Bartlett Design Anthology | UG8

Design Anthology UG8

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.

2022 Prototypes for an Afterlife

Farlie Reynolds, Greg Storrar

2021 At Truth’s Edge

Charlotte Reynolds, Greg Storrar

2020 Experiments in the Upside-Down

Farlie Reynolds, Greg Storrar

2019 Unfinished Business

Thomas Pearce, Greg Storrar

2018 Everything Loose will Land: Journeys through the Stack Thomas Pearce, Greg Storrar

2017 Precise Disasters: A Laboratory at the Edge of Failure

Colin Herperger, Thomas Pearce

2016 Souvenirs and Foreign Ghosts

Colin Herperger, Thomas Pearce

2015 Shifting Scales

Rhys Cannon, Colin Herperger 2014 Details and Misbehaviors

Rhys Cannon, Colin Herperger

2013 No Agenda Ben Addy, Rhys Cannon 2012 Composition Ben Addy, Rhys Cannon

2011 3D

Johan Berglund, Rhys Cannon 2010 Weathermen Johan Berglund, Rhys Cannon

2009 Good Night Past, Good Morning Future

Johan Berglund, Rhys Cannon

2008 An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar

Johan Berglund, Rhys Cannon

2007 The Explorers

Johan Berglund, Rhys Cannon

2006 Syncopated Territories

Laura Allen, Rhys Cannon, Mark Smout

2005 Mutability-Superfluity

Laura Allen, Mark Smout

2004 Limits and Landscapes

Laura Allen, Mark Smout

Prototypes for an Afterlife Farlie Reynolds, Greg Storrar

Prototypes for an Afterlife

Farlie Reynolds, Greg Storrar

UG8 welcomes curious students interested in prototypical materials, structures and technologies. We work between the drawn, the made and the moving image to champion innovative architectural strategies rooted in the environmental challenges of our time. As we rally to address the climate crisis and rethink the very fundamentals of how we live our lives, our collective gaze slowly shifts towards different visions of the world to come. This year the unit prototyped for an ‘afterlife’. We explored the curiosities, idiosyncrasies and opportunities inherent in the working and re-working of architecture with a previous life.

Every 10 minutes a building in the UK is demolished. Our architectures are mortal – eternal sufferers of the relentless laws of gravity, destructive weather, disobedient tenants and the metronomic wrecking ball of the architectural press. Wiping the slate clean can be an aggressive act of social, cultural and material erasure, but to retain in some capacity – to lease new life – requires embracing and interfacing awkward or inconvenient fragments and memories.

Any radical act of retention, resurrection or reincarnation requires prototyping. We worked with and against materials, infrastructures, building fragments and technologies, borrowing and leaning on existing fabric to develop our own architectures of reinvention.

Our field trip was a journey through stone, from the deep mines of the Peak District, through the pennant stone city of Bristol, to the vast open quarries of the Isle of Portland. Along the way we discovered bold prototypes such as the Smithsons’ Solar Pavilion and the work of Frei Otto in Hooke Park.

The year’s first design project was a making-led residency in Flimwell. We constructed and deployed a series of prototypes to speculate upon how and why materials might adopt new uses and meaning in subsequent lives. These methodologies informed and evolved into the building projects that followed. Located in constrained urban sites in central Bristol, the projects include: a museum of contested histories built from the remains of cancelled buildings and monuments; a reinterpretation of the public house constructed in unfired clay; and a night school that reconfigures the ruin of a deconsecrated church.

Year 2

Lorenzo Angoli, Myles Green, Chanya (Miu) Ieosivikul, Jinyi (Athena) Li, Hannah Lingard, Luke Saito Koper, Cosmin Ticus, Mateusz Zwijacz

Year 3

Oi (Tiffany) Chin, Jacob Meyers, Krit Pichedvanichok, Oska Smith, Adam Stoddart, Luke Sturgeon, Yen Ting

Technical tutors and consultants: Tom Budd, Steve Johnson

Special thanks to Steve Johnson and all those at Flimwell Park and the Woodland Enterprise Centre whose support and dedication made ‘The Flimwell Prototypes’ such a success.

Thanks also to our critics and skills tutors: Luke Bowler, Theo Brader-Tan, Tom Budd, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Nat Chard, James Della Valle, Penelope Haralambidou, Steve Johnson, Tea Maria Marta, Ana MonrabalCook, Cira Oller Tovar, Ben Spong, Negar Taatizadeh

8.1, 8.10 Cosmin Ticus, Y2 ‘Negotiating the Wreckage’. An adult education centre for traditional crafts sits upon and within the ruined church of St Mary le Port in Bristol’s Castle Park. Through a reappropriation of l’art du trait techniques in fabrication drawing, practices of woodworking, ceramics and stonemasonry reside within both the building and its design.

8.2, 8.5, 8.14–8.15, 8.18–8.19 Oska Smith, Y3 ‘Towards a New Public House’. A neglected church ruin in Bristol serves as the foundations for the recontextualisation of a public house. The pub’s eroded function as an important civic space is re-established through the reframing of its material culture. A new ceramic architecture aims to be more expressive and inclusive, drawing inspiration from the diversity of traditional brick and glazed tiles, and recognising the aesthetic and social pluralism in the surrounding communities it serves.

8.3, 8.9, 8.11–8.13 Hannah Lingard, Y2 ‘The Bristol Institute of Oral Histories’. Stewarding and curating an intimate tradition of historical enquiry, this new museum for the spoken word collects, interprets and broadcasts every voice in the city. An architecture of stone, steel and softwood announces, amplifies and attenuates stories of the past, present and future.

8.4, 8.6, 8.27 Myles Green, Y2 ‘Do Pictures Talk of Mirrors?’ A production studio and cinema reclaims a forgotten corner of Castle Park in the centre of Bristol. The architecture learns from the complex material make-up of projection, from the scale of the screen surface down to the chemical composition of the film strip. The appearance of everyday construction materials is transformed by oxygen-starved heating and other prototypical metamorphosis techniques, substituting unsustainable precious metals with waste by-products from the building industry.

8.7 Luke Saito Koper, Y2 ‘Hotwells Village Hall’. A campus of reconfigurable community spaces brings together residents and students in the historic residential neighbourhood of Clifton Village, Bristol. Incrementally shapeshifting through the day and over a term, the architecture actively and passively flexes to suit the cohabitation of two typically disparate communities.

8.8 Lorenzo Angoli, Y2 ‘Clifton’s Acoustic Chamber Hall’. Musical performance and artist residencies come together in this hybridisation of two architectural typologies: the music hall and the hostel. Learning from the fabrication of traditional string instruments, the building’s internal envelope is a series of crafted acoustic timber chambers, each tuned to the modes of rehearsal, recording and recital that they accommodate.

8.16–8.17 Jinyi (Athena) Li, Y2 ‘ Recipes and the City: A New Reciprocity’. A cooperative food store and culinary kitchen for Bristol’s Clifton Village. Perched on a steep urban site, this stepped architecture of processing, preserving, cooking and dining spaces seeks to support Bristolians in recultivating their interpersonal relationships in the post-pandemic world through a renewed understanding of food and the city.

8.20–8.21, 8.23–8.26 Jacob Meyers, Y3 ‘Centre for Bristol’s Contested Histories’. A civic forum and archive for contested histories located in Bristol’s historic Old City becomes a beacon of a new democratic order where citizens can rewrite their future. The building is a physical embodiment of its programme, constructed out of reclaimed stone and rubble-filled gabion bags, salvaged from the projected demolition of maligned nearby buildings with dark pasts – a cairn for a city.

8.22 Mateusz Zwijacz, Y2 ‘Finding a New Earth’. A community centre and shelter run by the LGBTQIA+ community offers a new home to accommodate, witness and share the queer stories and tales of Bristol past and present. Providing accommodation for youth in danger of

homelessness and a headquarters for charity support organisations, the proposal is an intervention into the lost and forgotten identity of the city, drawing upon the stories of its segregated communities.

8.28 Oi (Tiffany) Chin, Y3 ‘Redressing Mary le Port: A New Clothing Market for the Circular Economy’. In this upcycled fashion studio and showroom negotiating the ruins of Mary le Port church, recycled household fabric is deployed as a building material. Combining traditional tailoring techniques with contemporary construction principles, the building is able to recycle and reconstitute itself over time, maintaining relevance as showrooms and fashion styles evolve.

8.29 Chanya (Miu) Ieosivikul, Y2 ‘Old City District Screening Rooms’. A gallery for the moving image seeks to rejuvenate the post-pandemic cinema experience by embracing alternative and unexpected ways of both screening and viewing film. In the District Cinema, space becomes image, and vice versa, through an exploration in projection, illumination and receptive architectural surfaces.

8.30 Yen Ting, Y3 ‘Dying for Dark, the Darker the Worse’. A new city theatre and cinema for avant-garde production, staging and screening sits at the intersection of medieval and modern Bristol. Exploring the prototypical use of wax as structure, light modulator and heat exchanger, the architecture seeks spectacle in the techniques of building performance.

8.31–8.32 Luke Sturgeon, Y3 ‘ In the Corner – At the Edge’. A new harbour workshop and landmark at the edge of Bristol’s Cumberland Basin and surrounding dock infrastructure. Constructed in stone, the building operates as a series of sculpted voids derived from physical and digital fluid dynamic simulations. The pressure differentials invoked by the architecture enable passive ventilation of workshop spaces, allowing a zero-carbon approach to a traditionally energy-intensive building programme.

At Truth’s Edge Charlotte Reynolds, Greg Storrar

At Truth’s Edge

Charlotte Reynolds, Greg Storrar

This year UG8 investigated the agency of architecture in today’s culture of misinformation and the roles that architects play in the defence of fundamental truths. By reorienting ourselves in ambiguous states, we explored conspiratorial narratives and critical doubt. Daring to meddle in the murky world of paranoia and mistrust, we sought to address the critical need for new architectures that confront the post-truth age.

In our first project we unravelled the social, spatial and architectural mechanisms behind the false narratives of conspiracy theories by developing tools to disarm conspiratorial plots. We employed investigative systems and forensic techniques to learn the ways of the conspirator, to demystify the magic in the mundane and distinguish ‘conspiracy’ from ‘conspiracy theory’.

In the building project that followed, we developed designs for cultural buildings dealing with complex spatial, structural and climatic conditions. We asked, How could architecture be reimagined or refigured when it becomes the refuge from, or target of, mistrust? We learnt from the creative stagings and precision props of others: Jeff Wall’s photographic reconstructions, NASA’s neutral buoyancy simulation labs, Marguerite Humeau’s pseudo-scientific installations, Miriam Bäckström’s parallel-reality stage sets, Thomas Demand’s political facsimiles and Forensic Architecture’s evidentiary systems that reconstruct physical and virtual worlds to fight socio-political injustice. We treated each forensic (re)staging as a critical tool rather than simply an architectural end-product, each becoming a model for questioning and (dis)organising ideas. We embraced first principles –starting with a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further or refuted – see-sawing between intuition and precision, (mis)using digital technologies to advance physical learning and prototyping over and over again.

Interested in material, structural and spatial experimentation at a range of scales, UG8 champions innovative architectural strategies that boldly address the environmental challenges of our time. Despite the challenges of lockdown and remote working, the unit’s wellestablished practice of prototyping and hands-on thinking was maintained through close collaboration with our technical and digital tutors. Together we explored the potential of new technologies and age-old crafts. Through these working methods we were able to move fluidly between the analogue and digital, technical and psychological, and remote and physical to develop a well-judged selective sharpness in these times when the truth often appears blurred.

Year 2

Anna Dixon, Max Hubbard, Yuto Ikeda, Michalis

Philiastidis, Rafiq Sawyerr, Libby Sturgeon, Ying (Sunny) Sun, Kate Taylor, Peixuan (Olivia) Xu

Year 3

Ivy Aris, Ling Fung (Grace) Chan, Chelsea Dacoco, Andrei Dinu, Alice Guglielmi, Tom Keeling, Parin Nawachartkosit

Thank you to Tom Budd and Steve Johnson

Critics: Valentina Billios, Theo Brader-Tan, Tom Budd, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Nat Chard, James Della Valle, Sarah Frith, Stephen Gage, Freddie Hong, Steve Johnson, Johanna Just, Stefan Lengen, Emma-Kate Matthews, Jack Newton, Cira Oller Tovar, Luke Olsen, Thomas Pearce, Danielle Purkiss, Matthew Simpson, Oliver Wilton

8.1, 8.6, 8.24 Ling Fung (Grace) Chan, Y3 ‘Bedding In

At the Edge of Origin: A new museum for Shekou’. A study in stone, seven ways. This city museum tells the story of Shekou in Shenzhen, China, through the life cycle of its bedrock granite. The project looks to new models of museology, understanding that visitors better relate to exhibited artefacts through an experience of the work in its context.

8.2, 8.3 Ivy Aris, Y3 ‘Where’s North from Here?’. The processes of papermaking, printing and archiving are brought together in this new home for Westbourne’s society of self-publishers. Led by the collaborative principles of the zine and constructed entirely from paper, the building brings together documenters and disseminators and challenges architecture’s relationship with the Fourth Estate: press and news media.

8.4, 8.5, 8.11 Chelsea Dacoco, Y3 ‘Can You See Me Now?’. The Westminster Guild of Filmmakers investigates the authenticity of what is seen. Drawing on research into the mechanics of the human eye and filmic production, the building looks to recreate ways of seeing, both mimicking and provoking the industry it serves.

8.7, 8.21, 8.23 Andrei Dinu, Y3 ‘The Westminster Faith Exchange’. A new headquarters for the multi-faith congregation of the Westminster Faith Exchange, a council that promotes inter-religious community engagement in London. The building challenges the way we interpret contemporary spaces of worship, acknowledging the distinctions between beliefs while identifying places of common ground.

8.8, 8.9 Peixuan (Olivia) Xu, Y2 ‘Beyond the Visible’. A cinema and media art centre for visual and acoustic experimentation, welcoming filmmakers, artists and the public. An ode to superstitious beliefs, the building explores how cinematic techniques can offer experiences of the phenomenological and supernatural.

8.10, 8.27–30 Parin Nawachartkosit, Y3 ‘And the Truth Will Set You Free’. A radio station and open-education media centre for the congregation and broadcast of the voices of the community. Located on the site of the former Royal Doulton clay-pipework manufacturing plant, the building takes cues from the site’s industrial past, translating casting processes into spaces for the production and dissemination of radio.

8.12 Alice Guglielmi, Y3 ‘Thames Habitat Frameworks’. Nestled on the Victoria Embankment in London, between river, bridge, railway and street, this environmentalmonitoring station looks to reframe our relationship with the city. Responding to the circadian rhythm of the site, the building shifts with the tide and the movement of the sun to promote habitat growth.

8.13 Kate Taylor, Y2 ‘Tempering the Mundaneum’. A repository for the lost narratives of musical history, this public-facing archive resists the reclusive nature of the City of Westminster in London and offers new insights into the handling of musical artefacts.

8.14 Rafiq Sawyerr, Y2 ‘Amplifying a Stateless Truth’. Victims of geopolitical conflict are offered food, temporary accommodation and workspace in the city, as part of this new embassy for the stateless.

8.15 Anna Dixon, Y2 ‘The Lost Living Museum’. Public collection displays and an archival research centre form this new home for the disputed artefacts of London’s alternative histories and the beginnings of a new cultural quarter in the City of Westminster.

8.16-17 Tom Keeling, Y3 ‘Urban Prosthesis’. An aquatic filtration facility and leisure centre looks to revive London’s interconnected cultural, fluid and infrastructural networks. Taking cues from biological processes and metaphors, the project embraces the potentials of a metabolic architecture; a new landscape for photoreactive ecologies and buoyant human bodies.

8.18-19 Max Hubbard, Y2 ‘Red Sauce and Refuge’. A café complex at the centre of London’s legal district offers a last bastion to the demise of the ‘greasy spoon’ and the community that it fostered.

8.20 Michalis Philiastidis, Y2 ‘Observations in Residence’. A thinktank for the research of residential living in London’s Westminster. Projecting forward the history of housing typologies, the adaptable building reconfigures to accommodate residencies in speculative models of urban living.

8.22 Yuto Ikeda, Y2 ‘Institute for Prototypical Housing’. In this showroom and laboratory for future homes, radical approaches to new construction methods are fabricated, tested and promoted. Facing off against the Houses of Parliament, the building is a new landmark for London’s changing built environment.

8.25 Ying (Sunny) Sun, Y2 ‘Shifting Therapies’. A facility for art and dance therapeutics negotiates the space between bank and river in Westminster, London. Responding to exacerbated post-Covid-19 physical and mental health problems in the city, the building creates a new safe space for the local community.

8.26 Libby Sturgeon, Y2 ‘Disrupted Choreographies’. A riverside community arts centre, wedged between two iconic London bridges, serves as testament to the reclamation of public river space and the future pedestrianisation of the city.

Experiments in the Upside-Down Farlie Reynolds, Greg Storrar

Experiments in the Upside-Down

Farlie Reynolds, Greg Storrar

In UG8 we welcome the brave and the curious. We value a will to discover, rather than a need to prove. Interested in prototypical materials, structures, and technologies, we work between the drawn, the made and the captured to champion innovative architectural strategies rooted in the environmental challenges of our time. Groundbreaking creative practice is rooted in radical experimentation. Take the maverick painters we call ‘Ain’ters’ who rejected deterministic methods of painting: Sigmar Polke with chemical reactions, Yves Klein with fire, now Lucien Smith with a fire extinguisher. Ain’ters experiment with the unknown to embrace the creative potential of chance, and this year UG8 dared to join them. Our fieldtrip took us across the American midwest in search of intrepid testing grounds. We discovered bold architectures that opted for progress over convention and innovation over expectation, casting the world in a new light – just as the very first camera obscura experiment did – inverted, upside-down.

On our roadtrip we delved deep into all manner of marvels. The lifting of an entire city block-by-block in homage to the rising shoreline of Lake Michigan. Mies Van der Rohe’s tradition-dismantling Farnsworth House. Frank Lloyd Wright’s gravity-defying Johnson Wax. The pioneering skyscrapers that grew from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1910. Looking down as well as up, we found tomorrow’s discoveries in the depths of Fermilab’s Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. The journey taught us that to progress our profession beyond that which is already proven, architects too can – and must – Ain’t.

Our first act of design began with a woodland residency in East Sussex. In the untamed landscapes of Flimwell’s ancient woodlands and waterways, we surveyed, constructed and deployed a series of experiments. Each one was an exquisitely made apparatus, designed to uncover and log a phenomenon not previously witnessed. We sought to find out without fear of failure, discovering new ways of designing through analogue and digital prototyping, tooling, and logging. We moved on to refine these methodologies and develop critical building proposals in Downtown Chicago. Each project employed our newfound understanding of experimental practice in a highly personal way: a photography gallery lamenting the death of timber construction in the post fire-raged city, slowly rotting as in the ‘vinegar syndrome’ of the film negatives it displays; an eco-therapy centre and shelter that expands to meet demand in ever-increasing extreme temperature events; an internet café veiled in skins of digital glitch-inducing anonymity, offering mixed signals to the passer-by, the street-view car, and the satellite; a municipal library constructed from kiln-cast glass that gives light to the voice of a storyteller. We discovered that through the act of Ain’t-ing, each design methodology became a powerful tool for architectural invention.

Year 2

Zixi (Vito) Chen, Thuc Anh (Tia) Duong, Marie Faivre, Harrison Maddox, Mariia Shapovalova, Martins Starks, Supawut (Leo) Teerawatanachai, Zhi Qian (Jacqueline) Yu

Year 3

James Della Valle, Diana Mykhaylychenko, Konrad Pawlaczyk, Cira Oller Tovar, Matthew Semiao Carmo Simpson, Theo Syder, Natália Sýkorová, Anthony Tai, Milon Thomsen

Special thanks to Steve Johnson, Nick Meech and all those at Flimwell Park and the Woodland Enterprise Centre whose support and dedication made ‘The Flimwell Experiments’ such a success

Special thanks to The Bartlett’s Architecture Project Fund and to our sponsor Refico for generously supporting our Flimwell expedition

Thanks also to all our critics and skills tutors Theo Brader-Tan, Luke Bowler, Tom Budd, Ella Caldicott, Nat Chard, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Ryan Hakimian, Penelope Haralambidou, Ness Lafoy, Stefan Lengen, Emma-Kate Matthews, Lisa McSweeney, Ana Monrabal-Cook, Thomas Pearce, Vseva Popov, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Simon Withers and Michelle Young. A final thanks to Steven Pippin, whose otherworldly studio visit set the scene for a year of a great adventure and experimentation in the upside-down

8.1, 8.15–8.17 James Della Valle, Y3 ‘Between the Frame’. A photography gallery constructed in mass lumber laments the loss of timber construction in Chicago since the Great Fire of 1871. A shrine to the city’s industrial past and a call to arms for a low-carbon future, the architecture revives the lost forestry practices of lumber felling with contemporary robotic milling techniques.

8.2 Harrison Maddox, Y2 ‘Scarcity Beneath the Canopy’. Camouflaged in the ancient woodlands and waterways of Flimwell forest, an apparatus captures and reveals micro-shifts in humidity imperceptible to the human eye. Derived from the geometry of native tree bark and lichen formation, the experiment is crafted from steam-bent ply, latex and residual moisture from the forest floor.

8.3, 8.13 Natália Sýkorová, Y3 ‘Sonic Tomography’. A precision recording apparatus reveals the interior of a coppiced tree through the process of sonic tomography; identifying the make-up of weakness and decay through the use of non-invasive sound waves. The recording is reconstructed in-situ as a hand-smelted and cast aluminium taxonomical tag, designed to outlast the receding woodland.

8.4 Diana Mykhaylychenko, Y3 ‘The Generative Architecture of Predictive Hydrology, Or: How I Learned to Reverse the Flow’. A riverside clubhouse and rowing school on the Chicago River, famous for defying laws of hydrology when made to flow backwards in 1900. Deploying algorithmic spatial and material negotiations between water and land, the architecture promotes a novel hybridised timber and carbon fibre structure derived from fluid dynamic simulations.

8.5 Zhi Qian (Jacqueline) Yu, Y2 ‘Depot Clubhouse: A Dressed Architecture for Social Acupuncture’. A parcel depot and community centre sited on prime riverside real estate in Chicago. The building spreads awareness of social issues through an interplay of bold full-frontal gestures and discrete spatial interventions. The architectural skin, an attention-seeking dressing, is informed by (and tailored to) a body that we typically turn our back on.

8.6, 8.22–8.23 Theo Syder, Y3 ‘Reactive Rehab’. A physiotherapy centre challenges the status quo in American healthcare that rehab is a concrete process, deploying a dynamic and interactive architecture to offer a holistic and accelerated recovery experience. The architecture implements key principles of physiotherapy – flexibility, balance, strength, buoyancy – both structurally and programmatically.

8.7–8.9 Anthony Tai, Y3 ‘Co-Workers Café: An Architectural Hack for Surveillance Society’. An internet café veiled in skins of digital glitch-induced anonymity. Questioning how architecture might soon come to be driven by the blind spots of surveillance technologies, the building deconstructs itself digitally in a bid to offer unrivalled privacy to its inhabitants.

8.10–8.11, 8.14 Matthew Semiao Carmo Simpson, Y3 ‘An Ode To Apollo’. A centre for research in acoustics and musical production for the creative and scientific studies of sound. The facility celebrates and amplifies the dynamics of sound and space in a series of experimental and inhabitable music chambers, formulated to offer a remedial architectural response to noise pollution in cities.

8.12 Konrad Pawlaczyk, Y3 ‘A Conversation Across a Valley’. A site-specific sound installation sited in Flimwell’s ancient woodlands. Prosthetic interventions at the scale of both the human body and landscape redefine the experience of place and space by distorting and replaying the environment’s soundscape upon itself.

8.18 Mariia Shapovalova, Y2 ‘The Gallery of Reappropriated Light’. A photography gallery captures and exhibits Chicago’s past and present cultural identity, home to an otherwise dysfunctional family of exhibits,

visitors, and artists-in-residence. Carved by sunlight and constructed from sheet aluminium, melted bioplastics, and cast glass, the building serves as mediator, filter, and frame.

8.19 Marie Faivre, Y2 ‘Intersection Theatre’. A tripartite theatre shared by the local communities of three segregated ethnicities in inner-city Chicago; Black, Hispanic and white. Constructed as a place of exchange, the building hosts shared front-of-house spaces and three auditoria designed to accommodate radically different plays. The typically formal architectural boundaries of theatre are stripped back to create an open environment for intercultural storytelling.

8.20 Thuc Anh (Tia) Duong, Y2 ‘The Cast School of Culinary Craft’. A plant-based culinary school in the heart of Chicago’s former meat-packing district champions new sustainable means of food cultivation and preparation. Addressing the history of the site, the architecture comprises tailored casts derived from the clothing of the meat packers and the geometry of cuts of meat.

8.21 Martins Starks, Y2 ‘Where the Spirits Come to Play’. A downtown community centre upon the native lands of the previously exiled Algonquian people. Through the shared practice of woodcarving, all ages come together in the ritual of chronicling and reasserting their history. Varying in scale between vast carved rooms and detailed engravings, these architectural acts manifest as shifts in resolution, translating an age-old analogue craft through contemporary digital fabrication tools.

8.24 Supawut (Leo) Teerawatanachai, Y2 ‘Synecdoche Chicago: A Mesocosm for a Stained City’. In a false-field landscape in central Chicago, a laboratory harbours the experimental study of a heavily polluted river for real-time research. Constructed using recycled and reconstituted porous stone, it absorbs its environment, offering an undeniable record and holding the city to account for its actions upon the environment.

8.25 Zixi (Vito) Chen, Y2 ‘Between Statis and Anti-Statis: An Architectural Duel of Market and Music’. A food market embedded with adaptive performance spaces for Jazz, revives the street culture lost to Chicago’s sprawl. Programmatic contradictions play out through an architecture of balance, transforming daily from market to music hall. The building frame is weighted and calibrated to poise, shift, and reconstruct differing spatial conditions.

8.26–8.28 Cira Oller Tovar, Y3 ‘In the Shadow of the Sun’. A public library constructed from kiln-cast glass gives light the voice of a storyteller. Questioning the outmoded ‘more is more’ paradigm of glass construction in Chicago, a new processing of the material is proposed and prototyped, to better address the social, spatial, and technical needs of a municipal architecture.

8.29 Milon Thomsen, Y3 ‘To See The World in a Grain of Sand’. A primary school and environmental observatory, made of sand, teaches a new pedagogy of environmental consciousness. As virtual reality learning erodes established ideas of schooling, the building bears witness to slow climatic shift, mapping and adapting in a flow of learning between the virtual, the real, the city, and the child.

8.30–8.31 Natalia Sykorova, Y3 ‘Eco-Anxiety Centre and Extreme Temperature Shelter’. A centre for mass ecotherapy shape-shifts to meet fluctuating demand in tune with Chicago’s ever-increasing extreme temperature events. The shelter reacts and grows to accommodate this ‘new normal’ with responsive fast- and slow-twitch building skins activated by differentials in temperature, pressure and rainfall.

Unfinished Business Thomas Pearce, Greg Storrar

Unfinished Business

Thomas Pearce, Greg Storrar

The unfinished is a welcome antidote to the post-processed. It reveals the ruminations of invention and emanates a sense of possibility, of becoming rather than being. Flying in the face of predictability and determinism, it levitates, leaving space for imagination and letting us dream of alternative futures.

In 2019, we travelled to Sweden and Finland, where we explored notions of the unfinished. On our Nordic adventure, we looked beyond the nostalgic impression of the unfinished to instead revel in its opportunity for active reinvention. We learned how embracing openness and open-endedness is not just a critical part of a productive creative process, it is also our responsibility as designers and makers.

In our first project, we designed a spatial construction to house a found ‘artifact of the unfinished’. We formulated speculative design strategies that questioned how we might deal with the unfinished, forensically studying the artifact to decode its texture and replace its phantom limbs, whilst celebrating the rupture, the edge condition between the inherited and the invented, inverting and perverting the rules of the artifact under study, seeing the old with new eyes, and tinkering with the recipe of the past to radically change the taste of the present. Having ventured between the modes of (un)finishing that constitute our creative process – media and models, drawn and made, digital and analogue, technical and psychological, and social and perceptual – we moved on to formulate building proposals for Helsinki. Each project deployed our newfound understanding of the unfinished in a highly personal way: a theatre that stages the same play repeatedly within its frozen-formwork cast-concrete frame; a musician’s residency generating alternative compositions in response to Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s abandoned symphony; a fire-free crematorium where the lives of those who pass through it are charred into its walls; a birthing sauna growing out of the armpits of Finnish mythological creatures; and the artifacts for a fictional architectural biography of the inventor of the Perlin noise algorithm. We found that seeking a design methodology for finishing the unfinished became a powerful tool for architectural invention.

Year 2 Maciej Adaszewski, Mohammad Aldoori, Alisa Baraboshkina, Albert Brown, Ana Dosheva, Yannick (Ocian) Hamel-Smith, Dilara Koz, Ziwei (Philip) Liu, Loukis Menelaou

Year 3 Miles Elliott, Charlotte Evans, Georgia Green, Bijou Harding, Hugo Loydell, Alessandro Rognoni, Imogen Ruthven-Taggart

Special thanks to our accomplices in design: technical tutor Steve Johnson and super-critic Simon Withers. Thanks also to all our critics and skills tutors, without whom we’d still be stumbling around in the great unknown: Charles Arsène-Henry, Theo Brader-Tan, Tom Budd, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Nat Chard, Kate Davies, Max Dewdney, Anna Drakes, Niamh Grace, James Green, Tom Parker, Rebecca Payne, Vseva Popov, Sophie Read, Farlie Reynolds, Bob Sheil, Jerry Tate, Emmanuel Vercruysse and Michelle Young. A final thanks to Steven Pippin, whose astonishing balancing pencil became the inspirational leitmotif to a year of experimentation and adventure

8.1 Ana Dosheva, Y2 ‘Mobile Tupa’. Challenging dominant notions of cultural preservation based on visual museum displays, this wearable travel companion simulates the physical experience of sleeping on a traditional northern-Finnish plank bed.

8.2–8.4 Charlotte Evans, Y3 ‘The Building as a Doula’. The ‘Helsinki Home-Birthing Institute’ aims to educate and redefine the sauna as a sacred space for birth, embracing Finland’s reverse shift in development towards greater home birthing. Three protagonists – the midwife, the man and the woman – together simulate a symbiotic pseudo-sauna birthing experience within an architecture of membranes that sweat and breathe.

8.5–8.7 Ziwei (Philip) Liu, Y2 ‘Mark Agency’. Echoing Marcel Duchamp’s Equation ‘A Guest + A Host = A Ghost’, this six-room hostel situated in central Helsinki sells tailor-made dreams for guests seeking immersive cosplay experiences. The building skeleton confuses the guests and disguises the ‘host’, Mark, who practices his subversive spying behaviour within the building’s layered fabric.

8.8 Loukis Menelaou, Y2 ‘Building Sisu’. Inspired by the story of Tom Sukanen – a Finnish sailor who pulled a boat across the Canadian plains on an epic journey to Finland – this project exemplifies ‘sisu’, a Finnish word meaning hardiness and determination against all odds. The rehabilitation centre for social media addicts combats addiction by physically and psychologically separating the patient from their social media following and encouraging an investigation of the inner self.

8.9 Georgia Green, Y3 ‘Studies in Finnish White’. The Helsinki immigration centre aims to atmospherically acclimatise newcomers to the Nordic light and landscape through an organisation of spaces that reference the Finnish forest. Surface textures in the building highlight and modulate light, and are made using a design methodology structured around the representation of light in Finnish landscape painting.

8.10 Albert Brown, Y2 ‘City-Sami Sample Scape’. This project proposes an inner-city cultural centre for the Sami – an indigenous people originating from northern Finland – in Helsinki. Located on a street corner, the building’s publicly-accessible roof topography samples the landscapes and settlements of the Sami. The vision of the building as a landscape is realised through the development of a lightweight structure.

8.11 Yannick (Ocian) Hamel-Smith, Y2 ‘Baby Fever: A City Oasis’. This project proposes a sacred realm for the Finnish child within a carved spatial landscape. Warped in scale, its inhabitants are perceived as giants. The project is a reminder that we are sensory beings with a primal need to surround ourselves with qualities that thrill our fingertips and possess our mind.

8.12 Alisa Baraboshkina, Y2 ‘The Rune Library’. Evoking runes – figural depictions of elements of the natural landscape translated into alphabet characters –‘The Rune Library’ imports qualities of the rural Finnish landscape into the inner city, creating a place for quiet study and learning.

8.13 Miles Elliott, Y3 ‘Stories told by the Fire’. A proposal for a crematorium where the bodies are dissolved and the building is burnt. Stories of the deceased are digitally encoded and physically inscribed into the fabric of the building. These inscriptions filter precious sunlight onto the body as it is lifted into the ceremony space.

8.14 Ana Dosheva, Y2 ‘Finnish Tango: A Phantom Dance’. A proposal for a dance centre celebrating and preserving the tradition of Finnish Tango. Built upon the tradition of the frozen-lake tanssilava (dance hall), it provides an immersive experience of dance as ritual, using architecture defined by tools: the sand cast is eventually embedded in the building structure.

8.15–8.17 Imogen Ruthven-Taggart, Y3 ‘Forging Impressions in the Positive’. A bereavement centre appropriating jewellery-making techniques to develop a reusable metal formwork. Designed to empathise with the mourner, the building patinates with rainfall, and maps the passing of time.

8.18 Hugo Loydell, Y3 ‘Perlin’s Descent into Digital Noise’. After growing tired of the machine-like computer graphics of the late 1970s, Ken Perlin developed ‘Perlin noise’. This project explores the forgotten, obscure narrative that guided Perlin to his discovery and enacts its fictional architectural framing.

8.19–8.20 Maciej Adaszewski, Y2 ‘Helsinki Woodwork Academy’. At the intersection of the digital and analogue worlds of Finnish craftsmanship, the design of the academy is driven by the physical prototyping of a novel hybrid timber-lamination system. Through its experimental use of timber construction, the academy attempts to teach its students using its architecture.

8.21–8.23 Alessandro Rognoni, Y3 ‘Finns Just Eat Marinated Reindeer. Berlusconi Gets a Very Finnish Revenge’. Two building proposals for the Finnish fast-food chain, Kotipizza. In the first, the flagship store in Helsinki, the industrial process of smoking reindeer becomes a commercial spectacle. In the second proposal, located in Parma, Italy, a smokehouse imported from Finland retains a vernacular façade, challenging the Italians’ curiosity and mistrust of foreign pizza.

8.24 Dilara Koz, Y2 ‘Following the Swan of Tuonela’. This project proposes a musician’s residency and research facility that generates alternative compositions in response to Jean Sibelius’ abandoned symphony The Swan of Tuonela. The building is a temporal space where layered patterns of light and shadow deconstruct musical dimensions.

8.25–8.27 Bijou Harding, Y3 ‘Dramatic Variations of Frozen Fabric Formwork’. A proposal for an independent theatre in central Helsinki that shows different renditions of the play The Seven Brothers based on the famous novel by Finnish author Aleksis Kivi. The building is fabricated by casting into the frozen fabric formwork which, as a result, drastically reduces the amount of waste material produced. Setting it apart from other fabric formworks, the concrete allows for moulds to be reused and generates different geometries.

Year 2

Mohammad Aldoori, Jahba Anan, Vasily Babichev, Hiu (Victor) Chow, Amanda Dolga, Maria Jones Delgado, Yingying (Iris) Lou, Diana Marin, James McLaughlin, Carlota Nunez-Barranco Vallejo

Year 3

Grant Beaumont, Theo Brader-Tan, George Brazier, Sebastian Fathi, Negar Taatizadeh, Hon (Arthur) Wong, Daniel Johnston

Special thanks to our technical tutor Ralph Parker and to our long-time accomplice Simon Withers. Thank you also to our critics, skills tutors and speakers: Charles Arsène-Henry, Alastair Browning, Tom Budd, Mark Campbell, Barbara Campbell-Lange, Kate Davies, Anna Drakes, Penelope Haralambidou, Freddy Hong, Steven Johnson, Joe Johnson, Korbinian Kainz, Mara Kanthak, Fergus Knox, Vsevolod Kondratiev-Popov, Aleksandra Kugacka, Ellie Manou, Ralph Parker, Thomas Parker, Arthur Prior, Caroline Rabourdin, Peter Scully, Bob Sheil, Jerry Tate, Mike Tonkin, Emmanuel Vercruysse

Thank you as well to our sponsors ScanLAB Projects and Tata Steel Building Systems

Everything Loose will Land: Journeys through the Stack

Thomas Pearce, Greg Storrar

In UG8, we welcome the brave and the curious. We value the type of individuality and character that thrives from a will to find out, rather than the need to prove. We like to give time and space for the development of an approach to design research that is personal and grounded. We value work that is inventive, risk-taking and as precise as it is intuitive.

In 2018 we travelled to Los Angeles, where we learnt how to navigate what we call ‘the Stack’. The Stack is both the city’s infamous four-level tangled freeway, and a conceptual scaffold for this year’s research. It is a contemporary condition in which notions of the singular, real or original – whether within creative production, scientific knowledge or images of the self – have become secondary, irrelevant or often indeed non-existent. The Stack is a hybrid pool of entangled doppelgängers, cross-contaminating simulations, and bastardising representations.

‘Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles’, Frank Lloyd Wright notoriously joked. Delving deep into LA, we set out to debunk the myth of a city lacking density and complexity, harbouring a flat and superficial urban sprawl. We uncovered endless spaces of stacking, difference and multiplicity, exploring the coexistences and complexities that endure within a city of contradicting realities. We scratched beneath the surface to reveal its strange character; we drove on the city’s Lost Highways, taking shortcuts that only exist between the frames of film; we travelled between the as-built Case Study Houses and their idealised representation in a glossy magazine; we chased the space of doubling and difference within a city that constantly plays itself.

In our first project we used the exploration of these spaces within and between the layers of the Stack as the diving board for our own creative process. Inhabiting the uncanny distortions between these doppelgängers, we embraced the opportunity of mistranslation, the bending of time and space, and the shifting of scales that become inevitable when navigating the Stack. Having ventured between media and models, drawn and made, digital and analogue, technical and psychological, social and perceptual – the false and real fields that constitute our creative process – we moved on to formulate building proposals for downtown LA.

Each project interpreted the notion of the Stack in a highly personal way: a methodology for forensic facial reconstruction metamorphoses into the layers of a laboratory; photographic focal stacking becomes a subversive architectural strategy; the climatic stack effect is harnessed in an Iranian architecture of absence dictated by the Trump travel ban; UNESCO culinary heritage is safeguarded in an architecture that slowly erodes through the layers of time. The Stack becomes a tool for architectural invention.

The Bartlett School of Architecture 2018

Fig. 8.1 Theo Brader-Tan Y3, ‘An Investigation of the Spatial Lie Within the Filmic Punch.’ The project focuses on a fight scene from the 1999 film Fight Club. The actor’s fist never makes impact, it is the perspective of the camera that compresses the void between the knuckles and the face. Thereafter, 23 voids are sculpted by the defined parameters of the film screen. The sculpture of merged voids becomes the desk for the sound artist to create the sounds of the punch.

Fig. 8.2 Carlota Nuñez-Barranco Vellejo Y2, ‘Stahl’s Volume’. A spatial score translating the movements and actions of film characters in Koenig’s Stahl House. The composite of human interactions sculpts voids for occupation. Figs. 8.3 – 8.4 Sebastian Fathi Y3, ‘Into the Lost Photograph’. Street photographer Garry Winogrand left behind 75,000 undeveloped

negatives of LA when he died. This photography museum develops and exhibits these lost photographs and architecturally immerses the user into their lost photographic conditions. Fig. 8.5 George Brazier Y3, ‘DTLA’s Gig Economy Guild’. An ephemeral monument to an ever-changing industry scattered across Downtown LA, the building for gig economy workers spatialises – block by block, member by member –the anthropogenic sublime. 8.3 8.2

Bartlett

Figs. 8.6 – 8.7 Theo Brader-Tan Y3, ‘2019ers [1849ers]’. A space for LA’s current gold prospectors and smiths, within which the boundaries between body and building, and body and jewellery are blurred. Sculpted pieces become either the mould or the cast and perform at both the scales of the building and jewellery by using the shifting scales of the body as a hinge. Fig. 8.8 Vasily Babichev Y2, ‘Landscapes of Accelerated Erosion’. Prototypes for a Museum of Ancient Recipes harnessing the process of erosion as a building method to shape and reveal, over centuries, market stalls, ultimately safeguarding UNESCO culinary heritage. Figs. 8.9 – 8.10 James McLaughlin Y2, ‘Los Angeles Museum of Glitches’. 1:1 replicas of destroyed and forgotten urban fragments are refabricated from their corrupted virtual online existence.

The museum, constructed according to their glitched logic, houses these artefacts, captured between a state of construction and deconstruction. Fig. 8.11 Vasily Babichev Y2, ‘Landscapes of Accelerated Erosion’. Fig. 8.12 Hon (Arthur) Wong Y3, ‘Caffeinated Analogue Mechanical Organism’. Housing rituals of energy transformation in the spirit of post-coffee, post-car, and post-gentrification. An embodiment of, and response to, this energy in flux, the coffee shop awakens as an analogue mechanical organism.

The Bartlett School of Architecture 2018

The Bartlett School of Architecture

Fig. 8.13 Maria Jones Delgado Y2, ‘La Sagrada Lavanderia de Cochineal’. A laundromat and fabric dyeing space that blends the materiality of the undulating patterned concrete vaults with the drying fabrics in the arches and mezzanines above and the washing machines below. Fig. 8.14 Hiu (Victor) Chow Y2, ‘Inhabiting the Focal Stack’. Counterfeiting a bank note through photographic focal stacking. The note is exploded into a series of focal ranges, layered objects forming spaces of design opportunity, both within the shadow of these objects and within the out-of-focus zones of the focal stack. Fig. 8.15 Yingying (Iris) Lou Y2, ‘Eavesdrop Speakeasy (Bronzeville Jazz Hub)’. Jazz is infused with public space, using interactive structures to gather people and rebuild the vitality of the neighbourhood, aiming to provide comfort and equality for the

audience. Figs. 8.16 – 8.17 Daniel Johnston Y3, ‘Fabricating the Splash: So Far So Good’. A forensic reconstruction, through various time-based media, of the splash created by Holden’s death in the final scene of Sunset Boulevard. The splash is recreated, reconstructed and fabricated, capturing its ephemeral quality, the moment of inevitability before impact, and probing its alternative narrative framings. Fig. 8.18 Grant Beaumont Y3, ‘The LA Hop-Drying House’. This project explores how the procedures of hop-processing – taking place across the building’s hop-drying floors, market place and soaking spaces – can etch directly into the zinc surfaces of the building fabric. Inscribed surfaces are repurposed as cladding elements, forming an ongoing record of the operations within the building.

UG8 The Bartlett School of Architecture 2018

Fig. 8.19 Amanda Dolga Y2, ‘Los(t) Angeles’. A public archive. Veil-like steel reading spaces are suspended from and embrace a central core holding artefacts – reminiscences of LA’s evicted people, demolished houses and lost memories – that were erased during the extensive urban expansion and the erection of ‘The Stack’ as part of the Highway Revolt in 1960s and 70s. It is an act of ‘anti-erasure’ of the past. A memorial. A ghost. Fig. 8.20 Jahba Anan Y2, ‘Materialising the Gaze’. A series of study objects and drawings attempting to unpick and physically encapsulate the motion of the gaze whilst navigating various architectural and narrative environments, eventually developed into a method of drawing with the eye. Originally inspired by Giacometti’s hand-eye translation and his language of mark making, the project confronts these methods

with contemporary technologies of eye tracking, digital modelling and rapid prototyping. Fig. 8.21 Mohammad Aldoori Y2, ‘PLAY LA’. A social platform functioning as a video game academy situated in Downtown LA, exploring spaces of speculation by reimagining the notion of play and blurring the line between the real and the virtual. The objective: to provoke, engage and interact with the public realm.

Figs. 8.22 – 8.23 Negar Taatizadeh Y3, ‘In Absentia’. Reinventing an architecture formed and shaped by the poetry of wind. Both the building and its fictional inhabitant are awaiting the elimination of President Trump’s 2016 travel ban from Iran to America. Wind continues to perform as a metaphor for the distant inhabitant within the house, intricately designed to control occupation and circulation throughout the building.

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Precise Disasters:

A Laboratory at the Edge of Failure

Colin Herperger, Thomas Pearce

Year 2

Maxim Goldau, Millicent Green, Lola Haines, Florence Hemmings, Joe Johnson, Ying-Ying Lou (Iris), Oscar Maguire

Year 3

Hohgun Choi, Thomas Chu, Christina Garbi, Georgia Jaeckle, Carmen Kong, Aleksandra Kugacka, Elissavet Manou, Felix Sagar

Special thanks to our technical tutor Jerry Tate

Thank you to our critics, speakers and supporters: Charles Arsene-Henry, Alastair Browning, Nat Chard, Ricardo de Ostos, Max Dewdney, Gary Edwards, Jurgis Gecys, Jack Holmes, Jessica Inn, Bálint Kádár, Korbinian Kainz, Luke Lupton, Mara Kanthak, Gergely Kovacs, Ifigeneia Liangi, Thandi Loewenson, Dora Mathe, Emma-Kate Matthews, Inigo Minns, Shaun Murray, Thomas Parker, Frederik Petersen, Caroline Rabourdin, Soma Sato, Peter Scully, Bob Sheil, Greg Storrar, Anna Tripamer, William Trossell, Athanasios Varnavas, Simon Withers

Thank you to our sponsors: FABberz, ScanLAB Projects, Tate Harmer & Ultimaker

Precise Disasters: A Laboratory at the Edge of Failure

Colin Herperger, Thomas Pearce

“If I fail, I will fail so hard that I can never recover.” Werner Herzog, before beginning his first feature film, Herakles

The lifeblood of any experiment in science or design is its potential to fail. Progress is all about being wrong. Searching for the horizon, we must be ready to find the edge of collapse as a place of excitement. To try is to fail and to fail is to discover.

This year, Unit 8 sets out to explore the fringes of failure as a space of seduction and a vehicle for creative opportunity. In architectural education most are scared of the very idea of failure. Why? Perhaps it could be considered the point where learning begins – a liberated escape from the shadow of rehearsal.

In our Laboratory at the Edge of Failure, we chased the subtle delights of this nimble edge, tempting us beyond assumption into the world of the unexpected. To do so, we operated with a sense of poetry and tenacity, but also with utmost precision, producing well-crafted failures on the edge of perception, collapse or consciousness. We hunted the boundaries of structural and material performance, chased the seduction of the glitch, the misaligned and mistranslated, the shadows of knowledge and common sense, the technological blind-spots and slippages of control.

On our field trip from Vienna to Budapest and through the wild countryside in between, we tracked the experiments of a series of architectural and artistic misfits, outsiders venturing to the edges of failure, consciousness and supposed good taste: Adolf Loos’ notoriously ‘unfashionable’ buildings, Egon Schiele’s perverse character of line within figure drawing, Fritz Wotruba’s controversial sculpture-turned-architecture, Coop Himmelb(l)au’s technical challenge of a religious adherence to an intoxicated sketch, Imre Makovecz’s politically and structurally subversive architectural inventions, as well as the difficult material and conceptual junctions in the sculpture and architecture of Walter Pichler, created at his farm.

The building projects continued our research into strategies of disturbance and failure by translating ideas into inventive architecture. Our projects were situated along the Danube trajectory in difficult topographies and various cultural conditions, in order to serve up a range of possibility and resistance to spatial ideas.

In Unit 8 we like to make disobedient things and find curiosity within challenging ideas. This is delightfully hard but is nurtured within the studio through creative practice – a focused learning of architectural craft and technique through repeated prediction, attempt, reflection and iteration.  This allows for the development of an intuitive ability to become precise in a manner that holds no responsibility to prove, but, more importantly, does have the will to find out. We seek pleasure in the precision of the unresolved.

The Bartlett School of Architecture 2017

Figs. 8.1 – 8.2 Elissavet Manou Y3, ‘Wearing Out-Wearing In’. Nested within the Gül Baba ruins on the hills of Budapest, this Academy of Method Acting is completely fabricated via Hungarian saddlemaking techniques. Through an intimate architectural dialogue between the ruin and the leather structures, notions of performance and reality, and between artifice and authenticity, are blurred and dissolved. Fig. 8.3 Joe Johnson Y2, ‘Rhythmicised soundscapes’. A Viennese café transforms into a nightclub by amplifying, distorting and tuning the café’s native soundscape through a series of automated sound nests. The project operates through the simultaneous simulation, scripting and actuation of hybrid physical and digital, architectural and acoustic models. Figs. 8.4 – 8.6 Hohgun Choi Y3, ‘Part-time Art Time’. An underground art

gallery and bank challenging Vienna’s obsession with the ornate and opulent, and the current trend towards art-as–commodity. The vaults store secrets instead of money. This programmatic duality is explored through a kinetic shift in the building that changes the bank into a publicly accessible art gallery and pavilion. 8.2

Figs. 8.7 – 8.8 Florence Hemmings Y2, ‘Unfurling Subjects, Inverted Objects’. A tailoring shop in central Vienna uses strategies of material and programmatic inversion on the scales of the body, the garment and the building. This plays host to a sequence of displays, initially treating display windows as an observed object, and then becoming the subject of/subject to the shop. Fig. 8.9 Lola Haines Y2, ‘Museum of Baroque Theatre’. A gallery situated in Vienna to house a permanent theatre exhibition capturing the magic of stage and illusion. The project merges intuitive analogue figure-modelling and digital fabrication to bridge the boundaries between sculpture and architecture, and building and exhibit. Fig. 8.10 Maxim Goldau Y2, ‘When Chi Chi Met Semper’. This is a conceptual arts faculty for the Viennese

Academy, emerging from an imaginative misreading of the Semperdepot as well as from an illusionistic ceiling painting and an ongoing genealogy of mistranslated panda light drawings. It seeks to manifest the expectation and interpretation of the designer into an architectural form.

Figs. 8.11 – 8.12 Felix Sagar Y3, ‘Object Hallucinations’. Through practicing object-triggered ‘free association’, the project questions whether the flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness during object perception can be used as a tool in architectural design. The visitor unexpectedly comes face-to-face with the creatures that now inhabit six of Sigmund Freud’s objects, re-imagined and re-composed as a Reptile House.

Fig. 8.13 Millie Green Y2, ‘The Climbing Library’. The project aims to explore aspects of climbing: tension, counterbalance and the equilibrium between the heavy and the light. A cantilevering lightweight chassis, in the form of a library, supports a mass of counterbalancing books, only achieving its equilibrium by its symbiotic relationship with an out-ofbalance climbing wall. Fig. 8.14 Carmen Kong Y3, ‘Palinka Hotel’. A micro-distillery and hotel exploring the interaction between a tasting experience and the perception of colour. Carved out of the hills of Buda, it uses discreet materials to blend into Budapest’s landscape during the day – but at night, it comes alive in saturated brightness, and guests enjoy palinka in special tasting rooms located around the hotel. Fig. 8.15 Christina Garbi Y3, ‘A Cathedral of Water’. A bath

house on the banks of the Danube that uses inflatable casting techniques to create an architecture of thin fragile shells. The perfect geometries of the computationally designed inflatables are distorted when tailored and cast, creating shells of collapsing curved surfaces with traces of deflation.

Fig. 8.16 Thomas Chu Y3, ‘House for a Conductor’. The house explores the manipulation of sound and light through an architecture of thin, layered translucent screens made using the Baroque technique of scagliola. Enveloping a central auditorium, these form a sequence of structurally independent layers that create acoustic and atmospheric buffers between the city of Budapest and the inhabitants and functions on the house. Figs. 8.17 – 8.18 Georgia May Jaeckle Y3, ‘Between the Haptic and the Optic’. A 35mm film museum in Vienna which, through the hand-crafted alchemy of celluloid, seeks to spatially compose an internal landscape and architectural binary of positive and negative. It negotiates the discrepancy between the projected flicker and the fall of natural light on textured plaster through a curated architectural aperture.

Fig. 8.19 Joe Johnson Y2, ‘Rhythmicised soundscapes’. A 1:25 kinetic model exploring how the wall planes move in response to spontaneous events in a simulation. Figs. 8.20 – 8.22 Aleksandra Kugacka Y3, ‘Hotel Unheimlich’. Secret mechanisms, out-of-sight ornaments, strangely familiar shadows - these things are uncanny: they ought to have remained hidden, yet they have come to light. The back of the building emerges, the entrance is lost in darkness. Crafted nooks and passages seduce and bewitch the occupants. The memory of home blurs as the architectural uncanny materialises. Fig. 8.23 Oscar Maguire Y2, ‘Twisting, Turning and the Dance of Learning’. A language school in Vienna considers learning as a performative act: building understanding on top of the sediment of successes, failures

and fruity glitches laid down by enacting certain actions again and again. It translates performances into landscaped ceramic floors, sculptural cores and baroque revolving doors.

Souvenirs and Foreign Ghosts Colin Herperger, Thomas Pearce

Year 2

Ella Caldicott, Jun Chan, Krina Christopoulou, Morgan Hamel de Monchenault, James Hepper, Janis Ho, Rory Noble-Turner, Daniel Pope, Ryan Walsh

Year 3

James Bradford, Danny Dimbleby, Tae Woo (Freddy) Hong, Charles Redman, Isaac Simpson, Matthew Taylor, Minh Tran

Special thanks to our technical tutor Scott Batty and to Soma Sato. Thanks to our critics and speakers Charles Arsène-Henry, Alessandro Ayuso, Amy Begg, William Bondin, Tom Budd, Alastair Browning, Matthew Butcher, Nat Chard, Max Dewdney, Patch DobsonPérez, Gary Edwards, Stephen Gage, Penelope Haralambidou, Niki-Marie Jansson, Carlos Jiménez, Mara Kanthak, Felipe Lanuza Rilling, Ifigeneia Liangi, Anna Liu, Luke Lupton, Johanna Maierski, Shaun Murray, Ian Ng, Davide Sacconi, Peter Scully, Greg Storrar, Tom Svilans, Mohammed Syafiq Jubri, Josh Toh, William Trossell, Athanasios Varnavas, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Boon Yik Chung and Simon Withers

Thank you as well to our sponsors: Harlequin Floors, Fernox, & ScanLAB Projects

Souvenirs and Foreign Ghosts

Colin Herperger, Thomas Pearce

Max Ernst paints a garden. When he has finished the picture, he sees that he has forgotten to paint a tree. He immediately has the tree cut down. Jean Baudrillard (1997)

Souvenir is a verb. To remember (se souvenir) is to construct, repair, erase, project, extend, consolidate, extract, mystify. Memory is a tool of invention as well as a repository of truth. This year UG8 investigated how memory and mistranslation can play an active role in creative practice.

We set out to refashion (the) Souvenir as a complex and subjective material practice of physical and mental construction, oscillating between the stubborn materiality of the physical artefact and an active notion of memory. Preferring the German-English mistranslation “to make a picture” to the more passive English “to take a picture”, we followed Max Ernst into his garden and started to edit reality driven by the shadows, gaps, outcasts, eccentricities, aberrations and off-cuts of memories, hidden between the cracks of consciousness and the seams of London’s urban fabric.

Our field trip lead us to Japan, the theatre of conflicting mnemonic practices of ritual remembering and constructive forgetting, where the re-enactment of architectural craftsmanship outlives the western obsession with the so-called 'original' object or building. Our own building projects were then conceived as 'Foreign Ghosts', which enjoyed the opportunity of being foreign within the familiar context of London. Following in the footsteps of architects like Bruno Taut or Frank Lloyd Wright, who architecturally absorbed 'Japan-ness' through the lens of their own ambitions, we devised architectural strategies that deployed our imported memories while leaving space for creative (mis)translation, constructive forgetting, selective amnesia, fabricated origins and the ever-shifting re-inventions of the verb se souvenir

In UG8, we like to make disobedient things and find curiosity within challenging ideas. This is delightfully hard but is nurtured within the studio through creative practice – a focused learning of architectural craft and technique through repeated prediction, attempt, reflection and iteration. This allows for the development of an intuitive ability to become precise in a manner that does not hold responsibility to prove, but more importantly the will to find out. We seek pleasure in the precision of the unresolved.

The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016

Fig. 8.1 Isaac Nanabeyin Simpson Y3, ‘Discovered Misreadings’. A host for the production, conservation and dissemination of the Survey of London, the building is constructed as a palimpsest of conflicting cartographic systems that encourages conversations between architecture, people and how we read and make the city. Figs. 8.2 & 8.4 James Hepper Y2, ‘Inhabiting the Space of Desire’. The promenade of tiny bars occupies a deep façade, masking and subverting the existing elevation through a series of drawn, written and fabricated Perecian operations that use confabulated memory, obsessive observation, erasure and inversion as sources of re-invention. Fig. 8.3 Morgan Hamel De Monchenault Y2, ‘Kingsland Mooring Spa’. The vertical spa occupies the interlocking solids within a refined play of

suspended volumes – scaled-up mistranslations of the geometrical rules of Japanese joinery and the spatial qualities of its interstitial voids. Figs. 8.5 – 8.6 Jun Hao Chan Y2, ‘Weather – Negotiating the Boundary’. Reading the weather not just as a subject matter but also as a co-author of JMW Turner’s paintings, the proposal for a house, public library and garden incorporates it as an active element of architectural design, allowing users to experience the intimate variations in the weather of the exterior, interior and transitional.

The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016

Figs. 8.7 – 8.8 Tae Woo (Freddie) Hong Y3, ‘A Bath of Mnemonic Vectors’. A reterritorialised Japanese bathhouse in Hoxton translating the symmetries and asymmetries of shared memories into measurable architectural units. These memories are diagrammed, encoded and re-staged by masked actors, then digitally captured and algorithmically translated to be 3D printed live in a performative procession of mistranslation. The baths stretch along a central inhabited service wall which separates genders but modulates the desire and projection of the assumed symmetry between the two halves. Fig. 8.9 Janis Ho Y2, ‘24hrs Microcosm’. An exploration of osmotic architectural skins negotiating and staging seduction between a nightclub, convenience store and capsule hotel. The architecture addresses the negotiation between spaces,

programmes and people through the deceptive and subtle movement of surfaces. Fig. 8.10 Ella Caldicott Y2, ‘The Lichen Zoo’. Creating a symbiotic relationship between human and non-human inhabitants on the canalside site –a careful negotiation with the environment allows for the growth, harvesting and processing of lichen products.

Fig. 8.11 Rory Noble-Turner Y2, ‘Caravaggio Dreams of Sushi’. A restaurant etched out from the darkness of the void, an architecture in honour of the art of sushi. It constructs an atmosphere of darkness and curiosity through the careful engineering of light in order to recreate the dramatic world present within Caravaggio’s paintings.

The Bartlett School of Architecture

Fig. 8.12 James Bradford Y3, ‘Hoxton Country House’. Seducing the visitor into buying and consuming rural products, the house architecturally re-interprets techniques of the English landscape garden to create a sense of spatial opulence within London’s urban fabric. Figs. 8.13 & 8.17 Minh Ngoc Tran Y3, ‘Gerontosonic Grand Palace’. A destination for elderly people where a Winter and a Summer Palace break the psychological boundaries between companionship and solitude by manipulating the architectural boundaries of acoustics. Fig. 8.14 Krina Christopoulou Y2, ‘Staging Deception’. The theatre challenges conventions of stage and auditorium to embrace notions of choice and chance – both within the experience of the plays and within the building’s design, which is generated through digital and analogue

translations of rule-based folds. Fig. 8.15 Danny Dimbleby Y3, ‘Hotel Derivé’. A Situationist answer to Airbnb, Hotel Derivé forms unique hyper-real narratives that playfully quote scenes and deconstruct cinematic techniques, borrowing scenery such as an architectural Japanese garden. Hotel Derivé flourishes through its users’ discussion of ‘experience’. Fig. 8.16 Matthew Taylor Y3, ‘Empowering Focus Through Light’. The calligraphy school uses the ruled geometries of delicate concrete cast shells to modulate light and redefine the perceived boundaries and scale of a hallucinogenic architecture. Fig. 8.18 Dan Pope Y2, ‘Redrawing Conventions’. A live drawing school collapsing the hierarchy between the object and subject of perspectival drawing, a prosthetic to the body of the site and the body of the drawer.

The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016

Figs. 8.19 – 8.21 Charlie Redman Y3, ‘Bars of the Unexpected’. Carved out of a narrow slot behind the façade of an industrial lift shaft, the bars are spaces for physical and social prototyping. The high-tech multi-axis articulated stages for dating and tasting sake are developed through in-depth explorations of CNC fabrication and scripted simulation.

sequence between the audience, the actors and the floating scenes creates moments of simultaneous intersecting narratives of distorted chronological and spatial order.

Fig. 8.24 Isaac Nanabeyin Simpson Y3, ‘Discovered Misreadings’. Disobedience becomes a method of exploring architecture, investigating the possibility of creating a space that causes a conversation between a public library and a private studio. The proposal is a vessel that wants to be misinterpreted, that encourages questioning and provokes the discovery of new readings. 8.20 8.19 8.22

Fig. 8.22 Ryan Walsh Y2, ‘Stadium News’. Forensically re-constructing and re-enacting scenes of the news, Stadium News offers a screenless immersive experience and discussion of the week’s events. Fig. 8.23 Krina Christopoulou Y2, ‘Staging Deception’. There is no stage. There is no auditorium. The theatre re-enacts the industrial past of the Regent’s Canal with a ground floor of water channels that allow for scenery to float, defining shifting positions of acting and viewing. The

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Shifting Scales

Rhys Cannon, Colin Herperger

Shifting Scales

Rhys Cannon, Colin Herperger

Year 2

Conor Clarke, Samuel Davies, Sarah May-Lee Hollis, Ana-Maria Ilusca, Daniel Little, Afrodite Moustroufi, Joanna Rzewuska, Yehan Zheng

Year 3

Boon Yik Chung, Patrick (Patch) Dobson Perez, Nikolas Kourtis, Sonia Magdziarz, Zi (Kevin) Meng, Emilio Sullivan, Yu Xuan (Nicole) Teh, Ernest Zhi Heng Wang

Thanks to Scott Batty, our technical tutor. Thank you to our critics: Benni Allen, Laura Allen, Tom Budd, Matthew Butcher, Mollie Claypool, Scott Grady, Penelope Haralambidou, Christine Hawley, Ben Hayes, Johan Hybschmann, Mara Kanthak Simon Kennedy, James Llewellyn, Luke Lupton, Tim Murray, Jack Newton, Ollie Palmer, Ralph Parker, Thomas Pearce, Bob Sheil, Eva Sopeoglou, Matt Springett, Tomas Stokke, Greg Storrar

The principle of scale and the units that define it are critical within the world we live and the one we explore. Composition, proportion and scale are ever-present companions to the practising architect. They should be respected and understood in equal measure, the scale rule never more than an arm’s reach from the drawing board. UG8 is interested in works of architecture that have the ability to engage, bewilder and amuse in equal measure – enduring, immediate, empathetic, emotional responses, but always creating the possibility for a reality shift and a sense of sitting on the edge of fantasy. It is this fantastical element we sought to encourage and nurture through the architecture developed during the year.

UG8 visited the ‘Space Coast’ – Cape Canaveral, USA, in order to appreciate a sense of scale first-hand. NASA’s vast space launch campus can be difficult to express in numbers – it encompasses the world’s tallest single-storey building, the Vehicle Assembly Building. The building’s internal volume is so large that it is reputedly able to generate its own internal weather system, with observations of rain clouds forming on humid days. Although opposite extremes exist too: NASA’s behemoth Crawler-Transporter may have a load capacity of 8,200 tonnes but shuffles along at a sedentary 1mph.

In an environment where ‘the sky’ is actually no longer ‘the limit’ it can be difficult to attribute limitations and parameters to our thinking of inhabiting volume and making spatial constructs – all of which we need, as designers, to work within and against. The site of Cape Canaveral has become host to the emergence of a new architecture. It is one that holds many examples of developing ideas and technology.

The unit’s building projects are distributed along the coast, utilising long-since abandoned launch pads; the port of Cape Canaveral; fishing piers for watching rocket launches and further outposts dotted along the Keys at the very southern tip of Florida.

Within UG8, attention is focused upon creative exploration through architectural invention. This is developed and nurtured by means of a range of making, thinking, and drawing. We consider architecture too complicated to be resolved simply through logic or good ideas alone, therefore the studio values work that is intuitive, inventive, and takes risks.

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Fig. 8.1 Sonia Magdziarz Y3, ‘Bahia Honda Summer Camp’. The main challenge posed by the site is the constantly shifting weather conditions. The project investigates ways of creating an architecture that contradicts the tradition of designing a hurricane-proof building as a fixed structure on land. The building suspended form the bridge above the water, undergoes transformations in line with the dynamics of the weather. Experiences are provided by the openings, closings and shifting of the elements, which correspond as much to changing weather as activities. Importantly, rain and light play a fundamental role, being architecturally harnessed to serve as signs for the kids to follow. Interaction with a building becomes almost a hide and seek game between kids and the weather. Figs. 8.2 – 8.5 Patrick Dobson Perez Y3, ‘Launch

Complex 34’ Located in the middle of a stretch of abandoned NASA launch sites from the glorious age of space travel. The building memorialises the Apollo I disaster in which three astronauts burned to death on this launch pad. This architectural investigation aims to preserve the memory of the astronauts on that fateful day by creating a relationship between solid and void; between substance and memory. Visitors undertake a vertical ‘pilgrimage’ up the voided tower, simulating the experience of an astronaut entering the insular world of the command module before departing Earth. The tower is constructed through a bespoke jump-forming device which is able to reconfigure to the form of each cross-section of the tower with the device left as an inhabitable space at the summit of the tower and becoming a ‘relic of progress’.

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Fig. 8.6 Zhi Heng Ernest Wang Y3, ‘Port Canaveral Drive-in’. A complex which embodies the hallmarks of American car culture. The programme incorporates various elements, such as the drive-in cinema, the American diner and the motel in a single facility, which also functions as a viewing space for rocket launches. Being located at the tip of Port Canaveral’s Pier, the site is in a prime location and the layout of parking bays and motel cabins were carefully for the viewing of rocket launches and the sunrise. Aspects of automobiles, such as panel contours, chassis and suspension informed the overall design aesthetic. Fig. 8.7 Yu Xuan (Nicole) Teh Y3, ‘The Little Prince Production Studio and Visitor Centre’. The Little Prince Studio was a proposal for a daylight film studio by Sarasota Lane, along the main street of Cape Canaveral to house the

film production of a children’s story, The Little Prince. The building was a study of the filming process and production, focusing on the study of lighting in films. Fig. 8.8 Sarah May Lee Hollis, Conor Clarke, Samuel Davies Y2, ‘Peter Pan South Kensington Townhouse’. Figs. 8.9 – 8.10 Samuel Davies Y2 ‘A House for Multigenerational Living’. A Multigenerational House perched at the mouth of Port Canaveral, the house has aspect towards the NASA Launch site. The project considers NASA rocket launches as a propagation point for memory, and explores how architecture of the home acts as a parallel generator of shared stories and domestic memory. The house is appropriated with each generation; childhood jetties are washed away, and prefabricated dining tables removed to leave scars and traces of occupation.

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The Bartlett School of Architecture 2015

Figs. 8.11 – 8.12 Emilio Sullivan Y3, ‘The Shrimp Road Fish Emporium’. The Florida Keys have been infamous for their laissez-faire attitude; the lesser-known fact is that The Keys have long been seen as the Mecca of sport fishing. This emporium creates a new sports fishing hub for all things fishing- and food- related and in a new home on Stock Key. Local vernaculars utilise passive systems to help minimise the effects of the oppressive Floridian heat and humidity. A developed study through the Cracker-style heavy shaded typology, the development of the Spanish Eclectic style and the Key West archetype allowed the materiality and composition of the project to arise and thus create a building that combines the theatre of the fishing with the pastiche cherry picking of a Disneyland-esque architecture.

Figs. 8.13 – 8.14 Nikolas Kourtis Y3, ‘CCAFS Camping Hostel’. Through the incorporation of lightweight, tensile and inflatable structures, along with further investigation of climbing equipment and techniques, the hostel not only provides a unique experience where the inhabitants are immersed in the environmentally protected site without ever coming into contact with the ground themselves, but also provides opportunities for a relationship between architectural space and inhabitation. This dialogue enriches the experience of the occupants within the hostel as it establishes a negotiation between not only the occupants themselves but also between the occupants and the building; through inhabitation they mould and reform the architectural space.

Fig. 8.15 Afrodite Moustroufi Y2, ‘The Camera School’. The Camera School explores the possibility of a building to become a machine for looking. Located in the centre of various subjects likely to trigger the photographic interest of the visitor, such as rocket launches, marine life, and extreme weather conditions, it features elements and spaces that are architectural translations, both direct and subtle, of camera components or composition techniques. As a result, navigating around the building and learning to use its elements, one learns and discovers photography and its principles. Fig. 8.16 Joanna Rzewuska Y2, ‘The Monastry of Casting’. Playing with the forms of casting and reference from the surrounding beaches the monastry reflects the context through expression in concrete. Fig. 8.17 Conor Clarke Y2, ‘A Bath House for Cape

Canaveral’. This project employs a lack of distinction between surfaces to encourage unexpected interactions between the body and the building. The bath house at once exposes and uncovers, like a partially removed garment. Fig. 8.18 Yehan Zheng Y2, ‘Port Canaveral Wreck Diving Training Resort’. This project attempts to translate the senses of the varying elements of scuba diving into spatial experience. Being situated near wrecks scattered around the region, the facility acts as a training base for wreck divers before setting out exploring. Divers go through extremes of wet and dry, dark and bright, social and private, high and low, compressed and decompressed. The building is thus part impression, part real application. The aim is to capture all elements of the process and fully prepare you for the many facets of deep sea diving.

Figs. 8.19 – Fig. 8.20 Zi (Kevin) Meng Y3, ‘Cocoa Beach Event Centre’. This project envisions a new suburban civic centre typology with a core of a library that is highly responsive to the ever-changing seasonal cyclical fluctuation of population in the City of Cocoa Beach. Two sliding transformable sheds along the linear square will adapt the requirements of the activities and events. As the predictable near future of American suburbia is marching towards a denser connective tissue, this building has the ambition of rejuvenating this seaside suburban city by establishing a new city centre. Fig. 8.21 Boon Yik Chung Y3, ‘Learning from Dollhouses ’. The project is an inquiry into the notion of miniature architecture and a spatial narrative. It revisits childhood and asks: why do we lose imagination about space as we grow up? It takes a nostalgic

viewpoint in investigating dollhouses, as a fertile design tool for children’s unending creations and hopes to revive our fascination with space.

Figs. 8.22 – 8.23 Boon Yik Chung Y3, ‘Space as the Third Teacher’. The project takes a philosophical and theoretical path in searching for an alternative classroom typology. Inspired by Alain de Botton’s writing on how architecture has the capability to interact with our senses and minds, the project investigates the idea of making classroom a ‘teacher’ – it ‘speaks to’ and even ‘teaches’ the children – by introducing into the architecture the notions of ambiguity, abstractness and open-endedness.

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Details and Misbehaviors Rhys Cannon, Colin Herperger

Details and Misbehaviors

Rhys Cannon, Colin Herperger

Year 2

Naomi De Barr, Kelly Frank, Egmontas Geras, Aqsa Iftikhar, Rikard Kahn, Wenya Liu, Priscilla Wong

Year 3

Charlotte Archer, Thomas Budd, Tik Chun (Zion) Chan, Emma Colthurst, Kar Tung (Karen) Ko, Ian Ng, Joshua Stevenson-Brown, Joshua Toh Kai Heng, Eleanor Daisy Ursell, Hoi Yiu (Carolyn) Wong

Thanks to our critics: Abi Abdolwahabi, Ben Addy, Laura Allen, Alessandro Ayuso, Nat Chard, Sarah Custance, Bernadette Devilat, Richard Grimes, Phillip Hall-Patch, Jonathan Hill, Diony Kypraiou, Adrian Lahoud, Felipe Lanuza Rilling, Jack Newton, Alan Penn, Frosso Pimenides, Franco Pisani, Hugo Sands, Peter Scully, Matt Springett, Tomas Stokke, Natalija Subotincic, Mark West, and Fiona Zisch

Special thanks to Scott Batty for his dedicated work as Year 3 Technical Tutor and also to Ness Lafoy, Steven Pippin and Marcus Stockton for sharing their works with the studio

We are grateful to our sponsors Moxon Architects and Prandina

We are interested in the beauty of the almost correct The Unit sets out to establish the importance of finding more within the world than that which is obvious. Intuition leads to invention but also demands risk taking. It is an uncertain area where the answers are not generally known. A sort of misbehaviour exists within the process of making that allows a character to emerge, somehow even richer.

Architecture, and the development of any idea, frequently reveals these glitches or gremlins. If nurtured, these moments can give lead to a degree of character or personality, anthropomorphism even. The very fabric of a building can come alive and it can begin to exert an unexpected influence upon those that occupy and interact with it. The Unit considers such character by proposing architectures as players within a wider landscape and that ‘contextuality’ is the term for the interplay and conversation between them.

The last few years have seen a proliferation of computer generated imagery and usage of digital techniques within student work. We seek to re-invigorate the use of handcrafted fabrication in parallel to this and better understand the application and transition to digital techniques within the design and production process. Physical models and objects have for centuries, represented one of the most engaging means to describe and declare architectural intention.

Venice and northern Italy was our focal point of study and invention for the second term. Errors, mistakes and abnormalities were encouraged and these unexpected attributes of the making process of the first term’s work became the foundation of the building proposals. We paid homage to the craftsmanship and attention to detail within the works of Carlo Scarpa, the passion and precision engineering of Italian high-performance cars, and the sculptural concrete forms of Giovanni Michelucci’s churches.

Examples of the Unit’s ambition are realised through a range of projects including: Joshua Toh’s ‘Cathedral of Craft’ which explores the extremes of cast concrete and fabric formwork with its performance and ability to be both monumental and delicate; Karen Ko’s ‘Venetto Town Hall’ examines the development and manipulation of traditional Venetian architecture and Josh Stevenson-Brown’s ‘Construction School’, an intimate examination of Venice stripped back to basics; as well as the careful observations, attention to detail, anomalies and quirks of culture found within Daisy Ursell’s ‘Venetian Film Studios’ and Tom Budd’s unexpected night in ‘Hotel Coletti’.

Fig. 8.1 Joshua Toh Kai Heng Y3, ‘1:10 Test Model of Tailored Classical Fabric Cast Doorway’. The final model in a series of study models tailoring a classical fabric architecture. Centering around the study of the technique of fabric formwork; casting into it; exploring the design potential of a fabric architecture introducing concepts of the body and the act of undressing. Fig. 8.2 Joshua Toh Kai Heng Y3, ‘Short Section of The Venice Cathedral of Craft’. The Venice Cathedral of Craft was a proposal for a dramatic building by the Rialto Bridge in Venice housing an atelier for the Italian fashion house of Valentino. The building was a culmination of a year long study into the design potential of a tailored fabric cast architecture. The proposal involved the selective preservation of a classical palazzo onsite and the insertion

of fabric cast elements to create a series of cathedral-like spaces celebrating the architecture and the craft of Venice. Fig. 8.3 – 8.4 Joshua Stevenson-Brown Y3, ‘Venetian Construction School, interior views’. A site of unused buildings become occupied in phases by the school. Temporary school facilities are set up onsite, while the existing buildings are dissected by the students to learn about the revealed construction techniques used to deal with the shifting conditions of the city. Adapting, developing and experimenting with these techniques students go on to build the permanent parts of the school.

Fig. 8.5 Ian Ng Y3, ‘Slit-Scan Test Rigs’. A series of bespoke ‘slit-scan’ cameras were fabricated and arranged accordingly to capture a variety time-based decays and interactions. The resulting imagery thus embodied an additional time-scale, depicted within the horizontal track of the photograph.

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Fig. 8.6 – 8.7 Rikard Khan Y2, ‘Linear Drawing of the Route taken by a Member of the Rowing Club’. The building responds to studies of navigating the city of Venice with the experiences of expanding and compressing spaces. It also responds to Venice’s sensitive relationship of land and water with the fluctuating tide, the experiences of these two networks individually and how they can overlap and interweave. The floating elements are refined, controlled spaces, and make reference to Venetian boat-building tradition. The two building elements adapt to different tides, reconfiguring routes within the building. Fig. 8.8 Hoi Yiu (Carolyn) Wong Y3, ‘The New Mercato del Pesce’. Built on the site of the existing fish market, it uses an intricate woven system of brass sunpipes to bring light from the sun-soaked rooftops to the darker alleyways

below. Steam from the kitchen and mist from the freezer room collide to create a suspended body of vapour within specific spaces, giving volume to the light intersecting it. The circulation of guests is choreographed to inhabit and interact with this volumetric light, transforming the functional into the spectacular. Fig. 8.9 Egmontas Geras Y2, ‘A House and Delicatessen’, Venice. A chef and his family inhabit a concrete house on the edge of a residential piazza. The house is comprised of concrete elements that are moulded to become an animated infrastructure of activities inside and outside its boundaries. The walls are abundant with rainwater and seagulls as much as hams and bread as the family struggles to inhabit a concrete which attempts to support a medley of Venetian activity.

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Fig. 8.10 Naomi de Barr Y2, ‘A Map of an Imagined Surface’. Drawn using a mapping instrument consisting of: a magnifying glass; set of mirrors; additional water and a varying scale, which are used to distort a real surface to and create a site-specific map. A graphical code is produced through the positioning of each cartographic tool which aids the interpretation of the map. Fig. 8.11 Kelly Frank Y2, ‘Star-Gazing Inn’. A clustered series of private boutique suites form a constellation of buildings to facilitate the occupants to observe the Venetian night sky. Fig. 8.12 Charlotte Archer Y3, ‘Sound Park and Touring Musicians Residence’. The Venetian tide changes four times a day shifting the horizon and altering the way you experience the city from the water and the flooding ground, Il Parco del Suono seeks to heighten this experience.

Undulating tidal shifts dictate subtle differences between the architecture of the landscape and water levels affecting sound pockets. The sound map illustrates the uniqueness of each experience by mapping frequency ranges, sound sources, lapping water and clunking gondolas, all translating tidal shift into a true Venetian performance. Fig. 8.13 Tik Chun (Zion) Chan Y3, ‘Urban Wetland Park’, East London. Adjacent to the busiest spaghetti junction in London, the scheme aims to regenerate the natural landscape of Roding Valley, and create a mini urban oasis within the gap of surrounding heavy infrastructures by transforming the site into a wetland park. The bowl-shaped landform collects wash-off from the motorways, and purifies it using series of constructed wetlands before entering the river.

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Fig. 8.14 Priscilla Wong Y2, ‘Nursery and Urban Park’, development model. A tectonic landscape of subtle undulating surfaces, capturing rainwater into a series of cisterns for the irrigation of the nursery and park. Fig. 8.15 Kar Tung (Karen) Ko Y3, ‘Pinhole Camera Assembly’. The operation of the pinhole camera relies on engaging the user’s curiosity. Each handle turns a different mechanism within the camera, which manifest themselves in the movement of sand filled weights below the camera. The camera records the static surrounding environment and the movements of the user, influencing the mechanisms within that further distort the image recorded by the camera to give a final result. Fig. 8.16 Emma Colthurst Y3, ‘The Gimbal’. This reconnects the landscape of Royal Victoria Docklands, taking each piece of industrial renascence as

players within the rings. Each piece sits in its own coordinate and relationship to its fellow players. As the rings turn, the spatial relationships between the pieces shift as they are juxtaposed against each other. In these brief moments of observation the Gimbal realigns the landscape, refocusing the Docklands in moments of realisation, before falling away.

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Fig. 8.17 Thomas Budd Y3, ‘An Unexpected Night in the Hotel Coletti’, short-section. A series of unique and peculiar interactions between the various hotel guests and staff are accentuated by an architecture interconnected by the various mechanical; electrical and operational services of the hotel.

Fig. 8.18 Thomas Budd Y3, ‘Instructional Re-configuration,’ drawing and photograph. A speculative drawing, modelling and photographic exercise undertaken in the London docklands which explores the potential for the inner workings of a camera to reorganise and reconfigure spatial relationships.

Fig. 8.19 Kar Tung (Karen) Ko Y3, ‘Venetto Town Hall’. The new architecture is an attempt to find a balance between the old and the new and to exemplify the result of the experiment, in which the architect’s take on the future of Venice manifests itself in the architecture. The architecture exploits the play of light and shadow to reveal what has been preserved and what has been demolished. Negative spaces are created by the demolished segments enabling new contemporary interventions. Fig. 8.20 Aqsa Iftikhar Y2, ‘Landscape of Smell’. The drawing explores the depiction of smell as a colour and the sequence of actions undertaken by the local fisherman preparing their nets. Fig. 8.21 Wenya Liu Y2, ‘Fish Market and Restaurant’. A building on the site of the existing Rialto fish market formed of a eries of interlocking brick arches creating

inner volumes to nestle the activiites of the market and restaurant. Fig. 8.22 Priscilla Wong Y2, ‘Nursery and Urban Park Model’, short-section. The relationship with the canal, water and shifting tidal conditions is further exploited within the new addition to the Venetian urban landscape.

Fig. 8.23 Eleanor Daisy Ursell Y3, ‘Venetian Film Studio’, plan. The Venicetian Film Studio is a speculative comment on the reality of Venice behind its tired and infamous façade. The play between fact and fiction within the architecture allows for a ‘super Venetian’ backdrop of activity on camera by creating a convincing and realistic setting. The studio design is driven by the notion of flexibility and optimum adaptability of the sets between films in parallel with the creation of the preconceived views held of Venice. The site lies within Dorsoduro in Venice, Italy.

No Agenda Ben Addy, Rhys Cannon

8 No Agenda

Rhys Cannon, Ben Addy

Unit 8 took the decision to abandon a thematic agenda for the year.

Clearly to have ‘no agenda’ is paradoxical – stating this establishes an agenda of sorts – however we framed the year this way because we were interested in the ideas, predilections, and ambitions of each individual. We continued to promote the Unit’s past interests and preoccupations such as technological implementation; spatial and experiential invention and innovative representation techniques. To this end the Unit’s first term work was structured around a detailed functional brief for a library, while the second and third term’s work was located in a precisely defined and quantified location that would be visited on the field trip.

We travelled to Finland, visiting Helsinki, the 2012 World Design Capital, and explored some its archipelago of 330 islands before travelling through the heavily forested interior to the Finnish Lakeland and then onto the Arctic Circle. The projects were structured around the twin notions of Projection and Intervention. Projection, in the first term, comprised a detailed competition brief for a library, located either in the Aalto-designed university campus or centrally alongside the train station, parliament and cultural buildings.

A range of responses to the notion of a 21st century library arose from the students’ interpretation of the brief and specifically the interaction with Finnish culture. Ness’s deconstructed campus library sought to provide a series of intimate reading spaces located on the periphery of the university lake while Timmy’s furnished the university with a new timber research faculty – the embedded information and expertise gathered from the study of native timber products akin to the reference volumes of a good library.

Josh celebrated the book as an artefact and represented the physical and structural qualities of volumes within the fabric, details and layout of his

proposal. Further exploring the book as ‘object’, Jackey suggested arrays of book storage and shelving to create acoustically attenuated reading spaces. Zion challenged the organisational systems of conventional libraries and proposed new classifications which manifest in a multicoloured and mutable plan form.

The combined efforts of the Robins explored ideas of periodicals, pulp novels and book swapping, disposable reading matter provided by libraries embedded within the concourse of the rail station, engaging with a transient or commuter readership.

The Intervention project in the second term adopted the principal Helsinki harbour (recently subject to a large masterplan competition for the relocation of the various ferry terminals and release of valuable development land) as the location for all of the projects, with each student’s research into the site forming the basis for their programmatic and architectural ambitions.

Reconciling the economic importance of Helsinki’s centrally located ferry terminals with the value of an uninterrupted sea view for new development, Vivian Wong proposed a sunken ferry terminal in the middle of the South Harbour inlet – maintaining the horizon while corralling five different modes of transport in an interchange that is barely visible from the land edge.

Simon similarly focused on the visual sweep of the harbour, using the dock edge and sea front as a backdrop to a ballet school’s performance space; layering performance, building, backdrop and audience in an ephemeral but elementally composed building. By contrast Ophelia’s museum of Baltic shipwrecks developed a massive and concrete form, designed from the inside out as a collection of tectonic elements brought together on the dockside.

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Jack’s seasonal reading library in the first term was orchestrated to exploit the annual extremes of light and dark at the northern latitude, while his second term project developed these ideas in the context of the daily cycle of activity in an international ferry terminal. Robin Ashurst’s maritime transport interchange and city market was designed around twin seasonal heat stores – subtly affecting internal temperature to profoundly affect the building operation and energy use.

Straddling a new pedestrian thoroughfare, Finbar’s marine research facility combines public amenity with engineering research – dramatically revealing material effects to passersby. Robin Gu’s sauna, on the island of Valkosaari, comprises a collection of built elements that in turn exploit specific aspects of the immediate context to characterise a sequence of deceptively simple spaces. Benedict’s boutique water-hotel similarly draws on the surrounding environment for its internal spatial strategy.

In both projects Konrad has sought to provide expression for Finnish folk culture – first in a building dedicated to the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, and then in a large scale music school. Robin Fu’s fish market in the second term is a counterpoint to the existing historic covered market on the west side of the harbor, wrapping fish smoking and preserving facilities through the body of the building as partitions to separate market stalls and restaurants.

In the second project Timmy examined the pervasive subculture of the gaming industry in Finland, proposing an adapted park that could be turned over to large scale ‘e-sports’ events. Ness harnessed the spirit of the archipelago and Finnish vernacular architecture while providing much needed cultural and political representation for the people of the archipelago in the capital city.

Vasilis’ dramatic underground archive in the first term was the result of a pragmatic study into book storage and circulation; his community housing

scheme in the second term was similarly the result of detailed functional research, but this time overlaid with a sensitive and lively approach to communal living and public amenity.

Year 2

Ruochong (Robin) Fu, Xiang (Robin) Gu, Konrad Holtsmark, Jack Sardeson, Benedict Tay, Simon Wimble

Year 3

Robin Ashurst, Ophelia Blackman, Tik Chun (Zion) Chan, Finbarr Anton Fallon, Man Lung (Jackey) Ip, Vanessa Lafoy, Vasilis Marcou-Ilchuk, Joshua Stevenson-Brown, Wai Yin (Vivian) Wong, Tae-In (Timmy) Yoon

Fig.8.1 Simon Wimble, Y2, Finnish National Ballet, Helsinki. The walls of the school create an ambiguous envelope, blurring the edges between the context of the South Harbour and the performance space. Fig.8.2 Xiang (Robin) Gu, Y2, Sauna complex, Valkosaari, Helsinki. Exploded diagrams of sauna rooms. Fig.8.3 Jack Sardeson, Y2, Ferry Terminal, Helsinki. Early sketch models of ferry terminal opening sections. Fig.8.4 Tai-In (Timmy) Yoon, Y3, E-Sports Arena, Esplanadin Puisto, Helsinki. Composite plan of landscaped park / arena. 8.2

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Fig.8.5 Robin Ashurst, Y3, South Harbour Transport Interchange, Helsinki. Short section through thermal stores, covered markets and upper concourse. Fig.8.6 Vasilis Marcou-Ilchuk, Y3, Communal Housing, Helsinki, Plan view of bakery. Fig.8.7 Ophelia Blackman, Y3, Museum of Baltic Shipwrecks, Helsinki, Model of Exterior. Fig.8.8 Robin Ashurst, Y3, South Harbour Transport Interchange, Helsinki. Perspex ticker board rainscreen facade.

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Unit

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Fig.8.9 Benedict Tay, Y2, City Centre Park Library, Helsinki. Collage view from café to library landscape. Fig.8.10 Wai Yin (Vivian) Wong, Y3, New Helsinki Cruise Terminal, Helsinki. Short section through concourses and metro lines. Fig.8.11 Ruoching (Robin) Fu, Y2, Central Station Magazine Library, Helsinki. White card model showing main entrance, library/ platform, reading rooms and magazine columns. Fig.8.12 Josh Stevenson-Brown, Y2, Municipal Library, Helsinki. Building grid and zoning aligned to principles of book layout.

The Bartlett School of Architecture 2013

The Bartlett School of Architecture 2013

Fig.8.13 Vanessa Lafoy, Y3, Archipelago, Helsinki, South elevation. Fig.8.14 Konrad Holtsmark, Y2, Musical Heritage Centre, Helsinki, 1st floor plan. Fig.8.15 Finbarr Anton Fallon, Y3, Marine Research Institute, Helsinki. Exposing the experimental: public thoroughfare through institute. Fig.8.16 Vanessa Lafoy, Y3, Archipelago, Helsinki. Detail plan through clubhouse and postal service sorting office. 8.13

The Bartlett School of Architecture 2013

The Bartlett School of Architecture 2013

Composition Ben Addy, Rhys Cannon

COMPOSITION

Ben Addy, Rhys Cannon

The idea of composition as a visual but also a material, programmatic and social concern has been the principle focus of our work this year. The unit’s investigations initially took place in London but developed with our field trip to Morocco into detailed studies of the Medina of Fes, before culminating in accurately sited propositions specifically located in Fes el Bali, an important World Heritage Site that is currently the focus of significant economic and infrastructural investment by the Moroccan and United States governments.

The Medina of Fes is a unique city where the confluence of 9th century buildings, 15th century artisanal industry and 21st century social media and politics combine with Arab, Berber and Jewish cultures to define an intense urban scene of extraordinary but often subtly demarcated diversity. The urban form of constricted alleyways and compact squares, private courtyards and concealed service streets provides for a tight mesh of activity where the extraordinary demographic mix is held together through the use of discrete signs and the highly sophisticated composition of public and private space. Into this situation the unit proposed a diverse but contextually aware range of architectural propositions, either based on existing demands or in order to posit alternative solutions to the generally unsophisticated schemes currently under consideration by the city authorities.

Celestria Kimmins’ project represents the culturally sensitive interweaving of a women’s hospice and counselling service into a new market quarter, drawing on the existing materiality of the Medina as a means to code the new proposition –concealing but also on occasion subtly revealing different aspects of the scheme.

Fergus Knox has proposed a hitherto new typology for the Medina – a public park – with virtuoso technical skill and an acute consideration for simple daily interactions. The subtle interplay of public and private space that is proposed gives a suggestion as to how the proximity of artisan industry to daily life in the Medina could be maintained, and is a direct riposte to the UNESCO-backed plan to relocate much of this activity to a suburban industrial park.

The school for girls proposed by Janice Lau starts with a simple but much needed new connection between two dislocated parts of the Medina. This route is then developed into the organising element for the new school, organising different levels of accessibility around the public thoroughfare, carefully and responsibly choreographing the level of interchange between pupils and passersby.

Following an examination of service traffic in the Medina, Yin Hui Chung’s wholesale market and logistics depot gives rational organising structure to the transfer of goods from van to donkey at an important entry point to the

Medina while also providing a flamboyant wholesale showroom and auction house for goods destined for the international market.

Marcus Stockton’s project provides a forum for two radically different levels of commerce – an exchange for the determination and listing of the international spot price for phosphate, and the architectural support for a micro financed and micro scaled community start up initiative. The tectonic considerations of the project are supported by an extraordinary and distinctive approach to the provision of natural lighting as well as an economically and materially workable strategy for the cross financing and cross servicing of the business start up spaces.

Finally, Cherry Beaumont’s masterplan for a new street on the edge of the Oued Boukhrareb channel combines an inventive environmental strategy with culturally aware compositions of public and private program. The typologies explored in detail by the project include those of madrassa, hammam and bakery as well as the private house and workspace. These typologies have been brought together into a dense architectural composition where each has been developed with an awareness of shifting politics to allow for a flexible response to the development of social attitudes, suggesting a valuable approach to development of culturally precious urban fabric.

Unit 8 would like to thank the following individuals for their invaluable criticism and advice as provided to the students during crits held over the course of the year: Andrew Abdulezer, Sarah Custance, Matthew Potter, James Llewelyn, Juliet Quintero, Simon Kennedy, James Hampton, Giles Martin, Scott Grady, Tomas Stokke, Tim Murray, Tamsie Thompson and Parvinder Marwaha.

Rhys Cannon and Ben Addy would like to extend particular thanks on behalf of the students to Andrew Best and his colleagues at Buro Happold for their continued support, design input and critical technical advice.

Year 2: Marta Dabrowska, Hao Han, Jasper Stevens, Chengcheng Peng, Qidan Chen, Tzen Chia

Year 3: Celestria Kimmins, Fergus Knox, Cherry Beaumont, Marcus Stockton, Yll Ajvazi, Tsz Yan Janice Lau, Yin Hui Chung

Fig. 8.1 Tzen Chia, Waterloo Bridge Subterranean Bathhouse, perspectival diagram. Presenting London’s hidden depths, a series of unique spatial experiences are explored emphasing the ‘below-ground’. Fig. 8.2 Han Hao, Centre of Craft, section. The project looks into two conditions central to the Medina: navigation and crafts. Top craftsmen live and work in the building, creating a ‘crafts expo’. Visitors experience the crafts as they circulate through the building and orientate themselves within the City. Fig. 8.3 Janice Lau, Moroccan Girl’s School, model. Girl’s education is currently underprovided within Fez, the building creates a public throughfare; over, in, around and balances privacy and public exposure will promoting its function. Fig. 8.4 Jasper Stevens, The American Fondouk Donkey Hospital,

exploded axonometric. An extension to an existing veterinary charity, the building provides: stabling; treatment; educational facilities; farrier; blacksmithing and a vast rooftop pasture for the beleaguered donkeys of the Medina. Mules, horses and donkeys form the backbone of the Medina’s goods distribution system and the new facilites are woven around a ramp providing direct linkage into the heart of the city.

Fig. 8.5 Marta Dabrowska, 30 St Mary’s Axe Registration Mark, drawing. Without directional elevation its presense is recorded through the reflections and diffraction of light permeating the streets of the City of London. Fig. 8.6 Yin Hui Chung, Re-composable London, drawing. A framing device exploring the arrangement of views within London, deconstructing and reconstructing key spatial components.

Fig. 8.7 Celestria Kimmins, Street Market and Women’s Refuge & Clinic, model. Discreetly hidden within the walls of the new Medina market and soup kitchen, reside consultancy rooms and a residential refuge and clinic.

8.8

Fig. 8.8, Fig. 8.11 Marcus Stockton, Phosphate Trade Centre and Fez-al-Bali Business Regeneration SchemePTC-FBRS, render. Pre-emptivly addressing the demand shift of phosphate production to Morocco the Trade Building functions as a Global Hub for the Coordination and regulation of the invaluable Phosphate resource. Utilising the improved economic state of Morocco through the phosphate trade, the project speculates a business regeneration scheme within Fez-al-Bali, centred in providing the infrastructure requirements of small scale businesses. . Fig. 8.9 — 8.10 Qidan Chen, Pattern Showcase, render. A series of cocoon like pods hover above the dense urban streetscape, their forms echoing the geometric patterns displayed within.

Fig. 8.12, Fig. 8.15 (Overleaf) Fergus Knox, Pearl River Gardens Regeneration Project, render & ground floor plan. Landscaped gardens and reedbeds create a new watercourse for the Wadi Boukrareb. A high-level water treatment plant cleans the river, before it is reintroduced into gardens for irrigation and public fountains. The treatment process will be made accessible to the public, educating through example, showing the benefits and the values of clean water whilst enticing people back to the river and the heart of the Medina. Fig. 8.13 Chengcheng Peng, Rights of Light – Party Wall Speculations, model. Whilst exploring the physical limitations of UK construction legislation a series of studies evolved into the ability to distort and manipulate these ‘rules’ in order to produce anew and unexpected architecture. Fig. 8.14

Cherry Beaumont, A New Street / Fes el Bali, model. Comprising the five traditional elements of a street within the Medina: fountain; bakery; hammam; mosque and quaranic school. The new proposed arrangement elongates the traditional courtyard and public square whilst utilising passive cooling strategies exploiting the resources of the flowing river below.

3D Johan Berglund, Rhys Cannon

3D

Unit 8 is shifting. We are becoming increasingly interested in the tools we use to design, and the reasons for using them We feel the need to stress the importance of architectural speculation beyond the usual plan and section. Not so much in terms of learning how to produce information for the construction of buildings, but as part of a critical and analytical design process Buildings are three-dimensional constructs, occupied in four dimensions by their users. It seems odd that so little design work takes place in these dimensions.

But we are not completely ignoring the unit themes that have been developed over recent years The relationship between the act of drawing and that of making is one of these, and the love for model making is another. We see our current focus as an addition to these themes, and we hope that the work of this year’s student group is more varied and explorative than ever before!

BRIEF SUMMARY

The relationship between the digital and the physical became the starting point of the year The unit built upon its longstanding tradition of producing evocative, intricate models through a set of initial workshops exploring 3d modelling and digital production techniques Concepts of craftsmanship were challenged and pieces produced integrating manual drawing and modelmaking techniques with components manufactured through a digital interface.

Small and medium scale inhabitable spatial propositions were located in sites remotely selected from fictional

depictions of Los Angeles. The sites bearing both a physical and temporal context that challenged the notion of the traditional architectural site, normally being nothing more than an empty plot of land

Our field trip took us to Los Angeles, a city unlike most others. The term ‘Los Angelisation’ refers to the homogeneous urban sprawl that makes up LA and as a result of its depiction in films and media, the flat and sprawling nature of LA has become an icon for the cardependent, low density, endlessly expanding American City.

In recent years however, LA has started to densify through a number of planning initiatives and a higher influx of residents, and is now one of the densest cities in the United States. We were interested to examine this trend further, and proposed inventive and unexpected ways for the city to grow and expand in a 3dimensional way, while at the same time generating sustainable ideas for how this could happen in an age where the petrol car is becoming more and more taboo.

Unit 8 would like to thank Andrew Best and his colleagues at Buro Happold for the invaluable technical support

Year 2: Tzen Chia, Kacper Chmielewski, Dean Hedman, Matthew Lucraft, Luke Scott, Simran Sidhu

Year 3: Charlotte Baker, James Bruce, Emma Carter, Siyu Frank Fan, Yue Mollie Gao, Jonathan Holmes, Chun Yin Samson Lau, Joseph Paxton, Antonina Tkachenko

Fig 8 1 Dean Hedman, Santa Monica Institute of Fish, Rendered overview drawing An exploration into the edge conditions of the city, where the building takes on natural properties (in this case a delta) to mediate the fragile boundary between city and nature

Fig 8 2 Frank Fan, Venice Vibes, sectional model The project studies the potential medical and aesthetic benefits of an architecture of vibrations, located in Venice Beach Fig. 8.3 Antonina Tkachenko, Disaster Pop-up Hotel, Santa Monica Acknowledging the fragile earth surface that makes up Los Angeles, this project seeks to implement a new kind of architecture that lays dormant under ground until activated by seismic activity

Fig 8 4 Mollie Yue Gao, Archive Silencio, Model Taking its cue from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, the project is sited in a derelict downtown theatre, where the architecture (like the film) occupies both real space and the space of dreams Fig. 8.5 Simran Sidhu, The Laugh Factory Theatre, Rendered view of the fly tower atrium Hidden away behind a hedge-like row of trees, the project is an exploration of the potential to create an architecture that uses its natural surrounding as a second facade Fig. 8.6 Samson Lau, Seed Towers, model view The project investigates the green policies of former Governor Schwarzenegger, and proposes a series of solar chimneys which will aid in the cleansing of the smog ridden freeway areas of downtown L A Fig. 8.7 Kacper Schmielewski, Surfers’ Retreat, Roofplan A playful study of the lives of surfers, and their requirements for cheap accomodation in the Venice Beach area Fig. 8.8 Charlotte Baker, The Los

Angeles Cathedral of Water, Fragment model The proposal investigates the tectonics of the folds and frills of the natural landscapes surrounding L A , and the dependence on the supply of (almost holy) water Fig. 8.9 Matt Lucraft, Culver City Film Museum, interior view Using film editing techniques such as montages, overlays and jump-cut, the project forms a rich and cinematic architectural sequence through the history of film Fig. 8.10 Luke Scott, Rift Market, model view Situated in two crossing rifts (the boundaries of the Crips and the Bloods territories, and an underground tectonic faultline) the project playfully creates a market where the activities of the area collide to form a dynamic and shifting urban environment Fig. 8.11 Joseph Paxton, Hollywood Dreams motel, model installation The landscape of Hollywood hills is re-imagined as a lightscape of fluctuating light sources, illuminated by a motel set within the hill As such it

suggests an organic counterpoint to the ever-present illuminated city grid below Fig 8 12 Jonathan Holmes, Hotel Cult, Fish eye perspective view A satirical take on the chateau culture of Hollywood, and the emergence of celebrity sects In the proposal, light is treated and manipulated to illuminate, as well as obscure spaces and views for the occupants, allowing only the highest ranking members to fully grasp the building interior

Fig 8 13 Emma Carter, Beverly Hills City Farm, model view Situated in a context where the clash between American fast food culture, and organic produce is at its extreme, the project suggests a dense form of urban farm housing, where the productive aspects of the land becomes as important as its aesthetic qualities Fig 8 14 Luke Scott, A clinic for R V users, plan The Rehabilitation Clinic embeds itself in the context of Venice beach, where it is at once beach, public plaza, parking, car repair shop and rehabilitation home for R V residents Fig. 8.15 James Bruce, Recycled Water Lifeguard Training Facility, sectional model The building, which is carved into the cliff dividing Santa Monica and the beach, and the place where the legendary route 66 meets the sea, forms the home of both a water recycling plant, and the training ground for the future stars of Baywatch Fig 8 16 Mollie Yue Gao, The Hollywood Chamber of Fame, section through the

main auditorium A highly adventureous investigation into cosmic geometries and their potential to form an architecture of stellar delight The section shows the main auditorium chamber, where the celebrities of Hollywood finds themselves truly in the center of the universe

Weathermen Johan Berglund, Rhys Cannon

Yr 2: Yll Ajvazi, Cherry Beaumont, Ekaterina Minyaeva, Amanda Moore, Cho-Hee Sung, Jaymar Vitangol, Sandra Youkhana, Alexander Zhukov

Yr 3: Nichola Barrington-Leach, David Rhys Jones, Christopher Mobbs, Stefano Passeri, Imran Matteo Perretta, Max Walmsley, Clarissa Yee

Weathermen

‘It is time to become part of everything.’

Unit 8 was interested in the potential for real buildings to incorporate strong poetic and experiential qualities, and to exist in symbiosis with the fabric of urban and natural landscapes they inhabit. We believe that architecture communicates the ideals and dreams of society, with the ability to respond to social, urban, and environmental problems. We put a strong emphasis on the stuff of buildings, their technologies and systems, and find great joy in exploring novel and innovative techniques of construction.

This year, the unit challenged the relationship between the natural and the man-made. With an increasingly blurred boundary of definition between the two, how can one make a distinction between the ‘real’ and the artificial? What we see emerging is a new, synthesized version of nature, predominantly existing in relation to cities, where green space is no longer necessarily synonymous with natural space, and where human interaction has influenced, or in some cases radically changed, natural phenomena.

We believe that buildings can be read in terms of weather (natural, political, cultural), with their own internal microclimates and zones of heat, pressure, and potentially also hurricanes, rain showers, blizzards and draughts. Acknowledging that both our natural and man-made worlds exists in a volatile and uncertain relationship, we looked at ideas of how to bridge or blur the artificial and the natural, and propose architectures that respond to these new and shifting conditions.

Johan Berglund & Rhys Cannon

Top: Cherry Beaumont, Harajuku School for the Almost Adult, Tokyo, timetable drawing. Bottom: Amanda Moore, Holborn Blood Bank, London, long section.

Clockwise from top left: Clarissa Yee, Growing a Printworks, Tokyo, screen printed perspective; Cho-Hee Sung, Rickshaw Centre, Tokyo, sectional model; Nichola Barrington-Leach, Arakawa River Sports Facility, Tokyo, Thermal Baths, interior view; Yll Ajvazi, Moisture Drawing Machine, London, installation photograph; Jaymar Vitangol, Turbulent market, London, model photograph; Nichola Barrington-Leach, Arakawa River Sports Facility, Tokyo, perspective view; Sandra Youkhana, Business School, Tokyo, axonometric view; Alexander Zhukov, Drawing from the Great Vine, London, detail view of photogram drawing.

Top: David Rhys Jones, The Local Warming Campaign HQ, London, model photograph. Middle: Christopher Mobbs, Sumotown, Tokyo, model photographs.

Bottom: Max Walmsley, Sub-Nature Research Station, London, model photograph.

Top: Sandra Youkhana, Emergency Post Office, London, model photograph; Business School, Tokyo, model photograph. Middle: Matteo Imran Perretta, Neon Onsen, Tokyo, model photograph; Kings Cross Radiation Refuge, photographic study. Bottom: Matteo Imran Perretta, Neon Onsen, Tokyo, energy mapping.

Top: Stefano Passeri, Namazu’s Restless Temple, Tokyo, magnitude drawing. Bottom: Stefano Passeri, Unveiling Perry’s Submerged Forest, London, axonometric phase drawings; global view drawings.

Good Night Past, Good Morning Future Johan Berglund, Rhys Cannon

Yr 2: Keiichi Iwamoto, Daniel James Lane, Michael Christopher Pugh, Yuan Zhao, Alexander Zhukov. Yr 3: Emi Bryan, XueTing Cai, Theodore Games Petrohilos, Ben Hayes, Kaowen Ho, Ejiri Kenzo, Chiara Montgomerie, Olivia Pearson, Francis Roper, Yong Jun Song.

Good Night Past, Good Morning Future

Good Night Past, Good Morning Future

Scaled scenarios for cities of the future have forever been an indulgence of architects. The modern age has seen frequent utopian proposals, with Le Corbusier, Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright being key names in advocating change. Technological advancements have now made some of these futures reality, while other discarded ideas have found a second life in museums and archives - cultural repositories for aspirations of the past, present and future.

As far as built environments go, New York still stands as one of the ultimate examples of the advances of urban, technological and cultural thought, a realised utopia. We will take an interest in the histories that shaped our image of New York as a ‘city of the future’. Through these stories we will look at the city’s current state of evolution and propose imaginative, unexpected, perhaps strange, but compelling avenues for the city to follow. How can we glance a vision of the future in a city that has already seen it...?

Johan Berglund and Rhys Cannon

Clockwise from top left: Ben Hayes, The Harlem Experiment; Daniel Lane, Newspaper Archive; Emi Bryan, School of Illusion; Keiichi Iwamoto, 1:100 Colonisation Vessel; Francis Roper, Immigration Support Facility.

Clockwise from top left: Theo Games Petrohilos, Williamsburg Town Hall; Olivia Pearson, Museum of Dust; Snow Cai, Dissolvable Pavillion; Jun Song, Box of Memories; Francis Roper, Body/Light Interface; Kenzo Ejiri, Firemen’s Retreat.

Top: Kaowen Ho, Long Island Intercity Transport Terminus, Bottom Left: Michael Pugh, Coney Island Fireworks Laboratory, Bottom Right: Theo Games Petrohilos, Bankers’ Refuge.

This Page: Chiara Montgomerie, Roosevelt Island Respiratory Clinic, Facing Page: Ben Hayes, Resonant Capsule Hotel

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar Johan Berglund, Rhys Cannon

Yr 2: Catherine St Hill, Jason Claxton, Joannne Marie Clark, Katherine Fudge, Man Fai (Martin) Tang, Richard Moakes, Sungwoo Park, Victor Hadjikyriacou. Yr 3: Alastair Stokes, Ana Mill, Ashmi Thapar, Daniel Hall, Edward Farndale, Jen Wang, Joseph Wegrzyn, Michael Hughes, Negin Moghaddam, Sophia Jones.

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar*

Unit 8 have investigated transient landforms, layering and exposure. Through engaging with these themes we sought to generate architectures that are responsive, dynamic and new. Immovable man-made interventions amongst the backdrop of fluid environmental change has long since been acknowledged as a challenge set down to nature and the destinations for the year are cases in point. We took an interest in shifts and change, and sited our projects within the nodes and moments of turbulence in first the natural, and later the urban environment.

The year was structured around three main stages of development:

1: The calm before the storm

An initial short project presented the theme of anticipation and suspense.

2:

Prospect (landscape)

The first term explored and developed concepts of adaptation and responsiveness towards natural shifts. Our site was Dungeness, an empty and vast expanse of shingle, accreted over time through the slow process of coastal drift.

3: Eye (city)

The unit visited New Orleans, a city in the American south with a turbulent past and present. A glorious melting point of cultural diversity: voodoo, jazz, Creole culture, French colonial architecture, mixed with a precarious geographical location at the low lying plains and swamps.

* Taryn Simon, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, 2007

Clockwise from top left: Katherine Fudge, Domestic Landscape; Cate St Hill, Mask Workshop and Theatre; Joey Clark, Horizon Distortion Device and Second Line Jazz Undertakers; Victor Hadjikyriacou, Iron Foundry and Dungeness Fishermen’s Beacon; David Park, Jazz School.

Johan Berglund and Rhys Cannon

Clockwise from top left: Martin Tang, Landscape Organ; Alistair Stokes, Random Map Generator; Ashmi Thapar, Watery Facade; Jen Wang, Surface Sensing Shoes

Top: Ed Farndale, Soulful Oncology Centre. Bottom: Michael Hughes, Lower 9th Ward Literacy Centre.

Top: Daniel Hall, Fisherman’s Amenity Structure. Bottom: Sophia Jones, Mardi Gras World Redux.

Top: Joey Wegrzyn, The Capsaicin institute, ground floor plan. Middle: Joey Wegrzyn, The Capsaicin institute, sectional model. Bottom: Anna Mill, Dungeness Wind Fair

Negin Moghaddam, Louisiana Cookery School.

The Explorers Johan Berglund, Rhys Cannon

Yr 2: Craig Allen, Carmelo Arancon, Ross Fernandes, Dalina Gashi, Ben Harriman, Katherine Hegab Gaafar, Louisa Danielle Hodgson, Julian Zi Liang Huang. Yr 3: Aditya Aachi, Beatrice Beazley, Natalie Benes, Sarah Custance, Edward Farndale, Adam Holland, Christopher Lees, Tia Randall, Georgina Robinson, Chris Thompson.

The Explorers

In the 19th century, a man called Monturiol dreamed of a refuge, a place where he could go to be free of the dense and dirty city of Barcelona in which he lived. To achieve his dream he built a vessel - the first of its kind - that would let him inhabit an element that one had previously only been able to visit for short periods of time.

Unit 8 took Monturiol and his dream as the starting point of the year, letting each student go off on a journey of discovery along which they defined and designed the tools needed to inhabit their own utopian worlds. We looked hard for the new, personal and original, generated architectures which contained layers of history, myth, place and time, and dealt with scales ranging from the microscopic landscapes of Soho to the almost infinite horizon of Montserrat.

Johan Berglund and Rhys Cannon

Clockwise from top left: Ben Harriman, Stereoscopic Viewing Instrument, London, installation view; Carmelo Arancon, Gallery of Light, London, section; Dalina Gashi, Masked Space, London, installation view; Louisa Danielle Hodgson; Ross Fernandes, Urban Arts Institute, Barcelona, façade study; Julian Huang, The institute of Bathymery, Barcelona, ground floor plan; Edward Farndale, Borough Market Beadle Headquarters, London, model; Craig Allen, Whispering Gallery, London, model; Katherine Hegab, Chocolate and Ceramics Workshop, section, Barcelona

Top: Ad Aachi, Close Care Centre, Barcelona, short section. Middle: Tia Randall.Botom: Georgie Robinson, Gymnastics and Kastel Centre, Barcelona, model.

Top: Chris Thompson, Botanical Workshop, London, model. Bottom: Beatrice Beazley.

This page: Christopher Lees; top: Museum of Microlandscapes, London, section; bottom: Catalan Ceramics Forum, Barcelona, perspective

This page, top: Natalie Benes; left: Cleansing Instrument, London, installation view; right: Bell Foundry, Montserrat, plan; bottom: Adam Holland, Montserrat School of Astronomy, Montserrat, model. Facing page: Sarah Custance, Scriptwriter’s retreat, Barcelona, plan

Syncopated Territories Laura Allen, Rhys Cannon, Mark Smout

BSc Unit 8

Syncopated Territories

In Unit 8 we continued to look at the landscape. In recent years we have been preoccupied by the distinctions of rural landscapes as artificially maintained environments and of urban landscapes responding to fluctuating environmental and cultural influences. We have scrutinised the tacit relationship between man, the manmade and nature. Moreover, the unit responds to landscape as dynamic and fluxing, reacting and adapting to numerous natural and artificial stimuli.

This year we focused on the rate of change. Stimulated by cataclysmic geographical events or by the gradual emergence of new cultural forces, the rural and urban landscape flexes to respond. Unfamiliar rhythms of the city are exposed, established territories manipulated and fresh topographies evolved.

Laura Allen, Rhys Canon and Mark Smout

Yr 2: Mayu Akashi, Sarah Bromley, James Hughes, ,Aaron Lim, James Palmer, Oliver Sheppard, Sarah Syed. Yr 3: Lik San Chan, Veronique Geiger, Jonathan Horsfall, Emily Keyte Richard Lipson, Azusa Murakami, Rae Whittow-Williams, Lucy Wood.

Top:Lik San Chan, Housed Appliances for an Architect’s Christmas. Clockwise from bottom left: Lik San Chan, Odourless Fish Market with solar plenum; Azusa Murakami, Handbag Decoy, avoiding unwanted encounters; Azusa Murakami, The Theatre of Embroidery, Funchal

Clockwise from top: Rae Whittow-Williams, Marine Biology Research Centre, the architecture of splash, spray, upsurge, drip and overflow; Ric Lipson, ‘Theatre na Borde’, a building performance on the Funchal promenade; Veronique Geiger, Cliff-top flight school, ‘seconds of sheer terror punctuated with hours of boredom’; Jonny Horsfall, Spa hotel responding to Madeira’s leaky topography; Veronique Geiger, Knitting map; Lucy Wood, ‘The Thames Collection’, homage to Sir John Soane

This page: Aaron Lim, Blubber landscape plan

This page: Lucy Wood, Garden of Environmental Diversity

This and facing page: Emily Keyte, The picturesque concrete garden, a succession of water-soaked scenes in Funchal, Madeira

Mutability-Superfluity Laura Allen, Mark Smout

Mutability-Superfluity

In recent years we have looked at the fluid and yielding nature of landscape This year we will concentrate on Cities – urban landscapes, generally deemed immutable, impervious or resistant to rapidly fluctuating environmental conditions However, cities also exist in a chaotic natural world and accommodate evolving and shifting patterns of behaviour

We are interested in developing mutable architectural landscapes which are responsive to the elemental force of the changing environment and to the dynamic nature of the use of cities These restless landscapes – with malleable uses, fluctuating functions and transitory inhabitants – are the basis of our architecture We will look at superfluity as the origin to necessity, as inspiration for bold, abundant and inventive architecture

Projects are based in Helsinki and Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Laura Allen and Mark Smout

Yr 2: Hai Yee Jacqueline Chak, Anabela Chan, Christopher Day, Andrew Friend, Eleanor Lakin, Nicholas Wood, Yang Yu, Sanaa Shaikh Yr 3: Marcus Brett, Margaret Bursa, Imogen Long, Benjamin Ridley, Frank Gilks, Alexander Kirkwood, Tom Finch, Luke Pearson, Tumpa Yasmin

Clockwise from top left: Tom Finch, Mags Bursa, Imogen Long, Frank Gilks

Clockwise from top left: Ben Ridley, Mags Bursa, Marcus Brett, Tumpa Yasmin, Alex Kirkwood Overleaf: Luke Pearson

Limits and Landscapes Laura Allen, Mark Smout

BSc Unit 8

Limits & Landscapes

Buildings, cities and landscapes result from the same tectonic processes of erosion and accumulation, drift and growth Seemingly contrasting topographies of London and Oslo are the focus of our investigations

Extreme climates, multicultural populations, geographical inertia and geological transformations encourage us to respond with hybrids of site and programme Dynamic responses take the form of 1:1 recorded events, 1:100 urban concepts and 1:1000 architectural topographies

Laura Allen and Mark Smout

Yr 2: John Craske, Oliver Goodhall, Alissa Holmes, Holly Lewis, Emily Mann, Maxwell Mutanda, Liz Sleeman, Gemima Tatel, Charlotte Thomas Yr 3: Dimitris Argyros, Thomas Carrington, Steve De Micoli, Asif Khan, Poppy Kirkwood, Ben Nicholls, Pernilla Ohrstedt, Jasminder Sohi, Nick Westby, Rion Willard

Clockwise from top left: Ben Nicholls, Nick Westby, Tom Carrington, Jasmin Sohi, Dimitris Argyros, Asif Khan, Rion Willard, Asif Khan

Clockwise from top left: Poppy Kirkwood, Pernilla Ohrstedt, John Craske