Design Anthology PG25
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 Wild at Heart and Weird on Top
Ivan Chan, Daniel Dream, Ifigeneia Liangi
2023 What Is Your Measure?
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
2022 An Ecology of Architectural Knowledge
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
2021 Decadent Ecologies
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
2020 On Expedition
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
2019 Practice and Simulation
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
2018 Activating Architecture
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
2017 Negotiating the Seam
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
2024
Wild at Heart and Weird on Top Ivan Chan, Daniel Dream, Ifigeneia Liangi
Wild at Heart and Weird on Top
Ivan Chan, Daniel Dream, Ifigeneia Liangi
Not so long ago it was expected for an architect to be as familiar with the design of outfits, theatre sets, pyrotechnics and even snacks, alongside the design of buildings. In addition to being a military expert, artist, theatre designer, engineer and architect, Bernardo Buontalenti also found time to invent ice cream in the 16th century. During this era such activities were considered inseparable.
This year our students reflected on this history from our current position in the 21st century. As such we considered how the slowness of building might be informed by quicker disciplines, such as entertainment and fashion. We looked into the lives and works of architects who have created with artistic concerns and explored contemporary social issues through practical and poetic positions. This included the design of furniture and everyday objects alongside the design of spaces that are inseparable from them. Central to this were interplays between the domestic and the civic, and explorations on how objects may enable domestic or civic rituals.
PG25 is interested in exploring hybrid forms of practice by learning from the methods of other disciplines and cross-pollinating them with architectural concerns. Examples of hybrid forms of practice can include painter-architects, geographer-architects, actor-architects, horseman-architects and everything in between. The nature of these hybridisations was determined by our students and the interests they brought to the table. Members of the unit developed autobiographical ways of working, while also speaking to wider concerns to develop personal, poetic and critical proposals that add to the available stock of reality.
The unit is interested in the weird, the wild and the otherworldly, and we value designs that are both spellbinding and critical. Going above and beyond the general expectations of architecture, our projects aim to suggest other worlds as critical reflections on our existing one.
PG25 is a result of the influence and impact of the late Professor Jonathan Hill.
Year 4
Finlay Aitken, Monica Burman, Shouhui Chen, Bianca Croitoriu, Kate Hargreaves Davis, Gabriel Edyvean-Heard, Ioana Enache, Kayley Gibbons, Eleanor Mettham, Zuzanna Rostocka, Seyedeh Rana Tabatabaie, Jiawei Yao, Kai Yi (Kelvin) Zhang, Shuming Zhou
Year 5
Latisha Chan, Natalie Rayya
Technical tutors and consultants: Bedir Bekar, Arturo Reyes, Martin Reynolds
Thesis supervisors: Christophe Gerard, Stamatis Zografos
Critics: Naomi Gibson, Vsevolod KondratievPopov, Martin Reynolds, Jonathan Tyrrell
25.1, 25.13
Natalie Rayya, Y5 ‘Bound (1987)’. Set in both fantasy and reality, this project investigates the layered desire between women, and the subsequent spatial reorientation of a semi-fictional 1980s Athens. A narrative written in the form of a love letter exchange guides the parameters of the project, which unpacks the idea of Athenian-Sapphic space, time(lessness), sensuality and individuation, and archives its material and conceptual history.
25.2 Finlay Aitken, Y4 ‘The Catford Commons’. This project is an alternative proposal to a planned redevelopment in Catford. Set within the old bounds of Elmwood Farm, the building uses and subverts the process of domestication to reimagine ways of urban living with nature. The horse is employed as informant and builder on this project; as creatures serving as both an instrument of power and unrepresented labourers, they share a complex history with humanity, underpinned by a process of co-domestication.
25.3 Zuzanna Rostocka, Y4 ‘Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?’. Catford City Farm is a negotiation of gentrification. The project introduces an alternative lifestyle to Lewisham by incorporating cohabitation with animals into a vertical city farm. The seductive building shape is inspired by automotive design and manufactured by local mechanics. The newly built high-rise residential towers see their brick-slip covered faces mirrored in the curvaceous body of this coquettish project.
25.4 Kate Hargreaves Davis, Y4 ‘The Catford Birthing Centre’. Until the 18th century, all women in Britain gave birth at home. The development of forceps was the catalyst for the mechanised conception of the maternal body. With birth integrated into medical discourse, the act of birth became absorbed by the infrastructure of the hospital. This project reimagines childbirth through the exploration of connections to others and the mother’s connection to her own body to empower the act of birth today.
25.5 Gabriel Edyvean-Heard, Y4 ‘Jack of all Trades’. This project revitalises Crossbones, a necropolis in Southwark, into a dynamic cultural nexus. The intervention implements commemorative elements that acknowledge the site’s rich symbols and material culture. The local community is empowered through educational workshops and a dedicated marketplace, ecologically sound methodologies for soil and atmospheric remediation, and design principles inspired by medieval pageant and polychromy aesthetics.
25.6, 25.17 Latisha Chan, Y5 ‘ The Shades of Discipline’. The project challenges traditional school architecture that centres on the student–teacher dynamic and a standardised educational system. Using storytelling as a tool to reimagine a school for witches, the project explores the nature of disciplinary power as oppressive control and support mechanism. The school for witches explores how different motivations interact with disciplinary power and respond to the perception of architecture.
25.7 Kai Yi (Kelvin) Zhang, Y4 ‘A Place of Your Own’. This project unites builders, planners, architects and the local community to challenge the UK’s profit-driven, repetitive and standardised housing schemes. Drawing inspiration from Walter Segal’s vision for self-build, Catford’s town centre transforms into a creative hub for manufacturing and testing DIY homes that emphasise self-expression, architectural variety and innovative urban planning strategies.
25.8 Jiawei Yao, Y4 ‘Butterfly Dream’. The butterfly embodies both transience and eternity, as its metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly serves as a metaphor for immortality. Using the language of Taoism, the vet hospital establishs an immortal world, inviting residents into a dream where they can intimately
connect with the perpetual rhythm of life, while sharing harmonious coexistence with animals.
25.9 Seyedeh Rana Tabatabaie, Y4 ‘Catford’s Queen of the South’. Catford’s perpetual regeneration over its history hints at an urban fragility which is now being taken advantage of by current regeneration plans. These transitions for the sake of ‘improvement’ have implications for the neighbourhood beyond the aesthetic. Through a theatrical exploration of objects, the project embraces Catford’s character with a film studio where objects take centre stage, archived for eternity through the lens of cinema.
25.10 Shouhui Chen, Y4 ‘What Remains’. This project investigates alternative ritualistic practices associated with grief and bereavement, focusing on the human body as a material resource in construction. Given that grief is a universal experience, the project examines the remnants following one’s death: the physical body, personal belongings and identity. It explores methods for repurposing these elements architecturally. The project shifts public perception and fosters a more open conversation about mortality.
25.11 Eleanor Mettham, Y4 ‘A Hotel for Haunting’. This scheme explores the irrational and enchanting realms that architecture can transport us to. It focuses on the hauntingly beautiful Gothic architecture and the gateway it provides into the spiritual realm. Based in the ‘haunted’ historical city of York, the project proposes a hotel of heightened perception that accentuates the receptivity of a spiritual realm for visiting guests. Their memories are continually captured and replayed, so that within its stone walls are our own souls.
25.12 Shuming Zhou, Y4 ‘The Second Insomnia: To the Forest’. A living forest primary school enhances the magical relationship between children and nature, and the power of self-healing. The site is a huge ‘sandplay’ allowing for healing, learning and growth. A wild vibrant landscape is provided to appreciate and learn from, and to be shared by all.
25.14 Monica Burman, Y4 ‘The Polishing Refinery’. This multifaceted beauty hub combines a salon, training centre and a beauty parliament to preserve and enrich Catford’s unique beauty culture amid urban regeneration. This project addresses the displacement of local beauty professionals, serving as a cultural and social anchor that values the significance of nail design – a craft traditionally marginalised yet rich in cultural expression.
25.15 Kayley Gibbons, Y4 ‘Ornamental Grime’. Current social movements encourage the acceptance of age, tattoos and imperfections on the skin as signs of individuality. Can the same be done for the urban skin? Can a structure’s defects be incorporated into the design process? The project is an interpretation of Catford’s redevelopment plan, including a retrofit of its abandoned substation. It houses a factory that functions as an epidermis, growing the cells that build its outer membrane, and a club that celebrates the town’s ‘grimy’ subcultures.
25.16 Bianca Croitoriu, Y4 ‘Marmalade City’. In response to Catford’s redevelopment, this project introduces a community-led housing initiative with controlled rents to address London’s unaffordable housing crisis. The design draws inspiration from cakes, bakeries and pop culture, with a focus on women’s safety and needs. It utilises a hyperfeminine aesthetic to challenge societal norms, exploring the complex balance between celebrating and critiquing femininity.
25.3
25.4
25.10
25.11
25.13
2023
What Is Your Measure?
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
What Is Your Measure?
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
Measurement is critical to architectural operations. The siting and location of parts depend on our capacity to register the geometry and nature of the materials we use and how to put them together. We do not dispute the importance of measurement, but we observe the cultural shift in the political agency of the measure and the consequence that this has had on architectural values.
In many realms within the politician’s reach, there has been an increasing tendency to measure what people do as a means of control and passing on responsibility. Consequently we live in a culture where things are valued because they can be measured rather than because they matter. Many of the attributes of architecture that elevate one project above another defy numerical appropriation, yet they register strongly in our experience. The reductive nature of conventional measuring can have a numbing and normalising effect on architectural production. PG25 looks at ways of valuing those dimensions that matter to each student and sit beyond conventional means of calibration.
PG25 is interested in the processes and methods of design. It explores how they can nurture ideas that go beyond the oftenreductive logic of programme and performance specifications. We are interested in the parallels between how the medium of design can inform the content of a project and how construction techniques can embody those ideas in the built work.
Our unit is interested in teasing out the particularities of each student’s concerns, and in finding ways to explore and realise those ambitions. Some students have developed media for exploration that translate directly into production; others focus on developing the medium for researching an idea or the techniques for realising their concerns.
This year PG25 travelled to Brussels and Amsterdam for their field trip to study examples of architecture where the architect was able to express their fascinations through their built works. These included the work of the Belgian designer Victor Horta. We visited museums where exhibits displayed a precise resonance between idea and technique, such as in the construction of musical instruments and anatomical models. We also studied techniques of display used in other museums to enhance the value of their objects’ content.
Year 4
Vasily Babichev, Samantha Dorrity, Simona Drabuzinskaite, Soyun Lim, Olivia O’Driscoll, Natalie Rayya, William Smith
Year 5
Theo Brader-Tan, Florence Hemmings, Hanna HendricksonRebizant, Yu-Wen (Yvonne) Huang, Joe Johnson, Ziwei Liu, Matthew Needham, Olivia O’Callaghan
Technical tutors and consultants: Bedir Bekar, Hareth Pochee, Jerry Tate
Thesis supervisors: Alessandro Ayuso, Andrew Barnett, William Victor Camilleri, Paul Dobraszczyk, Shaun Murray, Sophia Psarra, Fiona Zisch
Critics: William Victor Camilleri, Peter Cook, Ana Monrabal-Cook, Alex Pillen, Jerry Tate
25.1–25.2 Ziwei Liu, Y5 ‘Rehearsing and Acting Architecture as a Design Process’. OMA is an architectural office that engages in the practice of physically acting out and rehearsing architecture. Through this process, the architects gain experience in learning to ‘be’ architecture. The project investigates a system of varying power and levels of responsibility between the body and architecture.
25.3–25.5 Joe Johnson, Y5 ‘Laminated Vessels: Moulding a Hostel from Flat Sheets’. This project explores the design and fabrication of moulded timber components –laminated geometries with curvature in more than one plane. The project examines how curvature can be drawn from developable sheets of veneer. Woodwind instruments were developed to explore how moulded timber shells could form enclosed vessels. These studies were then reimagined as inhabitable spaces.
25.6 Florence Hemmings, Y5 ‘Characters at the Hairdressers’. The project explores relational performances and interactions between invented architectural characters within the programmatic charge of a hairdressers, sited within a Brussels arcade. The characters are assembled under a series of mundane alibis, and their individual mannerisms are present as both drawing tools and machined pieces.
25.7–25.9 Theo Brader-Tan, Y5 ‘So Brick, Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want’. The project researches the methods by which architecture is typically practised. It investigates traditional methods of drawing through parallel projection and uncovers novel, alternative ways of arriving at architecture. This project renews a wholly masonry architecture. Clay is of particular interest due to its ability to be both plastic and hard, such as soft clay or rigid ceramic.
25.10–25.11 Olivia O’Callaghan, Y5 ‘Somewhere I Have Never Travelled’. Where do we go when we read? The project, designed for Amsterdam’s city centre, answers this by creating a bar residing in the metaphysical; its drawings invite you in, wherever you may be visiting from. The pencil artwork emerges from data collected within the site at dusk when the pub opens. Small devices constructed from black mirrors and poetic fragments were taken to the site at this time and created textual openings, using the fragments as locators.
25.12, 25.15 Hanna Hendrickson-Rebizant, Y5 ‘Bodily Aberrations: The Anatomical Bathhouse’. This project asks the public to suspend their beliefs and delve into sublime unreality, asking what if architecture could be a fleshy body – an autonomous body with hair, spots, stretch marks, flab and inner workings, much like our own bodies. A body capable of physiological responses such as blushing, getting goosebumps, sweating and excreting, as well as being capable of growing and metastasising.
25.13 Olivia O’Driscoll, Y4 ‘Orchestrating a Compassionate Travel’. This project proposes an acoustic orchestration of a Brussels metro station to momentarily accompany the lonely traveller on their daily commute. Instruments have been devised from the usual station infrastructure to bring metro travel to life. As the lonely traveller embarks on their daily commute through the city, moments of interaction between the traveller and the architecture of the station have been orchestrated to compassionately guide and accompany users through the space.
25.14 Natalie Rayya, Y4 ‘Bondage in Fifth Gear’. This project teases the boundaries of pleasure. It seeks new, unexpected pleasures by exploring the idea that stimulation could come from an architecture of sensation. It embraces otherness and provocation and gives architecture a surreal and sensual life. The proposal is a culmination of fetishistic poesies drawn from a tectonic, mechano-erotic investigation of pleasure and sensuality, a flirtation between speed and intimacy.
25.16 Simona Drabuzinskaite, Y4 ‘Artificial Womb Pregnancy Home’. Exploring the opportunities of prenatal architecture, the pregnancy home is a temporary residence where families cohabit with an artificial womb. The baby moves through five womb vessels correlating to the five stages of physical and sensory development. The family space is also rearranged in response to this. The architecture becomes a pregnant body, relieving the pregnancy apparatus from the burdens of physicality and freeing it to become a purely relational process. This new and improved body discusses ideas of the separation of subjectivities and softening of thresholds.
25.17 Vasily Babichev, Y4 ‘The Institute of Environmental Abstraction: Unmasking Catenary Architectural Abstraction’. This project investigates abstraction as a tool between technology and the more-than-human world. This term refers to our understanding of the processes that make up our ecological environment. Through developing methods of reflection and projection, the programme explores optics and catenary simulation as abstracted wonders of the physical world.
25.18 Matthew Needham, Y5 ‘Rue Du Départ’. This project investigates the potential of layering in architecture. Through the iterative deployment of analogue drawing, model-making and film animation, these methodologies reveal a series of layers within alternate architectural worlds. Using a cyclical process of filming, drawing and modelling, different spaces are re-animated, creating a constant feedback loop. This enables a method of flattening and stretching across different media, which reveals the many different spatial arrangements that can exist in the same instance.
25.19 William Smith, Y4 ‘The Erosive Musical Laboratory’. The project conceives an experimental space where music and erosion intersect with the exploration of unconventional musical techniques and compositions influenced by erosion. The project examines the morphology of erosion, investigating alternative architectural design and construction methods that harness its power. The project focuses on utilising rammed earth as a method to experiment with and construct an eroding architecture that can be adaptable, reusable and sustainable.
25.20 Soyun Lim, Y4 ‘The Embassy of the Anonymous’. This project explores an architecture of emotions, examining the possibility of fabric in curtains as an enclosure and tool to reveal and conceal privacy. This project looks at how the fabrics could function as a device to articulate the subtle psychology of fear and comfort as an extension of a personal experience with the object. Curtains mediate the residents’ presence, with light, shade and soft wind constantly breaking and establishing the threshold of privacy. Depending on the density of daylight and fabric textures, the project provides different atmospheric experiences, which are explored by a wide range of physical models and collages.
25.21–25.23 Yu-Wen ( Yvonne) Huang, Y5 ‘Bodies on Air’. The research begins with a choreographic method of design. By using a body as a spatial drawing instrument, the planar conditioning of bodily knowledge is challenged. To transgress this horizon(t)al framework, the project physically posits the body as the ‘degree zero of spatiality’ and explores the embodied experience of flying, using a series of experimental performances to speculate on what the altered spatial experience could potentially reveal and afford architecturally.
25.12
2022
An Ecology of Architectural Knowledge
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
An Ecology of Architectural Knowledge
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
This year PG25 is running architectural research and creative practice in parallel. We asked what constitutes an ecology of architectural knowledge, with a particular emphasis on each student’s underlying practice. The unit helps students develop a practice that is individual to their fascinations, with an emphasis on the processes, material and media that can carry a particular form of speculation. Research and practice are developed simultaneously, both through experimentation and careful reflection. Although the academic year typically places emphasis on the final project, this year we acknowledged that most practitioners have a practice that constantly evolves and transcends an individual project.
One of the pleasures of architecture is that it first gathers many ideas and interests, then makes sense of them through an assembly that is richer and more telling than the parts. Where does the knowledge enabling us to do this come from and how do we further that knowledge? We have investigated how new architectural knowledge is generated while also learning from the past. We also explored the ongoing studies of architects and artists in other fields, examining ideas and acts of practise to develop skills and sensibilities. We were specifically interested in how spatial networks equate to ecological networks across disciplines, and the ways in which architectural knowledge exists within larger networks.
Our site this year was the Isle of Portland, Dorset. Unimaginable volumes of stone have been extracted from the island to build London’s monuments (one million cubic feet for St Paul’s Cathedral alone). The combination of the given geology and subtractive quarrying have created a captivating landscape. As stone is having a renaissance as a sustainable material and a more economically viable material to work with due to CNC tools, Portland provides an opportunity to study the rich history of stone construction and to speculate on its future possibilities.
Year 4
Theo Brader-Tan, Florence Hemmings, Yu-Wen (Yvonne) Huang, Joe Johnson, Ziwei Liu, Olivia O’Callaghan
Year 5
Hannah Anderson, George Barnes, Samuel Beattie, Grant Beaumont, George Brazier, Conor Clarke, Eleanor Evason, Bessie Holloway Davies, Simona Moneva, Sindija Skilta, Adam West
Technical tutors and consultants: Bedir Bekar, Ioannis Rizos, Jerry Tate
Thesis supervisors: Alessandro Ayuso, Oliver Domeisen, Christophe Gérard, Polly Gould, Joshua Mardell, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Shaun Murray, Thomas Pearce, Stamatis Zografos
Critics: Alessandro Ayuso, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Perry Kulper, Ben McDonnell, Alex Pillen, Mark Ruthven, Gill Scampton, Justin Sayer
Partners: Emmanuel Vercruysse and Frederik Petersen (Hooke Park)
25.1–25.2 Hannah Anderson, Y5 ‘Nightwalking the Highlands’. The project explores our relationship with the night and landscapes of darkness. Darkness is an everyday phenomenon that could easily be overlooked due to its apparent simplicity: a lack of light. But what if darkness is not as simple as it seems? How might we see more when we see less? Could the night reveal rather than conceal?
25.3 Adam West, Y5 ‘Infra-Sculpting Portland’. How could architecture make relationships between different speeds of change? The research began with examining events too fast or slow for us to usually notice. In an abandoned gulley in Tout Quarry, Portland, an existing sculpting infrastructure is extended, providing opportunities for local students to develop artistic practices and reconnect with traditional local crafts.
25.4–25.5 Samuel Beattie, Y5 ‘An Isle of Excavation –A Guildhall for Stonemasons’. The project adopts a decommissioned Admiralty mine as the site for a stonemason’s guild and supplementary workshop. The question of temporality is a key element explored throughout the project. A series of conversations between landscape and occupant evolve through the development of the architecture.
25.6 Yu-Wen (Yvonne) Huang, Y4 ‘Once upon a Tide’. This project explores the architecture of choreography, using physical and digital garments as drawing instruments to transpose the body’s tacit knowledge of Portland Bill’s coastal landscape into built spaces across a magnitude of scales.
25.7–25.9 George Brazier, Y5 ‘Body and Rock’. The body primarily relates to space through furniture and architectural details such as handrails. Furthermore, the act of climbing shifts a largely horizontal usage of space to a vertical one. The work culminates in the design and manufacture of a dining table/climbing wall/site model/drawing board that allows the body to be used as a design tool and questions how the body relates to architecture.
25.10 Grant Beaumont, Y5 ‘Don’t Mention Rabbits’. The Isle of Portland Falconers’ Lodge is an experiment in pre-emption, anticipation and finding home. Using the operations of a falconry lodge, the architecture explores how to position itself on the site in the most meaningful way possible, while holding itself in a state of apprehension, waiting for its next requirement. As it does this, it allows for new conditions and spaces to emerge, and with them, the potential for new ecological discoveries.
25.11 Olivia O’Callaghan, Y4 ‘Somewhere I Have Never Travelled’. After years of producing successful books, a group of authors are running out of ideas and are looking for new ways to write. One of the authors particularly enjoys long walks to develop their ideas. On one of these walks, they overhear a couple animatedly discussing a strange story about the surrounding area.
25.12 George Barnes, Y5 ‘Regenerative Pressure Points: The Portland Archive at Durdle Pier’. The term ‘regenerative pressure points’ highlights the use of the old to influence the new. Through the inclusion of our past, whether recent or distant, we are able to imagine an architectural framework where old and new can contribute to an architectural totality.
25.13 Ziwei Liu, Y4 ‘Untitled’. The project explores the body as a site of transformation and reinvention, while questioning the conventions between body and architecture. If the body is changed, how does architecture change? Conjoined bodies investigate how multiple bodies might come together and ask ‘what are the terms of their engagement both with the architecture and with each other?’
25.14–25.15 Simona Moneva, Y5 ‘Satellite House’. The project is sited on the coastline of the Isle of Portland and is a two-studio residency in which artists and researchers can live and work, providing temporary accommodation, shared spaces and private studies. The architecture is an exploration of spatial connections between physically disconnected fragments (satellite structures) which are bound by a conceptual framework, lines of sight and methods of communication.
25.16–25.17 Eleanor Evason, Y5 ‘Of Nips & Nits’. The work teases the idea of artefacts ‘not-in-place’ through an exploration of fossilisation – that strange transformation of something alive and soft into something porous and bone dry. The results of anthropocentric fossilisations are fascinating: shoals of pint glasses partially digested in the trunk of a Volkswagen Beetle.
25.18–25.19 Theo Brader-Tan, Y4 ‘The Sweep, the Cut and the Lay Up’. This project is an investigation into the relationship between drawing and making, a relationship that is taken for granted in architecture, with its established drawing conventions such as the section and two-point perspective. The topic is enlivened, however, by peering into the historical means of drawing-to-make by shipwrights (the loft) and stonemasons (the trait).
25.20 Florence Hemmings, Y4 ‘Between the Grains and Gaps – An Object-Led Conditions Forecaster’. Enabling the perception and prediction of the near and far, through the inspection of washed-up objects gifted to the reconfigurable littoral site by the tide, the programme operates within the realms of a ‘lost and found’ concept, but with projective capacity.
25.21 Bessie Holloway Davies, Y5 ‘Of the Body, of the Earth: Portland Crematorium’. The project provides a space for mourners to celebrate the lives of their deceased loved ones, allowing memorialisation and remembrance to take precedence via the rituals that take place. Themes of transformation and containment are particularly present. The relationship between the body and ceramics will facilitate the containment of the physical and metaphysical body and soul, allowing for the immortalisation of an embodied memory.
25.22–25.23 Joe Johnson, Y4 ‘Linkage Lamination – Carving a Festival in Portland, UK’. Stemming from a close study of Michihiro Matsuda’s recycled guitar No.125A, this project is concerned with minimising material waste and developing fabrication strategies that extract the maximum potential from timber and local materials. The project explores two methods of fabrication – earth casting and timber lamination. Initial studies in casting concrete in carved earth reveal the scope for fluid, highly intricate geometries to be achieved without the need for complex formwork.
25.24–25.25 Sindija Skilta, Y5 ‘In Search of the Ordinary and Forgotten’. This exploration of nature pursues a transdiscursive approach. In so doing, it extends the discourse of architectural knowledge. Formed from various readings of nature, studies reveal the entanglement of natural phenomena as their materiality, forces and modes of generation overlap and affect each other.
25.26 Conor Clarke, Y5 ‘A School For Trespassing’. The project explores the viscosity of space and the fluidity of bodies through cutting metal and textiles. There are two stages to forming sheet metal: cutting and folding and stretching and shrinking. When using the wheeling machine, the process happens within arm’s reach – the form is determined between the capacities of the machine and the body and becomes a metaphor for making architecture.
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25.4 25.5
25.7 25.8
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25.12
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25.17
2021
Decadent Ecologies
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
Decadent Ecologies
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
PG25 helps students develop their own methods of practice, concentrating on finding a resonance between the means of representation in design, where the media they invent or appropriate either hold or provide a critical resistance to their architectural ideas. We see this as parallel to the way in which ideas can be made present through the careful and inventive application of materials and processes when building architecture.
Normally, we start the year by building a research project. These range from surveying items to understand a site on the terms of each student to inventions that project an idea onto a site at full scale, or building an instrument that invents or takes possession of a medium. This year, due to the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions and limited access to the workshops, this has not been possible. Despite this, many students developed their own voice through whatever was available at home.
We started the year with the observation that most of the methods used to address climate change operate on the same terms as the actions that caused the difficulties in the first place: reductive systems of problem solving that ignore the larger and more diverse ecologies in which we are intertwined. We therefore did not set out to establish problems and solutions. Rather, we asked about the diverse influences that play on the built environment and how architecture discusses their simultaneous differences. We were interested in how the cessation of activity during lockdown revealed new opportunities, e.g. seismologists listening to the Earth without so much human noise, and aspects of our lives that we had taken for granted, e.g. the accuracy of weather forecasts due to data collected by commercial flights.
Such a broad ecology is synonymous with the way architecture gathers diverse concerns and needs. We embarked on the work by looking at examples that took in the most surprising differences of discipline or need. Our sites were mostly in Brighton and the South Downs, East Sussex. We examined how long-term knowledge of the use of local materials, such as flint and chalk, was built into the vernacular architecture.
As is typical in the unit, each student took the work in their own direction. Projects looked at a range of connections between social groups in the city, issues of trespassing, new landscapes, connecting diverse groups with local knowledge to more disciplinary researchers, and playing out the pleasures of geomorphological movement. Despite the circumstances, students developed their own means of studying their territory.
Year 4
Hannah Anderson, George Barnes, Samuel Beattie, Grant Beaumont, George Brazier, Eleanor Evason, Bessie Holloway Davies, Sindija Skilta, Adam West
Year 5
Conor Clarke, Abigail Cotgrove, Arthur Harmsworth, Zachary David Higson, Emmeline Kos, Louis Peralta, Joel Saldeck, Barry Wong
Thank you to our technical tutors and consultants: Sinéad Conneely, Patch Dobson-Pérez, Egmontas Geras, Jerry Tate, Sal Wilson
Thesis supervisors: Amica Dall, Christophe Gérard, Polly Gould, Thomas Pearce, Simon Withers
Thank you to our critics: Alessandro Ayuso, Kirsty Badenoch, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Bryan Cantley, Peter Cook, James Craig, Penelope Haralambidou, Florian Köhl, Perry Kulper, Ifigeneia Liangi, Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Ben McDonnell, Rocky, Mark Ruthven, Jerry Tate
25.1–25.3 Joel Saldeck, Y5 ‘Prosthetic Material Realities’. One of a number of study puppets built to help form an architecture. Models were built around (and cast off) the puppets and sets of furniture with various degrees of specific fit (dimensionally and conceptually).
25.4–25.5 Zachary David Higson, Y5 ‘Sites of Flux’. The project responds to working in an aggregate quarry where the lease elapses if a certain amount of material is not moved each year. It proposes a reconfiguration of the ground for various events and the architecture provides the infrastructure.
25.6 Samuel Beattie, Y4 ‘Stowed Away’. A building for people who, like stowaways, want to belong to another place. The project was evolved using drawing methods incorporating a flatbed scanner and geological material from the site.
25.7–25.9 Abigail Cotgrove, Y5 ‘Amphibious Bodies’. The project explores the spatial equivalent of amphibiousness: having two modes of existence of doubtful nature. The building is situated between the city and a nudist beach in Brighton and plays out intermediate sites of belonging to both territories.
25.10–25.11 Hannah Anderson, Y4 ‘Brills Lane Hotel’. An unfolded elevation of a refurbished seafront hotel in Brighton. Its interior world is concealed, yet is partly given away, by the architectural drapery that makes up the bedrooms and other parts of the hotel, as well as the way its life is reflected in the walls of the adjacent buildings. A cutaway drawing depicts two bedrooms that can be laundered in their entirety between stays. The folds and thickness of the drapery offers varying degrees of modesty for the guests.
25.12 Grant Beaumont, Y4 ‘Interloper’. Unfolded section of a boatyard partly made of reused hulls from old boats. It is a project thick with displaced attributes learned from interpolated shadows that were confused about their origin.
25.13–25.14 Adam West, Y4 ‘Brighton Marina Coastal Research Facility’. View of the building in a storm. The project is a multi-programmed building that entices diverse groups with local knowledge to organically share their wisdom about the site with others.
25.15 Bessie Holloway Davies , Y4 ‘Organic Resonance’. In today’s society, time is a precious commodity. There is a possibility of losing oneself in a moment of time through the medium of sound. The spatial qualities of a place change with our perception of sound and silence. A cymatics device was constructed, using site-recorded frequencies, quarried chalk and pigments to investigate and express sonic temporality.
25.16 Conor Clarke, Y5 ‘Institute of Trespassing and Land Politics’. Stainless steel building shells made on the English wheel, a metalworking tool that produces compound curves from flat sheets of metal.
25.17 George Brazier, Y4 ‘A Beacon of Fragility’. An ever evolving and decaying set of buildings created from chalk, flint, clay and trees, made in collaboration with a robot and a group of craftspeople local to the site.
25.18 George Barnes, Y4 ‘The Excavation of the Chalk Spa’. The project explores how architecture can propagate plausibility. The chalk stream spa was designed by painting a premonition of the project in various thicknesses of paint and then covering this with a slurry of chalk from the site that is critically excavated to reveal parts of the premonition.
25.19 Arthur Harmsworth, Y5 ‘Playing Amongst the Wilds’. The project plays out the space of indifferent acceptance and partial dependency between godwits, deer, people fishing and wildlife researchers.
25.20 Sindija Skilta, Y4 ‘An Active Ground’. The project explores how architecture can work with the geomorphological shifts in the ground and seasonal variations, including flooding, rather than resist them. Various joints were invented and manufactured to play out these accommodations.
25.21 Barry Wong , Y5 ‘Lost Between Worlds’. The project asks how spatial and temporal uncertainties can be created for visitors to a construction on Brighton Beach.
25.22–25.23 Eleanor Evason, Y4 ‘Borrowed Ground’. An infrastructure for a set of quarry caves built to support a range of activities and performances. A smaller building lightly touches the caves.
25.24–25.25 Emmeline Kos , Y5 ‘Quarry the City’. The project asks how the city can be more like a wild landscape. It constructs a new ground over Brighton with interstices that absorb and expand on the existing programmes within the city. As the new landscape takes over, it quarries material from parts of the existing city to expand its reach.
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25.19
2020
On Expedition
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
On Expedition
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
In PG25, each student to develops their own experimental practices to tease out possibilities beyond those that tend to be prescribed by typical sets of architectural logic. Much of the work is process led and there is an emphasis on the role of making and drawing as part of each student’s design methods. The outbreak of Covid-19 and the absence of a workshop has provided an extra spur for resourcefulness.
This year our main question has been about how architecture can discuss a ‘world beyond’, with some projects speculating on worlds external to their building and others providing discoveries of deeply internal presence. While certain projects took the idea of preparing for an expedition literally, others employ unsuspecting witnesses to tell of worlds beyond or forms of production as emissaries, to gently permeate territories beyond their boundaries while some reinvent more traditional sites of expedition within the city. All are particular to the fascinations of each student.
We saw the preparation for an expedition as parallel with the production of architecture, where there is a hope for what might happen but much of what will actually transpire is unknown – and indeed that the greatest longing might be for circumstances beyond our imagination.
Our study trip took us to a range of deeply personal projects and collections on the borders between France, Germany and Switzerland. Many of the sites we studied exhibited an intensely personal fascination that was embodied in the work though the thoughtfulness and particularity of the way they were made, something we care about deeply in the work of the unit.
Year 4
Samuel Beattie, Conor Clarke, Abi Cotgrove, Arthur Harmsworth, Zachary David Higson, Emmeline Kos, Louis Peralta, Joel Saldeck, Barry Wong
Year 5
Alexander Borrell, Darren Buttar, Callum Campbell, Peter Markos, Tsz Hin (Matthew) Poon, Blake Walter
Thank you to our consultants Jerry Tate and Will York
Thanks to our thesis tutors Eva Branscome, Oliver Domesien, Richard Martin, Simon Withers
Thank you to our critics Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Bryan Cantley, Peter Cook, Neil Denari, Perry Kulper, Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Shaun Murray, Alex Pillen, Mark Ruthven, Bob Sheil, Nada Subotincic, Jerry Tate, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Mark West
25.1, 25.4 Peter Markos, Y5 ‘Dilettanti’. This project looks at transdisciplinary knowledge through the projection of a spatial instrument. The instrument resonates with ground surfaces, deciphering and illustrating a world beneath the ground. The value of transdisciplinary knowledge is embodied in the practice of dilettantism. When connected to the ground, the tool hits the drum, which records the sonic output. This audio reveals the subterranean world to our imaginations.
25.2–25.3 Louis Peralta, Y4 ‘Water Bodies’. This project explores the relationship between textile membranes and water. As water fills the space of the membrane internally, a swelling occurs, causing the membrane to become a pressurised vessel animated with life. However, as water leaves the membrane, the vitality of its bulging form becomes instead a draped piece of fabric, sagging in space. These membranes become water storage vessels and pools, becoming active layers in space making.
25.5 Abi Cotgrove, Y4 ‘The Water Potteries’. This project originates within the author’s experience of living upon the Thames Estuary within an environment in which the presence of water was constantly apparent. Water is often considered as an undesirable element of architecture, something to be kept out and moved away, a burden, a destructive imposter. The project aims to invert the architectural approach towards water by accepting and embracing its presence within the design therefore exploring its fundamental capabilities and, furthermore, its relationship to us as other bodies of water.
25.6 Callum Campbell, Y5 ‘Unravelling Memories’. This project uses bespoke photographic equipment to construct architectural opportunities within the mis-registrations of stereoscopic images. The project exists in the space between optical registration points, which become distorted by speed, accelleration and varying focal distances, as manipulated by the photographic instruments.
25.7–25.8 Tsz Hin (Matthew) Poon, Y5 ‘Institute for Hydraulic Calibration and Hydrometrical Automata’. This pigeon-seducing spatial arrangement sits at the seam of the human and nonhuman worlds. Experiments were conducted to re-educate and reprogramme pigeonkind while an an investigation into their logic explored how they see the world in pec(k)uliar ways. Through this dioramic setup, pigeons are seen the as probes and compasses of the outer world.
25.9 Emmeline Kos, Y4 ‘ Naturisms’. This project explores the idea of escape from the sensations of being in a city. The crowded streets, the dense polluted air, heavy artificial materials, jarring noises and harsh lighting. The project questions whether architecture can be more like nature, if it can increase the awareness of the effect of nature. It proposes using a naturalised language, using biomimicry, to produce this affect. Nature is seen and experienced as flows of energy, as matter that is interconnected.
25.10 Darren Buttar, Y5 ‘Conjured Spaces in the Mind’. This project merges aspects of the city of London with the author’s memories of the spaces carved in Mount Pilatus near Luzern in Switzerland. Its Swiss-landscape-inspired theatre borrows from ideas of the grotto. The grotto invites the curious citizen to investigate its internal world, progressively revealing the stages and scenery within the theatre building and its visual relationship to the city beyond; a progression which is simultaneously reflected in the intesifying of the faceting of the rock elements.
25.11 Joel Saldeck, Y4 ‘Two Bodies’. This work explores architecture and the human body as a merged functional entity. The project understands the body as flesh, dependent on the conveniences of constructed environments, drawing on architecture-as-prothesis to ensure its survival. A prothesis is worn to facilitate a greater or more convenient level of performance or
inhabitation. The projects asks how architecture can reinvent systems of behaviour, occupation, and movement, increasing one’s awareness and critical capacity to establish their very own form of inhabitation.
25.12 Blake Walter, Y5 ‘Perpetual Looking Machine’. This project explores relationships between representation, content, and fiction. Filmic elements (set design, lighting, cinematography) influence the architectural content of the project. The programme assumes the function of a film studio and backlots; however, the reflexive nature of the project also allows the sets to open and manipulate the organisation of the site and soundstages. The relationship between the image, the site, and their content informed various studies throughout the year, including a reading of different mirrors through slitscan algorithms, the ’baking’ of procedural geometries from film frames, and site expeditions with mirrors which embedded multiple site actors in a single, unmanipulated photo.
25.13 Zachary David Higson, Y4 ‘The Third Space/Field of Pleasures’. This project investigates defamiliarisation as a tool for recalibration within the city of London, proposing an alternative ‘tourist’ route for London’s South East. The theme of montage runs as a parallel between pictorial montage and programmatic montage within the project. The initial leap into pictorial montage begins to start a dialogue between itself and a possible programmatic montage. The relationship between pictorial and programmatic montage starts to ask wider questions about other types of montage that can exist.
25.14 Barry Wong, Y4 ‘Nostalgia’. This project aims to explore the feeling of living in two worlds: the familiar (Hong Kong), and the unfamiliar (London). Inspired by Susan Stewart’s 1984 book On Longing, the initial models explore ideas of the miniature and the souvenir, as an attempt to make the foreign feel more familiar, and to understand the desires that stem from nostalgic feelings.
25.15 Arthur Harmsworth, Y4 ‘Ubereigen and the Present Memory’. This project is situated in Begson’s conception of the memory cone: a bank of past experience from which one draws when encountering a new thing, so that it is laced with the presence of others like it, and yet distinguished by its uniqueness. The project proposes a set of movable and reconfigurable spaces as a means of investigating themes of memory and spatial montage, through animated models.
25.16–25.17 Conor Clarke, Y4 ‘Garden Jacket’. This project began with a fascination with the body and its scalar relationship to the urban world. How might we meet the city halfway? A jacket is constructed to anticipate a journey and to confiscate objects. Confiscated itself by places and landscapes, it tries to act as a memory theatre for these illicit exchanges. The architecture is informed by tailoring techniques and the construction of textile garments as a metaphor and model for larger spatial constructions and architectural manufacture.
25.18–25.20 Alexander Borrell, Y5 ‘Time Vessels’. This expedition begins with a quote from Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk. The project stems from an interest in time, and particularly these ’other times not of the clock’. The prevailing question is what is an other time? How do you capture or sample this other time? Can you measure it? The project navigates these questions with families of time vessels, precious and fragile ceramic cameras. Slowly these vessels discover a capacity beyond themselves, not only to capture time but to draw out their own.
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2019
Practice and Simulation
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
Practice and Simulation
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
PG25 focuses on developing experimental research methods and processes. We value the production of tacit knowledge and encourage practices that tease this out in research. We are also interested in the role of media in the development of ideas, and the way in which this might provide a critical resistance or resonance in discussion. This particularity leads to a diverse range of means of representation in the unit, often developments of existing processes or fresh inventions. We see the reciprocity between design, material and processes of representation as parallel to the ways that ideas can be embodied in architecture. Many of the students in the unit, therefore, make use of the wide range of manufacturing techniques available at The Bartlett.
This year, we have concentrated on developing ideas of practice along with the means to simulate them. Our projects and fascinations were diverse, with projects ranging from explorations into the world of geological action to observing how speed mediates our experience of architecture; also understanding what is to be learned from the spaces implicated in still-life painting; experiencing sensual architecture; improvising architecture, and more. Each student developed the means to test their ideas through content-related modes of simulation. In most examples, this involved the construction of the apparatus through which ideas are tested and that nurtured the character of the subsequent architecture. On our field trip to Sweden and Denmark, we visited projects in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Klippan, Malmö and Copenhagen, by architects such as Lewerentz and Asplund.
This year, Professor Perry Kulper from the University of Michigan was the Sir Banister Fletcher Visiting Professor, and made a wonderful contribution to our reviews, seminars and tutorials.
Year 4
Callum Campbell, Pete Markos, Tse Hin Matthew Poon, Blake Walter
Year 5
Yuezai Chen, Vlad Daraban, Patrick Dobson-Perez, Egmontas Geras, Ren Zhi Goh, Isaac Leung, Gaoqi Lou, Carys Payne, Toby Preston, Roshan Sehra, Ben Spong
Critics: William Victor Camilleri, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Peter Cook, Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Shaun Murray, Thomas Parker, Alex Pillen, Mark Ruthven, Bob Sheil, James Solly, Jerry Tate, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Simon Withers
Thank you to Geoff Morrow, Jerry Tate and the B-made workshop team
25.1–25.3 Patrick Dobson-Perez, Y5 ‘Digging Matter(s)’. This project, based in Portland, investigates architectural possibilities on a geological timescale. Habitable machines manipulate the landscape and become buried, only to be rediscovered in deep time.
25.4–25.7 Egmontas Geras, Y5 ‘Haunts’. This project interrogates a personal photograph of a manor house which sits in ruin amongst the trees. The forest is usurping: the roof is off, the manor shuts its two visible eyes. The rest can fit between the overexposed sky and the unknown darkness of the shade.
25.8–25.9 Roshan Sehra, Y5 ‘Accelerating Hotel’. Speed, velocity and acceleration are parameters associated with motion. This project utilises a spatial score as a method for spatio-temporal investigation in the context of a hotel situated in the gaps between Charing Cross station and the Southbank in London.
25.10–25.12 Ren Zhi Goh, Y5 ‘In Nature’s Shadow’. This extraordinary office block is situated in the spaces between the Blackfriars Bridge in London. Somewhere between architecture and infrastructure, these individually-scaled spaces provide habitats for birds, humans and horses.
25.13–25.14 Ben Spong, Y5 ‘House at 685 Degrees’. This design/research-based project explores how still-life painting can function in an architectural context. Several fundamental questions are asked: ‘How can objects have the capacity to ‘discuss’ content from other worlds?’ ‘What spatial relationships are defined when site and architectural objects are assembled within a still-life composition?’ and ‘Does the concept of ‘blackness’ have the ability to describe indescribable spatio-temporal depths?’
25.15 Callum Campbell Y4 ’Thurston’s Match Hall’. This project proposes a space for practicing and learning snooker, in the heart of London’s Soho. The project has been investigated using pinhole photography and the making of large cameras.
25.16 Pete Markos, Y4 ’Collaging Markets: An architecture of production’. This market, on the edges of Edgware Road, acts as a gathering device for spatio-cultural phenomena. The project provides a reliable infrastructure whilst the products on sale are visually curated in a way that generates its own architectural character.
25.17 Vlad Daraban, Y5 ’Fantastic Realities (and Where to Find Them)’. Hackney Wick is the site of a project which investigates how normal spaces can become shaped by personal fascinations, in a world where residential architecture is becoming increasingly generic.
25.18–25.19 Toby Preston Y5 ’Improvising Architecture’. This project is a proposal for a primary school in Frostrow Fell, Yorkshire Dales National Park. Several drawing instruments were developed as a means to interrogate the site and the practice of improvising architecture in an educational context.
25.20 Yuezai Chen, Y5 ’Time Clinic’. Based on the white cliffs of England’s south coast, this project is a proposal for a medical clinic which celebrates and makes visible the passing of time on a range of timescales. This research was conducted through a series of paintings, material studies and time-based site studies.
25.21 Blake Walter, Y4 ’Inverted Museum’. A building which exhibits scale models of projects which never existed or no longer exist. The concept of ‘the frame’ is investigated as a spatial construct for housing these exhibits on multiple scales.
25.22–25.23 Gaoqi Lou, Y5 ’Le corps a l’envers l’architecture en verlan’. This project proposes a club in the heart of Paris for those who are fond of dressing in extravagant and whimsical ways. The research was conducted through a series of 1:1 garments which dress the performance of an elaborate architecture, on a large-scale site model.
25.24 Matthew Poon, Y4 ‘Spatial Monosodium Glutamate’. This project investigates the uncanniness between the reality that we experience on a day-to-day basis, and the unreal encounters that we are free to explore within the world of videogames and virtual reality technologies. The resultant architecture is ‘alive’ with character, behaviour and reaction.
25.25 Carys Payne, Y5 ‘Complementary Therapies’. This research project uses a series of drawing devices which encourage the architect to ‘feel’ space as opposed to seeing it. Situated by the water in Berlin, the project offers a series of spaces which are designed to emit an ‘energy’ which can often only be felt and not seen.
25.26 Isaac Leung, Y5 ‘Tuning the Acousmatic Veil’. This radio station in the Regent’s Canal broadcasts found sound, performed music and sound art. A grand piano acts as an analogy for the site, which can be performed, improvised and articulated as an acoustic representation of designed architectural space.
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25.18
Activating Architecture
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
Year 4
Patrick Dobson-Perez, Ren Zhi Goh, Alex Kitching, Gaoqi Lou, Carys Payne, Toby Preston, Roshan Sehra, Ben Spong
Year 5
Naomi Hui Au, Alya El-Chiati, Declan Harvey, Kar Tung (Karen) Ko, Demetris Ktorides, Yawen (Arwen) Liu, Vita Rossi, Dougal Sadler, Tatiana Southey-Bassols
Thank you to our consultants: Geoff Morrow, Jerry Tate
Thank you to our critics: Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, James Craig, Penelope Haralambidou, Mark Morris, Shaun Murray, Phuong-Trâm Nguyan, Thomas Parker, Frederik Petersen, Alex Pillen, Mark Ruthven, Neil Spiller, Jerry Tate, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Simon Withers
We are grateful to our sponsors: Studio Mark Ruthven, Tate Harmer Architects, [Y/N] Studio
Thank you to Mick Delieu, Hythe Ranges Safety Officer, for making his site available to us, and to The Bartlett’s B-made workshop staff for their help and support
Activating Architecture
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
The core of our unit involves helping each student to develop their own experimental practices, both in their approach to design and in the media through which they think and work. An experimental approach fosters rich design potential while also providing a productive educational method. We value the way that working experimentally through materials and processes can open up possibilities that might elude us when working with more conventional design methods. We encourage speculative risk and not knowing where the idea will end. To operate like this, we look for rigour when nurturing the relationship between idea and technique: seeking ways in which each student might develop or invent their own media and be in control of it on their own terms. We are much more interested in the literal and figurative manifestation of the idea than in the diagram.
This year we speculated on how architecture might be implicated in between various realities. To help study this we visited Rome and Naples with a special emphasis on examples of architecture where there was a tantalising assembly of material and pictorial space. Most of the unit then proposed building projects on sites on England’s South Coast. These include the Hythe Ranges, that combine in equal measure the cultural marks and operational strictures of the military with ecologies hardly touched by humans during the military tenure. Above the Ranges, the soft cliffs of the Roughs present a realm of diverse geologies, inventive military listening devices and all manner of walkers. Our research teases out diverse ways of activating these sites, that question the obvious oppositions between nature and culture.
Architects often feel the pressure to explain their work but we are interested in less reductive constructions. Each student has created their own worlds with apparent logics but also more hidden realms of invention. Many of the projects are developed through constructions or drawing methods that act more as tools for discovery than as illustrations of the designs. Much of the act of design depends on tacit knowledge, and so we have been looking at ways in which, not only the research instruments, but also the propositional tools can help develop such a capacity.
25.1 Dougal Sadler Y5, ‘Body-Drawing-Environment: A New System for Drawing Architecture’. A physical and intellectual investigation into the relationship between drawing architecture and the climbing body. Multi-scaled models form an environment in which the act of climbing becomes a productive tool for determining an architecture. Figs. 25.2 – 25.4 Vita Rossi Y5, ‘Surface Translations: Pursuing Mutations in a Cosmetic Surgery’. Tailored formwork, drapery and transfered patterns generate an architecture which address ideas of surface and skin. Evidence of this process can be traced through the stitches and indentations present in the unfolded formworks and resultant casts.
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Fig. 25.5 Declan Harvey Y5, ‘Adaptive Imaginations’. This structured garden for a geo-botanist, responds to the slowly shifting landscape of the Roughs above Hythe. Evidence of a mischievous sub-plot is slowly captured by a series of pinhole cameras, synchronised and embedded in the model.
Fig. 25.6 Gaoqi Lou Y4, ‘An Experimental Holiday Home’. This house has the capacity to change state according to its occupants. The ‘Chair’ (pictured) is one of a series of studies which seeks to question our familiarity with everyday items of domestic furniture. Fig.25.7 Ben Spong Y4, ‘The Restaurant in The Roughs’. This project is situated at the end of a hike up to the Roughs above Hythe. Diners are subjected to a number of carefully curated smells from the landscape and food preparation processes. Fig.25.8 Roshan Sehra Y4, ‘Hythe Hoarding and House Clearance’. A live-in architectural salvage facility overlooks the town of Hythe and provides a place in which the objects on display are assigned value according to the way in which they are placed within the architecture. Fig.25.9 Ren Zhi Goh Y4, ‘The Cosmic
Horticultural Foundation of Hythe’. This project proposes an inhabitable instrument which connects horticulturists to the cycles of our closest celestial neighbours – the moon and sun.
Figs. 25.10 – 25.11 Demetris Ktorides Y5, ‘Pondering on Dreams’. This hotel is situated between the coastline and the end of the military shooting range at Hythe. The architecture activates a layering of realities and dream-like states in the occupant.
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Fig. 25.12 Naomi Hui Au Y5, ‘The Architect and the Collage Maker’. The proposed architecture is an installation within the archaeological site at Pompeii. The project embodies the architect’s sense of order and her perception of the world through a careful assemblage of domestic elements.
Fig. 25.13 Kar Tung (Karen) Ko Y5, ‘Chances, Deformation in Morphological Change’. A winery is located within the strips of land currently untouched and designated sites of special scientific interest, between the firing ranges. The rammed earth and clay walls slowly degrade over time, affecting the taste of the wine fermenting inside.
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Fig. 25.14 Yawen (Arwen) Liu Y5, ‘A Violin Workshop: Defamiliarising Spaces Through Sound’. This project proposes a luthier’s workshop, situated next to the wartime sound mirrors over Hythe. A range of acoustically reflective and absorbent surfaces controls both ambient and performed sounds within and around the architecture, at times making the occupant question the origin of the seemingly displaced noises. Fig. 25.15 Tatiana Southey Basols Y5, ‘Exploring Memory Through Printmaking: Impressions and Impressors’. This is a proposal for a bowling green and recreational centre, nestled within the Roughs at Hythe. Analogue printmaking techniques were used to explore ideas of time, memory and surface in a way which becomes embedded in the drawing and the realisation of the architectural proposal.
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Fig. 25.16 Toby Preston Y4, ‘Domestic and Military Strategies’. This project proposes an architecture which interrogates ideas of social hierarchy in a semi-fictional domestic setting, at the edge of a fake military town. Fig.25.17 Alex Kitching Y4, ‘Mobile Studios on the Ranges’. A series of artist’s studios with mobile Kevlar shields, move in and around the parallel programme of the firing range. The fibreglass volumes sit on tracks and can be moved and adapted to suit the individual needs of the artists in residence. Fig. 25.18 Alya El-Chiati Y5, ‘A Study into the Opportunities Held in the Conventions of Architectural Projection and Scale Drawings’. This hotel was designed using a series of perspectival devices in order to control relationships between key views and architectural sequences. The proposal was drawn and modelled in miniature.
Fig. 25.19 Carys Payne Y4, ‘Architecture for the Unconscious: The Launderette for Uninhibited Bodies’. The building seeks to encourage immersive, corporal explorations of architecture. After trekking across the hilly Roughs, visitors arrive at a launderette, where they leave their clothes behind before exploring curious spaces and pools nestled into the landscape beyond.
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Fig. 25.20 Patrick Dobson-Perez Y4, ‘Underground Naples’. This semi-subterranean project uses casting, scanning and microscopic photography to understand the urban condition of Naples, often experienced as a series of fragments.
Negotiating the Seam
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
Year 4
Callum Campbell, Vlad Daraban, Declan Harvey, Demetris Ktorides, Isaac Leung, Arwen Liu, Vita Rossi, Dougal Sadler
Year 5
George Bolwell, Simona Fratila, Andrea Rocco Matta, Kirsty McMullan, Thomas Parker, Daniel Van Der Poll, Peter West
Thank you to our Design Realisation tutor, Jerry Tate
Thank you to our critics: Penelope Haralambidou, Colin Fournier, Birgir Orn Jonsson, Neil Spiller, Mar Fer Saez, Mark Morris, Eva Ravenborg, Shaun Murray, Ifigeneia Liangi, Simon Withers, Phuong-Trâm Nguyen, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Rebecca Loewen, Mark Ruthven, Frederik Petersen, Thomas Pearce, Matthew Butcher, Carlos Jiménez Cenamor, Bob Sheil
Thank you to our sponsors: RIAA Barker Gillette, Helix Architecture, Tate Harmer, Studio Mark Ruthven
Negotiating the Seam
Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
Unit 25 is interested in experimental architectural practices, both as a means of proposing architecture and as an educational method. We concentrate on ways of thinking through the drawings and constructions we make, where the act of drawing or making might tease out possibilities beyond our immediate imagination.
This year, we have been looking at equivocal conditions. We started out by comparing Bertillon’s criminology laboratory (where the apparatus was constructed with a specificity to the programme) and Freud’s study, where apart from his chair, almost everything that is active in his practice of psychoanalysis pre-dates his invention of the discipline. Antique artefacts and furniture are appropriated for his purpose yet the room appears as instrumental and specific as Bertillon’s laboratory. We considered the realm between specificity and appropriation.
We also looked at Gio Ponte’s ‘chair chair’, a chair he said had no adjectives and was only about being a chair, yet at the same time he named it to describe its lack of weight – he also made it about lightness. He wanted it to be at once the essence of a chair and yet specifically about one thing beyond being a chair.
More generally, we looked at the ambiguity between realities and representation, spending time in Vienna and around Munich looking at conditions in the Baroque and Rococo periods, where the seams between representations and realities were blurred, especially at the Wurtzburg Residenz.
We started by examining equivocal conditions and then, from this exploration, each student went on to develop their own particular path of study.
Fig. 25.1 Thomas Parker Y5, ‘An Architecture of Lumetric Causality’. Generative Model. Film and photographs of the model are translated digitally by a programme to open up possibilities beyond the imagination. The translations are selected for a physical collage which is then translated (mostly by hand) into a set of architectural drawings.
Fig. 25.2 Kirsty McMullan Y5, ‘Simultaneous Narratives’. View from the Donaukanal. The building is designed through a series of gestures captured through various photographic processes. Each part of the project has a dedicated model as a set to locate the gestures that are played out with specially designed (and tailored) gloves. Fig. 25.3 Kirsty McMullan Y5, ‘Simultaneous Narratives’. One of many studies to work out the parts of the building. The tailors prepare garments for the
many social occasions in Vienna. The building adapts to these events and acts in anticipation of the city’s events. Fig. 25.4 Kirsty McMullan Y5, ‘Simultaneous Narratives’. Two studies using different gloves. Note the wire choreographic registers that programme what is known in advance so work can be done as intuitively as possible on the things that the gloves can design. Fig. 25.5 Peter West Y5, ‘City of Desire’. A fragment of a fragmented hostel that is dispersed around Vienna. The cuts in the grey walls allow phosphorescent paint to be sprayed onto the stretched fabric screens, casting shadows of passing travellers while also fleetingly showing decaying projections.
Fig. 25.6 George Bolwell Y5, ‘Thicket Bathhouse’. Bodies, undergrowth and the parts that make up a bathhouse are melded together in a building that explores spatial thickness on the hills above Graz. Fig. 25.7 Vita Rossi Y4, ‘Lost Property Office’. In a building that teases out many ways to understand a lost property office, building materials are themselves created out of unclaimed lost property. Fig. 25.8 Vlad Daraban Y4, ‘Occupying the Glitch’. A selective scan of a building in Vienna reveals only the parts it wishes to give away – one of a number of surveillance techniques used to probe this café and archive. Fig. 25.9 Arwen Liu Y4, ‘Purposeless Place’. This project looks at how to occupy a city without the compulsion to be purposeful, providing a sequence of ambiguous distractions next to the canal in Vienna.
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Fig. 25.10 Dougal Sadler Y4, ‘Folded City’. A series of folded paper studies which emerge through games of chance inform a proposal for a new entrance to a Viennese subway station that leads its passengers astray. Fig. 25.11 Simona Fratila Y5, ‘Alien Archive’. A number of archives in capital cities register the stories of immigrants. These archives are similar but take on small but dislocating differences due to the cultural differences of their host city. Fig. 25.12 Demetris Ktorides Y4, ‘Between the Frame and the Picture’. Seducing unsuspecting travellers on the Vienna subway into a lush and perplexing labyrinth. Fig. 25.13 Callum Campbell Y4, ‘A Gallery for One Painting’. Fig. 25.14 Andrea Rocco Matta Y5, ‘The Manufacture of Memories’. A collection of suggestive small buildings made out of folded rectangles tease out unspecified memories.
Fig. 25.15 Declan Harvey Y4, ‘Hydrological Research Centre in Munich’. Under the cover of scientific research into the flow of the river Isar, the project investigates its potential level of threat to the city. Figs. 25.16 – 25.17 Isaac Leung Y4, ‘Framing Theatricality’. As a rehearsal for designing a performance centre in a Baroque palace in Graz, a small proscenium is installed for a lift, allowing visitors to anticipate what might colour one's expectations of what might lie beyond. Fig. 25.18 Daniel Van Der Poll Y5, ‘Illuminated City – a Tourist Information Centre in Graz’. This project began by using models together with an overhead projector, where the glowing model related to its projection. It then became a tourist centre that discusses the immediate underbelly of the city.
