Design Anthology PG18
Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2)
Compiled from Bartlett Summer Show Books
Our Design DNA
At The Bartlett School of Architecture, we have been publishing annual exhibition catalogues for each of our design-based programmes for more than a decade. These catalogues, amounting to thousands of pages, illustrate the best of our students’ extraordinary work. Our Design Anthology series brings together the annual catalogue pages for each of our renowned units, clusters, and labs, to give an overview of how their practice and research has evolved.
Throughout this time some teaching partnerships have remained constant, others have changed. Students have also progressed from one programme to another. Nevertheless, the way in which design is taught and explored at The Bartlett School of Architecture is in our DNA. Now with almost 50 units, clusters and labs in the school across our programmes, the Design Anthology series shows how we define, progress and reinvent our agendas and themes from year to year.
2024 Generational Phantoms / East–West Deviations
Isaie Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
2023 Generational Phantoms / Contextual Futurism
Isaie Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
2022 Generational Phantoms / WE 2.0
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo Carvalho De Ostos
2021 Generational Phantoms / Neo-Ecological Myths
Ricardo de Ostos, Isaïe Bloch
2020 Moonchild
Ricardo de Ostos, Isaïe Bloch
2019 Earth Child / Education through Innovation
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
2018 Heterodox Natures
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
2017 Generational Phantoms/Re-de-constructing Ecology
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
2016 Portraits of Nature
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
2015 Materialising the Incomplete
Ricardo de Ostos, Nannette Jackowski
2014 Carving a Giant
Ricardo de Ostos, Nannette Jackowski
2013 Crypto Phantom’s Sensorial Materiality
Ricardo de Ostos, Nannette Jackowski, Manuel Jiménez Garcia
2012 Generational Phantoms
Ricardo de Ostos, Nannette Jackowski
2010 Psychospace
David Ardill, Colin Fournier
2009 Mutant!
David Ardill, Colin Fournier
2008 “Learning from Nature” The Environmental Paradigm
David Ardill, Colin Fournier
2007 Experimental Ecosystems
David Ardill, Colin Fournier
2006 Space, Emotion and Architecture
David Ardill, Colin Fournier
2005 Obscure Objects of Desire
David Ardill, Colin Fournier
2004 Vertigo/Verticality
Colin Fournier, Peter Szczepaniak
2024
Generational Phantoms / East–West Deviations
Isaie Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
Generational Phantoms / East–West Deviations
Isaie Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
Why should architecture students travel? Some might say it’s to learn from other cultures, but what can they do with that knowledge if they live in places different from their travel destinations? Aren’t the piazzas, temples, boulevards, cafés and sacred domes specific to their local foreign context? We instinctively know the answers to these questions. Learning is not about memorising and repeating, but rather about interpreting, transposing and reconnecting. Deep learning involves weaving one’s own tapestry of ideas, interlinked by the threads of places, impossible structures and characters. This year PG18’s brief was to explore Eastern and Western values as well as the ideas prevalent in the Turkish metropolis of Istanbul.
We visited Istanbul to learn from its historical legacy, as well as its modern cultural context and complex urbanisation. Both ancient and modern Istanbul are still home to a wide array of historical and contemporary migratory cultures that share public space and ritual times.
Based on the context of Istanbul, students worked with both intellectual and creative tools. After reading seminars and discussions the unit created an initial platform to challenge contemporary dogmas of cultural appropriation and academicism. Digital tools were utilised to both draw the existing environment and work with concepts of layered syncretism and material hybrids.
One of our students, Edward Chan, designed a building using quarry leftovers and mining paraphernalia, creating an architecture where refined materiality emerges from material waste. Serving as a mental health clinic with semi-public spaces, the architecture offers care through tactility, light and material history. El Hadi Boudouch questioned whether a five-star hotel can be formally exclusive and spatially inclusive. He worked with hand drawings and digital models across scales to design a luxury hotel along the Bosphorus that encourages diverse social encounters. Momchil Petrinski, responding to a massive canal project, proposed an ecological citadel that minimises the impact of megalomanic state projects, where colonnades of flora and fauna blossom among market spaces and community areas.
Studying a multilayered city like Istanbul offered students the opportunity to see culture as dynamic and active, providing a tremendous boost for an architecture that drifts between East and West.
Year 4
Andia Chan, Adnan Demachkieh, Erica Hawking, Ik Hui Lam, Omar Latif, Yi Heng (Zero) Lim, Ioana Petre, Jordan Stulich
Year 5
Heather Black, El Hadi Boudouch, King Long Chan, Ming Chung (Edward) Chan, Silvan Cimpoesu, Nada Maktari, Momchil Petrinski, Noah Robinson-Stanier
Technical tutors and consultants: Rob Haworth, Nick Ling
Critics: Teoman Ayas, Niran Buyukkoz, Peter Cook, Marcoz Cruz, Irem Dökmeci, Jack Moreton, Viviana Muscettola, Yael Reisner, Nic Stamford, Andrei Zamfir, Nicholas Zembashi
18.1, 18.5 Momchil Petrinski, Y5 ‘The Citadel of Alluvial Sanctuaries and Exchange’. The proposal investigates the repurposing of scarred landscapes to challenge contemporary dystopias in the context of Istanbul’s peripheries. It uses the controversial Istanbul Canal megaproject as a base to facilitate cultural exchange, ecological sanctuaries, a market and an exchange hall. The main enclosure constitutes a hybrid building typology of human and ecological inhabitation, facilitating a terraced market, workshops, caverns, internal ecological sanctuaries, congregation spaces and atrium gardens.
18.2 El Hadi Boudouch, Y5 ‘In-between the Sultans Gardens’. The project rethinks the relationship between public and private space within Turkey’s luxury tourism sector. It revisits the city’s Ottoman palaces to contextualise the cultural hybrid that is Istanbul. This image shows how level changes, gardens and strategically placed pathways create spaces used by private guests and outside visitors.
18.3–18.4, 18.11 Ming Chung (Edward) Chan, Y5 ‘A Stone is an Onion’. Rapid urban expansion and excessive quarrying in suburban Istanbul have led to an abundance of ‘leftover’ industrial towns and unresolved mental distress among their inhabitants. Beyond the façade of monumentality and aesthetics, various stone tectonics can diversify the audio-visual qualities of this proposed therapy centre for different sensitivities. Taking cues from Ottoman kiosks, Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and suburban houses, this project’s geometry encourages subtle movement and interaction. From raw stone to rammed walls and translucent veneer, tectonic gradation provides a starting point for patients to explore their relationship and connection with the city.
18.6, 18.22 Nada Maktari, Y5 ‘The Theatre of Myths and Tragedies’. Inspired by legends of Medusa heads in the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul, visitors arriving by boat are welcomed with a corridor integrating columns of a hybridised Corinthian and muqarnas structure. The storyteller greets visitors here and guides them. The theatre is inspired by classical Greek architecture. Performers descend from the midst, and plays unfold according to tidal times, flooding the orchestra pit in reflection of the ruin. From the theatre seats, the Asian side of Istanbul is framed, with the axis pointing towards the Maiden Tower, a historic structure steeped in tales of tragedy.
18.7, 18.12 King Long Chan, Y5 ‘Reinterpreting Oil Wrestling’. The project spaces accommodate a variety of activities, allowing for exercising with sports equipment and performances to take place simultaneously. The roof mechanisms enable visitors to rotate rock pieces, altering platform positions to facilitate different events.
18.8 Heather Black, Y5 ‘The Museum of Now (MoN)’. The project challenges the rigid museum typology seen within Europe, which often associates object ‘value’ with subjective ephemeral tastes. It represents an archival and exhibition centre housing artefacts of today. It raises questions regarding how we value artefacts through curating and narrating them into architectural forms.
18.9 Noah Robinson-Stanier, Y5 ‘[UN]Break The Ground’. The project addresses the displacement of the Bostan market farmers from the land surrounding the Theodosian Walls in Yedikule, Istanbul, and to repair the depleted soil condition.
18.10 Jordan Stulich, Y4 ‘Xurtkirin: A Kurdish Record Label’. The project counters the suppression of Kurdish cultural expression in Istanbul by creating XK Records, an electronic record label and nightclub. ‘XK’ stands for xurt (strong) and kirin (action) in Kurdish, symbolising a cultural stronghold and beacon within the city’s urban landscape.
18.13 Adnan Demachkieh, Y4 ‘The Sino-Turkish Exchange Programme’. The renovation of Büyük Yeni Han in Istanbul merges the historic structure with the surrounding cityscape. Featuring restored stone façades and arches, the redesign includes contemporary walkways and public spaces, enhancing accessibility while preserving cultural heritage and creating a blend of tradition and modernity.
18.14 Omar Latif, Y4 ‘Cultivating ‘“Heterochronotopia”’. This project highlights the interaction between building elements and excavated volumes, revealing the exposed limestone wall of the existing structure. It illustrates how structure and inhabitation extend from the limestone wall to the natural park. Exterior activity permeates the building, and the façade and walkway undulate to create interstitial spaces and thresholds.
18.15 Erica Hawking, Y4 ‘The Microcosm for Anthroaquatic Learning’. This educational facility uses the lens of deviation to formulate an architectural response that fragments existing barriers between land and water, density and openness, and human/non-human relationships. By responding to current marine ecology and urban threats, as well as the city’s traditional fishing culture, it introduces a new floating typology for the city.
18.16 Ik Hui Lam, Y4 ‘A Living Heritage Approach to the Yedikule Bostans in Istanbul’. The project investigates architectural solutions to sustain historical alignment and geographical placement between bostans, the endangered historical market gardens in Istanbul, and the Theodosian Walls, the ancient defensive walls of the city, with strong awareness of their UNESCO status and existing cultural heritage.
18.17, 18.20 Silvan Cimpoesu, Y5 ‘Co-located Augmented Hans’. Addressing the politically infused art scene of Istanbul, this prototype highlights the capability of digital technologies to transcend traditional barriers within sociopolitical and cultural landscapes. It advocates for technology integration in revitalising cultural heritage sites within contemporary urban settings. The project proposes digital realms coexisting with physical spaces as new hybrid social infrastructures, reinstating artistic freedom based on a system to present art and share information in an untraceable, decentralised way.
18.18 Yi Heng (Zero) Lim, Y4 ‘StrataMaritime’. This journey through time is not just chronological but also emotional, where intact and damaged artefacts evoke a sense of loss or hüzün. The water feature skylight, casting a reflection line dividing the east and west display zones, accentuates the passage of time and the historical divisions that have shaped the city’s identity.
18.19 Andia Chan, Y4 ‘Parallel Lives’. The Şeker Han, a historical landmark in Istanbul, remains in its existing site, serving as a base for new timber architecture that rises above it. Cutouts are made in the historical structure, exposing passers-by to a scandalous array of life that is typically hidden from public view, all to frame a glimpse beyond.
18.21 Ioana Petre, Y4 ‘The Cihangir Community Health Hub’. The project offers a place to shift the focus back to health in the context of a fast-paced, ever-changing urban environment where green spaces are rapidly diminishing.
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2023
Generational Phantoms / Contextual Futurism
Isaie Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
Generational Phantoms / Contextual Futurism
Isaie Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
How do we study and design architecture in places where we were not born or raised? Contemporary orthodoxy suggests leaving such places untouched or designed via the filter of localism. An alternative view is that the world is now more connected than ever via global networks, with ubiquitous technology enabling influencer trends and horizontal fabrication techniques as well as climate advocacy. Confronting both the gospel of localism and the global milieu, PG18’s brief titled Contextual Futurism asked students to consider civic spaces. How could civic projects suit pressing contemporary topics around culture and environment?
Using Cairo, Egypt as a research ground, students selected contemporary issues to explore. Instead of looking only for the genius loci – i.e. the spirit of place – they also conceived architecture as a transformative and disruptive urban practice. The unit promoted seminars and reading discussions on the concepts of modern tribalism, vernacular design and digital remixing. Between design workshops and reading seminars, students were invited to understand and develop their own approach to the balance of tradition and innovation. Beginning with a particular artefact, they drew inspiration from graphic novels and science fiction films such as Dune while addressing present-day realities of extreme climate and social change.
On the streets of Cairo, fifth-year student Ma Patricia Castello created a biophilic landscape that broke down the busy, car-centric city roads into green public landscapes. Exploring generative formfinding while following local garden and courtyard typologies, the project speculates on how new types of greenery may be introduced in urban centres.
Inspired by existing brickwork and ancient Egyptian monumentality, fourth-year student Momchil Petrinski articulates spaces in which water is used to bring relief and leisure to the outskirts of the capital. In maintaining a fine line between design and programme brief, the project celebrates the potential of civic spaces and enables accessibility to those in most need.
Contextual Futurism addresses the core of PG18 research into how innovation can take on architectural tradition and proposition can challenge contemporary strategies of decolonisation. Students learned the importance of thinking about architecture from the point of view of culture, seeing how it can lead to a critical but also optimistic approach both to the profession and to life itself.
Year 4
El Hadi Boudouch, King Long Chan, Ming Chun Chan, Silvan Cimpoesu, Tessa Lewes, Harrison Lovelock, Nada Maktari, Momchil Petrinski, Noah Robinson-Stanier, Madeleine RutherfordBrowne, Ben Smallwood, Robert Tang
Year 5
Ma Patricia Castelo, Jasper Choi, Tu-Ann Dao, Olivia Shiu, Olubiyi Oluwatosin Sogbesan
Technical tutors and consultants: Rob Haworth, Nick Ling
Critics: Farbod Afshar Bakeshloo, Mahala Attwell Thomas, Teoman Ayas, Paulo Estrada, Armor Gutierrez, Alexander Kolar, Jack Moreton, Yael Reisner, Andrei Zamfir
18.1 Momchil Petrinski, Y4 ‘The Obelisk, the Aqua and the Repository’. A clay brick civic centre of contextual futurism in the industrial area of Helwan, Cairo, explores the themes of ‘contextual disturbances’ as water scarcity, pollution, hydro-healing, disruptive structures and harsh climatic conditions transform the exploitative brick industry through water holism.
18.2–18.3 Olivia Shiu, Y5 ‘Transitioning Visibility and the Power of Choice’. The project’s ambition was to challenge the dynamics of gender equality in modern-day Cairo, where women face difficulties overcoming sociocultural barriers to personal and financial independence. By exploring what it means to be a contemporary Egyptian woman, the scheme is inspired by libertarian paternalism. The design features social dining areas that experiment with notions of privacy and exposure through sculptural brickwork, manifesting in a traditional ceramic craft school for local women and international students.
18.4–18.5 Madeleine Rutherford-Browne, Y4
‘Contemporary Sabil’. Situated in Al-Hattaba, the project explores harmonious solutions to Cairo’s water crisis and its difficult relationship with heritage. The sabil (fountain) is a contextualised response to confronting water scarcity and community needs through a filtration centre. Driven by the need for a sympathetic approach to the UNESCO World Heritage Site’s history, the project mediates between the industrial water filtration process and Al-Hattaba’s deep-rooted connection to water provision in ancient Cairo.
18.6 Ben Smallwood, Y4 ‘Outpost: Sahara Refugee Camp’. The project puts forward a formally planned community space that uses familiar yet abstracted geometric tribal patterns and Egyptian colours to dictate the design language and programme. The space is used to rebuild relationships and communities through social activities including teaching, praying, weaving and cooking while offering shelter from the harsh Saharan elements.
18.7–18.8 Ma Patricia Castelo, Y5 ‘Reclaiming Cairo: The Heliopolis Square Park’. A view from above the sprawling canopy of the urban park, reclaiming space lost to cars and returning it to the city’s inhabitants. The design creates liveable areas for humans and non-humans in the dense and hot city of Cairo, focusing on the creation of microclimates through textured forms, sunken gardens and sprawling canopies. A semi-enclosed space provides a peaceful refuge in a vendor’s garden. The project emphasises the importance of biodiversity in the city through the creation of sunken desert gardens, embedding the textures and forms of native Egyptian flora in the architecture of the park. 18.9–18.10 Harrison Lovelock, Y4 ‘Re:Thinking Plants’. The project addresses the misunderstandings regarding Cairo’s water scarcity and accessibility, focusing on the goal of bringing water equity to the city. Building on themes of water scarcity inspired by Dune (2021), the project draws parallels with the Egyptian government’s plans to build a new green capital within the desert.
18.11 Silvan Cimpoesu, Y4 ‘Markaz fan a’nazaha wa-tahtib: Tahtib for Social Cohesion – Permanent and Changing Memory of Identity’. Tahtib is the term for a traditional stick-fighting martial art. The project explores this art as a way to destabilise the divide between the isolated communities of Imbabah and Zamalek. By re-establishing a strong connection through a shared cultural identity, the project tackles aggression among the youth through the values of power and control, honesty and truth, and mutual respect for the ‘other’. 18.12–18.13 Nada Maktari, Y4 ‘Burying the Dome’. The project creates underground sanctuaries to congregate in, reviving freedom of speech through surrealist ideals and passageway interactions as a form of protest.
18.14 Tessa Lewes, Y4 ‘The Cairo Cancer Centre: The Nest’. The Nest is a support facility for cancer patients and their families. It tackles air pollution, cancer stigma and a crippled public health system in Cairo. This therapeutic space holds, comforts and offers hope for those affected by the disease.
18.15–18.17 Jasper Choi, Y5 ‘Sukhur Al’Amal: Boulders of Hope for the Old and the New’. The proposed concept provides a cultural complex, vocational facilities and open public spaces for youths and young adults from the informal community, Haggana, and the formal community, Gardenia City, to come together. The cultural complex celebrates Egypt’s stone-sculpting craftsmanship through its workshop, studio and research facility. Emphasising social and cultural engagement, the site allows the two communities to share and gain skills and experiences from each other. The design language, building placement and sculpted façade embody boulders of hope for Haggana and Gardenia.
18.18–18.19 Ming Chun Chan, Y4 ‘The Hull: Marine Cultural Exchange’. An amphibious crossover between a fishing village and an education centre in Warraq Island, Cairo. The project investigates the topics of mass eviction, industrial reform and production–education hybrids via multi-materiality and the tides of the Nile.
18.20 Robert Tang, Y4 ‘Farm Re(in)jected’. This project recontextualises informal settlements in peri-urban Cairo, by creating an urbanistic system that alters how the local context is perceived. Sampling the local vernacular of red brick housing blocks, the project utilises an irregular grid network to create a plateau that covers the entirety of the site, thus halting further uncontrolled informal expansion. This system creates sheltered areas of market space as well as reintroducing agriculture as the focal point of the community.
18.21–18.22 King Long Chan, Y4 ‘In Dialogue with Informality: Photojournalistic Hub in Downtown Cairo’. Based on the contradiction between informal street vendors and the local authorities, the project creates a photojournalistic hub in downtown Cairo. It provides spaces for photojournalism events that decode local stories and generate discussions between citizens and government parties. The project’s façade is made up of recycled plastic chain mail that acts as a drape, resembling the traditional Egyptian tent cloth, khayamiya, and moves according to internal activities.
18.23 El Hadi Boudouch, Y4 ‘Public?’. The project rethinks how public space relates to densely populated urban slums and how waste can be viewed as an asset in creating energy, producing building materials and giving inhabitants an economic incentive to innovate. Understanding how to incorporate waste within a multi-programme system that allows industrial, social and commercial interventions to develop is paramount.
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2022
Generational Phantoms / WE 2.0
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo Carvalho De Ostos
Generational Phantoms / WE 2.0
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo Carvalho
De Ostos
The longer people live, the more they tend to question the three sequential stages of 20th-century life: education, work and retirement. Inspired by the challenge of increasing life expectancy in the 21st century, PG18 researched and designed educational institutions for a new life structure. Over a spectrum of classical, digital or alternative learning systems, students considered current political and economic pressures; from the impact of Web 2.0 social networks and ecological uncertainty to the massive ongoing transformation of learning environments. PG18 offered a series of seminars alongside digital workshops stimulating agile conversations between anthropological concepts and design experiments.
Ideas of longevity for young university students may sound unusual, but concepts of financial literacy, multiple career paths, non-formal continuous learning, healthier lifestyles and sustainable practice are relevant to their lives. Research into education models is less an abstract idea and more about shaping aspirations for a different educational process, one to which students will want to belong. Themes from economics, biology, forestry, disappearing coasts, crypto and NFTs became topics to fertilise architectural ideas. PG18 is a place that enables students to bring their own interests to the foreground of their work, while at the same time offering critical and constructive debate about the role of individuals in society.
Heather Black’s fourth-year project illustrates the merger of crypto economies to revitalise a forest in Scotland. Utilising tokens and the early ideas of ownership present in crypto space, the project proposes a building to attract both forest enthusiasts and investors, creating bridges between preservation and collective stewardship. Ecological education becomes linked to practices of care, maintenance of trees and the overall tokenisation of the landscape’s arboreal coverage.
Fifth year student Pablo Wheldon investigated how an abandoned mining site could be recreated as a sustainable forestry complex, uniting a diverse group of workers. Focusing on the intersection of congregational spaces and timber processing, the project addresses local industrial history, shifting it to a more sustainable landscape. Instead of ignoring the past, the proposed architecture encourages coexistence, productive conflict and future forest economies.
Inspired by our passion for culture and its expression in architecture tectonics, PG18 shows how rich, non-dogmatic and innovative the future of educational institutions can be.
Year 4
Heather Black, Ma Patricia Castelo, Neelkanth Depala, Noah Robinson-Stanier, Olivia Shiu, Joshua Snell, Biyi Sogbesan
Year 5
Victoria Bocchiotti, Tu-Ann Dao, Sara Eldeib
Leo Francois-Serafin, Grégoire Gagneux, Tobias Himawan, Alvin Lim, Sophie Peterson, Raul Rutnam, Pablo Wheldon
Technical tutors and consultants: Rob Haworth, Nick Ling, Hareth Pochee
Critics: Oliver Domeisen, Christina Grytten, Jack Moreton, Jez Ralph, Alisa Silanteva, Tul Srisompun, Paulo Waisberg, Yeena Yoon
18.1 Pablo Wheldon, Y5 ‘The Timber Colliery’. The proposed building is a timber-processing facility in the Forest of Dean on top of a former colliery. The proposal repurposes the fragments of the area’s coal-mining infrastructure into the timber process, from transport and milling to drying.
18.2 Tobias Himawan, Y5 ‘The Sacred Guardians of the Coast’. Situated in Fairbourne, a Welsh coastal village planned to be decommissioned by 2054 due to its failing sea defences, the project reviews the rich heritage of Christian pilgrimage in Wales and proposes three pilgrimage structures across three sites within the village.
18.3–18.4 Pablo Wheldon, Y5 ‘The Timber Colliery’. The new journey of timber is mapped across the old route of coal, with the material approach and architecture of the building reflecting these transitions from above ground to below ground.
18.5–18.6 Tobias Himawan, Y5 ‘The Sacred Guardians of the Coast’. Utilising geological narration, time, coastal dynamics, eroding earth materiality and the changing climate as architectural resources and design drivers, each proposed structure uncovers the varying struggles of the village against the future coastal climate. The architecture ultimately serves as a place where the villagers and the pilgrims interact, exchanging their knowledge as both are confronted with the transient reality of man-made habitation.
18.7 Alvin Lim, Y5 ‘Dreaming with Scales in My Eyes’. The project’s surreal, reimagined realities propose an architectural position and expression that intends to safeguard the region’s fishing heritage amid a changing nature and culture. An illustrated narrative forms a cultural education that shifts between optimism and uncertainty, revealing architecture’s capacity to be emotionally compelling. The project moves below the sea’s surface and beyond the land’s edge, to where all eyes in Cornwall cannot help but turn – the ocean.
18.8 Raul Rutnam, Y5 ‘London Craft Studies & Research Centre’. The project speculates on the future of transference and distribution of education in London through knowledge of accomplished craftsmanship, materiality and architectural tradition. The workshops explore the mass customisation of bespoke architectural components and objects of industrial design by exploring future tooling methods and fabrication, combining both digital processes and handcrafts.
18.9 Joshua Snell, Y4 ‘Insect Monitoring Centre’. The proposal establishes a cultural landmark which creates the habitat and spatial opportunity for interactions with insects, while also hosting an interactive data exhibit for displaying data captured by the community.
18.10–18.11 Grégoire Gagneux, Y5 ‘Elastogenesis Flexible Institution’. Elastogenesis explores the potential of flexible spaces to increase the performance of physical interactions, in a context in which longevity and technology generate new methods of working, teaching and living together. Creating a hybrid between virtual and physical space, the scheme facilitates observation, experience and sharing. The digital translation of natural growing models is proposed to deal with the notion of flexibility, articulating semi-virtual spaces within the architectural massing.
18.12 Leo Francois-Serafin, Y5 ‘The Library of Babel’. As the city of London aims to become net zero by 2050, the project proposes the creation of a centre for reskilling dedicated to workers of the High Speed Two (HS2) line. Open to workers and visitors alike, the building’s permeability and layout become a catalyst for education and socialisation.
18.13 Victoria Bocchiotti, Y5 ‘Hydrotherapy Centre or How to Live Longer’. Hydrotherapy has been present across cultures and has long been used to aid people
both physically and mentally. Steam bathing, for example, was recognised by both the Greeks and Romans for its many benefits. Through its architecture, the hydrotherapy centre brings people into a space that can educate them about how water can benefit the body and mind.
18.14 Olivia Shiu, Y4 ‘Navigating a New Zero: Natural Disaster Education Centre’. Warping wood model study. Located in London, the project provides a physical space for disaster management education as we adapt to changing water levels. The project investigates timber as the principal material and explores the hygroscopic qualities of wood in reaction to natural weathering.
18.15 Raul Rutnam, Y5 ‘London Craft Studies & Research Centre’. Milled, steam-bent and hand-finished parts of an interior model. Ornamental surfaces are designed by the architect in collaboration with craftspeople.
18.16 Grégoire Gagneux, Y5 ‘Elastogenesis Flexible Institution’. Model exploring interlocking spaces. The stretching, intersecting and interlocking of spaces not only mixes spatial perception associated with textures, but also extends architectural functions to multiple areas.
18.17 Sophie Peterson, Y5 ‘The Pharos Centre: Migration Community Centre’. Material model experiment exploring physical qualities and atmosphere. Set in the year 2051, the project is a training centre for individuals who have migrated from different climates, as well as being a base for learning new skills and languages, acquiring mental health services and finding safety, stillness and connection.
18.18 Olubiyi Sogbesan, Y4 ‘Rites of Passage’. Set in 2080, the project proposes a non-profit training facility that help build resilient and equitable communities that are sustainably integrated within the natural world. Through ongoing experimentation with earth-based additive manufacturing, trainees are entrusted to personalise their units while providing innovative solutions to environmental issues.
18.19–18.20 Patricia Castelo, Y4 ‘ The Merry Hill Agroecological Centre’. The project looks at how architecture can facilitate education in agroecological farming and growing while fostering a mutual relationship with the natural world. This is explored through the inclusion of non-human life forms in the built environment, focusing on a phenomenological approach towards learning and design, and challenging the relationship we have with how buildings are inhabited and the materials that are used.
18.21 Heather Carole Black, Y4 ‘ Trading Boundaries’. The scheme taps into the psychology of ownership and possession to incentivise people to take responsibility for forestry in Scotland, where the forestry is largely commercial and owned by a few wealthy elite. The project allows community members and investors to purchase plots of land in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and to collectively own the forest. The architectural response to the tokenised forest takes the form of a new-age investor’s centre.
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2021
Generational Phantoms / Neo-Ecological Myths
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo Carvalho De Ostos
Generational Phantoms / Neo-Ecological Myths
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
This year, PG18 studied how to frame ecological urgency by utilising architectural metaphors as arcs of narrative and meaning. Inspired by work on microeconomics, behavioural psychology and environmental sciences, we investigated how metaphors are a powerful tool to visualise and communicate complex ideas. Focussing on the current ecological crisis as the most pressing story of our time, students researched how forest metaphors could be used to reimagine parts of London. From macro to micro metaphors, we looked at how concepts of environmental performance are linked to public perception in London’s distinct cultures and physical contexts.
To shape a relevant environmental story into an urban forest metaphor, design proposals had to combine the urban and the natural while navigating the dense woods of knowledge, online activism, fake news and professional bias. PG18 encouraged students to take a position, but never at the expense of learning and questioning. By speculating how London could be transformed via the development of architectures as forest artefacts, students created projects inspired by contemporary topics such as the Covid-19 pandemic, rewilding, technological nature, robotics, conservation and culture wars. PG18 students developed compelling projects while engaging with today’s pressing environmental and cultural topics via wellcrafted architectural designs. Most importantly, however, they showed resilience, patience and a will to thrive under adverse circumstances, all of which are key ingredients necessary to write our biggest global story yet: a neo-ecological myth to be inked by us all.
Year 4
Victoria Bocchiotti, Siu Yuk Chu, Grégoire Gagneux, Tobias Himawan, Alvin Lim, Kacper Pach, Sophie Peterson, Raul Rutnam, Michaella Tafalla, Pablo Wheldon
Year 5
Aya Ataya, Yusef Burhanuddin, Alex Desov, Sara Eldeib, Kaizer Hud, Alexander Kolar, Shoakang Li, Rory Noble-Turner, Niall O’Hara
Technical tutors and consultants: Robert Haworth, Bina Nikolova, Anna Woodeson
Critics: Oliver Domeisen, David Hutama, Alice Labourel, Jez Ralph, Yael Reisner, Alisa Silanteva, Nathan Su, Paulo Waisberg, Yeena Yoon
18.1 Shoakang Li, Y5 ‘Under the Mask: Neo dark heritage in the post-pandemic world’. London has experienced economic and social disruption because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In response, the project provides a new form of urban forest architecture for healing and creativity. Using metaphor – the forest as a ‘dark’ palace of healing and possibility – the design explores the idea of ‘dark’ heritage. Sited at the ExCeL London, the project is comprised of theatrical space that enables audiences and actors to explore uncanny situations.
18.2–18.3 Kaizer Hud, Y5 ‘Waterlow Hospice: A forest to depart’. In the forest, life and death are trapped in an endless cycle: life turns to death and death feeds life. In UK cities, most people die in hospital – closed-off and often undignified. The project proposes a hospice in Waterlow Park, neighbouring Highgate Cemetery, that incorporates trees as a site of living and dying. The project’s design encourages more open conversations about death and dying. After dying, hospice residents are put to rest in a forest park and their bodies turn into trees that shade the living, while dead-matter mycelium provides comfort for the patients. 18.4–18.5 Rory Noble-Turner, Y5 ‘The Forest of Possibility’. Inspired by German Romanticism of the late-18th and early-19th centuries, the project explores the themes of wanderlust and waldeinsamkeit (forest loneliness) and applies them to frame the forest adventure as an individual desire for meaning and self-actualisation. Situated in the heart of Tower Hamlets’ historic silk district, the project builds on the borough’s experimentation with IDEA Stores (educational community centres) as a means of rethinking the public library, proposing the concept of the Knowledge Forest. 18.6, 18.20 Pablo Wheldon, Y4 ‘The Augmented Park’. The project explores parks as open-air living rooms and proposes gathering a variety of park activities into a single building. The building facilitates these activities throughout the year, and during harsh weather conditions, fostering new opportunities for communal interaction. The building is formed using existing paths and landscape, harnessing the sensorial aspects of the forest, with its programmes dependent on the seasons.
18.7 Raul Rutnam, Y4 ‘Rewilding Highgate: London’s future urban forest’. It is estimated that UK populations of the most important wildlife have been plummeting for decades. The project investigates this crisis and explores the complex communication between human and non-human life within London’s urban forests. It presents a multifaceted understanding of the heterogeneous conditions of Parkland Walk, a 3.1-mile linear green pedestrian and cycle route in North London.
18.8 Victoria Bocchiotti, Y4 ‘Urban Forests: Gateways to new rituals’. Threshold as forest metaphors explores and analyses their influence on our experience of space. The proposal for a market in Castle Square, Elephant Park, introduces a new speed transition in a busy and congested area of London.
18.9 Yusef Burhanuddin, Y5 ‘Land-Fill’. The project is a multifunctional space for marketplaces, performance art, community and business meetings, and retail trading. The building emphasises the critical role of the architect to design collaboratively with the local community, respecting their culture and ambitions, while also anticipating future needs.
18.10 Alvin Lim, Y4 ‘Museum for Slowing Down’. The project is a museum set along the Riverside Walkway, along the South Bank, London. Situated by Gabriel’s Pier Park, the project creates an oasis within the fast-paced urban fabric of London. The spaces encourage people to slow down and draw new and unexpected connections with nature.
18.11–18.12 Alexander Kolar, Y5 ‘Sanctuary of the Unloved’. The project develops an unconventional sanctuary architecture, utilising a variety of existing materials arranged to create a plethora of niches, crevices and atmospheres, and allowing certain creatures to flourish within. It includes spaces for the public to understand how nature has taken over these structures and research facilities for ecologists to study wildlife onsite. The project is based in Mill Meads, Bromley-by-Bow, the location of a future Metropolitan Park, according to the All London Green Grid, targeted for completion in 2050.
18.13–18.14 Sophie Peterson, Y4 ‘An Athenaeum for the Unearthed’. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the design explores image distortion and spatial navigation. A local archival display allows a dynamic, non-stop community to access the stillness, surprise and contemplation of the forest. The architecture curates a narrative of local people and objects that would otherwise be hidden, discarded or lost to time.
18.15 Tobias Himawan, Y4 ‘Ephemeral Interconnection’. Beneath the soil participation, communication and nutrient transfer occur as means of maintaining the resilience of the forest, enabled by an underground network formed by fungi. Deep within London, one of the world’s most sustainable cities, the project proposes a new social superstructure, a fungus, that reconnects society with energy systems on a social and cultural level, and invites public participation through education and activism.
18.16 Kacper Pach, Y4 ‘Shoreditch Olympia’. Inspired by biophilic concepts and the history of ornament, the project connects symbolic and performative elements through several architectural scales.
18.17 Aya Ataya, Y5 ‘The Future of Human-Nature Relationships’. The project focusses on the role of digital screens in contemporary urban life and explores how digitally mediated nature can become part of architecture.
18.18 Michaella Tafalla, Y4 ‘Canning Town Co-botics’. The project takes inspiration from forest root networks and investigates how they implement collaborative systems to survive in competitive environments. The design accommodates a pilot facility in collaborative robotics and research, which includes apprenticeships and educational programmes, responding to the shift towards digital skills and the digital-skills gap facing our economy.
18.19 Grégoire Gagneux, Y4 ‘UCL Contemplative Centre’. The project explores light pollution and interprets a building’s architectural skin as a producer and receiver of light. The building is a place where light pollution can be controlled, used and transformed. Dedicated to UCL students, it offers a multi-sensory relaxing experience.
18.21–18.22 Niall O’Hara, Y5 ‘ Through the Eyes of the Forest’. A proposal for a new market typology that integrates contemporary hydroponic systems into its daily programme. The project considers atmosphere and experience as primary motivators for community engagement in the development of urban food production. Agents of change in the forest, inspired by decay and provisions left by the past, facilitate growth and the creation of something new.
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2020
Moonchild
Ricardo de Ostos, Isaïe Bloch
PG18 Moonchild
Ricardo de Ostos, Isaïe Bloch
Architecture, more than any other artform, consolidates culture in public space for most to see and for the curious to wander. The city is both a solid cast of historical moments and the ground where society erects its novel views and reactions about the world in the form of buildings, spaces and landscapes. In recent years, however, culture has been more of a drilling machine, carving spaces of protest, dispute and rights across the world. In PG18, we study culture as a dynamic force, evolving from tradition and innovating new forms of expression.
This year, the unit investigated cultural centres as spaces for mediation between old and new, tradition and progress. With projects ranging from art, dance, film, and literary manifestations, students investigated how culture is perceived, encrypted, performed and manifested in meaningful architecture. By exploring the connection between tectonics, materiality, space and atmosphere students worked with test models and expressive drawings and renderings.
We travelled to Colombia in South America in order to study how architectural, ecological and cultural tendencies coexist. Focusing on the capital Bogotá, students investigated how the actual city is beyond sensationalist documentaries and polarising clichés. We found a city with great buildings, diverse cuisine and high tension between richer and poorer areas. Based on interviews with architects, anthropologists and cultural institutions, students engaged in discussions about how Bogotá has created its new spaces of culture.
Students focused on adventurous design paths and tectonic expression to worked on projects bridging digital skills and vernacular sensibilities. Christina Grytten studied light pollution in her project ‘The Nocturnal Landscape’, proposing a complex ecological and atmospheric design. Between observatory and mixed public areas, the design uses natural light and form to suggest uses and reveal spaces. Andrei Zamfir focused on producing a compelling digital narrative about Colombian mythology and its deep roots in ecological sensibilities. In his film ‘Impossible Encounters’, Andrei narrates how natural and human worlds are interwoven, exploring storytelling as a resilient mode to convey intangible heritages.
This year, students asked complex questions about the role architecture can play in current cultural discourses. Together, we created a space of tolerance where ideas could be discussed from diverse points of view, avoiding fashionable jargon. Whether working from Bogotá, London, or from their desks at home, all the students created passionate projects that show how determined and inspired they are.
Year 4
Aya Ataya, Putra (Yusuf) Burhanuddin, Sara Eldeib, Alexander Kolar, Shoakang Li, Rory Noble-Turner, Niall O’Hara, Alexis Udegbe
Year 5
Alex Desov, Christina Grytten, Maria Alessia Junco, Funto King, Lucie Krulichova, Joanna Rzewuska, Bogdan Stanciu, Andrei Zamfir
Thanks to our consultants Paul Diller, Robert Haworth, Franck Robert, Anna Woodeson
Thank you to our critics Teoman Ayas, Robert Haworth, Sonia Magdziarz, Ana Maria Fries Martinez, Theo Sarantoglou Lalis, Jimena Puyo, Michal Scigaj, Chiara Zaccagnini
18.1 Shaokang Li, Y4 ‘An Archive of the Ciudad Perdida’. This project focuses on an almost-lost civilisation: ’ The Lost City ’ (Ciudad Perdida) in Colombia. Conceptually, the building emphasises a profound coherence among construction, material, atmosphere and spatial qualities by controlling nature elements (light and water).
18.2–18.4 Christina Grytten, Y5 ‘The Nocturnal Landscape’. This project, a dark sky preserve and research facility in Colombia, embodies the need for darkness in urban areas while studying the indigenous Muisca culture. By carefully exploring the threshold of city and nature, it maps shades of dark where visitors can venture in safety, bringing a closeness to nature. The proposal consists of a series of observatories, both scientific and analogue, for astronomic and anthropological research with the importance of preserving the dark sky to better understand and keep on investigating the cultural heritage and ritual manifested in the sky phenomena. Naked-eye (analogue) observatories enable open-air skywatching and open-air performances. The journey in space is augmented by both the material shift and the light contrast.
18.5–18.10 Andrei Zamfir, Y5 ‘Impossible Encounters’. Using virtual reality, this project explores the creative potential of layered and hybrid realities. Magical realism attempts to capture reality by depicting life’s many dimensions, seen and unseen, visible and invisible, rational and mysterious. The project positions the users at the centre of the space and relies on their interaction to accept both realistic and magical elements of reality on the same level. Myths, stories of origin, and family histories are often interwoven and narrated in many different forms – from dances to songs or mythical creatures. The proposal merges facts with mythical tales to reshape them in a narrative space where architecture becomes a tool in telling the story of Mocoa and helps to heal Mother Earth. The final film embodies numerous elements of magical realism in portraying the native Amazonian Shaman’s perception of the indigenous natural environment. The natives believe in local tales and unseen powers, where the occident has a clear separation between real and unreal, factual and imaginary, science and myth. These clash together to form the designed geometry.
18.11 Aya Ataya, Y4 ‘Chambira’s Children’. Located in the province of Ciudad Bolivar, this design explores craft and atmosphere to create a place to represent the Indigenous Wounnan Community. The design uses grid-shell roofs, timber columns and a concrete base, reinterpreting modern and traditional sensibilities.
18.12 Sara Eldeib, Y4 ‘Antechambers for Storytelling: Reinterpreting Ancestral Pintas’. This project is a mass of walking rooms, providing discrete yet homogenous experiences for the visitor. It is set in a landscape to stimulate metaphysical and physical meeting, wandering, reflection, and sometimes isolation.
18.13 Shaokang Li, Y4 ‘An Archive of the Ciudad Perdida’. This project embraces the idea from ‘Aluna’ while translating it into architectural form. The building is an archive of the Lost City of Aluna, which records messages and culture in an architectural language.
18.14 Rory Noble-Turner, Y4 ‘Unearthing an Emerald Trade Centre in Bogota’. A new cultural research centre, this building hopes to mark a new chapter Colombia’s relationship with the emerald, demystifying the trade, and providing a worthy home for the country’s most priceless jewels.
18.15 Bogdan Stanciu, Y5 ‘The Myth Labyrinth’. Looking at myths as a source of inspiration and a repository of knowledge shaped this project’s approach to context and form. The methodology explored acts of translation of myth or instances of craft into tectonic acts that later
evolved in the final building proposal. While avoiding the Disneyfication of tradition, the scheme explores how light and space can stir the imaginations of visitors.
18.16 Putra (Yusuf) Burhanuddin, Y4 ‘A Barrio’s Urban Canvas’. The objective of this design is to investigate ways to bridge the relationship between the locals, the tourists and the general public, to prosper the development of the favela. By expressing contextual relationships of colour, pattern and materials, the proposal also adapts to the compact and steep terrain, creating a sensitive siting.
18.17 Niall O’Hara, Y4 ‘Hybrid Sounds’. This proposal examines the indigenous Muisca people of Colombia, South America, and set out to combat the critical lack of communal space in low-income areas inhabited by the Muisca in the capital city of Bogotá. The design explores regional primitive timber architecture and urban vernacular brick typologies, to create spaces that balance acoustic history with modernity.
18.18–18.19 Alexander Kolar, Y4 ‘Council of Earth’. This project investigates the reinterpretation of Spanish Colonial architecture in the context of an indigenous society called the Muisca. It establishes a permanent home for the Muisca Cabildo (town council) in Suba, Bogotá. It seeks to introduce a main library space, office spaces for the town council, as well a public Muisca garden within Suba Central Square. Materially the project was driven by the ambition to add another function to the tile other than that of rain-screening, changing its form, function and character.
18.20 Funto King, Y5 ‘A Song of the Pacific’. By creating a place for poetry based on the local Colombian Pacific tradition, this project is a model for regional improvement. Following Pacific oral tradition, water plays an important role within the scheme as a material that defines thresholds, creates atmosphere and responds to the rainy context.
18.21 Lucie Krulichova, Y5 ‘Fogscapes’. Fogscapes is an experimental centre where the issues of water, plant and forest conservation are discussed. Through collaboration, action and discussion of indigenous and scientific knowledge, the project aims to mitigate biodiversity loss, deforestation and promote sustainable water exploitation.
18.22 Maria Alessia Junco, Y5 ‘Bosque Renace: The Centre of Intangible Heritage’. Aiming to explore the existing forest line and its future growth, this design integrates the ecosystems of flora, fauna and man. Permeable facades and living walls allow each to coexist and thrive with minimum impact to the forest floor and landscape.
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2019
Earth Child / Education through Innovation
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
Earth Child / Education through Innovation
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
A lot has been said about what makes culture local and specific, especially following recent debates on borders and identity. In PG18, we investigate the idea that the culture of a city is the meeting of tradition and innovation. We work with architecture as a place where knowledge is embedded in space, from the tectonic to the context of materials and uses. None of that is relevant, however, if we are not able to introduce concepts that challenge the status quo.
This year, the unit developed proposals for educational institutions in Ghana that focused less on the basics and more on innovation. Ghana is the fastest growing economy in Sub-Saharan Africa and, in 2017, the country’s government announced a campaign ‘Ghana Beyond Aid’ to challenge its dependency on foreign aid, by focusing on innovation and technology to develop a long-term future plan instead of short-term measures. In response, this year, our students researched and proposed potential architectures. Focusing on both technical and intellectual skills, students were introduced to ways of thinking innovatively, in specific contexts with specific opportunities and challenges. In order to be innovative, students often had to go against current academic discourse, incorporating both local sensibilities and entrepreneurial know-how.
‘The Accra Literacy Centre’ by Jack Moreton responds to a local history of verbal learning by proposing a centre to facilitate the practice and education of reading and speaking. Located in the Jamestown district of Ghana’s capital city Accra, the project mixes existing materials and practices with new forms of expression. Developed through model tests and in-depth material research, the building aims to create sheltered space for locals to read, write and debate.
For a rural area of Ghana, Christina Grytten designed a ‘Bamboo Demonstration Farm’ in collaboration with a real client, combining entrepreneurial principles with local sensibilities. The social, economic and sustainable demonstration farm aims to promote a more positive perception of bamboo.
By following a brief about education and innovation in Ghana, students explored the balance between passion and scepticism. Both qualities are crucial to any architect delving into the dangerous yet wonderful space of cultural development.
Year 4
Alex Desov, Christina Grytten, Maria Alessia Junco, Lucie Krulichova, Joanna Rzewuska, Alexis Udegbe, Andrei Zamfir
Year 5
Mahalah Attwell Thomas, Teodor Cuciureanu, Paalan Lakhani, Krasimir Mitrev, Jack Moreton, Farah Omar, Liang Qiao, Tul Srisompun, Rashi Vijan
Thank you to: Teoman Ayas, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Marjan Colletti, Oliver Domeisen, Pedro Gil, Robert Haworth, Nannette Jackowski, Stefan Necula, Elena Pascolo, Gilles Retsin, Nic Stamford, Risa Tadauchi, Anna Woodeson, Adrian Yiu, Yeena Yoon
18.1 Jack Moreton, Y5 ‘Written By Accra’. The ‘Accra Literacy Centre’ helps with reading, writing and speaking in the Jamestown area in Ghana’s capital city. Ghana has a long history of verbal learning but the teaching of literacy is considered underdeveloped for a country that has the leading economic position in West Africa.
18.2–18.4 Christina Grytten, Y4 ‘Bamboo Demonstration Farm’. This project investigates the untapped potential of bamboo in Ghana. It aims to shift its current perception through a socio-economic and sustainable bamboo demonstration farm in Kumawu, where bamboo plays an alleviating role on forest resources. The building will educate current ‘slash-and-burn’ farmers to become agro-foresters at an established bamboo nursery. With integration, knowledge about the harvest and treatment of bamboo will better provide for the livelihoods of local farmers and the landscape they settle on.
18.5–18.7 Mahalah Attwell Thomas, Y5 ‘Aeolian Soundscapes’. This project researches the particular psycho-sensorial experience of the Brekete tribe in Ghana, and investigates how architectural interventions, through geometry and materiality, may manipulate and amplify traditional rituals and practices of the culture. The dance and drumming centre is intended to interact with the annual sand-laden wind in Harmattan – a season in West Africa – forming a space that links culture and place over time. Through the reconfiguration of a shifting landscape, the proposal manifests a collective cultural identity in the landscape that formed it.
18.8–18.9 Farah Omar, Y5 ‘Food and Landscape Narratives’. This project aims to address the idea of food as a social and cultural aspect by reflecting on the environment. It intends to understand the concept of the market as a place for education and awareness. The social purpose of the intervention is to celebrate the harvest of yam, West Africa’s staple food, providing an educational exchange for women, a trading platform and a public entertainment arena.
18.10 Andrei Zamfir, Y4 ‘The [AR]Hub’. This project is a political hub for new policy making in regards to wildlife conservation. Data gathered on wildlife for scientific purposes can hold immense value for the communication of conservation efforts to a wider audience, hence the centre will act as a main data bank for the Ghanaian natural environment and its wildlife.
18.11 Paalan Lakhani, Y5, ‘Education In Urban Parks’. In Accra, parks that could be valuable spaces for people are often neglected, including the derelict Efua Sutherland Children’s Park located in the heart of the city. This project seeks to redevelop the park, integrating education into the design of the landscape for the benefit of children’s development, providing an additional form of education to classroom learning, which is beneficial for low-income families in the developing country.
18.12 Rashi Vijan, Y5 ‘(D I S) P L A Y’. This project focuses on the power of ‘play and display’ as a means of education. It is a women-led initiative using datum shifts and canopy typologies to bring Ghanaian folklore back to life via ancient games ( Agoro). It aims to protect the main cultural and crafts hub of Accra – the Centre for National Culture – and its 3,000 artisans. The waterfront of Accra will fight to keep its artisanal and cultural hub alive through the women-led ‘Agoro Bazaar’.
18.13 Maria Alessia Junco, Y4 ‘The Drinking Lake: Prototype 1.0. ‘The Drinking Lake’ offers locals a congregation ground, where water acts as its key architectural element in the realm of spatial design, education, interaction and growth.
18.14 Teodor Cuciureanu, Y5 ‘Nkrumah Art Foundation’. Working with existing artistic manifestations in Ghana, this project proposes a foundation in order to celebrate art from the region. Exploring urban typologies, the design of the semi-detached galleries connects the city to the coast.
18.15–18.17 Tul Srisompun, Y5 ‘Outposts at the Worlds’ Conjunction’. This project investigates a built environment within a conflicted landscape betweeen a forest preservation and a palm oil plantation. Situated along the border of Kakum National Park, the design aims to reconfigure a territorial relationship between forest and farmland, using a gradient strategy that enables indigenous forest restoration as a driver of environmental education.
18.18 Lucie Krulichova, Y4 ‘e-Jewellery’. This project works with local artisans to create treasure from trash. The goal is to empower low-wage, informal-sector workers, giving the community the opportunity to showcase their skills internationally by creating modern and beautiful jewellery and metal crafts. The project proposes a jewellery innovation hub and market space to promote formalised entrepreneurship through education and training.
18.19–18.20 Krasimir Mitrev, Y5 ‘Ethnocomputing’. Taking inspiration from African patterns and the mathematics behind them, this project proposes a territorial masterplan for an ethnocomputing centre in Accra, providing mathematics education to its residents. By understanding principles of spatial and social organisation, a new topological growth is speculated that uses a pattern-based rule system and incorporates cultural preservation and computational understanding.
18.21–18.22 Liang Qiao, Y5 ‘Un/foreseen’. With the advance of information technology, contemporary knowledge is exchanged through intangible data, and is a new way of storytelling. This project proposes a research institution in Ghana that creates a hub for resourcetrading education and speculation via augmented reality. The project takes multi-layered reality as a driving force for the construction of experiential and educational landscapes, nested in academic research spaces. Without AR, the congregational spaces enable public engagement.
18.23 Teodor Cuciureanu, Y5 ‘Nkrumah Art Foundation’. A plan study organising open spaces, sculpture areas and entrances to gallery areas.
18.24–18.25 Jack Moreton, Y5 ‘Written By Accra’. In this project, modern facilities run through rammed earth structures constructed in collaboration with local specialists. Spaces for reading, writing and speaking have a tactile materiality referencing Ghanaian traditions of building using earth. The building is sited in a vibrant environment, so that it is integrated culturally and politically into the context without the reductive practice of drawing directly from the physical surroundings.
18.26 Joanna Rzewuska, Y4 ‘The Living School’. Inspired by the Barefoot College in India, this secondary education training centre equips local women with skills for creating a wide range of healthcare and sanitation products (e.g. mosquito nets and sanitary pads). Upon graduation, the students are able to stay onsite and construct their own workshop within the school. Due to the ever-changing community, the building comes alive and morphs its form, whilst the workshops are constructed and taken apart by the alumni.
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Heterodox Natures
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
Unit 18
Heterodox Natures
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
Year 4
Mahalah Attwell Thomas, Teodor Cuciureanu, Palaan Lakhani, Krasimir Mitrev, Jack Moreton, Farah Omar, Cameron Overy, Liang Qiao, Tul Srisompun, Rashi Vijan
Year 5
James Joseph Bashford, Josh Corfield, Stefan Necula, Matthew James Rogers, Alisa Silanteva, Ren Yang Tan, Hui Ye
Thank you to our consultants and critics: Anthony D'Audia, Andre Baugh, Pedro Gil, Robert Haworth, Fredrik Hellberg, Maren Klasing, Maya Laitinen, Matteo Mauro, Nicholas Stamford, Anat Stern, Nathan Su, Harald Trapp, Anthanasios Varnavas, Graeme Wallace, Anna Woodeson, Adrian Yiu
Are you in a relationship right now? Only one?
More often than not we are asked the first question regarding personal instead of professional status. Rarely does a clerk in a bureau somewhere ask about one’s architectural relationships. Are they healthy? Monogamous? Convenient? And what about cities’ relations? Straight, curved, high-maintenance? Cities, like humans, are involved in a collection of relationships. Some are layered, confusing and ambiguous, others precise, progressive and clear, but more often than not they come as multiples instead of being singular. One can be a father, an accountant, a churchgoer and be part of a bingo club without much trouble. Cities are no different. They can be modern, old, sacred, smart and polluted and at the same time.
One of the best examples of the complex relationship between humans and cities is Varanasi, India, our research ground for Unit 18 this year. Varanasi is one of the most sacred cities for Hindus, hosting thousands of pilgrims who visit its ancient streets and bathe in the waters of the River Ganges. However, Varanasi is also experiencing many of the contemporary problems troubling most urban secular cities. Pollution, waste disposal issues and traffic congestion coexist with ambitious plans to transform the ancient city into a smart city in the near future.
In a scenario between the old and new, not in opposition but in unison is where we departed to work on the Unit 18 brief ‘Heterodox Natures’. Students were asked to design a research centre in Varanasi investigating how knowledge is produced via science and/or ritual. Varanasi studied from afar can be a challenging undertaking. However, after our visit to the city and insightful meetings, the discussion of context, culture and geometry became a rich source of design research for the students.
Working on the issue of water culture, many students consider both ecological and cultural principles. In his project ‘A Centre for Social Hydrology’ Cameron Overy recreates the ancient typology of stepwells proposing learning and public spaces. The project reacts to the monsoon season, activating green and congregational areas.
Interested in the city’s smells, Stefan Necula designed a project to document, catalogue and research the diverse urban olfactory myriad. Articulating a series of archival towers along open paths, the scheme used wind and water in order to create a nuanced experience of the science of smells. Alisa Silanteva crafted a tectonic and geometric experiment, treating the city as a composite multi-layered ground. In her project urban and interior spaces meet in a deviant twist of materials, users and atmospheric spaces.
Beautiful, unfamiliar, panoramic, three-dimensional, layered, crowded, and mysterious are a few of the words that describe our relationship to an unforgettable research experience. Varanasi, City of Light indeed.
Figs. 18.1 – 18.2 Stefan Necula Y5, ‘RE_SCENT: Institute of Smells’. Investigating the engaging qualities of smell in cities, the project speculates an architecture that archives the heritage of Varanasi, India by storing and collecting its distinctive odours. The interplay between senses and heritage is deeply rooted in the Hindu culture and tradition. Located on the shores of the Ganges, the scheme harmonises research facilities, distillery spaces and archives with the existing temple and new pedestrian routes.
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Figs. 18.3 – 18.4 Josh Corfield, Y5. The research centre utilises storytelling as a way of analysing the public’s perception of a changing city. Through spontaneous, everyday storytelling and planned performances, stories are recorded, analysed and preserved to gain an insight into the fears, worries, truths, hopes and desires of the people of Varanasi. Public spaces, with varying levels of intimacy and three different archives make up the key spaces within the scheme. Some of the public spaces are experienced through the primary route within the scheme whereas others are more general, everyday spaces which can be used for other activities. Some of the public spaces are more desirable within the evening hours when the sun is low and temperature is much cooler, whereas others are sheltered from the heat during the day.
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Figs. 18.5 – 18.7 Matthew James Rogers Y5, ‘City of Bliss’. The project researches how the cultivation of medicinal plants can be reintroduced into the city. Within India, mass deforestation is making it hard for the people of Varanasi to access certain types of medication. This is largely due to medicinal plants losing priority in the wake of urban expansion, agriculture, livestock ranching and logging. The proposed design aims to establish cultivation centres by repurposing abandoned step well typologies. Fig. 18.7 Sectional study of key project elements. Utilising the stepwells’ functions of human congregation and water source management, the design proposes the vertical placement of different medicinal plants. The project would work with surrounding communities and monsoon cycles to promote the use of medicinal plants.
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Fig. 18.8 Tul Srisompun Y4, ‘Re-composing Cityscape’. Based on landscape principles, the project explores learning spaces and their relationship to light and writing. Plan and section worked around existing trees, utilising their cultural symbolism and spatial presence to articulate workshop and study areas.
Fig. 18.9 Farah Omar Y4, ‘A Woman-Made Landscape’. Focusing on women’s empowerment, the project is organised into phases of implementation, water cycles and micro-organisation.
Fig. 18.10 Hui Ye Y5. The project takes the sitar, one of the main instruments in Indian music, as the object of research, creating spaces for performance, congregational and musical exchange. Positioned on the riverside, the scheme explores the sitar and raga in lyrical exterior and interior spaces.
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18.11 – 18.13 Ren Yang Tan Y5, ‘Living Monument’. Based in Hong Kong, the project explores the traditional Chinese burial rituals. By proposing a columbarium, the project deploys an artificial landscape and the concept of mnemonic techniques in order to create a response to the lack of burial space in the region. The sacred world is buried within the landscape, centralising death in an urban environment while the secular world extends the public realm above. Fig. 18.12 The funeral entrance space. By exploring traditional and modern material patterns, the design elaborates the ritual journey and semi-open spaces. Fig. 18.13 Render image exploring water and ornamental massing and relationship to background landscape. The project aims to reconnect with the tradition of encoding
stories in the land in order to combat the rapid land reclamation and urban development impact on local culture.
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Figs. 18.14 – 18.16 Alisa Silanteva Y5, ‘Movement Academy: Research Centre for Physical and Metaphysical Wellbeing’. Exploring Varanasi’s pilgrimage cycles, its rich textures and three-dimensional qualities, the design is both a geometrical and tectonic celebration. Hosting research spaces for both ritualistic and scientific methods, the project is located alongside the River Ganges. Fig. 18.15 Model photo testing multiple material tectonic interfaces. The overlap of tectonic qualities aims to create heterogeneous spatial conditions inspired by Varanasi’s multilayered context. Based on thesis studies of perspective, object and material in transformation the model mixes not only materials, but also finishes, creating cavities, caves and pockets. Fig. 18.16 Render study of riverside threshold and building volumetric qualities.
Inspired by the pilgrimage ritual in Varanasi and its relationship to water, the building connects to the river step typology, creating different ways to access water.
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Figs. 18.17 – 18.18 Cameron Overy Y4, ‘Centre for SocioHydrology’. Render view of project and context relationship. The proposal aims to work with both the cultural and scientific aspects of water. Learning from Varanasi, the building is organised as a network of spaces that flow in and out of one another. The research centre is comprised of three main programme groups: the research group for data collection; the broadcast group for data transfer and the park group for data reception. Fig. 18.18 As an extension of the ground, the programmatic spaces are made from soil-cement concrete created by mixing earth excavated from the kunds with cement. To contrast this rough earthen texture, the water system intersections are clad with white marble, a local and abundant material. The smooth white marble contrasts with
the roughness of the soil cement and plays with control and free-form. Fig. 18.19 Tul Srisompun Y4, ‘Re-composing Cityscape’. Render view of communal space and open learning areas. Architecture and literature have a very strong tradition in Varanasi with many examples of great writers visiting and narrating the city. By proposing a literary centre aimed at young writers, the project elaborates the idea of learning, landscape and materiality.
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Fig. 18.20 Teodor Cuciureanu Y4, ‘Centre for Solar Research and Education’. The project develops both new storage and infrastructural devices for the solar energy sector and introduces a public educational facility for raising awareness about the importance of using renewable energy at every scale and in every Indian household. Limestone is added to the concrete mass to provide a bright and warm surface in keeping with the surroundings. Like the ancient walls in Varanasi, the prefabricated façade panels will be chipped to unify the overall form. Fig. 18.21 Jack Moreton Y4, ‘The Future Craft of a City’s Past’. Inspired by Varanasi’s artisan skills, the project aims to introduce a digital economy space where artists, investors and the general public can meet. The plan drawing illustrates how the building opens up to the side streets enabling interactive
exhibition spaces and interchange with street usage.
Fig. 18.22 Mahalah Attwell Thomas Y4, ‘The Pseudo-Kidney of Varanasi’. Sectional drawing, showing wood structure and water waste accumulation on the building roof. The design is a provocative manufacturing lab, transforming river surface waste and embedding it within the building’s own envelope. By utilising monsoon rains, the project articulates cycles of cleaning and data visualisation pollution in order to create social awareness and behavioural change.
Generational Phantoms/ Re-de-constructing Ecology
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
Unit 18
Generational Phantoms/ Re-de-constructing Ecology
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
Year 4
James Joseph Bashford, Matthew James Rogers, Alisa Silanteva, Tatiana Rocio Southey-Bassols, Ren Yang Tan, Arturs Tols
Year 5
Arti Braude, Anjie Gu, Man Jia, Nikolaos Koutroulos, Matteo Mauro, Nicholas Stamford, Risa Tadauchi, Samuel Whiting, Chan Sze (Maisie) Yan
Thank you to:
Sir Peter Cook, Manuel Jimenez García, Jakub Klaska, Daniel Kohler, Claudia Palma, Igor Pantic, Yael Reisner, Javier Ruiz, Harald Trapp, Daniel Widrig, Yeena Yoon
Up close, no one is normal. In architecture and cultural studies, a similar saying can also apply. It is easy to conceive of an image about general contextual characteristics, national styles, local mannerisms or regional patterns. However, when exploring those elements in design, it becomes clear that form follows culture. But what are the opportunities for cultural studies in architectural design?
This year we travelled to Peru to investigate how the Andean landscape shaped architecture and its many lifestyles, villages and cities. Home to the Inca civilization, we visited multiple urban and natural sites at different altitudes, from the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu to Peru’s capital city of Lima, with its modern and colonial architecture; from the Pacific Ocean climate to the dry deserts of Pachacamac. For many students, it was their first visit to South America, and that precise feeling of strangeness and contemplation generated many discussions. Cheerful conversations with our many hosts varied from gender-based houses, mystic landscapes, desert-dwelling adaptation, altitude sickness, and how Peruvian food and its cities are incredibly rich and deeply flavoured. The return to London meant great memories, but also the challenge to mediate critically between cultural references and design ambitions.
If experimentation in design is about taking risks, testing out techniques and exploring the unknown, our students have been highly experimental. Mixing contemporary design strategies and older crafts, projects were developed as a response to both the context of Peru, and also to the context of making itself. From concrete casting, wood and metal carving, nylon 3D-printed moulds to jelly blobs and furry upholstering, we experimented how to think via design.
Matteo Mauro recreates the ongoing airport masterplan for the city of Cuzco as a sacred geoglyph. By understanding the Inca tradition of city-building and contrasting it with colonial and contemporary commercial built practices, he re-imagines parts of the site as semi-figurative enclosures, built as long-term negotiations between the community and the city. Nicholas Stamford proposes a decomposing community centre, tying together the problematic of mining towns and village resilience. As parts of the factory building erode in time, new spaces appear to be appropriated by the community, and also by local fauna and flora.
This year we learnt about the beauty of contextualising architecture and also the necessity to be – and feel – alien in the emerging landscapes of spatial politics.
Figs. 18.1 – 18.4 Nicholas Stamford Y5. ‘A Resilient Landscape’. In Huayllay, 4,300m above sea level in the Andes, the project mediates the eroding materiality of the landscape, creating cycles of formal shift based on material consistency and village ritual cycles. The section illustrates the forum area and farming terraces. Through years of usage and landscape metamorphosing, the area behind the main building-mass exposes its material decomposition and renewal. The plan exhibits the infrastructural concrete masses and user circulation zones. By mixing existing local mining waste and sustainable local practices, the building articulates both industrial and indigenous traditions in a project of interiors and vast panoramic views. A series of physical models test material consistency between concrete, sand, earth and volcanic ash,
as well as triggering different cycles of formal decomposition in response to local wind patterns and usage.
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Fig. 18.5 Alisa Silanteva Y4, ‘Waterscapes’. Section through a proposal for an educational centre located in Lima, where surface delaminations result in spatial permeability. By bringing water in and around the building, the scheme allows light reflection and cooling to counterpoint the surrounding dry urbanscape. Figs. 18.6 – 18.7 Artur Tols Y4, ‘Cusco Landscape Theatre’. Both illustrations represent an alternative way of engaging with theatre space and performance. The landscape surrounding the theatre enclosure is overlaid with a residue of theatre props and other architectural elements, which by themselves act as a more spontaneous form of play. Users can reapropriate those elements and congregate around them for a vast range of activities.
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Figs. 18.8 – 18.10 Samuel Whiting Y5, ‘Aymara Archive’. The project facilitates the continuous growing of the archive by providing rooms for locals to record their oral stories. By doing so, this establishes a new cycle of inclusion for the Aymara culture. Located in the city of Juli in Peru, the project references the research of cognitive scientist Rafael Nuñez to create a language of spatial framing, linear pattern, motive repetition and non-linear paths. The overall circulation through the archive uses a system of Aymara gestures and patterns. Users of the archive must pass through specific signifiers (such as a golden marker) a certain number of times in order fully to understand the complexities of the archive and decipher the relationship between its elements in relation to the information stored.
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Fig. 18.11 Risa Tadauchi Y5, ‘Landscape Intimacy’. Located in the Rainbow Mountains in Peru, a series of lodges explore the notion of comfort and intimacy in a unique environmental setting. The project explores material malleability and the threshold between soft and hard surfaces in a high-altitude terrain. Fig. 18.12 Nikolaos Koutroulos Y5, ‘Lima 2019 Screens’. The project proposes to redesign a partially existing sports site in the city of Lima in order to host the 2019 Pan American Games, which will be held in the city. Based on Chicha, a local street culture and visual signage in Lima, the design speculates about a hyper-intense blend of sports and popular imagery. It mixes both screens and physical infographics to mediate different uses. Fig. 18.13 Tatiana Rocio Southey-Bassols Y4 ‘A Vendor’s Retreat’. Speculating on
female empowerment and the effects of displacement on the everyday life of a street-vending community in Lima. The proposal articulates mass, atmosphere and ground extension to create an inclusive architecture of practical hope.
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Figs. 18.14, 18.16 & 18.18 Matteo Mauro Y5, ‘MicroMegalic DeJavu’. Physical model exploring a more hands-on/crafted way of engaging with city planning, thus suggesting and relating to a non-western form of urban organisation. Investigating a contemporary way of using large-scale figural elements in order to dissolve an even larger-scale infrastructural geoglyph within the city of Cusco. Fig. 18.15 Man Jia Y5, ‘Land Speaks Identity’. Section through the landscape, Quechua Language School. By designing a rule set for the position, forms, openings and materials of the schools, a journey of discovery ensues. Allowing Quechua language, identity and landscape to encounter each other within a steep mountainous topography. Fig. 18.17 Man Jia Y5, ‘Land Speaks Identity’. Mixing chromatic and stone materials, the design
develops a formal language that recreates native navigation methods using contemporary undertones and laminations. Through a series of semi-open spaces and plateaus along an ascending route, the project intends to produce a public space in which Quechua language students, locals and tourists can interact and engage in sharing knowledge.
Figs. 18.19 – 18.20. Chan Sze (Maisie) Yan Y5 ‘Trace and Marking’. Water system canopy utilising polluted water from the Rimac river in Lima, together with natural oxidation processes, in order to create colourful textile products, based on native symbolic tones. The concrete structure acts as an extension of the existing promenade, while the lightweight transparent canopy emerges from the base of the river below. They blend with each other in order to create a participatory public building, where users engage with both pollution awareness and upcycling of those pollutants into consumerfriendly textiles.
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Fig. 18.21 Ren Yang Tan Y4, ‘Woven Futures’. The project is a proposition for an Urban Andean Weaving workshop to revitalise an abandoned civic plot adjacent to the museum of art in the Exposition Palace Park of Lima. This will create an independent enterprise zone for textile art production and education. Fig. 18.22 Anjie Gu Y5, ‘Unfolding Maps – Civic Centre for Cusco’. Drawing inspired by ancient Andean water vessels and their unique form of mapping the environment. Between the plan and the unfolded 3D model, the drawing maps Cusco’s key features in order to create a spatial arrangement system for the internal spaces of the civic centre proposal.
Fig. 18.23 Arti Braudi Y5, ‘Syncretic City’. Between a building and a semi-enclosed landscape, the project explores hybrid identities in postcolonial Lima.
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Fig. 18.24 Matthew James Rogers Y4, ‘Floating Fishery’. Proposal for a floating fishery, bridging sea and land. Fig. 18.25 Chan Sze (Maisie) Yan Y5, ‘Trace and Marking’. Plan organising making activities and visitor areas. Positioned along the Rimac river in Lima, Peru, the design reacts to water levels and pollution in a dynamic sequence of floating hubs and unifying canopies. Fig. 18.26 Man Jia Y5, ‘Land Speaks Identity’. Section through the landscape, Quechua Language School. By designing a rule set for the position, forms, openings and materials of the schools, a journey of discovery ensues. Allowing Quechua language, identity and landscape to encounter each other within a steep mountainous topography.
Fig. 18.27 Anjie Gu Y5, ‘Unfolding Maps – Civic Centre for Cusco’. Section through exhibition spaces and open public
areas above. The project explores how Andean culture would perceive the natural and built environment in today’s urban context, so as to deliver an architectural map which is about both exhibition and usage, but also functions as a chamber of experiences.
Portraits of Nature
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
Unit 18
Portraits of Nature
Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
Year 4
Arti Braude, Maisie Chan, Anjie Gu, Man Jia, Aleksandra Kravchenko, Matteo Mauro, Nicholas Stamford, Risa Tadauchi, Samuel Whiting
Year 5
Anthony Awanis, Shu Ran, Thomas Reeves, James Tang, Man Tai (Adrian) Yiu
With thanks to our consultants and critics Julia Backhaus, Christina Dahdaleh, Christine Hawley, Michelle Hudson, Nannette Jackowski, Manuel Jimenez Garcia, Jakub Klaska, Abel Maciel, Yael Reisner, Javier Ruiz, Stefan Rutzinger, Kristina Shinegger, David Tajchman, Athanasios Varnavas
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of the planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive. Frank Herbert, Dune
Instead of asking what nature is, Unit 18 investigated the politics of thinking about nature in the context of Brazil, in order to test digital architectures of cultural expression and sensorial surprises. Unit 18, or Generational Phantoms, is interested in researching how architecture translates and expresses culture with a focus on digital media and practices of making. Students operate between reading, writing, digital modelling and fabricating and are encouraged to create critical arguments via architectural form and ornamentation. In this year’s brief, whilst studying radical ecological agendas from ecofeminism to eco-marxism, Portraits of Nature found opportunities and contradictions within which architecture could operate.
In Brazil, the Unit travelled to the state of Rio de Janeiro and found cities, neighbourhoods, natural reserves and institutions working on the edge of man/nature relationships. Working between shaping landscapes and building massing studies, projects addressed thresholds of a changing cityscape due to mega sport events and rapid urban development.
Risa Tadauchi created a Fatigue Rehabilitation Centre in Flamengo Park, inspired by Roberto Burle Marx's landscape design in combination with the recent Olympic Games. Her design mixed objects and landscape concepts, bringing surrealism and color exposure to translate not only body fatigue symptoms but also urban fatigue to sporting events. Investigating the edge of city and rainforest, Nic Stamford proposes a complex set of elevated experiential buildings, in order to explore the threshold between the urban and the natural fabric of Rio de Janeiro. Tree buildings of different heights explored an earth-like materiality between top and bottom vistas, enabling a time-base adaptation with the fauna and flora on the site. At the edge of a favela, Anthony Awanis explores a syncretic culture that proposes an architecture of lines versus volumes for an Afro-Brazilian religion. Similarly, Adrian Yiu based his investigation into Brazilian anthropophagy on designing a economical and expressive way to quarry in a urban set. Between physical and digital, natural and urban, thinking and making, Generational Phantoms explored architectures based on individual thinking and critical expression.
Fig. 18.1 Man Tai (Adrian) Yiu Y5, ‘Anthropophagic Territory’. View from quarry interior looking down on newly carved spaces and the city of Rio de Janeiro. The scheme aims to create an economically independent zone to provide social opportunities for the community by reestablishing the quarry. All profit will fund the social programme and provide further excavation for civic spaces through quarrying. Fig. 18.2 Man Tai (Adrian) Yiu Y5, ‘Anthropophagic Territory’. Section through ‘Morro da Providencia’ and quarry. Inspired by ideas of Anthropophagy the project blends infrastructure and social economy to create a variety of spaces. Capturing the relationship between time and social reality, the quarry adopts a state of constant physical expansion, and its relevance to the community it serves grows in tandem. Eventually splitting the cliff open,
the internal lived experience of the people is exposed. Fig. 18.3 Man Tai (Adrian) Yiu Y5, ‘Anthropophagic Territory’. View from a passage portal looking towards community hall. The project seeks to reunite the people with their environment, through spatial and sensational experiences. Spaces are designed to evoke emotional expressions. Their functionality is set out and then adapted by the users allowing for contingency.
Fig. 18.4 Man Tai (Adrian) Yiu Y5, ‘Anthropophagic Territory’. Model showing the core quarry and extending social spaces. Different quarrying methods are used to create various spatial and tactile qualities.
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18.5 James Tang Y5, ‘The Protest Art Installation’. Physical model showing design appropriation of existing warehouse where artists and the public interact and discuss the future of Rio de Janeiro city developments. Fig. 18.6 James Tang Y5, ‘The Protest Art Installation’. Physical model showing different geometrical appropriations.
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Fig. 18.7 Sam Whiting Y4, ‘Better Safe than Sorry –A Survivalist’s Echo Chamber’, cross-section. The project aims to translate information processes into an architectural media device in order to educate and prepare residents of Rio de Janeiro in regards to flooding and landslide risks within the area. Fig. 18.8 Matteo Mauro Y4, ‘Sand Culture’. Landscape massing model studies. Located in Copacabana beach, the project proposes a permanent, creative, research platform testing new ideas about sand and hosting temporary educational and recreational events. Fig. 18.9 Aleksandra Kravchenko Y4, ‘Quilomba 2020’. Interior render with semi-opaque recycled plastic façade. The project proposes a centre for former Brazilian maids, where they can train in using a variety of arts and crafts techniques to recycle waste and
debris collected from on-site in Marina da Gloria along Rio’s polluted Guanabara Bay. Fig. 18.10 Risa Tadauchi Y4, ‘Flamengo Park Fatigue Rehabilitation Centre’. The project explores the constant exposure of Rio to mega sports events, creating a humorous fatigue centre to welcome exhausted marathon runners and citizens alike. Fig. 18.11 Risa Tadauchi Y4, ‘Flamengo Park Fatigue Rehabilitation Centre’. Landscape study inspired by Burle Marx’s exuberant colours and design. Fig. 18.12 Anjie Gu Y4, ‘Culture Centre for Maracanã Village’. Derived from the social events of a group of urban Indians and the government, the project aims to address the constant conflict between urban development and native culture. Render showing an interpretation of the idea of boundary in indigenous culture.
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Fig. 18.13 Maisie Chan Y4, ‘The Ugly Truth’. Model investigation for elevated artists’ workshop, landscape plaza and tram rail passage.
Figs. 18.14– Fig. 18.15 Thomas Reeves Y5, ‘Rocinha Mudslide Barrier’. Between infrastructure and architecture, the project articulates a mud barrier in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro with civic and working spaces. The design has a relationship with nature as the barrier protects the favela residents from the threat of mudslides and creates a boundary between the favela and the forest further up the mountain. Fig. 18.16 Ran Shu Y5, ‘Free Market’. A bridge, a market, and a new connection between two distinct neighborhoods set the project strategy as both economical and social. Inspired by kiting, the design merges both heavy and light components.
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Fig. 18.17 Anthony Awanis Y5, ‘The Exile Temple’. CNC model exploring path marking on landscape. Fig. 18.18 Anthony Awanis Y5, ‘The Exile Temple’. Set within the context of Rio de Janeiro, the project explicitly aims to formulate a new typology of the Candomble temple, an Afro-Brazilian religion practiced by the Quilombo people, who are descendants of slave workers. Fig. 18.19 Anthony Awanis Y5, ‘The Exile Temple’. Aluminum milled model of main Candomble temple with striations and contours.
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Fig. 18.20 Man Jia Y4, ‘Reconstitute Ambiguous Nature/ Culture-Artisanal Fishery Workshop’, cross-section. The project speculates on the tension, interaction and possible common development of the waning traditional small-scale fishery culture and the rising ecological tourism in Angra under the state’s environmental conservation policy. Fig. 18.21 Arti Braude Y4, ‘The People’s Market’. A textured market landscape seeps through an abandoned building at the site of the Historic Port at two levels, acting as a socio-spatial bridge between the Port’s Afro-Brazilian ‘Povo de Santo’ community and Olympic development. The building houses a food and trinket market, event space, and advocacy centre for the residents of the town. Fig. 18.22 Man Jia Y4, ‘Reconstitute Ambiguous Nature/Culture-Artisanal Fishery Workshop’.
This section render emphasises the project as a public insertion aiming to shape a more diverse image of the city. Fig. 18.23 Nic Stamford Y4, ‘Urban Rainforest Power Plant’. Sub-Canopy Observation Station. The project looks at the boundary between the city and the rainforest, proposing an architecture which explores material, context and cohabitation proximity while providing a platform for varying degrees of interaction.
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The split buildings make use of the existing rainforest structures, being suspended from the primary trees so as make as little permanent ground impact as possible, while providing unique vantage points within the many different layers of the forest.
Fig. 18.24 Nic Stamford Y4, ‘Urban Rainforest Power Plant’. Emergent Observation Station.
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Materialising the Incomplete
Ricardo de Ostos, Nannette Jackowski
Year 4
Anthony Awanis, Yulia Gilbert, Nikolaos Koutroulos, Thomas Reeves, Ran Shu, Man Tai (Adrian) Yiu
Year 5
Christina Dahdaleh, Manuel Gonzalez-Nogueira, Kagen Lam, Jingsi (Joyce) Li, Chihoon Seong, Zhiying (Sean) Xu, Liang Zhou
Thank you to our Design Realisation tutor Anna Woodeson and structural consultant Franck Robert, and workshop tutor Saman Ziaie. Thanks also to our guest critics: Abi Abdolwahabi, Ana Araujo, Kasper Ax, Julia Backhaus, Laura Barbi, Brendon Carlin, Mollie Claypool, Ryan Dillon, Lawrence Friesen, Christine Hawley, Colin Herperger, Carlos Jiménez Cenamor, Manuel Jimenez Garcia, Alice Labourel, Michelle Lam, Ben Masterton-Smith, Anis Munira Kamaruddin, Sebastian Kite, Elke Presser, Yael Reisner, Stefan Rutzinger, Theo Sarantoglou Lalis, Tania Sengupta, Liang Shang, Aris Theodoropoulos, Kaleigh Tirone Nunes, Athanasios Varnavas, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Simon Withers
Materialising the Incomplete
Nannette Jackowski, Ricardo de Ostos
Unit 18, or Generational Phantoms, researches concepts of materiality based on non-standard materials and practices studying architecture as a continuous time based economy of solid, immaterial and symbolic medium. Taking Sir John Soane’s Museum as research laboratory for symbolism and ornamentation studies, students started to utilise digital methods of modelling and fabrication to create their own non-standard material palette. The result was volumetric and rich spaces that worked with light, the hidden and other ephemeral qualities.
We then journeyed to Havana, Cuba, to study the notion of the incomplete and find project grounds. From affirmations to surprises we discovered a city suffering from the many years of US economic embargo, with most of its heritage in ruins and heavy dependency on tourism. However we also found a resilient local method of living, challenged by a fierce foreign investment bringing large developments into various city areas. Talking to tourist guides, local residents and academics, the students not only absorbed art deco and modernist buildings but also started to imagine their own radical agendas for the future of Havana.
Investigating the Colon Cemetery of Havana, its hierarchical layout based on economical and ethical status, and its expanding space struggles in a city which has long overgrown it, Chihoon Seong proposes a new type of necropolis. Taking existing fragments of the Old Wall of Havana he reinterprets its linearity and creates a new non-continuous city of the dead. Cuban burial traditions are re-imagined as cremation rituals using bone china to form a new receptacle for the deceased body. Composed of temporary porcelain workshops transforming into small chapels, an ever-growing grave wall and memory paths for relatives the proposed necropolis is placed amid occupied ruins of the city and simultaneously creates a radical strategy for the preservation of Old Havana.
Intrigued by the dichotomy between energy propaganda and DIY methods – in the form of spiderlike webs of informal cables – Kagen Lam’s response is an energy forest that secretly reintroduces a small portion of energy production to the city centre. Amidst a satirical vertical cable net structure lie energy-consuming hotel capsules, a workshop and a theatre space with exquisite vistas and an intricate journey of experiences. For energy performance, the fibrous structure is sprayed with a dust control chemical, a byproduct of energy production from sugar, creating an oozing materiality transitioning the city to a new institution, in an undefined form between forest and building.
Between architecture, symbolism and materiality, students took their own positions to debate the role architects have towards memory, performance and the city. Discussing Havana not only by the possible, but also the imaginable, enabled the students to link the ghosts of the past to the generational challenges of a corporate future.
Fig. 18.1 Nikolaos Koutroulos Y4, ‘Car Junkyard Museum’. Façade render. Havana will soon be rid of its old vintage cars. A theme-park-like museum aims to revive the presence of those iconic automobiles. Castings of these extinct cars are kit-bashed together creating the façade of the museum.
Fig. 18.2 Chihoon Seong Y5, ‘Memento Mori’. Digital fossil prototype with encoded binary codes. Digital codes are materialised and brought to a physical form making use of a shift and lift process. Figs. 18.3 – 18.4 Chihoon Seong Y5, ‘Memento Mori’. Proposal for a radical new burial ground in Havana as a response to the poor conditions at Colon Cemetery bone yard. By radically identifying Old Havana as the new edge of the cemetery the design recreates an urban, but respectful burial ritual and protocol for treating the bones.
Using 3D print, bone china and casting methods a series of experiments investigated new burial artefacts in relation to material processes.
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Fig. 18.5 Zhiying (Sean) Xu Y5, ‘Printing Institute of Re-Press’. Render section. As a fictional reconstruction of Havana’s city wall, the project places social expression, in the form of printing rather than solid division, as departure points for the design. The sectional drawing shows the space behind the façade with various paths for public access, serving as entrance points to reactionary functions like the institute of excuses and the printing walls. Fig. 18.6 Zhiying (Sean) Xu Y5, ‘Printing Institute of Re-Press’. Render. Top view render showing narrow walkways with different spatial junctions portraying engraved walls. The print is engraved with letters on the wall surface accumulating a palimpsest of ideas and opinions.
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Fig. 18.7 Manuel Gonzalez-Nogueira Y5, ‘In ‘Cuba’ting Capitalism; A Socioeconomic Re-Evolution in ‘Contradictionaryland’. By proposing an alternative timeline for Havana’s next urban development, the project speculates on the question ‘what if a particular part of the city turned its back to homogenous international development?’ Anti-wifi areas and elevated buildings orchestrate an alternative environment for a new generation of young Cubans, born and bred between foreign capital and Cuban identity. Fig. 18.8 Manuel Gonzalez-Nogueira Y5, ‘In ‘Cuba’ting Capitalism; A Socioeconomic Re-Evolution in ‘Contradictionaryland’’, Elevation. The new generation will be an important part of the poetry of a Cuban economic independence reinforcing the dependence on the state as a big mother that feeds her
children. Fresh fruit juice will be directly produced by the local community and channelled through the structure.
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Fig. 18.9 Christina Dahdaleh Y5, ‘Processional Decay through Entropic Ruination: From Object to Disintegrated Particles’. Simulation renders exploring ruination patterns through a series of tests using particle systems. The notion of decay is simulated through negative gravitational particle systems employing alternative thresholds, key-frames, emissions speeds and mesh tessellations in order to study the disorder presented in a decaying system. Fig. 18.10 Christina Dahdaleh Y5, ‘Havana Traders Architectural Seed Bank’. Placed in an abandoned theatre, the scheme deals with the implications of lifting the embargo on Cuba and the effects of foreign investment on the urban life of Havana. A perspective view of the seed bank in 200 years, depicting the ascension of the observer through the Architectural Seed Bank as one looks
down at the continuously expanding collection and the trading floor. As long as the brokers continue to trade, the seed bank will continue to collect disappearing architectural relics of present Havana.
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Fig. 18.11 Anthony Awanis Y4, ‘Casting the Ornate’. Sand casted metal ornament made from recycled aluminium. Through the process of (re)making / materialising significant cultural symbolism, the ornament creates an opportunity for the fractured neighbourhood to collaborate on the making process of the ornament itself. Fig. 18.12 Ran Shu Y4, ‘Lighting Library’. Interior render simulating glass and the quality of liquidity and transparency. The materiality of glass, density and thickness affect the light quality of interior space and how it functions. Fig. 18.13 Anthony Awanis Y4, ‘The Theatre of Exchange’. Street view render. Located within a racially segregated community in Havana’s Chinatown, the project aims to create a transition from a mono to a multifunctional gateway, stimulating diverse social interaction. Symbolic
ornamentation is used to formulate a communal identity, while creating a tectonic expression that permeates the existing fabric. Figs. 18.14 – 18.15 Man Tai (Adrian) Yiu Y4, ‘The Guild of Poetry’. Renders. The guild addresses the societal transformation from labour to intellectual in Cuba after the US embargo was lifted. It provides a ground for literary exploration and an international educational exchange programme. The project explores the opportunities of the extreme site conditions; strong waves and salt accumulation together with 3D printing technology create the building elements. The project materialises the collective results of people’s poems and memories as an ever-changing entity.
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Fig. 18.16 Yulia Gilbert Y4, ‘Ripple of Adaptation’. Diagram exploring structural variation of external building surface in order to create variable light conditions inside the building. Internally the building operates with shifting programmes, being able to adapt to different making workshops. Fig. 18.17 Thomas Reeves Y4, ‘San Nicholas Grand Carpenters Market Revealed’. Render. The San Nicholas Carpenters Market harnesses the skills of local carpenters in the rebuilding process of Central Havana, Cuba. A glulam and timber construction, external timber storage and permeable façades help to make the material source and the technique of the carpenters’ craft visible to the local community.
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Fig. 18.18 Liang Zhou Y5, ‘Imprisoned Freedom’. Façade study. The project investigates salsa as a dynamic cultural quality of Havana’s lifestyle. The render shows a façade iteration using the complexity of salsa rhythms applied to the building apertures and openings. Colour code and form progression utilised digital systems systematically and intuitionally to generate the final result. Fig. 18.19 Jingsi (Joyce) Li Y5, ‘Food Guildhall Garden of Populace in Havana’. Section investigating urban agriculture as an interactive data display for food security in Havana. By appropriating a derelict site in the city the project repurposes the site into a data landscape utilising kinetic structures and current city know-how on urban agriculture to create a space that functions as both a seasonal meeting place and food production. Fig. 18.20 Kagen Lam Y5,
‘Havana Energy Forest’. What if Cuba used energy independence as a new post-socialist propaganda? The absurd quality of political propaganda permeates the design by utilising Havana’s derelict energy grid and DIY cabling system as ornamental language creating a dense ‘forest’ consisting of ventilation pipes, cables, ethanol storage columns and dust control mesh. A mix between an energy container, a hotel and an amphitheatre, the project discusses materiality as a political device.
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Carving a Giant Ricardo de Ostos, Nannette Jackowski
Year 4
Christina Dahdaleh, Jingsi (Joyce) Li, Chi Hoon Seong, Shao Wang, Zhiying (Sean) Xu, Liang Zhou
Year 5
Sonal Balasuriya, Sing Sun (Ryan) Cheng, Anthony D’Auria, Anna Maria Janiak, Haaris Ramzan, Liang Shang, Anthanasios Varnavas
Thank you to our consultants: Ross Exo Adams, Ricardo Baptista, Jan Birksted, Anis Wan Kamaruddin, Sara Klomps, Guan Lee, Rob Partridge, Tania Sengupta, Simon Withers, Saman Ziaie
Thanks also to our guest critics: Jeroen van Armeijde, Julia Backhaus, Brendon Carlin, Ryan Dillon, Oliver Domeisen, Lawrence Friesen, Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu, Christine Hawley, Megha Chand Inglis, Manuel Jimenez, Sebastian Kite, Sara Klomps, Alice Labourel, Stephen Lau, Abel Maciel, Kaleigh Tirone Nunes, Claudia Pasquero, Vesna Petresin, Khyle Raja, Yael Reisner, Tania Sengupta, Marilena Skavara, Bob Sheil, Ellie Stathaki, Catrina Stewart, Robert StuartSmith, Aris Theodoropoulos, Lorenzo Vianello, Sam Welham, Young Wei Yang Chiu, Tim Yue, Brendan Woods
generationalphantoms.co.uk
Carving a Giant
Nannette Jackowski, Ricardo de Ostos
This year Unit 18, or Generational Phantoms, continued to explore relationships between digital technologies and social structures. Furthering last year’s understanding of cryptology as a way to generate architecture we specifically focused on the notion of the human body and its encryption into ornament.
Firstly students investigated how in recent decades the body has been a fundamental benchmark for encoding information into buildings – as proportion, ornamentation, but also to communicate social structures. Utilising digital software and fabrication techniques students then developed their own concepts of the body, generating small-scale ornaments such as a vestigial rubber wisdom tooth, typewriter skins and a Morse Code hand ornament based on encryption strategies.
In order to expand the notion of the individual body to the idea of a collective or collaborative body, we voyaged to Rajasthan, India to experience places of production and to study its social structures, known as guilds. We visited India’s largest salt lake; a marble-extracting town covered by a thick layer of white marble dust; a city specialised in marble processing; a neighbourhood of storefront artisans; a clay brick factory whose kiln is made of the bricks that are being burnt; and an important trading region known for its ornately decorated residences.
For the final project, students reconsidered their understanding of the body and the ornament in order to create a collaborative network in the form of a guild. To choose a context, students analysed specific scenarios of material extraction and manufacturing places in India where workers, corporations and more sophisticated fabrication methods overlap with endemic urban organisations and social inequalities.
The ‘Spiritual Guild’ project by Sonal investigated a seasonal interaction between marble sculptors, Makrana city and its quarries. A series of narrow shafts allow for new places of production to rise directly out of the quarry, housing three generations of marble sculptors who make popular mini-temples using stone remains left on site. Athanasios created a compelling spatial narrative by designing an experiential journey along the Makrana quarry site rooted on India’s rich mystical stories. Utilising earthworks, metal and concrete to shape each other and the idea of a vestigial ornament Anthony rearticulated the trade and technological possibilities of a nomadic guild, the Gadulia Lohar, by generating a building that is as much a shelter as a political space for identity.
Along the journey, departing from the notion of the body, students uncovered a few architectural corpses and effected many digital autopsies, creating a dossier of projects where material and architecture go beyond the idea of the catalogue. Instead, material, technology and social networks opened new ways to the new collaborations between the visible and the invisible.
Fig. 18.1 Anthony D’Auria Y5, ‘Vestigial Materialities / Vestigial Economies’, cast site model. Vestigial steel from disused colonial railways near the Dolphur sandstone fields becomes the impetus for a seasonal waystation for the nomadic Gadulia Lohar blacksmiths. Steel is melted and cast into the landscape to create forges and covered market spaces that engage with the local economies of the agrarian and quarrying villages and the proposed tourist train that will traverse the region.
Fig. 18.2 Anthony D’Auria Y5, ‘Vestigial Materialities / Vestigial Economies’. Section showing metal process at new site. The architecture follows the logic of the vestigial cycle as steel is transformed from obsolete railway to architectural armature to smithing tool and finally into saleable forged goods for distribution during the Gadulia Lohar’s peripatetic season.
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Fig. 18.3 Athanasios Varnavas Y5, ‘Ariadne’s Thread’, aerial view of a cannibalised corpus. The project / book / labyrinth / body is nested on a Nave(l) in the City-Quarry of Makrana precisely located at 27°01’39” N 74°42’42” E. It envisions a series of operations on the existing Durga temple, where architecture transforms from ‘static’ Vitruvian proportions into a multilayered cannibalised, armored corpus of a Carved Giant. It seeks to challenge additive or weaving (‘Penelope’) processes in architecture through the subtractive thinking of carving (‘Odysseus’) and the uncanny of destruction, removing and releasing matter. The Blasphemous Guild explores these two processes (+-), blurring and merging so as to augment the surrounding landscape, operating between destruction and generation. Fig. 18.4 Athanasios Varnavas Y5, ‘Ariadne’s
Thread’, robotic carving, tombstone book. A fragment from the proposed spherical language based upon the 6-axis affinities of robotic carving (‘the eye’) simulated on a marble block. The spatial qualities sought by glyphs (that accumulate with time), form a space of memory and micro-niches, which temporarily accommodate the ashes from the ‘sacrificed’ quarry-workers. The ritual symbolically begins and ends based upon the circadian flooding of the quarry to further highlight the possibilities of an infinite book-labyrinth: a resurrected corpus.
Fig. 18.5 Chi Hoon Seong Y4, ‘Retreat Island’. The Island is a retreat from the harsh conditions created by the high salt content in Lake Sambhar in India; providing physical, spiritual and ecological regeneration through the creation of salt grottos and the play of light using ornamental roofs. Salt water absorbed from the site is used to crystallise the salt grottos, creating rehabilitation spaces for saltpan workers; and the marshes in pocket areas improve the ecological system of the lake. Fig. 18.6 Liang Zhou Y4, ‘The Giant Sari Witness’, Varanasi, India. The ground plan articulates the wedding ceremony centre and the context of the city, creating a street procession and generating narrow alleyways, in keeping with the city’s morphological tradition. Fig. 18.7 Liang Zhou Y4, ‘The Giant Sari Witness’, Varanasi, India, fabric formwork test pieces.
The prototypes explore the retention of fabric in concrete crevices as part of an ornamental strategy.
Fig. 18.8 Zhiying Xu Y4, ‘Varanasi Crematorium and Smoke Garden’. Model exploring multiple scales for a new crematorium in Varanasi, expanding the city streets into an elevated smoke garden enabling tourists to experience part of the ceremony without causing disruption to guild workers and families. Fig. 18.9 Jingsi (Joyce) Li Y4, ‘Buddhist Pilgrimage in Sarnath’. Model exploring roof performance and light patterns. By utilising different types of paper and apertures based on symbolic Buddhist scriptures, the project explores the transition between performance and ornament. Fig. 18.10 Christina Dahdaleh Y4, ‘Form Exploration’. Harvesting toxic waste present in one of the main marble quarries in the town of Makrana. The façade is developed to capture the Marble dust through the utilisation of updrafts onsite. 18.10
Fig. 18.11 Haaris Ramzan Y5, ‘Guild of the Storyteller’. The Guild of the Storyteller proposes a fairytale retreat situated within the Valley of Kashmir. The retreat aims to provide the orphans of Kashmir with a moment of escape from the turbulence of a violent political conflict. The architectural language of the retreat mimics that of the menagerie of animals and beasts found within traditional Kashmiri fairytales. The journey through the retreat attempts to simulate the forgotten art of storytelling through an enchanted architectural language. Fig. 18.12 Liang Shang Y5, ‘Guild of Identity – Call Centre Agent Village’. Digital render section of the call centre agents’ work and living space: Five individual working units including one senior agent and four juniors. The cable connections indicate the ‘office’ network, forming a vertical
structure that acts as the ’façade’ of the guild. Fig. 18.13
Liang Shang Y5, ‘Guild of Identity – Call Centre Agent Village’. Sectional drawing exploring proposed guild social structure and its relationship with the local context. Open markets extend the sightline towards the IT campus, and the prayer room utilises the Gudawara concept of tolerance for all religions, providing a welcoming collective space as a new village centre.
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Fig. 18.14 Anna Maria Janiak Y5, ‘The Architecture of Mathematical Rituals’. The project aims to explore ideas of order and chaos in architectural creation in New Delhi. Order is represented by the beauty of forms generated using ancient geometric formulas. Chaos refers to the social and environmental issues connected with e-waste recycling. The final architectural output is an ever-growing temple constructed out of reused metals slowly emerging from the waters of Yamuna River. Fig. 18.15 Sing Sun (Ryan) Cheng Y5, ‘Perceiving an Erroneous Landscape’. Camouflage garden situated in-between the disputed mine boundaries in Goa, India. The architecture is generated by glitches in Google Earth, in which the landscape is misinterpreted as a malformed forest, concealing the local community’s unlawful mining
activities from satellite surveillance. Fig. 18.16 Sing Sun (Ryan) Cheng Y5, ‘Perceiving an Erroneous Landscape’. Digital errors are physically manifested to reinvent the process of translating the human body in ornamentation for the digital age.
Fig. 18.17 Sonal Balasuriya Y5, ‘The Spiritual Guild’, Makrana, Rajasthan. The project proposes the migration of contemporary stone carving guilds of Jaipur, to Makrana, where white marble has been quarried for centuries creating a landscape of gigantic proportions. These craftsmen will inhabit self-built shafts that rise from the depths of the quarry, attempting to link the liberated with the non-liberated along the cosmic axis. The stone carving workshops will be located along this axis, creating sacred ornaments, mini temples capable of provoking thoughts of liberation or ‘moksha’.
Fig. 18.18 Sonal Balasuriya Y5, ‘The Spiritual Guild’, Makrana, Rajasthan. 1:10 prototype of the workshop façade, milled in white Makrana marble. The façade detail shows the perforated nature of marble at a much larger scale with the agglomeration
of mini temples that alter and reconfigure the porosity of the façade. Fig. 18.19 – 18.20 Sonal Balasuriya Y5, ‘The Spiritual Guild, Makrana’, Rajasthan.
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Crypto Phantom’s Sensorial Materiality
Ricardo de Ostos, Nannette Jackowski, Manuel Jiménez Garcia
Unit 18 Crypto Phantom’s Sensorial Materiality
Nannette Jackowski, Ricardo de Ostos, Manuel Jimenez Garcia
This year Unit 18, or Generational Phantoms, investigated concepts of cryptography to generate architectures with rich encoded social and material effects situated in the contentious territory of Jerusalem.
In many societies, secrets, mysteries, secluded knowledge and confidential information have been converted into codes, signs and symbols; their real meanings only being noted by those in the know. Cryptography as the art of encrypting information has been used for centuries in security protocols and military communication to securely transmit classified messages. The development of encrypting/decrypting methods alongside the arms races in the Second World War was the midwife of the digital computer, as testified in our visit to Bletchley Park, a secret code-breaking facility during WWII in the UK. At this moment students started to explore encryption and architecture as vents for design as a channel to processing codes of social practices and history into its armature.
Following the study of Alan Turing, one of the key cryptanalysts in Bletchley Park, and his exploration of what computational power can be and do, students developed their own process of encryption with the aim to create spatial structures and scripts. Here the notion of code was subverted from the well-known digital realm into analogue vocabularies of materiality. By generating methods of transforming information into matter, students created worlds where the computational is processed and ‘saved,’ not in bits, but in material grains and spatial scenography.
How could architecture as a vessel of spatial and material information further levels of social interaction? Could cryptography and its neurotic concern with security, codes and calculation power be utilised in architecture, not only to protect but also to create unconventional access to layers of interactive performance in buildings?
Moving to Jerusalem as a main context, students pursued the concept of diplomatic spaces placed in a sacred city filled with multi-layered beliefs, deep divisions and ancient religious practices. Where diplomacy, coexistence and access are key to understand the nuances of one of the oldest cities in the world, students mapped social practices, rituals, myths and symbol systems creating an architectural repertoire, positioning themselves and reacting to the tranquil and tense conditions found.
Investigating the Dead Sea Scrolls and their ambivalent interpretation, Anthanasios Varnavas problematised the notion of architectural meaning and digital language. Based on limestone extraction on site and the cultivation of knowledge the project is organised as a series of encrusted cave like spaces deliberately manufactured and encrypted by rough limestone drilling. The project unveils part of his experiential hypertext via a combination of wet surfaces and dry cactus, de-territorialising the contested landscape into a steaming primeval rock of opaque meaning.
Exploring the connection between encrypting generational codes, Anthony D’Auria regarded his project as a computational machine where materiality becomes the medium for social-historical integration. Here the secrets of Bletchley Park evolved into the history of a group of Ethiopian Jews called ‘Beta Israeli’ and their dramatic migration to Jerusalem. The outcome is an Amharic language institute situated on the armistice line in Jerusalem where the construction of the building becomes interwoven with a political and material context. Social codes are metamorphosed into a bullet spray, concrete formwork becomes a toolset of language degradation and light apertures slowly unveil a building under tension. Encryption becomes the means to morph the weak signals of culture.
What happens when ruins are territorialised, alienated from its users and disputed by religious driven politics? Set up in the City of David’s
archaeological site, Adam Casey investigated cryptography as the shadow noise between digital scanning and its mistranslation into a fluid construction site. Ruined arches and underground ornamented caves ooze into a new language of luminescent resins and light effects. The emerging structure is a digital phantasmagoria of scanned archaeological ruins manifesting against the backdrop of desert storms and religious conflict. Recognition is exchanged for discovery, symbolism for vestiges and the architecture figures ground for a reincarnated landscape of ambiguous formations. Visitors of this park of sorts may meander through sluggish spaces of incomplete arches, ornamented columns, reflective ceilings in search for hidden meanings and revelations.
Generational Phantoms is a think tank scrutinising the outcomes of digital interfaces in contentious territories. We speculate about the abnormal of ‘situation normal’ in war zones, divided geographies and contested territories reutilising the catalogue of beautiful monstrosities and the horrifically entertaining present in machine or human form. As spatial response the projects recreate what architecture can be in a world where the notion of the architect as a figure behind a desk is being substituted by an explorer of emerging environmental conditions. In this context cryptography is as much a digital design process as a protocol for socio-political engagement.
Thank you to our external consultants: Sara Klomps, Rob Partridge, Ricardo Baptista, Ruairi Glynn, Christian Derix, Stephen Gage and Jason Slocombe.
Thank you to our guest critics: Apostolos Despotidis, Ryan Dillon, Jeroen van Armeijde, Kostas Griqoriadis, Theodore Spyropoulos, Ruairi Glynn, Mollie Claypool, Theodore Sarantoglou Lalis, Marcos Cruz, Carles Sala, Tyen Masten, Brendon Carlin, Gilles Retsin, Filip Visnjic, Jose Sanchez, Christine Hawley, Alice Labourel, Tobias Klein and Robert Stuart-Smith.
Year 4
Anthony D’Auria, Sing Sun (Ryan) Cheng, Juhyung (John) Chun, Anna Maria Janiak, Alan O’Connell, Mahmetcan Sisman, Anthanasios Varnavas
Year 5
Adam Casey, Shao Jun (Susan) Fan, Anis Wan Kamaruddin, Alex Sanghwa Kim Saman Ziaie,
phantom18.co.uk
Fig. 18.1 Adam Casey, Y5, Translations of an Invisible Landscape. The initiation of a new archaeology based upon the hidden landscape of Jerusalem’s contested past. Reconstruction revealing the translation from digital 3D scan to physical manifestation and the emergence of a new depiction of a digital landscape. Fig. 18.2 Adam Casey, Y5, Translations of an Invisible Landscape. Process of manifesting the digital through the casting of light onto a UV curable material. Fig. 18.3 Adam Casey, Y5, Translations of an Invisible Landscape; Material prototypes for the manifestation of the hidden archaeology, exposing the conditions for growth and the reconstruction through a light responsive medium. Fig. 18.4 Adam Casey, Y5, Translations of an Invisible Landscape. Technological excavation of the hidden
pathways, cisterns and ossuary’s beneath the surface of the old city of Jerusalem, and the extraction of the digital for the physical manifestation in the new archaeological park for the contested past.
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Fig. 18.5 Anis Wan Kamaruddin, Y5, The Essene Temples of Purity. In the quest for purity away from the politics of the sacred and an increasing anthropocentricity within Jerusalem, a cluster of Essene Temples slowly emerges from the receding Dead Sea. A section through the first level of ritual baths (mikveh) reveals the physical transformation it goes through as the water level recedes. The shape allows it to hold water long after it is fully exposed, allowing for crystallisation to take place, and for it to become a bath. Fig. 18.6 Anis Wan Kamaruddin, Y5, The Essene of Purity. The descent into the Room of Feasts sits below a sequence of reading rooms overlooking the sacred space – its shape influencing the eventual crystallisation that will form on its underside, adorning the space below. Descent into the room is possible only when the cluster has completed
its Jubilee cycle and the space is fully revealed. Fig. 18.7 Anthony D’Auria, Y4, Amharic Language Institute. A hybrid materiality of 3D-printed bullets blasted into a concrete substrate encrypts recollections of the gruelling exodus of the Beta Israel people from Ethiopia to Israel. Encrusted bullets plug into the inner façade and act as expulsion vents for eclectic formwork secreted within the mass of the building. Fig. 18.8 Anthony D’Auria, Y4, The Exodus of the Beta Israel. The language institute explores the social, cultural and linguistic displacement of the Beta Israel people by proposing a piece of cultural infrastructure to combat the gradual erosion and decline of their native Amharic Language in Jerusalem.
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Fig. 18.09 Shao Jun (Susan) Fan, Y5, Colour Enigma. The first prototype decodes the light of Jerusalem into colours. These emmanating lights are mixed through additive process to generate a gradient of colours in the space. Fig. 18.10 Shao Jun (Susan) Fan, Y5, Colour Enigma. The second prototype, a reappropriated militar drone fires colours into the environment creating an aurora like phenomenon as a new dome to Jerusalem. Fig. 18.11 Shao Jun (Susan) Fan, Y5, Colour Enigma. Study test between video streams and decoded effect. Fig. 18.12 Saman Ziaie, Y5, Third state Nexus. Scenario articulation of bridge and branch networks extracted from topographical formations between Israeli Har Homa and Palestinian Sur Bahir. Fig. 18.13 Saman Ziaie, Y5, Third state Nexus. Networks are manifested through encrypted space,
hidden within a shell that camouflages the activity within. The concept of duality becomes integral to design, where two seemingly disparate elements harmonise with each other.
Fig. 18.14 Saman Ziaie, Y5, Third state Nexus. Digital painting study of entangled networks and appropriation of new peeled topography.
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Fig. 18.15 Juhyung (John) Chun, Y4, Lighting Study of Shi-pai Village, Guangzhou, China. Fig. 18.16 Anna Maria Janiak, Y5, (Top) Repository of Destroyed Buildings. The events of numerous terrorist attacks and bombings along Jaffa Road are encrypted in the 3D matrix of the building. (Bottom) Enchanted Forest. Intervention in Bletchley Park encrypts events from WWII into the forest of information. Lines encipher data of people killed during battles, countries participating in them and date of each event. Fig. 18.17 Mahmetcan Sisman, Y4, Sonic installation in Bletchley Park. Fig. 18.18 Sing Sun (Ryan) Cheng, Y4, Encryption of the decay. Spatial intervention in Hut 6, Bletchley Park utilising temperature difference and state change of wax as an encoding process for building envelope decay, consequently creating a deformation of spatial
and tactile experience over time as the notion of internal/ external gradually diminishes. Fig. 18.19 Anthanasios Varnavas, Y4, Hermeneuticist’s Embassy. The bridge of fear and courage. Expressing the innocence or danger of crossing between lines; the delicate artefact becomes referential to its urban context, augmenting the volatile nature of the 1949 Armistice Line and the place where it’s torn to generate the No-Mans Land. Fig. 18.20 Anthanasios Varnavas, Y4, Hermeneuticist’s Embassy. Mining the rock, sourcing the materia prima. The building is constructed in a series of time-based phases of a choreographed machine performance which resembles even celebrates segregation. The rock is constantly sculpted, translating threshold lines into deep scars in the earths surface.
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Generational Phantoms
Ricardo de Ostos, Nannette Jackowski
Unit 18
GENERATIONAL PHANTOMS
Nannette Jackowski, Ricardo de Ostos
Have you read the reviews yet? ‘Brutally graphic’ … ‘wonderfully unpleasant’ … ‘underground classic’ … ‘notorious banned thriller’ … ‘hits the nerve!’… Name the in-between using your background imagination…
Unit 18 set up to study hellish zones of emerging social conditions and technological payload scenarios inherited in these zones. These are zones where urbanity has to be redefined simply because the dots in between are not differentiated enough from the headlines, social noise and techno craft archaeology for Wikipedia. Generational Phantoms, or Unit 18, studied the short and long-circuits that connect generations — generations lost or slowly fading into kingdom come for not being ‘fit for purpose’. In our trip to South China these fading ghosts seemed abundant and manifested in different spatial forms and time events. From dying out fish farms near Shantou to the homogenisation of special cultures such as the ex-boat dwellers called Tanka to ‘secret services’ coercing us upon entrance to immediately leave again the e-waste town Guiyu to prevent any suggestive ‘danger’.
We started the year by investigating three fiction and technology literature references in order to set up each individual’s bandwidth of interest. Between territory recognition and tactics the first project included ventures into sentient environments, alternate presents and technological natures. Followed by a seven-day bus ride along many not-so-well-known spots in South China we experienced and started to articulate thought provoking pictures of China’s social political horizon. In disease-beauty scenarios of e-waste dumps and quiet star-packed sky evenings amid hot noodle soups in ancestral courtyards students formed their own contextual maps, social constellations and technological tales. Understanding architecture not just as a building but as a built environment the final projects combine narratives of spatial commentary, digital speculation and social construct.
Interested in the phenomenon of mass art re-production, specifically in the area of Dafen Village in Shenzhen, where thousands of classic western paintings are reproduced daily, Aris Theodoropoulos created a digital myth of architecture as a multi-faceted process of sensorial experience. As a Dorian Gray of sorts the project reconnects visitors and painters in a process of infinite reproduction utilising a feedback loop of scanning and 3d projection mapping. The resulting architecture is in constant revolution due to the visitors and space relationship in a building of social ghosts and technological phantoms.
In a tale of an alternate present linked with crafts and social reality Michelle Lam speculated on the question of what if the Tanka people would not have been forced to leave their life on boats and become urban dwellers due to the events
of the Mao’s Land Reformation. Investigated through a series of innovative ceramic tests — including one of the first successful ceramic 3d prints — the project’s materiality explores fragility, translucency and communicative patterns. Designed as a series of water dwellings that are specially arranged according to the moon light the ceramic roof interacts with the light and sea water revealing hidden messages about the dwellers’ lost history and customs.
Encrusted in an ultra dense urban plot occupying the same land from the farm days of Guangzhou, now surrounded by rising towers of an emergent speculative market a small meandering building surveys and documents the demise of Shipai Urban Village. Designed by Adam Casey an extension to an existing ancestral hall acts as a digital reservoir of the urban village culture. Daily objects are 3d scanned and its data is used to carve into the buildings altar that is positioned at the highest point. Utilizing Microsoft Kinect, coding and traditional model making Adam tested and explored the design between digital crafts and environmental storytelling to create a project that discusses the inevitability of market forces against the resilience of popular culture.
Generational Phantoms is set up as a design think tank on how rapid social and technological developments can work not only predatorily under market forces but also collaboratively. Unit 18 discusses how long-circuits between generations can be ground for speculation but also long-term investment. Amid digital dreams and tense social zones students designed their own tales of hope and wonder. As active engagement to imagine not the future but short-circuits in the present its main goal was to ‘hit the nerve’.
Thank you to our external consultants: Manuel Jimenez Garcia, Sara Klomps, Nicolas Sterling, Gary Grant, Guan Lee, Oliver Wilton, Vesna Petresin Robert. Thank you to our guest critics: Ben Masterton-Smith, Abel Maciel, Manuel Jimenez Garcia, Sara Klomps, Guvenc Topcuoglu, Barbara Campbell Lange, Lawrence Friesen, Goswin Schwendinger, Ana Araujo, Theo Sarantoglou Lalis, Marcos Cruz, Vesna Petresin Robert, Yael Reisner, Julia Backhaus, Paul Bavister, Nick Szczepaniak, Theo Spyropoulos, Claudia Pasquero, Kate Davies, Joao Wilbert
Year 4: Sonal Balasuriya, Adam Casey, Shao Jun Fan, Liang Shang, Anis Wan Kamaruddin, Rintaro Yoshida, Saman Ziaie
Year 5: Ming Fung Jeff Ng, Michelle Lam, Kaleigh Tirone Nunes, Aris Theodoropoulos
Fig. 18.1 Michelle Lam, ‘The Tanka Archipelago’, Pearl River Delta, China. Digitally printed ceramic prototype, first produced in UCL. Fig. 18.2 Michelle Lam, The Tanka Archipelago, Pearl River Delta, China. Digitally printed ceramic prototype, first produced in UCL. Fig. 18.3
Michelle Lam, The Tanka Archipelago, Pearl River Delta, China. Tessellated origami porcelain prototype. Fig. 18.4
Michelle Lam, ‘The Tanka Archipelago’, Pearl River Delta, China. Translucency study of fired prototype. Fig. 18.5
Michelle Lam, ‘The Tanka Archipelago’, Pearl River Delta, China. Lunar festival cluster. Fig. 18.6 Michelle Lam, ‘The Tanka Archipelago’, Pearl River Delta, China. Tanka dwelling isometric. This project speculates an alternative timeline that hypothesises; what if the Tanka community had remained untouched during Mao’s land reformation in the
1950s. The architectural proposition is manifested through the re-mastering of lost Ming dynasty eggshell porcelain. An alternative urban condition reincarnates mythical Lunar festival rituals in the Pearl River Delta, China.
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Fig. 18.7 Saman Ziaie, ‘Shipyard for Modular Offshore Habitation,’ Pearl River Delta, China. The point of origin, as expressed through the model, for a self-replicating and evolving architecture that responds to proposals of a Megacity, combining major cities in the Pearl River Delta. Dwellers living in urban villages such as Shipai in Guangzhou expand out into the water, constructing more offshore homes from a shared platform via a collaborative process of living/working. Fig. 18.8 Saman Ziaie, ‘Shipyard for Modular Offshore Habitation,’ Pearl River Delta, China. Over time, the nature of buildings and modules change, utilising newer technologies and customized elements, responding to the needs of the offshore settlers while urban density reaches the waters.
Fig. 18.9 ShaoJun Fan. Conceptual drawing of Chinese
Tulou events happening in the building, generating new relationships between form and space and allowing the meaning of Tulou to be reinterpreted from its own culture. Fig. 18.10 Anis Wan Kamaruddin, A view inside a phytomine in Guiyu, China – where gold particles from technological remnants are collected using plants, and the harvest processed in biochemical laboratories on site.
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Fig. 18.11 Adam Casey, ‘Ancestral Temple Extension’, Guangzhou, China. Composition of the digitally manufactured Altar surface inspired by the transformation of Shipai urban village in Guangzhou, China. The surface becomes a diasporic depiction of a transcient landscape constructed from the artefacts collected from the rural and forgotten in the urban, creating an archive of future archaeology. Fig. 18.12 Adam Casey, ‘Ancestral Temple Extension’, Guangzhou, China. Axonometric section depicting the ascension of the observer away from the street level to the Altar in transformation. Creating an architecture for capturing the temporality of the urban village as Traces of the migrating population are left in the architecture as those chosen progress beyond the boundary of the village, into the urban city; creating a
surreal amalgamation of architectural references that reflect upon rural traditions. Fig. 18.13 Adam Casey, Ancestral Temple Extension, Guangzhou, China. Digitally composed surface using processing and Kinect to extract fragments of the forgotten to be digitally recomposed into an adaptive architectural expression of the social changes of the urban village.
Fig. 18.14 Kaleigh Tirone Nunes, Illustrating the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’. Cities are usually perceived as near utopias, by those who live outside them. However it seems, the more cities expand, the further the divide grows, between urban and rural realities. We rarely know where our food, clothes, water and energy come from, or what conditions prevail in the systems and chains that provide us with our daily needs. Furthermore, the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, arising through the actions of multiple individuals independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, inevitably leads to the destruction of shared limited resources, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.
Fig. 18.15 Kaleigh Tirone Nunes, Urban Ecosystem, the Habitation and Harvesting Units , The image speculates on
a future, re-invented rural life in the city, motivated by the need to undo the harm caused by depleted ecosystems and resources, which affect both society and nature.
Fig. 18.16 Kaleigh Tirone Nunes, Urban Ecosystem, Project Overview, Roof Plan. Sited at a live Seafood Market in Guangzhou, China, the intervention forms a biophilic aquaponic urban farm inhabited/taken care of by agricultural experts — Rural Migrants. Water is purified from the neighbouring Pearl River in order to harvest seafood, vegetables and fruit for the local community. The project encourages the formation of a renewed socioecological relationship with nature in the city by allowing the existing natural resources to reappropriate and reestablish urban ground.
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Fig. 18.17 Ming Fung Ng, Memory Archaeology, view towards the public recording hall for the public to record their narratives on clay tiles, as part of the institute to collect memories of the inhabitants in Guangxia village which suffers from a strong sense of collective amnesia about its past and uncertainty about its future. The space is appropriated by the urban villagers to create their own space to represent their humanity. Fig. 18.18 Ming Fung Ng, The clay tablet prototype. to transcribe data on the wet clay to show how to engage villagers with the tactile experience of crafting with clay to record their narratives, which is then fired to become the building component to display and store data permanently, as opposed to the ephemeral contemporary culture in the fast-developing modern city bordering the village. Fig. 18.19 Ming Fung
Ng, The strata plaster cast. plaster is poured and cast in place layers by layers over time – to narrate how the narratives of the place are recorded and portrayed by the engravings on the clay tiles.
Fig. 18.20 Aris Theodoropoulos, 3D Prints. Dafen Artist Pixelation Portraits. Prosthetic Recall Memory Portraits. Fig. 18.21 Aris Theodoropoulos, Dafen Artist Studio: 2D to 3D Spatial Experiment. Grasshopper Image sampler definition of image pixelation from a photograph of artist studio in Dafen. Image pixelation is generated from its RGB channel values. Fig. 18.22 Aris Theodoropoulos, Tintoretto Nativity: 2D to 3D Spatial experiment. Grasshoper Image sampler definition of triangulation from the image luminance values. Fig. 18.23 Aris Theodoropoulos, Prosthetic sensorial Dome. Anamorphosis of repetitive phenomena in a sensorial Image of recognition and prosthetic recall memories investigate the body memory and body self image.
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Psychospace
David Ardill, Colin Fournier
Dip/MArch Unit 18
Kirchner
Psychospace
Space, experienced emotionally, is not isotropic. Through processes of mental projection and association that are deeply rooted in the collective unconscious and the individual psyche, different attributes of space, both within nature and in manmade environments, are invested with psychological connotations that are not intrinsic to them but have a profound effect on us. We can be deeply moved by space. Different psychoanalytic theories propose various analogies between psychic and spatial structure, but associations vary from individual to individual and are open to interpretation and creative license. It is up to us as designers to challenge conventional associations and archetypal symbolism, play with them, and invent our own.
Strangely, architects are usually reluctant to engage with the psychological dimension of space and seldom design buildings with the deliberate intention of provoking and manipulating emotions. Actors provoke emotional responses. Can a building “act”? Can it project it’s own sense of being, its personality, agenda, ambition? Is this the next mutation in architectural evolution, a sentient extension of biomorphism into the realm of artificial intelligence and personality? The brief was to design an environment that induces a strong psychological reaction: agoraphobia, claustrophobia, fear, anger, aggression, irritation, impatience, surprise, wonder, curiosity, amusement, suspense, desire, delight, happiness, wellbeing, love, tenderness, ecstasy. The ultimate aim was to challenge students to reconcile the ‘reality principle’ of developing a finely tuned project with the ‘pleasure principle’ of giving free reign to unconscious desires in conceiving a singular vision of an emotionally striking psychospace.
Yr 5: Quinton Clarke, Rory Donald, Christian Dorin, Harry Godfrey, Elizabeth
Colin Fournier & David Ardill
Clockwise from top: Harry Godfrey, Masked Venetians; Christian Dorin, Restaurant Se7en; Elizabeth Kirchner, Carnevale Club; Quinton Clarke, Gondoliers’ Social Club; Rory Donald, Santa Maria
Della Salute Laboratory. Opposite page: Harry Godfrey, Ambivalent Desires Glass Bottle Reycling Plant.
Elizabeth Kirchner, Frustration: Reward. Elevated Luxury for Neo-Renaissance Man. Clockwise from top left: layered glass sectional model; design development; roof plan.
Christian Dorin, Restaurant Se7en; A Taste of the Seven Deadly Sins. Top: Perspective of Sloth Chamber. Bottom: Pressure-sensitive Glutony device.
Quinton Clarke, Gondoliers’ Social Club. Top: Section through Seating Pod. Bottom: Installation Introspective Passage. Opposite page: Rory Donald, Santa Maria Della Salute Laboratory. Top: Pyschobotanical Installation. Bottom: Sectional Model.
Mutant!
David Ardill, Colin Fournier
Dip/MArch Unit 18
Yr 4: Craig Brailsford, Quinton Clarke, Rory Donald, Christian Dorin, Harry Godfrey, Elizabeth Kirchner. Yr 5: Alice Cadogan, Christine Hui, Myoungjae Kim, George King, Koasis Fung, Daniel Madeiros, Thomas Mahon, Mark Nixon, Rachel Song, Miya Kate Ushida
Mutant!
Mutations provide the raw material for evolution, fuel for the Darwinian factory. They arise from random errors in translation of the genetic code and ensure the survival of living species subjected to unpredictable environmental changes. Architecture also faces the question of how to design for a changing world. Perhaps the answer is the same: paradoxically, the best way to develop robust design solutions may be to encourage mistakes in the transmission of established design rules, so that the architectural gene pool can become more diverse, enriched by freak mutations that may prove better adapted to new circumstances. The brief for this year stemmed from these fundamental considerations; it called for the exploration of architectural mutations, design processes that imitate Nature not so much in her forms but rather in her mode of operation.
The first exercise was to design a device investigating the working principles of mutations, a live demonstration of a mutation process. This initial exercise set the intellectual ambitions for the year and explored different ways in which these ambitions can be materialised. The architectural project following this conceptual exercise was set in Los Angeles, a city whose architectural gene pool, resulting from many distortions of its original genetic code, is particularly rich and exotic. This urban and architectural diversity, together with the complex cultural, socio-economic, physical and political milieu that underlies it, makes LA an ideal place to experiment with further mutations.
Colin Fournier and David Ardill
Top: Rory Donald, Cymatic Landscape Symphonia. Bottom: Harry Godfrey, “Moment bien heureux” Escapism Clinic.
Top: Christian Dorin, The Los Angeles Times. Middle: Quinton Clarke, The Body Boutique. Bottom: Elizabeth Kirchner, Kymaerica and stuff of other worlds.
Top Left: Christine Hui, Parsons School for Fashion Re-Development. Top Right: Koasis Fung, Vireality. Bottom: Myoungjae Kim, Paranoic Paradise; Acting School in LA
Top: Miya Kate Ushida, The Act of Memory. Middle: Rachel Song, Artificial Dream Museum of Film Noir. Bottom: Daniel Madeiros, Celestial Cave, Death Valley. Overleaf, left: George King, The Blind Architect; right: Alice Cadogan, La Maison a Trois.
“Learning from Nature” The Environmental Paradigm David Ardill, Colin Fournier
Dip Unit 18
Yr 4: Craig Brailsford, Alice Cadogan, Chun Pong Fung, Myoungjae Kim, George King, Daniel Madeiros, Thomas Mahon, Mark Nixon, Zi Shi Song, Miya Kate Ushida.
Yr 5: Keith Chan, Irene Shun Nei Cheng, Rory Harmer, Jonathan Holt, Jonathan Mizzi, Jacob Strauss.
“Learning from Nature” The Environmental Paradigm
The unit was encouraged to look for sources of inspiration within the mineral, vegetal and animal world and to reflect upon nature at many different levels, both formal and functional, paying attention to visual, tactile, sensual qualities as well as structural properties, environmental control processes, photosynthesis, etc… and how these may lead to design principles for a sustainable architecture.
The behavioural aspects of biological systems were explored in terms of responsiveness and adaptability, autonomous behaviour, growth and change, intelligence and sensitivity; some students looked at the natural processes of morphogenesis and biological evolution, investigating their impact on architectural design, drawing on the early pioneering work of John Frazer as well as current experiments in parametric modelling, potentially leading to an architecture that could be truly generative and selforganised.
By asking the general question “what can be learned from nature?”, this brief is clearly a continuation of last year’s brief on sustainability (titled “experimental ecosystems”), perhaps from a less technical and less prescriptive perspective; it is an open question, leaving room for a diversity of interpretations and calling for other dimensions of design in addition to those strictly related to environmental performance, while ensuring that this year’s projects were intrinsically sustainable due to their grounding in natural systems.
The majority of students worked on two projects, one sited in the botanical gardens at Kew, the other in different parts of Manhattan.
Colin Fournier and David Ardill
Clockwise from top: Alice Cadogan, Thomas Mahon, Myoungjae Kim.
Clockwise from top left:Daniel Madeiros, Miya Kate Ushida, Mark Nixon, Zi Shi Song, chun Pong Fung, George King.
Top: Keith Chan. Middle: Jacob Strauss. Bottom: Irene Shun Nei Cheng.
Top and middle: Jonathan Holt. Bottom: Sonia Chiu. Opposite: Jonathan Mizzi.
Experimental Ecosystems
David Ardill, Colin Fournier
Dip Unit 18
Yr 4: Keith Chan, Irene Cheng, Thomas Dulake, Rory Harmer, Anna Hastings, Jonathan Holt, Christine Hui, Jonathan Mizzi, Jessica Rostron, Jacobus Strauss, Natasha Telford. Yr 5: Charles Coates, Andy Hau, Shuk Yan Ho, Ian Law, Win Man, Christopher Phillips, Hannah Woo, Di Zhang.
Experimental Ecosystems
Sustainability is now the single most important challenge to be faced by architecture, both at the city scale and at the scale of individual buildings. A major change in environmental consciousness is finally taking place, politically and culturally. All design fields are being affected. Yet, for a number of reasons, sustainable design of the complex ecosystem formed by the built environment and its occupants still has a bad name in the sophisticated spheres of the architectural world.
“Green” architecture is perceived by many designers as having negative connotations, primarily in terms of aesthetics but also in terms of the alleged narrowness of its intellectual scope. It is high time to overcome this prejudice. A number of architects, such as Renzo Piano, Ken Yeang, Shiguru Ban and others, have demonstrated that sustainability is not antithetical to design creativity and style; in fact, it is an opportunity to experiment with a radically new aesthetic.
We therefore challenge you this year to undertake projects that tackle, as comprehensively as possible, the complex technical requirements of sustainability while demonstrating design creativity and a sense of style within a broader intellectual and artistic context, including a concern for the philosophical, poetic and emotional dimensions of design. This is an ambitious agenda. While specific in its objectives, it leaves room for a considerable variety of individual investigations and responses, as is the well-established tradition of Unit 18. The brief is divided into three stages of increasing scale and complexity.
Colin Fournier and David Ardill Top to bottom: Jacu Strauss, Mosquito; Natasha Telford, Uniball Centre, Downtown LA; Anna Hastings, Barnacle Research Centre, Malibu; Irene Cheng, The Museum of Forgetting
Top to bottom, left to right: Rory Harmer, Hydroscape- Restoring the Coast of Venice; Thomas Dulake, Survival Scarf; Keith Chan, Revolution Studio; Christine Hui, Sound Outfit; Jessica Rostron, Venice Library; Jonathan Holt, Hollywood Pyro-Sensitivity Centre; Jonathan Mizzi, The Living
Wave Energy Generating Pier
Top left: Andy Hau, [HIDE]Seek; right: Di Zhang, Weather Therapy. Bottom: Vay Lon Luc, Kinkasan Monastery
Top: Win Man, Building Light. Middle left: Hannah Woo, Blooming Roof Canopy, Santa Monica; right: Juliet Ho, Play Cage - The Nightclub
Bottom: Ian Law, Dynamic Thermo-Responsive Surf Shack, Climatic Control Device. Overleaf, left: Anthony Lau, Floating City 2050 - Thames Estuary Aquatic Urbanism; right: Charles Coates, Bio-Sciences Field Station, Santa Monica Mountains
Space, Emotion and Architecture
David Ardill, Colin Fournier
Dip Unit 18
Yr 4: Andy Hau, Juliet Ho, Richard Sharam, Jay Williams, Hannah Woo, Di Zhang Yr 5: Stephen Clarke, Miki Hirakata, Hiroki Kakizoe, Jessica Lee, Vay Lon Luc, Charlotte Luther, Borja Marcaida, Elizabeth Nall, Maria Saradinou, Irene Siljama
Space, emotion and architecture
The film 'Lost in Translation' catches perfectly the mood of alienation and boredom felt by the two main protagonists The director achieves that effect not only through the performance of the actors, but also by controlling the physical setting, the desolate atmosphere of the generic hotel bar in which man and girl meet, turning their backs to a city that will forever remain remote and incomprehensible to them
While film directors are expected to use all the means at their disposal to manipulate th e emotions of spectators, architects, with a few notable exceptions, are generally more reticent to use explicitly the tools of their trade to provoke passionate feelings and reactions from clients and users Architectural space can also have strong emotional connotations, be it fear or nostalgia, anxiety or excitement, happiness or revulsion, wellbeing or discomfort, etc Both media use spatial design as t heir primary tool and while architecture does not usually make full use of the additional impact of narrative, it has other means at its disposal to achieve dramatic effect
In an academic environment where one is free to explore all of one's desires, why not experiment with feelings and explore the proposition that the search for emotion might be, after all, the underlying aspiration of architecture?
Tackl ing this question is not an easy task This year, the range of emotions has varied and included the sense of freedom, fear of technology, grief, yearning for the past, nervous expectation, isolation, vulnerability etc Feelings that have each lead, through the choice of individual briefs and sites within the city of Tokyo, to a wide range of architectural projects
Colin Fournier and David Ardill
Top: Jay Williams, Costume Play Park and Manga Cafe Middle: Juliet Ho, ‘Charade’ the Restaurant of Uncertainty Bottom: Hannah Woo, Underground Capsule Hotel, Shibuya
Top: Richard Sharam, Shinjuku Acting School Middle: Andy Hau, Furusato Undertakers Bottom: Di Zhang, The Corner Place for ‘Hope’ Cigarette Ltd
Top: Hiroki Kakizoe, Harajuko Match-Making Club, goup dating capsules Middle: Elizabeth Nall, Diving Academy Omotosando, view through glass lift Bottom: Jessica Lee, Asakusa Carpentry and Weathering Gallery
Clockwise from top left: Stephen Clarke, Kendo Do-Jo Match Arena; Maria Saradinou, The Roulette Gardens; Jessica Lee, Mind Chamber of Weathering Gallery
Clockwise from top left: Miki Hirakata, Elderly Residence and Cultural Centre; Vay Lon Luc, Kin Kasan Buddhist Retreat; Borja Marcaida, Brain Scanner, installation; Miki Hirakata, Matsuri Festival Time
Clockwise from top left: Irene Siljama, [Tokyo] Inter-Mission; Charlotte Luther, Yakuza Gang Members’ Club and Hostess Bar, Shibuya; Borja Marcaida, Hyperbody Out of Control
Obscure Objects of Desire
David Ardill, Colin Fournier
Dip Unit 18
Yr 4: Louise Charlton, Miki Hirakata, Hiroki Kakizoe, Jessica Lee, Claire Lewis-Smith, Vay Lon Luc, Charlotte Luther, Win Man, Borja Marcaida, Elizabeth Nall, Mark Ng, Maria Saradinou, Dora Sweijd Yr 5: Ivy Chan, Romanos Gortsios, Charlie Hearn, Joshua Lau, Ke Wang
Obscure Objects of Desire
Emotion, seduction and architecture
‘Theatre and cinema know admirably well how to use all the means at their disposal in order to manipulate our emotions and seduce us So do the other arts But architecture, on the whole, is strangely reticent to play openly on emotion It tends to restrict itself to the language of reason and function, to the world of Production’, as Jean Baudrillard says Yet the seductive power of the architectural object lies ultimately in the intensity of the emotions it can provoke
The unit brief attempts to explore the feelings that can be perceived through the physicality of the material world, emotions of pleasure, well-being, serenity, surprise, longing, love, exhilaration, erotic excitement, intimacy, but also perhaps anxiety, sadness, solitude, fear, anger, aggression, pain, pride, boredom, alienation, indifference, etc We explore how these emotions can be expressed and stimulated by using all of the sensorial means at the disposal of architectural design (form, materials, light, colour, movement, acoustics), using different media (physical models, drawing, computer renderings, photography, film) to represent and simulate the emotional effect of these design moves
The brief does not start by defining a specific design programme or by presupposing or prescribing any particular building type as an end product Instead, it starts with the essence: with feeling and emotion As the design process unfolds, the specific functional programmes and detailed design briefs take shape – a kind of alchemical transformation from the essence of the emotion to the built form and a highly seductive process of creative discovery
Clockwise from top left: Ivy Chan, Hiroki Kakizoe, Charlie Hearn, Jessica Lee, Joshua Lau
Colin Fournier and David Ardill
Clockwise from top left: Claire Lewis-Smith, Miki Hirakata, Dora Sweijd, Borja Marcaida, Louise Charlton, Ke Wang, Maria Saradinou, Win Man, Charlotte Luther, Vay Lon Luc, Elizabeth Nall, Mark Ng Overleaf: Romanos Gortsios
Vertigo/Verticality
Colin Fournier, Peter Szczepaniak
Dip Unit 18
Yr 4: Joshua Lau, Fiona Sheppard, Daniel Welham, Vincent Young Yr 5: Jamal Badran, Carlo Benigni, Sophie Anna Campbell, Chih-Yu Chang, Marc Hoffensher, Stella Kamba, George Kontaroudis, Yosuke Miura, Pritesh Patel, Lirong Soon, Roderick Tong, Eric Tong, Anna Van den Dool, Ke Wang, Kevin Yiu, Shean Yu
Vertigo/Verticality
This year we initially explored the dimension of verticality in architecture and the field trip was to Manhattan Could highrise go even further? Could vertical buildings take on more interesting forms than generic extrusions of the ground plane? Need they be as banal as they usually are? Are the economic and technical constraints such that there is little room left for experimental design and fantasy? As we rapidly move towards more compact hyperdense cities, particularly in the Far East, such questions are becoming highly topical As for the programme, although the city calls mainly for multi-use towers, the students are free to make their own choices and to propose more idiosyncratic interventions
The overall aim is to push the envelope further with respect to the design of verticality, and also to encourage each student to find her or his niche and individual interpretation
Needless to say, most students joining the unit have eventually developed their own briefs for various sites, giving relatively little importance to the underlying theme of verticality, and have even chosen some sites outside of New York, including Tokyo and London’s Canary Wharf Although we initially encouraged students to pursue the main theme, we were, as usual, even more interested in welcoming diversions from the brief And it shows in the resulting projects!
and Peter Szczepaniak
Clockwise from top left: Anna Van den Dool, Fiona Sheppard, George Kontaroudis, Jamal Badran, Joshua Lau, Eric Tong, Dan Welham, Carlo Benigni
Colin Fournier
Clockwise from top left: Kevin Yiu, Roderick Tong, Vincent Young, Yosuke Miura, Chih-Yu Chang, Stella Kamba, Pritesh Patel, Marc Hoffensher, Lirong Soon, Shean Yu, Sophie Anna Campbell