Bartlett Design Anthology | UG15

Design Anthology UG15

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.

2020 Real-Time Delay

Ivana Wingham, Lucy Pengilley Gibb

Real-Time

Delay

Ivana Wingham, Lucy Pengilley Gibb

Real-Time Delay

Ivana Wingham, Lucy Pengilley Gibb

This year, UG15 started to look at obsolete efficiencies, to turn them into present temporal delay by changing utilitarian objects into things that ‘talk’ to the present. Learning from objects that once transformed the lives of people as innovative pieces of modern technology affecting the home or work – typewriter, arithmometer, teasmade, sewing machine or apple peeler – the students drew ideas from these objects and their associated behaviours, turning operative investigations into individual responses to old technologies.

In the first term, students used these investigations to tease out ideas about behaviours that are in opposition to what is expected or predicted from such technologies. They launched into disobedient, accidental, playful, unexpected and emotional responses that provoked uniquely individual spatial constructions. The projects exploited technological obsolescence as a drive for locating indeterminate human behaviours and unusual engagements with architectural spaces.

During our carefully choreographed field trip across Northern Italy to visit remote, inaccessible and well-known modernist sites –such as dams and sites of disaster, viaducts and flood plains, palaces of labour and car test-tracks – we extended our understanding of obsolescence and innovation. Focusing on the once-iconic pieces of architecture that embody layers of temporal expiry, we revealed their potential latency, and quickly learned that when architecture becomes obsolete, it becomes liberated from its intended utility. UG15 embraced this opportunity and proposed a disobedient practice that played on the notion of architecture that is never complete and pristine, but rather engages with time and the unfinished, while it rebelliously and innovatively re-jigs established cultural, technological or historical practices.

The final architectural projects see architecture as fluctuating, kinetic, flowing, dispersed, and expanding temporally, operatively and programmatically. The designs embrace the incomplete, the hidden, the fragile, the orchestrated, and much more. Buildings are seen as sites of exploration; activators within larger strategies that draw out planes of multiple temporalities, layers of materiality and combinations of activated behaviours, on obsolete sites. We experimented with speeding and delaying time in designing architecture, creating conflicting strategies within our chosen sites, designing building projects that played with seductive registrations, in order to make spaces that nurture and inspire human life and create new atmospheres.

Year 2

Irene Entrecanales, Anna Knapczyk, Yutong Luo, Michela Morreale, Carmen-Theodora Noretu, Gregorian Tanto, Sevgi Yaman, Wenxi Zhang

Year 3

Ana Dosheva, Ceren Erten, Marina Kathidjotis, Amy Peacock, Carmen Ligia Poara

Thanks to our digital tutors Egmontas Geras, Omar Ibraz

Thanks to our consultants Kostas Grigoriadis, Michael Hadi, Nick Hayhurst

Thank you to our critics Irene Astrain, Asa Bruno, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Nat Chard, Maria Federochenko, James Foster, Egmontas Geras, Niamh Grace, Kostas Grigoriadis, Michael Hadi, Phil Hamilton, Kieran Hawkins, Nick Hayhurst, Marcus Hurst, Tim Norman, Teresa Stoppani

15.1 Ana Dosheva, Y3 ‘Orchestrated Flow’. This project reworks obsolete site of Italian Paper Mill Factory famous for its copper vessels used for paper pulp-making, and transforms it into a museum of obsolete hydraulic systems. The roof becomes a bespoke rain-activated museum artifact orchestrating water flow that creates unique sounds by double curved copper sheet tiles. This interior view looks towards Maglio Chamber.

15.2–15.3, 15.12 Ceren Erten, Y3 ‘Written on Water’. This project explores the temporal obsolescence of a site on the river Reno, Italy. Parts of the site are submerged seasonally, and the space between two buildings overlooks the wall. The canal observes the river flow regulated by the sluice, and is a place of unfulfilled desire with unfinished, parallel bridge that may bring both sides to the river. The project recalls the famous quote from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius: ‘Existence is like a river in ceaseless flow, … scarcely anything stands still, even what is most immediate.’

15.4 Amy Peacock, Y3 ‘Restless Architecture’. This project proposes an alternative to the traditional urban workplace setting, seeking to create work and home environments shaped to the needs of the individual inhabitant. Working with an inside-out method, the first view shows how the activities of the building’s occupants are impressed into the inner surfaces of the architecture, and are expressed by the outer façade.

15.5 Amy Peacock, Y3 ‘Restless Architecture’. This view shows the assembly and community buildings on site.

15.6 Ceren Erten, Y3 ‘Accidental Encounters’ engages the obsolete complexity of the machine, creating dual applepeeler drawings that explore movement and time, designing novel apparatus and exploratory devices that allows for accidental behaviours when operated by two people.

15.7–15.8 Marina Kathidijotis, Y3 ‘Hungry for More’. This project translates human desires for power, love or glory that embody inherent ambiguities, into architecture. Engaging the means arising from inconsistency of the actions (jaw) and the words (tongue), the ‘Ventriloquist’ and ‘Tongue Device’ critically explore the idea of hunger for monetary gain through the dissociation of the two.

15.9 Ana Dosheva, Y3 ‘A Su Filindeu Stretch’. In the first project of the year, analogue manufacturing exploited the advancements in air-powered technologies and silicon casting tested in a 1:1 only to eventually become an unfolding dinner: a didactic space, creating experiential memory of the almost extinct pasta making performancecraft Su Filindeu. This device focuses on elbow movement creating body memory for the occupant of the device.

15.10 Marina Kathidjiotis Y3 ‘Hungry for More’. The ‘Prolonging Touch Device’ simulates the ambiguity of love, introducing chance within the possibility of interlocking the touch.

15.11 Carmen Ligia Poara, Y3 ‘ Identity and Traces’ explores the way in which individual identity can be revealed by searching for patterns and traces that an individual makes. Changing the original typewriter letter function, a new method of pattern-making is discovered, with imposed restriction, offering a chance for new patterns to be engraved onto the canvas.

15.13 Yutong Luo, Y2 ‘Garden of Wisdom’. This project transforms Pier Luigi Nervi’s obsolete structure, the Palace of Labour, into a library with a large botanical garden. This drawing of textured ‘wall’ layers in the library-garden area allows the reader to experience the view and the access to the garden.

15.14 Sevgi Yaman, Y2 ‘Moments of Preservation’ explores relationship between an instant and ever-receding past, creating a never-ending strip of images left behind. The proposal creates new memories by capturing moments, from preservation of photography, to preserving flowers frozen in ice.

15.15 Wenxi Zhang, Y2 ‘Cinematic Tracks’ activates the Lingotto racetrack by reuniting it with vehicles and people as a place of cinematic experience and vehicle servicing. Suspended car access brings visitors in, to merge with diverse runways in rhythm, enclosures peel up from the road for restaurants and platforms stack to elevate views to cinema screens and city.

15.16 Michela Morreale, Y2 ‘Occupation of Breath’ is a museum of air inhabiting an obsolete concrete ramp of the Lingotto. A translucent kinetic pneumatic structure occupies the void in-between the ramps and spills out onto the roof-controlled and restricted by a tension cable ribcage to alter the internal space programmatically and atmospherically.

15.17 Gregorian Tanto, Y2 ‘Sight of an Eagle’ engages with the apertures of vision between man and eagle as they engage with each other around canyon of an obsolete dam. An Eagle observatory brings views upwards, outwards and through 360-degree immersions, with a landscape of golden eagle nesting areas and observation cabins.

15.18 Carmen-Theodora Noretu, Y2 ‘Healing Box’ Originating from a simple hourglass filled with grains of sand – a chamber of time and space vividly refracting light and shadows – this hand-held device explores light therapy in a spatial context with sequential kinetic elements, projecting outwards and within the space itself.

15.19 Ana Dosheva Y3 ‘Orchestrated Flow’. The distinct structural integrity of double-curved copper sheets allows a spatial arrangement free of any additional support elements. The method of topological optimisation used both on solid fragments and sheet surfaces extends the built strategy beyond the museum. This image shows a view from a car passing through Borgonuovo along Autostrada del Sole.

15.20 Carmen Ligia Poara Y3 ‘ Hidden in Plain Sight: Anti-Mafia Investigation And Prosecution Centre’. Inspired by the famous MAXI trials in early 1990s, this project creates a strategic game of hide and seek between the mafia and justice, and treats architecture as the ‘fingerprint of function’. Concealing architecture’s function from imminent threats, this view shows a building camouflaged by a biogas facility.

15.21 Amy Peacock Y3 ‘Restless Architecture’. This drawing explores the texture of the site, using pencil rendering and embossing to capture the experience of moving through the landscape, and highlighting key areas of occupation.