PG11 / Uncommon Ground

Laura Allen, Mark Smout

This year’s brief challenged students to rethink the edges and intersections between landscape and the urban realm, hand-in-hand with those between public and private space. These relationships are fluid, volatile, contested and reciprocal, and challenge the polarised notions that the unit continues to revisit: preservation versus progress and wilderness versus culture.

Situation Abnormal Our rural environment is substantially cultured as ‘wilderness kept in check’ or for the production of vast quantities of food – 70% of the UK’s land is agricultural.1 Environmental technologies and nature have become inextricably linked; cutting-edge technologies are increasingly deployed that engineer nature from the micro scale of genetically modified crops to the global scale of GPS agricultural automation. Furthermore, the landscape is crisscrossed with infrastructural networks, inter-urban links of road and rail that also connect cities with their surrounding rural areas and the regions of supply with the centres of demand. We asked, What are the radical outcomes of the synthesis of urban and rural spaces? A further blurring of the distinction between rural and urban, and private and public is the privatisation of nature. Natural capital – stocks of natural assets, access to and control of material resources, even forests and fields, soil, geology, water, air and all living things – are controlled by property rights where commercial agendas can overturn seemingly common sense. In our cities too, public spaces are being transferred to private ownership – Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) – with byelaws, urban design, surveillance and policing to control perceived misuse. We asked, How can architectural and technical innovations alleviate the pressure of private encroachment on public environments?

Re-Commoning We can see that the future of the city is inextricably linked to that of the rural. Controversially, some advocate for re-commoning – the application of a ‘sharing economy’ to urban space, borrowed from archaic rural environments that persist today. Contemporary commons are not only a material resource; they are also a form of social organisation that could be revisited in our urban environment. During lockdown, the use of urban parks soared where commoning laws – the rights of certain individuals to enjoy the property of others – were exploited. The Victorian parkland concept of ‘rational recreation’ – the ordered and orderly use of landscape – was stretched to breaking point. We asked, How can principles of commoning be applied to urban space?

Year 4 Theo Clarke, Michael Holland, Justin Lau, Kit Lee-Smith, Rory Martin, Iga Świercz, Yun Tam, Annabelle Tan, Zifeng Ye

Year 5 James Cook, Peter Davies, Meiying Hong, Thomas Leggatt, Liam Merrigan, Jack Spence, Sarmad Suhail, Ryan Walsh, Yitao Zhu

Thank you to Rhys Cannon for his invaluable Design Realisation teaching, structural consultant Stephen Foster and environmental consultant Ionnis Rizoz

Thesis supervisors: Matthew Barnett Howland, Mollie Claypool, Edward Denison, Daisy Froud, Polly Gould, Gary Grant, Jan Kattein, Oliver Wilton

1. Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (2015), Agriculture in the United Kingdom 2014 (accessed 22 June 2021), gov.uk/government/ statistics/agriculture-inthe-united-kingdom-2014

11.1 Peter Davies, Y5 ‘The Stone Language Centre’. Sited in the dormant Welsh granite quarries of Nant Gwrtheyrn, the project advocates a revival for low-carbon structural stone construction and demonstrates the whole-life benefits of stone, from extraction to material reuse. Monolithic stone buildings form The Stone Language Centre, creating a space for learning and discovery within the rich Welsh landscape. 11.2 Thomas Leggatt, Y5 ‘A Corn(ish) Community’. The Cornish coastline is being increasingly appropriated by outsiders, for outsiders, specifically second-home owners. Using a pub(lic) model, a dialogue is established between the architect and community in the design of a new village for second homeowners and local residents. The model encourages collaborative design and an immersive understanding of the project as a whole. 11.3 Annabelle Tan, Y4 ‘The River, Restoration and its Rituals’. Sited along the River Wensum in Norfolk, the building is a roving restoration scheme that visits rural villages to restore the vulnerable chalk river while engaging and empowering the local community to sustain an intimate relationship with the environment through rituals and beliefs. The building is simultaneously a restorative and ritual machine, marrying ecological values with the process of restoration. 11.4 Kit Lee-Smith, Y4 ‘Orkney’s Udal Energy’. Orkney’s foreshore and landscape boundaries, eroded by anthropologically driven climate change, are explored via an infrastructural design for the archipelago’s preservation. The design uses archaeological language and materiality alongside stone machining techniques to expose the relationship between the building foreshore and community-centric architecture. 11.5 Rory Martin, Y4 ‘The Hiker’s Retreat’. Situated in the intertidal mudflats off Osea Island in the Blackwater Estuary, the project creates a ‘hearth’ – a lost historical focal point in the home and a place for people to reconnect and share stories and experiences. The project works in harmony with the surrounding historical vernacular of the Essex coastline by referencing traditional building. The central kachelöfen (stove) stands as a beacon of sustainability and efficiency. 11.6 Theo Clarke, Y4 ‘Floreat Blaenau’. The town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, strewn with glaciers of cascading waste material, is one of seven identified sites to be included within a new UNESCO World Heritage bid. The project challenges the vision of UNESCO by highlighting Wales’ historical relationship with Patagonia, resulting in the formation of a Patagonian enclave. Analytical, physical and digital experimentation reveal elemental and man-made forces, exposing the visitor to the uncanny implementation of mechanical installations. 11.7 Zifeng Ye, Y4 ‘Inhabiting Common’s Nature’. The project seeks to establish a woodland common inside an old gravel quarry by the East Tilbury coast in Essex. Facilities allow access to the site and initiate a century-long programme of reforestation. The design aestheticises ‘waste’ land and materials, in order to rekindle a common interest in living with unappreciated landscapes. 11.8 Yun Tam, Y4 ‘Percolate Agri(Park)’. Merging agriculture, water and park in a symbiotic relationship, the project brings food currency to the citizens of Hong Kong by bridging the gap between the sensory connection of the public to the origins of food and the enjoyment of the recreational parkscape. 11.9 Iga Świercz, Y4 ‘Dressing the Scottish Landscape’. The ministry, located in the Cairngorms, has a profound understanding of the Scottish ancestral textile industry by creating soft architecture that also promotes a tourism strategy for the Highlands. The clothed interiors recall domestic rituals, the art of weaving, seasonality and the colours and textures of the Scottish tradition. 11.10 Justin Lau, Y4 ‘Leigh Frontier’. Extreme changes to global climates are expected to breach over 1,000 historic landfill sites on the British coast, through erosion. The increasing risk poses serious pollution damage to the estuarine landscape and beyond. ‘Leigh Frontier’ proposes a chained fortification embedded along the eroding edge of Leigh Marshes, allowing time to remediate one of the most toxic old landfill sites in the UK. 11.11 Michael Holland, Y4 ‘The Commons Community Centre’. The project raises awareness of the growing rate of food poverty throughout the borough of Hackney. It tackles the often negative associations of food banks, through the integration of commoning principles that inspire a sense of ‘togetherness’ and community expression, celebrating the sharing of culture, food, resources and knowledge. 11.12 Sarmad Suhail, Y5 ‘Power Palace Park’. The idiosyncratic Crystal Palace is reimagined as the showcase for the ‘Green Industrial Revolution’, providing a model for parks to become energy generating and carbon-capture resources. Ersatz materials and visual trickeries blur the line between what is ‘park’ and ‘building’, to provide a locally sourced, national-facing infrastructure. 11.13 Ryan Walsh, Y5 ‘Digital Archaic Commons’. How do we build a future where personal digital fabrication is utilised towards the common good? This project explores how users of commons, such as FABLAB, apply sophisticated digital manufacturing and scanning tools to produce decentralised architecture. 11.14 Yitao Zhu, Y5 ‘Parking Rectory Farm’. Rectory Farm is a derelict site near Heathrow, where a new public park is to be built on top of an underground logistics facility. The project challenges the park typology and envisages an alternative landscape for the site, which addresses potential financial crises. A mixture of housing, industry, infrastructure and landscape encourages richer interactions between domestic and park activities. 11.15–11.16 James Cook, Y5 ‘Inhabitable Billboard Vernaculars: Brush Park Agrihood’. Set in Detroit, ‘Brush Park Agrihood’ reimagines the potential for hoardings and billboards. Drawing inspiration from Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour’s book Learning from Las Vegas (1972), the hoardings stage moments in the storyline of construction and provide a framework for inhabitable spaces, which inevitably spill out into the backlands of the site. The agrihood’s infographics and community messages, embedded within the framework of the building, inform people about Detroit’s environmental crises. 11.17 Meiying Hong, Y5 ‘Productive Landscapes: Food community in Regent’s Park’. To counteract food poverty and waste post-pandemic, this project replans a section of Regent’s Park as an experimental food community, integrating housing with food production, collection, distribution and disposal. The terraced gardens, roof orchards and growing lands form a productive landscape in an overlooked section of the park. 11.18 Jack Spence, Y5 ‘The 4th Epoch: Reinhabiting desolate landscapes’. Highlighting the significant climate threat facing the UK’s coastline, this proposal looks to reinvigorate Hurst Castle in Hampshire through the siting of a research outpost. Digital inhabitation of the surrounding gamified landscape also enables the immersive engagement of ‘virtual researchers’ from around the world with the vulnerable coastline.

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