Advanced Architectural Studies

Module Coordinator: Tania Sengupta

The Advanced Architectural Studies module in the first year of the MArch Architecture programme focusses on architectural histories and theories. Here we reflect on architecture within a broader, critical, intellectual and contextual field – simultaneously producing and being produced by it. We look at architecture’s interfaces with other knowledge fields – from the scientific and technological to the social sciences and the humanities. We straddle empirics and theory, design and history, the iconic and the everyday. The module seeks to engage students with architectural history and theory as a critical approach to augment design, as a parallel domain to test out approaches or as a discrete or autonomous domain of architectural engagement. It focusses on three key aspects: first, a reflective, critical and analytical approach; second, research instinct and exploratory methods and research as a form of practice; and third, skills of synthesis, writing and articulation. It also acts as foundational ground for the students’ final year thesis. Our lecture series, entitled ‘Critical Frames’, covered the following themes this year: ‘Learning from Disorder’, ‘Of Naming and Tastemaking’, ‘The City as Memory’, ‘Alternative Realities’, ‘In Other Voices’ and ‘Two Readings of Materiality’. These lectures were accompanied by the heart of the module, which is a set of themed seminars. The seminars straddle, geographically, the architectural histories and theories of multiple global contexts, and, thematically, buildings, urbanism, landscapes, design, art, ecology and climate crisis, politics, activism, technology, production, representation, spatial and material cultures, public participation, urban regeneration, phenomenology, historiography and feminist and decolonial approaches. At the end, drawing upon the seminars and lectures, the students formulate a critical enquiry around a topic of their choice and produce a 4,500-word essay.

2020–21 Seminars Insurgent Cities, Sabina Andron Architecture + Film, Christophe Gérard U-topographics: Utopic journeys into postmodern culture, Robin Wilson Architecture and The People, Daisy Froud Feminist Approaches to Space and Text, Edwina Attlee Senses and the City, Jacob Paskins Green New Dialogues, Jon Goodbun Architecture as Spatial and Cultural Practice, Tania Sengupta Architecture, Art and the City, Eva Branscome Architectural Splendour: The history and theory of ornament 1750–2020, Oliver Domeisen Architecture and the Image of Decay, Paul Dobraszczyk The Dialogic Imagination: Landship and practices of worlding, Tim Waterman Teaching Assistants Farbod Afshar Bakeshloo, Adam Walls

The Peculiarity of the Chinese: The evolution of the cloud Kai Farzád Lee Tutor: Oliver Domeisen

Abstract: In The Grammar of Ornaments, Victorian architect and design theorist Owen Jones (1809-74) categorised more than a thousand ornaments of different cultural periods exhibited in the Great Exhibition, to demonstrate that ‘certain general laws appear to reign independently of the individual peculiarities of each.’ 1 In this taxonomy of ornamental styles, he curiously exclaimed that ‘… the Chinese are totally unimaginative’ and ‘had not the power of dealing with conventional ornamental form’.

The British looting of the Qing Empire later gave Jones access to an increased number of art samples from China, which prompted him to dedicate an entire book to the study of Chinese ornaments. Here he retracted his previously unfavourable opinions and declared that Chinese ornaments equally obeyed his universal principles of ornamental forms. Nevertheless, a closer reading of this second book still shows his dissatisfaction with the supra-realistic representation of natural objects, such as the recurring bats, bamboos, peonies, pine and prunes found on artefacts. The first part of this essay, therefore, investigates the figurative characteristic of Chinese ornaments of the Ming and Qing dynasties in particular and attributes it to a predominantly linguistic interpretation of ornaments, which embalms the motifs in a rigid system of symbolism, and renders them incapable for further artistic development.

The Chinese justifiably take pride in the diversity of literary meanings and homophonic allusions associated with these ornamental motifs. However, the propensity of employing a nationalistic art-historical agenda calls for a historical examination of Chinese ornaments. The second part of this essay thus picks up what Austrian art historian Alois Riegl mentioned but avoided discussing in his book Stilfragen (1893): the Chinese origins of a particular motif on Persian rugs and other Oriental artefacts, the ‘cloudband’.

Utilising Riegl’s own methodology of establishing a historical theory of ornament’s evolution in an attempt to combat the materialist and symbolist interpretations of his day, this essay traces the dynamic evolution of the cloud motif from Zhou bronzes to Han silk, from a coffin in Hunan to the Buddhist temples of Yungang, Shanxi. What comes to light is the transcultural breeding of ornamental motifs, both among the different Chinese dynasties and between the Chinese and the West.

As ornaments flee the hegemonic persecution of modernism and are torn in the postmodern struggle for idiosyncratic identities in our day, perhaps an appreciation of its transcultural genesis will lead to the next stage of its evolution.

Image: The unmistakable curls of the cloud motif lend any decorated item its ‘Chineseness‘. Image Source: Plate XXIV from Owen Jones’ Examples of Chinese Ornament (1867). 1. Owen Jones (2016), The Grammar of Ornament (S.l.: Girard & Stewart).

Hermetically Sealed: An analysis of the homogeneous and heterogeneous methods of ecological preservation presented in canned food & Biosphere II Samuel Pierce Tutor: Tim Waterman

Abstract: Hermetic seals provide stability to the everyday. Supermarket shelves are stocked with perfectly preserved foods, canned and vacuum-sealed, their contents frozen in an abiotic stasis. Emergence of the air-borne transmission of Covid-19 ignited a need for protective boundaries, the infected quarantined and society disbanded into bubbles filled with panic-bought apocalyptic supplies.

The contemporary built environment relies on specificity to provide comfort and efficiency. Just as canned food relies on perfectly balanced temperature and humidity to prevent natural decay, Le Corbusier believed the machine age could provide stability through ‘exact air’.1 Both present a hermetically sealed utopia of sterile closed air circuits with consistent internal pest-free conditions.

In 1991 an alternative air-tight utopia was enacted. Sealed away for two years in a 3.15-acre greenhouse in the Arizona desert, eight women and men conducted an ecological experiment. The isolated crew survived unaided amongst a maximally biodiverse and self-sufficient ecosystem, designed and named as the spiritual successor to Earth’s own heterogeneous life-support system, Biosphere II. In contrast to the sealed tin can’s exclusive environment, Biosphere II’s biomes were over-packed with flora and fauna beyond their natural capacity, assuming a self-organising ecosystem, a cathedral to Gaia.2

My research analyses these two contrasting scales, approaches and utopian responses to ecological preservation, tracing their apocalyptic origins and comparing their technocentric cornucopias through Lyman Tower Sargent’s definition of utopianism. Then, following Peter Sloterdijk’s description of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, I explore their methods of sphere-formation, reflecting on the contrasting egos and shared delusions embodied in their controlled interiors. Finally, using Laura Alice Watt’s analyses of the conservationist movement in the US National Park Service, I highlight the paradoxical effects of their approach to preservation.

In conclusion my paper begins to make a case for an alternative, ‘sympoietic’ utopia – one free from self-defined airtight boundaries that deny the reality of an alternative. With porous tissues and open edges, the free passage of air becomes an integral part of its survival. Like the necessity of airflow in the process of fermentation, the utopia should remain ‘leaky’.

Image: Model of Biosphere II, assembled from an assortment of tin cans, 2021. 1. Le Corbusier (1967), The Radiant City: Elements of a doctrine of urbanism to be used as the basis of our machine-age civilization (New York: Orion Press), p42. 2. Jane Poynter (2006), The Human Experiment: Two years and twenty minutes inside Biosphere 2 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press), p75.

Ritual and Space in Modernity: Emergent ecological rituals in the modern everyday Annabelle Tan Kai Lin Tutor: Tania Sengupta

Abstract: Ritual study has largely undervalued the significance of modernity and its conditions to ritual practice, especially in reference to architecture as a tool for ritualisation on a mass scale. This has allowed modern architecture’s ritual power to go unquestioned while it continues to structure and determine everyday socio-cultural beliefs and practices. This essay traces the evolution of critical ‘ritual modes’ throughout the modern age, using the frame of everyday life. Through this, I aim to uncover the dialogical relation between architecture, ritual practice and dominant belief systems, traversing the public and private realms.

Fordism catalysed the emergence of a Functionalist mode of ritual, born from the linear rhythms of the assembly line. Factories and machinery regimented bodily movement and gestures in the public realm, while standardised housing design segregated functions of the home in a similarly mechanical way. In our current everyday, most of us still perform our daily rituals in housing arrangements embedded with vestigial remnants of the Functional belief, embodying its beliefs with each ‘spontaneous’ ritualised action.

The working class resisted the alienation caused by mass production labouring in the domain of the factory with mass consumption in the private domestic realm, creating richly decorated, ornate interiors with a myriad of commodities. Individuals found new agency in transforming their private spaces to pursue the belief of self and identity as constructed by commodity. But again, public spaces like the shopping mall provided the dominant meanings and symbols in this belief system.

Finally, an emerging ecological mode of ritual is investigated in this essay as an evolutionary product of the previous modes, looking particularly at urban ecological rituals like recycling. However, differentiating characteristics between this nascent or emergent mode and its predecessors can be observed when these newly invented rituals are seen as a whole habitus. I have used the case study of the Skip Garden in London to analyse how spatial and ritual practice entwine to promote ecological thinking. In the age of the Anthropocene, modern ritual is reinvestigated here to understand architecture’s significance in propagating and nurturing new ecological ritual practices for the future.

Image: Ritual modes of modernity, Oxford Science Archive; Fordist, (post-Fordist) consumerism, Material World by Peter Menzel, 1994; and the emergent ecological, author’s own.