerland that fosters the re-education of pre-industrial Swiss crafts – specifically stone sculpture, sgraffito, tavillonage, wood-carving and decoupage. The centre aims to carve new histories into the land’s abundant resources of timber and stone in a ‘post-work’ society.
13.11 Seng (Aaron) Lim, Y2 ‘Play Atlas’. This project is an inter-generational playhouse bringing together families and artists-in-residence to inspire horizontal learning, collaboration and experimentation. Grounded by the Reggio Emilia pedagogy – a student-centred preschool education philosophy – the playhouse is a haven for imagination that subverts daily domestic elements, routines and scales to encourage residents to use their innate curiosity in understanding the world they inhabit.
13.12 Konrad Pawlaczyk, Y2 ‘Trans-Musical Realm’. This project explores the spatial possibilities of architecture in facilitating shifts of human cognition through the sublime experience of music (vibration), and represents a transition between the typology of a chapel (silence) and a club (sound). The project looks at physical engagement with the experience of music.
13.13 Theo Syder, Y2 ‘Concrete Latex Plastic Latex’. A proposal for a micro-hotel with an interior that subtly reconfigures according to the different groups of inhabitants and the unique configurations of the seven types of Greek love experienced by them.
13.14 Diana Mykhaylychenko, Y2 ‘The Search of Inflection Point’. This project asks ‘What is the best moment to perform the perfect shot?’, ‘How do you catch the inflection point between two different states and materialise opposite forces in the architecture?’ and ‘Can the sequential process of long-distance shooting be read as a transitional procession that helps you to understand the environment outside?’
13.15 Vladyslav Bondarenko, Y3 ‘Breath of the Landscape’.
A proposal for an inflatable pavilion in Tring Park, constructed using a method of both metal and reflective fabric tailoring. The pavilion – constantly inhaling and moving with the air and wind – houses a meditation space creating a fluid yet tranquil experience using its materiality.
13.16 Oscar Leung , Y2 ‘BURD’s Onsen’. A design proposal for a hot spring emporium for visitors and locals of the resort town, based on a mechanised bird. Abutting a saltworks-turned-museum, the building utilises its neighbour’s original brine pipelines and stores its contents in iron basins to supply rust-infused saltwater to its various hot springs for a genuine ‘iron onsen’ experience.
13.17–13.18 Henri Khoo, Y2 ‘The Tringest Tring’. An invitation to explore the unseen territory of the composited spectacle: the reanimation of Tring Park.
13.20, 13.22 Rory Cariss, Y2 ‘An Archive of Alpine Misadventure’. The archive, situated in Le Trétien, Switzerland, is based on the history of man’s failed attempts to conquer the Alps. The building houses a collection of objects and digital recordings, celebrating and preserving these stories of misadventure. A co-housing scheme forms a large part of the project, providing a home for the ex-mountaineers that run the archive.
13.21 Herui Chen, Y2 ‘Land/Soundscapes’. Experimentations on developing musical compositions into landscapes or converting spatial settings into music. The objective of this project is to find an alternative iterative tool to generate spatial designs.