The Bartlett Summer Show Book 2020

The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Summer Show 2020

Contents 4

Introduction Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Professor Bob Sheil, Professor Frédéric Migayrou

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Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1) Programme Directors: Ana Monrabal-Cook, Luke Pearson

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Year 1 / Meta-Morphosis: Ovid-Rome-Dalston Frosso Pimenides, Max Dewdney UG0 / Multitude Murray Fraser, Michiko Sumi UG1 / Alba Gu Bràth (Scotland Forever) Amica Dall, Toby O’Connor UG2 / Between the Object and the Picturesque Barry Wark, Maria Knutsson-Hall with Levent Ozruh UG3 / Birth and Rebirth Ifigeneia Liangi, Ralph Parker, Daniel Wilkinson UG4 / Inter Alia Katerina Dionysopoulou, Billy Mavropoulos UG5 / Generation Anthropocene: Risking Everything Julia Backhaus, Ben Hayes UG6 / Material Cultures Paloma Gormley, Summer Islam UG7 / Voyages Extraordinaires Pascal Bronner, Thomas Hillier UG8 / Experiments in the Upside-Down Farlie Reynolds, Greg Storrar UG9 / Follow the Water Jessica In, Chee-Kit Lai UG10 / Jackdaw Dream Kyle Buchanan, Mellis Haward, James Purkiss UG12 / Eyes Wide Shut Johan Hybschmann, Matthew Springett UG13 / In Decision Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger UG14 / Repeat, Recall, Rewrite David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata UG15 / Real-Time Delay Ivana Wingham, Lucy Pengilley Gibb

24 36 48 60 72 84 96 108 120 132 144 156 168 180 192

206 Architectural & Interdisciplinary Studies BSc Programme Director: Elizabeth Dow 220 Engineering & Architectural Design MEng Programme Director: Luke Olsen

234 Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2) Programme Directors: Julia Backhaus, Patrick Weber 236 PG10 / What If? An Alternative Urbanism History Simon Dickens, CJ Lim 248 PG11 / Incomplete Laura Allen, Mark Smout 260 PG12 / Cultivating the Future and the Past Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill 272 PG13 / Re-outottíα / Re-utopia Sabine Storp, Patrick Weber 284 PG14 / Systemic Impact Jakub Klaska, Dirk Krolikowski 296 PG15 / Parallel Presence / Parallel Presents Max Dewdney, Susanne Isa 308 PG16 / What Matters and the Capabilities to be Sensed Matthew Butcher, Ana Monrabal-Cook 320 PG17 / Prompt Score Ensemble Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker 332 PG18 / Moonchild Ricardo de Ostos, Isaïe Bloch 344 PG20 / Out of…

Marjan Colletti, Javier Ruiz Rodriguez 356 PG21 / Multiverse Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter 368 PG22 / The Caring City Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno, Daniel Ovalle Costal 380 PG24 / Guilt Free Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite 392 PG25 / On Expedition Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews 404 Design Realisation Pedro Gil, Stefan Lengen 406 Advanced Architectural Studies Tania Sengupta, Stylianos Giamarelos 410 Thesis Edward Denison, Robin Wilson, Oliver Wilton 418 420 421 422 423 425 426

Architecture Education Declares Alumni The Bartlett Promise Our Programmes Public Lectures Events & Exhibitions Staff, Visitors & Consultants

SUMMER 2020

Introduction This book documents outstanding work achieved in probably the most difficult and demanding year any of us has ever experienced.

In mid-March, our entire school transitioned online. Following government advice and in the fast-unfolding and uncertain situation of the Covid-19 pandemic, UCL took the decision to close its campus. Almost overnight, our 1300 students and 260 staff had to leave their physical work environments: offices, labs, studios, tools, printers and models were abandoned, buildings locked down and we all switched, entirely and completely, to remote working.

The workload increase was enormous, everything had to be adjusted, translated and adapted to alternative forms of delivery. Bob immediately gave up his sabbatical and joined Barbara to co-direct the school. At the same time more than 90 members of staff, academic and professional services, volunteered to assist in meeting the need for adjustment and new thinking. A series of Action and Advisory Groups was devised, each addressing a different set of challenges we now faced together as a school. Cutting across subject areas and domains of expertise, these groups formed new, passionate and powerful collaborations in an open environment of ideas and shared purpose.

The impact of sudden remote working on our students was enormous. It is with great admiration and appreciation that we acknowledge their extraordinary generosity and commitment in coping with this. Many had to return home, some to countries with onerous quarantine regimes. Many struggled with the nebulous and insidious stress of isolation. It is a testament to their tenacity and quality as people that they continued working, writing and designing, despite unsuitable spaces for study, poor wifi, minimal computer and fabrication facilities.

Yet amazingly, in these exceptionally difficult circumstances, we witnessed truly heroic and selfless acts, where students juggled their own projects while home-schooling younger siblings, nursing grandparents, caring for neighbours and fellow students, and managing general household duties with parents away carrying responsibilities as key workers.

Our tutors and professional services staff also continued with impeccable integrity and generosity. Working from their homes, they have been supporting everybody, juggling the significant extra workloads of running of a large and complex school remotely. Queries of every kind from students and colleagues have been fielded from the shared awkward spaces of hallways, kitchens, bedrooms and attics by colleagues juggling children, partners and frail parents along with all the complexities and demands of their own domestic lives.

Finances and human resources have been vigilantly maintained; meetings, tutorials, seminars, lectures, crits, assessments and external examinations have continued with brilliantly inventive reorganisations and procedural adaptations, maintaining the grounding rhythm of the academic year, despite distance.

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Concurrently, our school has been reacting to the focus on structural socioeconomic inequalities – specifically of race – with deep awareness of our responsibility to acknowledge, support and influence change: Black Lives Matter.

We are continuing also to address the climate crisis through our curriculum; we are committed to Architecture Education Declares. We form a hub in a vast ecology of relationships that span multiple generations, mindsets, trajectories and cultures. In the context of the many challenges that affect aspiring architects, recent graduates and experienced practitioners alike, we acknowledge that our school must do more to transform itself and the field of architecture as inspiring and talented environments that are equitable, diverse and inclusive.

Our students regularly produce unexpected and outstanding projects, yet the quality this year, in these unprecedented circumstances, has been humbling.

We are immensely proud. On every exam board, external examiners have repeatedly raised the high standard of this year’s projects, the contemporary relevance and rigour of subjects addressed in designs and writings, and beyond this, that the moment of transition when the school shifted to working online is invisible within the work is remarkable. The bravery and perseverance of our school community has been incredible. It is this spirit that has enabled us all to keep going, and to revise, evolve and innovate new ways of engaging together.

Our need to express gratitude is enormous, manifold and extensive. We wish to congratulate everyone – and appreciate everyone – who has taken part this year.

The impossible has been made possible. We thank all our students, our tutors, our Professional Services colleagues, the faculty and UCL, friends, parents, guardians and neighbours worldwide. The unexpected has challenged us all.

Yet it has revealed, at its best, an inspiring resilience, honesty and kindness that promises a great future.

Our school, faculty and university are transforming, we are co-creating new, better, ways of working together. Study is a lifelong practice and we are all learning all the time. Our strength will come from the renewed bonds formed in these extreme circumstances, and from our ability to face uncertainty with creativity and purpose as exemplified in this magnificent publication and exhibition. Well done to all those involved in their making.

Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange Acting Director / Deputy Director Professor Bob Sheil Director Professor Frédéric Migayrou Chair and Bartlett Professor 5

Prizes Architecture BSc Year 1 Architectural Prize for Resilience and Adaptability All Year 1 Students Norman Foster Foundation Scholarship Kate Taylor Process & Materiality Prize Emilia Bryce Process & Materiality Prize Ana-Maria Cazan Prize for Recycling and Response to Local Fabric Oska Smith Benjamin Woodier

Victor Kite Design Technology Prize Sharon Tam, UG13 Portfolio Prize Sirikarn (Preauw) Paopongthong, UG13 Xinze (Sean) Seah, UG7 Architecture BSc Year 3 Bartlett School of Architecture Medal Tengku (Sharil) Bin Tengku Abdul Kadir, UG5 James Della Valle, UG8 Rebecca Honey, UG0 Heba Mohsen, UG7 Jingxian (Jackie) Pan, UG13 Chak (Anthony) Tai, UG8 Donaldson Medal Ernest Chin, UG5

Site & Cultural Strategy Prize Samuel Field Yuto Ikeda Eoin Shaw Josef Slater Yeung (Julie) Yeung

Fitzroy Robinson Drawing Prize Giorgos Christofi, UG7

Collaborating with Community Prize Wei (Keane) Chua Luana Martins-Rodrigues Jacob Meyers Kate Taylor

Environmental Design Prize James Della Valle, UG8

Environmental Responses and Inventions Prize Taro (Luke) Bean Vanessa Chew Esme Dowle Andrew Fan

Making Buildings Prize Diana Mykhaylychenko, UG8

Craft, Technology & Invention Prize Nana Boffah Kai Mckim Ying (Sunny) Sun

Architectural & Interdisciplinary Studies BSc Year 3

Architecture BSc Year 2 Jump Studios Award for Professional Practice and Enterprise Selin Bengi, UG12

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Portfolio Prize Matthew Semiao Carmo Simpson, UG8 Alice Shanahan, UG10

Experimental Technology Prize Paul Kohlhaussen, UG14

Trevor Sprott History and Theory Prize Ewa Roztocka, UG5

Bartlett School of Architecture Medal Nyima Murry Distinguished work in History and Theory Tseng-Han (Christina) Lin Hou Exceptional Work in Creative Practice Mari Katsuno

Engineering & Architectural Design MEng Year 1 Council for Aluminium in Building Tectonics Prize Jengchi (Jason) Li, Eddie Jones, Cynthia (Marjorie) Luque Escalante, Miriam Czech, Co-op 4 Engineering & Architectural Design MEng Year 2 Engineering & Architectural Design Integration Prize Harry Sumner, Studio 2 Engineering & Architectural Design MEng Year 3 Engineering & Architectural Design Integration Prize Praefah (Muse) Praditbatuga, Unit 2 Architecture MArch Year 4 Design Realisation: Fabrication Innovation Prize Peter Davies, PG11 Design Realisation: Experimental Innovation Prize Elissavet Manou, PG24 Design Realisation: Environmental Innovation Prize Jiashi (Jess) Yu, PG10 Design Realisation: Innovation in Detail Prize Daniel Pope, PG16 Design Realisation: Entrepreneurial & Delivery Prize Arinjoy Sen, PG12 History & Theory Prize Benjamin Sykes-Thompson, PG12

Portfolio Prize James Cook, PG11 Elissavet Manou, PG24 Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates Bursary Rory Noble-Turner, PG18 Hawkins\Brown Bursary Marjut Lisco, PG13 Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners Bursary Elliot Nash, PG12 Architecture MArch Year 5 Bartlett School of Architecture Medal Julian Besems, PG21 Isaac Simpson, PG12 Karen Tsang, PG10 Yip Wing Siu, PG13 Philip Springall, PG17 Quiming (Douglas) Yang, PG14 Sir Banister Fletcher Prize and Medal Krina Christopoulou, PG24 Sir Andrew Taylor Prize Samuel Davies, PG16 Ambrose Poynter Prize Maxime Willing, PG11 Fitzroy Robinson Drawing Prize Clement Laurencio, PG15 Max Fordham Environmental Design Prize Siqi (Scott) Chen, PG11 Portfolio Prize Edmund Tan, PG10 Theodoros Tamvakis, PG20 John Cox Project Award Stephany Govier, PG15 Kit Wong, PG10 Professional Studies in Architecture, Part 3 Ross Jamieson Memorial Prize Orawan Jongsomjitr 7

Photo by Thomas Richardson, UG1

Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA   Part 1)

Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1) Programme Directors: Ana Monrabal-Cook, Luke Pearson The boundaries of the architectural profession have been tested more than ever in recent times, not only confronting technological and cultural shifts, but also environmental, political and human crises.

In this context, Architecture BSc continues to establish primary knowledge and understanding about the core principles of the discipline, providing a platform from which experimental and challenging design work can emerge.

The programme teaches students the fundamentals of architecture, developing their critical ability to think about what it means to synthesise architectural designs and what methods they can utilise to do so. This year, the course has accommodated a wider set of methods and research themes than ever before, with social housing projects, live site work and participatory practices sitting alongside explorations in advanced digital simulations, experimental drawing practice, filmmaking and virtual reality. In each case, experimentation is tied to a rigorous approach to design, not only in spatial planning but also in technology, social engagement, environmental design and computation, allowing our students to produce complex and layered buildings.

Our Year 1 cohort is organised as a single group before a design unit system begins in Year 2. The first year is a ‘contextual’ year in which architectural expertise is developed through diverse experimentation and exploration. Several modules, including ‘The History of Cities and their Architecture’ and ‘Making Cities’, meld ideas from different programmes and areas of research within The Bartlett, bringing undergraduates into contact with students from different disciplines to develop an understanding of the historical and social role of the architect.

In Years 2 and 3, our units offer unique expertise and a broad range of approaches, allowing students to connect their studies to their developing interests. The 14 undergraduate units explore diverse themes and agendas, including the relationship between architecture and landscape, digital simulation and fabrication, the role of narrative in architecture and the political context of design in London and beyond. Each unit establishes a methodology that builds core skills and expands them in new directions.

Following tailored research briefs, units undertake an in-depth field trip, forging links with other architectural schools and studios to help our students understand the complexities of producing architecture in radically different environments.

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Programme Administrator Kim van Poeteren

Throughout the course of the degree, students relate their design projects to all other taught modules. This culminates in Year 3, where design and technology are developed in synthesis, complemented by self-selected thematic interests in history and theory. By the end of their undergraduate studies, our students are equipped to engage with the design of architecture in a sophisticated manner, whilst also placing their own practice and research into wider socio-political, historical and environmental contexts.

This year, ambitious design projects from our undergraduate students vary, from architecture that proposes a ‘whole tree’ approach to timber construction in the face of wastage by the timber industry, to designs that peer behind the carefully cultivated face of Disney’s parks. Buildings that reuse waste stems from the Chelsea Flower Show as an architectural material sit alongside proposals for moonscape towers held up by the centrifugal force of orbital satellites. Architecture designed to be constructed through prefabricated timber cassette systems meets structures fused together within phosphogypsum stacks over hundreds of years.

Strange buildings that emerge from studies into children’s toys, bears and beer halls are seen alongside projects examining the history of Czech modernism, the living spaces of Glasgow tenements and older people’s societies in Essex. Projects that celebrate the cinematic construction of space, through films and virtual reality experiences, coexist with social housing schemes and buildings designed through participatory workshops.

The Covid-19 situation produced a fundamental shift in the working environments of our undergraduate students and a challenge to our studio culture. Even in this adversity, the students rose to produce projects of ever greater imagination, rigour and sensitivity.

The sheer diversity of approaches and the daring acts of design that emerge demonstrate that as our undergraduate students carefully study the fundamentals of architecture – whatever circumstances may arise – they continue to push the ever-shifting boundaries of the profession.

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Year 1 Students Nasser Al-Khereiji, Timothy Alexander, Yasminah Alhaddad, Supitchaya (Praew) Anivat, Taro (Luke) Bean, Seb Bellavia, Tida Bitar, Nana Boffah, Bogdan Botis, Grace Boyten-Heyes, Emilia Bryce, Monika (Nina) Buranasetkul, Ana-Maria Cazan, Pui (Benson) Chan, Park (Jin) Chan, Zehao (Daniel) Chen, Yu (Colin) Cheng, Hei (Eunice) Cheung, Vanessa Chew, Oi (Tiffany) Chin, Chantelle Chong, Wei (Keane) Chua, Daniel Collier, Natalia Da Silva Costa Dale, Cosimo De Barry, Adnan Demachkieh, Laura Diekmann, Anna Dixon, Minh (Dominic) Do, Esme Dowle, Fangxingchi (Brendan) Du, Dylan Duffy, Andrew Fan, Samuel Field, Alannah Fowler, Arnold Freund-Williams, Gabriel Fryer-Eccles, Aaron Green, Holly Griffiths, Marten Hall, Eleanor Hollis, Maxwell Hubbard, Zubair Ibrahim, Leonard Ide, Yuto Ikeda, Jovan Jankovic, Jazzlyn Jansen, Ying Jintarasamee, Kyra Johnston, Sally Kemp, Veronika Khasapova, Gaeul Kim, Moe Kojima, Yi (Glory) Kuk, Yan (Johnson) Lam, Daniel Langstaff, Wei Lim, Kah Loh, Sean Louis, Adam Lynes, Luana Martins Rodrigues, Kai McKim, Jacob Meyers, Eleanor Middleton, Johanna Moro, Ayaa Muhdar, Junyoung Myung, George Neyroud, Natnicha (Amy) Ng Wen Yi, Chisom Odoemene, Esma Onur, Leonids Osipovs, Siqi (Suky) Ouyang, Zahra Parhizi, Nicolas Pauwels, Michalis Philiastidis, Krit Pichedvanichok, Clara Popescu, Jack Powell, Alexander (Sasha) Pozen, Rupert Rochford, Joseph Russell, Rafiq Sawyerr, Flavia Scafella, Eoin Shaw, Mufeng Shi, Zuzanna Sienczyk, Xavier Simpson, Thanan (Orm) Sivapiromrat, Josef Slater, Oska Smith, Adam Stoddart, Libby Sturgeon, Luke Sturgeon, Pasat (Proud) Sudlabha, Ying (Sunny) Sun, Zhelin (Simon) Sun, Jerzy Szczerba, Scott Tan, Hau (Charmaine) Tang, Kate Taylor, Yen Ting, Karla Torio-Rivera, Shannon Townsend, Nathan Verrier, Walinnes (Eir) Walanchanurak, Isobel Watson, Elise Wehowski, Henry Williams, Benjamin Woodier, Peixuan (Oli) Xu, Chan (Antonio) Yang, Yeung (Julie) Yeung, Joy You, Ron Zaum, Jiahui Zhang, Fangyi (Erica) Zhou

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Meta-Morphosis: Ovid-Rome-Dalston

Year 1

Frosso Pimenides, Max Dewdney

The first investigation of the theme of metamorphosis started by studying Ovid’s seminal poem. Nine stories from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ were translated and translocated into nine sitespecific temporary performative installations, exploring a series of transformations in between and within spaces of Walmer Yard in West London. The setting acted as a theatrical scene for the one-evening event. As architecture and its practice is hugely dependent on collaboration at all levels, the installation enabled students to cultivate this skill, while learning to interpret ideas and qualities and experiment with craft and fabrication.

The second phase was during our inspirational field trip to Rome – Ovid’s home – where the students had the chance to experience, draw, and translate the layers of the city through an analysis of various elements. All these explorations led us to an understanding of the city as a porous entity whose life and inhabitation is constantly in flux.

The third phase took place in Dalston, where students were located between Ridley Market and Dalston Junction (on an old Roman road). A number of infill sites gave the opportunity to continue the investigations of reuse, translocation, and transformation. Dalston has a rich history of farms, agriculture, charitable institutions, entertainment and railways.

The students engaged with the diverse community and the range of cultural traditions by working with the existing sites and developing scenarios of a range of programmes and occupations. In dialogue with the social, political, and environmental conditions, they enhanced and preserved the urban fabric by developing projects that animated and transformed the local life.

Halfway through the year, shortly after the site visits, the global pandemic transformed our lives and studio culture: students packed all their stuff overnight, left their Bartlett studios behind, embraced their memories as ammunition and dispersed all over the world, and our remote studio culture lives began. Within a week everything shifted online, going from a collective analogue studio and way of working and teaching into a mediated digital studio whilst retaining an analogue way of working. While this has created challenges, it has also brought us closer together and led us to discover a new intimacy and immediacy with architects, students and teachers, alumni, and friends from around the world. 2019-20 has been a rather extraordinary year in initiating our students to higher education and exploring what architecture is, might be, and can be. This new way of teaching, exploring architecture and exchanging ideas has made us see that by disturbing and interrupting our habits we can find opportunities to see forgotten values, qualities, and new possibilities.

Associates: Emmanouil Stavrakakis, Stefan Lengen, Gavin Robotham Tutors: Alastair Browning, Joel Cady, Zachary Fluker, Maria Fulford, Alicia Gonzalez-Lafita, James Green, Ashley Hinchcliffe, Vasilis Ilchuk, Fergus Knox, Stefan Lengen, Sonia Magdziarz, Laura Mark, Elliot Nash, Thomas Parker, Marcel Rham, Colin Smith, Jasmin Sohi, Emmanouil Stavrakakis We would like to thank Dimitris Argyros, B-made, British School in Rome, Jason Brooks, Pascal Bronner, Emilia Bryce, Blanche Cameron, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Alan Ceen, Nat Chard, Laura Cherry, Fenella Collingridge, Peter Cook, Kate Darby, Edward Denison, Elizabeth Dow, Jane Gilbert, Emer Girling, Niamh Grace, Anderson Inge, Julitta Iranek Osmecka, Stephen Johnson, Carston Jungfer, Crispin Kelly, Carolina Kield, Katerina Kourkoula, Dragana Krsic, Roberto Ledda, CJ Lim, Alex de Little, Hannes Livers Gutberlet, Tim Lucas, Adam Lynes, Laura Mark, Niall McLaughlin, Josep Mias, Ana MonrabalCook, Don Onyido, Colin O’Sullivan, Luke Pearson, Sophie Percival, Jonathan Pile, Ulysses Pimenides Whelan, Emily Priest, Alicia Pivaro, Aeili Roberts, Neba Sere, Alistair Shaw, Eoin Shaw, Bob Sheil, Harmit Soora, Catrina Stewart, Greg Storrar, TOPOS String Quartet, Kim Van Poeteren, Amy White, James Willis, Oliver Wilton

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Y1.1 Group Installation Project, Y1 ‘Actaeon’. The installation is a translation of the myth of Actaeon from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. A cluster of crystal ice sculptures is suspended at the top of the stairwell of House A in Walmer Yard. As they melt, water drops fall in the narrow void of the staircase. They resume falling as they touch the striking brass cymbals which rest on a hand-beaten brass basin.

The drops leave their trace as they erode the dark-green copper, revealing the golden brass.

Y1.2 Group Installation Project, Y1 ‘Narcissus’. The installation is a translation of the myth of Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The installation is comprised of three datum creating using different thin membranes.

Each membrane transforms and utilises the courtyard through light and reflections, owing to their distance from one another. The materials and forms are based on tactility and the choreography of the performance centres around drawing together and pulling away.

Imprints from the mould of the latex and the inversion of the same motif on the neckpieces and umbrellas relate to the idea that reflections are not the same as the real thing.

Y1.3 Group Installation Project, Y1 ‘Phaethon’. The story of Phaethon in Ovid’s poem describes the journey of an arrogant mortal boy who burnt the earth. The journey to the lower-ground floor of Walmer Yard is a translation of the hero’s journey. The visitor descends through a ramp into an enclosed space. This piece transforms the wall by mimicking its concrete pattern with ply strips. The two datum of strips heighten the viewer’s senses in the space: one creating an overhang above the head and the other mounted onto the wall.

Y1.4 Group Installation Project, Y1 ‘Arachne’. This web was born out of the story of Arachne from Ovid’s poem.

Arachne is a girl who is transformed into a spider by the God Minerva when she challenges her to a weaving contest. Suspended by seven acrow props, these are designed to swoop through various levels, causing the observer to experience differences in size and proximity with relation to the room in Walmer Yard.

Y1.5 Group Installation Project, Y1 ‘Icarus’. In an attempt to escape from the labyrinth, Icarus and his father Daedalus decide to fly across the sea. Icarus flies too close to the sun, the sun melts his wax wings, plummets towards the sea, and meets his death. This installation explores concepts of verticality, falling, and perspective, highlighting the relationship between heavens and earth in the context of Ovid’s poem. The strings emphasise the scale of the void and the black fabric provides a medium for the wind and other elements to interact with the installation, whilst also uniting the space – that spans eight metres.

Y1.6 Group Installation Project, Y1 ‘Pygmalion’. According to Ovid’s poem, Pygmalion, disgusted by the promiscuous nature of the women in Cyprus, sculpts a perfect woman in ivory called Galatea, which Venus transforms into a live woman. A series of inviting structures manipulate the position of the body to both constrain movement and restrict the view to contemplate the yurt room in Walmer Yard. At the centre of the space is a swinging light controlled by a draining weight aiming to disorient the viewer.

Y1.7 Group Installation Project, Y1 ‘Echo’. Stalking, hiding, reaching, despair: these are Echo’s postures as she trails Narcissus through the forest. Projection, shadows and refraction are the visual echoes, repeating what came before. The four postures fill the centre of the space, a performance stage for the story of echo trailing Narcissus through the forest. Each posture of Echo is echoed in the bodies of the performers, from the hope of a crush, to death by the anguish of rejection.

Y1.8–Y1.10 Collective, Y1 ‘Studio Culture’. The studio culture is dispersed around the globe. The collective and the intimate coexist in our rooms, in our screens, and in our minds.

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Y1.11 Josef Slater, Y1 ‘Weaver’s Studio’. The Weaver’s Studio is an extension to a preexisting carpet shop on Ridley Road, leaving the storefront untouched and providing the spaces required for the weaver to work and live on the site. Instead of disturbing the market, the programme adds to an established amenity while emphasising the market’s atmosphere.

Y1.12 Jacob Meyers, Y1 ‘The Ridley Road Market Workshop’. Housing workshop facilities, a common room and living spaces for a craftsman-in-residence, the workshop would allow market stall-owners to refurbish and customise their stall carts. The workshop mimics the market’s time-based changes: flaps physically open and close the building over the course of the day.

Y1.13 Samuel Field, Y1 ‘The Fabric Enterprise’. The fabric enterprise was inspired by an clothes market stall observed in Ridely Market. A t-shirt-making, fabric screen-printing, and launderette space building run by one occupant who also lives there, spans two terraces united by a bridge.

Y1.14–Y1.15 Esme Dowle, Y1 ‘Dalston Spice Bazaar’.

The spice bazaar fully facilitates and exaggerates the spice production process by allowing one to inhabit the oversized machinery and experience the oscillating conditions of the journey that both produce and the viewers simultaneously go through.

Y1.16, Y1.23 Emilia Bryce, Y1 ‘Paper-Making Studio’.

A studio located at the heart of Ridley Road Market specialising in the recycling and reforming of paper using traditional techniques. Dalston has its own rich history of making and manufacturing. Paper is recycled from old unused paper rather than being made from limited local plant material.

Y1.17–Y1.18 Wei (Keane) Chua, Y1 ‘The Dining Room’.

Situated in Ridley Market, the Dining Room provides cooking facilities for both vendors and customers to use. At the top is a rooftop garden where simple vegetables, tea leaves and spices can be planted and grown by thecommunity, to be sold or traded and consumed.

Y1.19, Y1.22 Kai McKim, Y1 ‘Ridley Road Cinema’.

To combat the market’s decline, this building provides an indoor cinema as well as a large outdoor screen for the people of Dalston. This creates a vibrant nightlife attracting locals and visitors to watch films from the terraces on the roof or the street itself encouraging shops to stay open later and stimulate the local economy.

Y1.20 Yeung (Julie) Yeung, Y1 ‘Ridley Road Chicken House’. The building is designed for a retired couple who raise chickens as a pasttime, and aims to challenge the living mode in an urban context. Sitting on top of an existing shop, the house dissolves the boundaries between public and private, commercial, and residential.

Y1.21 Oska Smith, Y1 ‘A House for the Local Handyman of Dalston’. The project is designed for a handyman who lives in his own self-made home that includes workshop spaces along with lots of space to satisfy his hoarding obsession.

Through continual reworking, the building undergoes a transformation over time, growing in its uses and size.

Y1.24 Eoin Shaw, Y1 ‘Association of Enthusiasts of the North London Line (AENLL) Clubhouse’. This is a project for a group of trainspotters, their paraphernalia, and a living space for the owner, Allen. The site sits on the railway embankment behind the market. The building sits between two cranes and consists of a long corridor acting structurally like a beam connected to the cranes, and wrapped in ETFE bubbles, providing insulation and natural lighting.

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Multitude

UG0

Murray Fraser, Michiko Sumi

‘I contain multitudes’, wrote the American poet Walt Whitman.

Architecture does even more so – not least because every building serves in some way as a social condenser. Cities teem with population and so it becomes the role of architects to rethink and redesign the organisation and division of urban spaces. Yet ‘multitude’ can also refer to building materials, thousands of pieces of which need to be used for even the humblest of houses. Multitudes are equally environmental and ecological, and in future they will include for instance a profusion of robots and cyborgs amid our daily lives.

Dealing with such conditions of multiplicity was the broad challenge that we asked UG0 students to take on board in their design projects this year.

London is a city that can be seen in terms of multitudes, whether in terms of its population, its buildings, its urban spaces, its wildlife, its economics flows, and its cultural outpourings. To start things off, therefore, students were required to scrutinise these divergent ideas of multitudes in London as a large and complex and diverse global city.

This involved them in rediscovering those ignored or neglected spaces and landscapes, and also in exploring the invisible infrastructure of daily life in the city. Hence the presence of the ordinary lives of London’s diverse citizens needed to be a key aspect of the themes that they chose to investigate, and the projects they designed design.

We wanted them to consider, for example, how the everyday urban environment might be re-read as a multitude as well as a space of pleasure, enjoyment, and such like.

Following an initial project of their own devising in Term 1, students then went on to develop their own individual briefs for buildings or other urban interventions on sites they had selected around London. This year’s field trip was to Xi’an and Luoyang, precisely at the moment in mid-January when the Covid-19 pandemic was erupting in adjacent Hubei province. We encountered none of this while there, and instead visited the Terracotta Warriors, Longmen Grottoes, ancient Buddhist temples, and heard an inspiring talk from Liu Kecheng, the most talented local architect and former head of the Xi’an School of Architecture.

The unit’s underlying aim was for students to learn how to carry out a process of intensive research into contemporary architectural ideas, urban conditions, cultural relations, and practices of everyday life – and then to learn how to use these findings to create innovative and challenging forms of architecture for the contemporary city.

Year 2 Zijie Cai, Yiu (Raymond) Cham, Peter Cotton, Andrei Dinu, Tharadol (Robin) Sangmitr, Hei Ming (Leo) Tse Year 3 Temilayo Ajayi, Mohammed (Doori) Al-Doori, Tisha Aramkul, Maria (Masha) Gerzon, Rebecca Honey, Edmund King, Yiu (Anson) Lee, Zi Qi (Angel) Lim, Yingying (Iris) Lou, Yue (Miki) Yu Thanks to our digital tutor Tom Bush, technical tutor Nicholas Jewell and consultants Ewa Hazla and John I’Anson Thank you to our critics Alessandro Ayuso, Anthony Boulanger, Eva Branscome, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Nat Chard, Maria Federochenko, Stelios Giamarelos, Mimi Hawley, Marcus Hirst, Hazel McGregor, Ana MonrabalCook, Aggie Parker, Luke Pearson, Stuart Piercy, Ben Stringer, Simon Withers, Mika Zacharias

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0.1, 0.4–0.5 Rebecca Honey, Y3 ‘Hampstead Waterworks, NW3’. Conceptual overview; model components; perspective. Set between two of Hampstead Heath’s main ponds, the building monitors/measures climate change in London, carrying out adjustments and dramatising its architecture through the landscape’s unpredictable performance. The Heath has been altered by humans through the extraction of earth and redirection of water, creating its Picturesque topography.

Likewise, the building’s purpose as a meteorological centre taps into the ‘Technologies of the Picturesque’, framing environmental changes by echoing how weather is depicted in Romantic paintings.

0.2, 0.12, 0.21 Yue (Miki) Yu, Y3 ‘Thames Book Pier, SE1’.

Axonometric; model; site sections. A concrete casting workshop harvests aggregate and water from the Thames to erect a pier on the Coin Street riverbank. The pier has fixed and floating elements that create an aquatic book village where readers enjoy a constantly changing relationship with river tides. Its components operate as instruments that transmit the sound of waves via concrete pipe-organs, warning of unpredictable tidal flows. The casting workshop also makes concrete boats to take readers on leisurely river cruises.

0.3, 0.11, 0.19 Zi Qi (Angel) Lim, Y3 ‘Reshaping the Chelsea Physic Garden, SW3’. Aerial perspective; plan; riverfront elevation. Britain is a major market for cut flowers, with billions of stems consumed and wasted every year. Here the investigation is of flowers as the building material for a flower-arranging school and plant-recycling workshop along the southern boundary of Chelsea Physic Garden. This historic garden is surrounded by a high brick wall supposedly creating a conducive microclimate. The project questions this claim, instead proposing a timber-framed wall, clad with plant-fibre panels which introduce floral scents to interiors.

0.6–0.7 Yiu (Anson) Lee, Y3 ‘Sheep in the City, W1’.

Section; roof plan. In Cavendish Square a 1970s subterranean car park is being closed, probably to become a shopping mall. This project envisages an alternative future by the integration of sustainability and architecture, via an urban farm that creates a circular economy for foodstuffs. Emulating a successful Parisian precedent, it grows mushrooms and endives, and farms sheep. The scheme acts as a ‘digestive system’ for local food retailers and restaurants, mitigating food waste. Mushrooms create mycelium as a low-cost temporary building material.

0.8, 0.10 Edmund King, Y3 ‘The Digital Detox Clinic, SE16’.

Perspective; section. As a rehabilitation centre hovering over the entrance to Southwark Park, and aimed at those suffering from technology addiction, the problem of self-isolation is rectified through a process transitioning between different soundscapes. The building aids these changing sensations by using tactile materials like handbeaten/weathered copper and charcoal-burnt timber.

A side programme is research into spatial cognition.

Here the building acts as a neural network with many paths, allowing researchers to examine how users navigate these spaces and routes.

0.9 Edmund King, Y3 ‘The Neoliberal Pavement’. Model.

A speculative investigation into behavioural patterns and rhythms on London’s pavements. With the neoliberal notion of technological individualism trickling down into our lives over the last few decades, how we walk and interact with each other on pavements has gradually shifted. Sounds and rhythms taken from a sample section of pavement outside The Bartlett are transformed into performance pieces.

0.13 Tisha Aramkul, Y3 ‘Unplasticising the Thames, SW10’.

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Thames. Fully committed to the circular economy, with material experiments displayed to visitors within a large hall, communal workshops fabricate soil/plastic composite blocks using microplastic fragments harvested via a collection chamber jutting out on a pier. River microplastics thus become a substitute for traditional aggregates in rammed-earth construction, minimising environmental impact. At the end of its lifecycle the building can be broken down into its essential components.

0.14 Mohammed (Doori) Al-Doori, Y3 ‘Dragitecture (The Vauxhall Drag Palace), SW11’. Roof plan. A new mixed-use public hub (archival/educational/performative) in Vauxhall Gardens celebrates and documents the artform of drag. On offer are workshops, classes and jobs for drag performers. Anyone interested in escaping their identity for a while can attend one of the performances or change their own façade by following the drag transformation process. The project’s aim is thus to reimagine our contemporary conceptions of social performativity through architectural design, dissolving itself within the queer history of Vauxhall.

0.15 Andrei Dinu, Y2 ‘Urban Relocation, SE17’. Exterior render. This programme is for a co-living facility that provides affordable dwellings and a community hub in Elephant and Castle. Formerly home to the (demolished) Heygate Estate, the area is being rapidly gentrified. Local people are relocated with little compensation, often having to move out of London and lose their jobs. Instead, taking inspiration from collective housing precedents, the design encourages a community-like spirit among residents by sharing social spaces like gardens and laundromats, while letting the ordinary public engage too.

0.16 Maria (Masha) Gerzon, Y3 ‘Plastic Patchworks, E3’.

Material experiments. Waste is embedded into Western consumerist culture, with Britain having the highest clothing consumption in Europe and the greatest waste. If we alternatively re-purposed materials for more durability, showcasing their beauty, a new lifestyle could emerge.

A fashion school aims to revitalise a canalside area in Bow via a warm, playful design that encourages people to express their imaginations amid a sea of colour, texture and tactility – also educating about sustainability by creating garments with a cyclical life.

0.17 Tharadol (Robin) Sangmitr, Y2 ‘The Brixton Brewery, SW2’. Exploded isometric. The programme is for an underground micro-brewery and theatre located in Brixton’s Windrush Square, harnessing the area’s diverse cultures. Conceived as a beacon/attractor, the building’s strong sculptural presence at ground level and the social pull of beermaking and musical events increase footfall and awareness of the adjacent Black Cultural Archives.

The design celebrates the process of making by immersing the sequential flow required for the brewery process into its other spaces, linked together by enticing aromas.

0.18 Temilayo Ajayi, Y3 ‘London’s Little Lagos, SE15’.

Part-elevation. We naturally begin to accumulate objects around us, transforming our homes into places of storytelling. The theme of a multitude of personal objects – spurred by research into Black British history portrayed in archives and museums – underpins this project on a Peckham site known as ‘London’s Little Lagos’ because of its Nigerian links. The design celebrates social activities so usually ignored but fundamental to our lives today, creating a community-led heritage centre in the rooftop intertwined with a residential/commercial terrace.

0.20 Zijie Cai, Y2 ‘A Thousand Flakes’. Test model. Inspired by a famous Chinese poem titled ‘I Wonder if it’s the Milky Way Falling from the Skies’, a freefall testing device is created in order to explore the links between multitude and lightness. Cameras are also rigged up as part of this experimental model to examine the after-effects, thereby recording the myriad broken shards.

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Alba Gu Bràth (Scotland Forever)

UG1

Amica Dall, Toby O’Connor

The locus of architectural thought has always been the building, and the building as a complete object with a logic, rhythm and sensibility of its own. Since the mid 20th century, this view has shifted towards an understanding of architecture in the context of the city, centralising a concern for things like infrastructure, complexity and growth.

We are at a point where we must make another profound shift – not only in how we build, but how we think, expanding from the urban to the territorial, from the limits of the city to the limits of the planet. We need to think critically, openly and fearlessly about our role in the world, and we must become ever more polymathic, able to mediate information from an ever more diverse set of sources and think on radically expanded timeframes.

This year, we have been exploring what it means to be sited and specific while thinking in a planetary context, learning how to balance genuinely long-term thinking with the responsibility to respond to pressing contemporary needs.

Glasgow is the biggest city in Scotland, and one of the largest in the UK. In the late 19th and early 20th century the population was well over a million, as people moved to work in shipbuilding, iron works and textile industries. Now there are about 600,000 people, with another half a million in suburban and new town developments in the wider metropolitan area, most of which were built in the late 1950s and early 60s. Glasgow is a rich, sometimes chaotic-feeling city. Large-scale industrial infrastructure remains in the dense urban centre, and huge tracts of vacant land break up some of the densest residential areas in the UK. The historic West End includes the art school and a diverse, fluid and relatively wealthy community, whilst the more static, working class areas in the North and East remain some of the most marginalised in Europe.

Embedded research across multiple trips to the city and its wider territories, has enabled students to choose their own sites and develop their own briefs, engaging with a range of conditions and scales from Parkhead in the East End to the western shores of the Firth of Clyde through material experiments and exploratory drawings. Our projects start from the careful consideration and adjustment of existing situations, variously rewilding, reforming, recycling and remediating from the ground up, with designs for residential and community buildings, nursery and play spaces, rehabilitation and research facilities, construction education centres, motorway theatres, urban forests and farms (and sawmills and factories therein), and more... all springing from a situated and expansive sense of deep care.

Year 2 Conor Hacon, Guiming He, Rhiannon Howes, Barney Iley-Williamson, Angharad James, Zeb Le Voi, Asya Peker, Michael Rossiter Year 3 Rory Cariss, Samuel Dodgshon, Gabriel Healy, Mabel McCabe, Ben Murphie, Ellen Nankivell, Punnapa (Poon) Pairojtanachai, Thomas Richardson Special thanks to Anthony Engi-Meacock and Giles Smith Thank you to Agile City, Seyi Adelekun, Roo Angel, Baltic Street Adventure Playground, Eddie Blake, Valentin Bontjes van Beek, George Bruce, BarbaraAnn Campbell-Lange, Will Copper, Alison Crawshaw, Will Davies, Pierre D’Avoine, Experimental 7 (AA), First Steps Future Skills, Mark Gavigan, Ambrose Gillick, Alexandra Gomes, Jamie Goring, Paloma Gormley, Aidan Hall, Winston Hampel, Summer Islam, Tom James, Harry Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Margit Kraft, James Kwang-ho Chung, Nicolò Lewanski, Jon Lopez, Lola Lozano, Taneli Mansikkamäki, Quentin Martin, Neil McGuire, Ryan McStay, Aram Mooradian, Hikaru Nisanke, Rob Morrison, Kester Rattenbury, Simon Rix, Philipp Rode, Davide Sacconi, Irénée Scalbert, Nick Seaton, Kaye Song, Helen Teeling, Onur Teymur, Matina Theodoropoulou, Patrick Ueberbacher, James Ward, Martin Wecke, Emily Wickham, Abigale Wilson, Milly Wood

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1.1, 1.11 Conor Hacon, Y2 ‘Construction College, Glasgow’. A construction college in Glasgow’s East End, underneath an existing cattle shed. The project attempts to produce and communicate a reciprocity between three subjects – construction, care and the city – and is framed by the question: What reciprocal object-tools can manifest a complexity, enabling us to act out, physically and mentally, the larger patterns we are in a fold with?

1.2 Asya Peker, Y2 ‘The Govan Early Years Centre’.

This building project forms part of scheme to rewild an abandoned graving dock, attempting to enable a sesnitive reframing of perceptions of the area as a place for young children and parents to engage with the with the natural world and their (post)industrial history. Providing care for children aged 18 months to five years in a fully accessible building, the designs make a virtue of a challenging site by employing multiple circulation routes including a 48-metre ramp, weaving between insulated and permeable spaces for learning and play.

1.3–1.6 Gabriel Healy, Y3 ‘Forest Living’. The project articulates a forestry/housing scheme that could be replicated on alternative sites, where local natural materials are used to construct communities. Postindustrial Glasgow has been subject to rushed decisions which have torn apart social fabrics. Informed by explorations in the art of joinery, the project promotes a more nurturing approach, where a community can develop organically through generations, encouraging a culture of environmental education centred on the inventive reuse of waste products.

1.7 Guiming He, Y2 ‘Botanic Laboratory and Garden at Cloch Point, Gourock’. A small-scale research hub for the University of Glasgow located 40km west of the city centre on the Upper Firth of Clyde. Functioning as a facility for testing different growing conditions for plants, with the aim of improving life and wellbeing in Glasgow, the project has been developed through aesthetic and strategic considerations, including the employment of lowembodied energy materials to minimise environmental impact in both a local and planetary sense.

1.8 Michael Rossiter, Y2 ‘2-8 Landressy Street’. This project is a pilot scheme for infill housing to be owned and managed by Hawthorn Housing Co-operative as it expands to the east of the city, using vacant or derelict land (VDL) to redensify east Glasgow. The proposal comprises six family homes with kitchens overlooking a shared garden. The façades celebrate Bridgeton’s architectural history and the interiors are designed to be generous and legible. The project challenges UK housing standards and sets an example for urban redensification through the characterful development of VDL. 1.9–1.10 Rory Cariss, Y3 ‘Landressy Gardens: Social Co-Housing for Bridgeton’. This project consists of a social co-housing scheme and a series of communal infrastructures intended for use by both residents and the wider community. The scheme seeks to utilise shared resource as a means of encouraging social cohesion, and acknowledges the agency people deserve in relation to the physical fabric of their homes. Technologies used in its construction encourage and facilitate the easy maintenance and adaption of residences over time.

1.12 Angharad James, Y2 ‘How to be invisible: Rewilders’ Residence, Cowal Peninsula’. The proposal is framed by a wider speculative scheme: that the Scottish Government would endorse the rewilding of the West of Scotland in order to reduce carbon impact through the regeneration of the Caledonian Forest. The Cowal Peninsula, an hour west of Glasgow, would act as the pilot site. By translating the relationship with the landscape that rewilding promotes into a set of design principles, the project attempts to explore how architecture can embody wider ideas around ecology and land use.

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1.14 Mabel McCabe, Y3 ‘Village for Children, Bridgeton’.

Most cities are accidentally designed around adults. But what happens when you put children at the forefront?

In tackling this question, the proposed housing scheme consists of multiple-sized apartments, employing playable thresholds and generous balconies, while also reproviding the functions of an existing single-use low-density medical centre and incorporating a large play space between blocks, allowing for parental oversight and vibrant connectivity to the adjacent highstreet.

1.12–13 Zeb Le Voi, Y2 ‘Parkhead Mental Health Centre’.

The project propses a mental health clinic with onsite crisis housing for 16-25 year olds. Organised around two courtyards, the scheme offers an intermediate environment, bridging from a permeable street-side condition to a formal institution. The project seeks to address the treatment gap between diagnosis and hospital inpatient care or medication, and attempts to open up awareness of mental illness and wellness for those undiagnosed within the community. The design is informed by Stefan Linden’s thesis ‘Healing Architecture’ whereby the building should promote and encourage social interaction, normality and dignity within a free and open atmosphere.

1.15 Rhiannon Howes, Y2 ‘Horticultural Therapy Centre at Barmulloch, Glasgow’. In the context of post-industrial north Glasgow, the project proposes a horticultural therapy centre that contributes to the rewilding of Barmulloch’s brownfield sites – providing healing for both the people and the land. Inspired by the threshold of the walled garden, the project blends built and natural in a series of spaces that guides the healing process, easing patients into the surrounding landscape by gradually re-orientating according to its features.

1.16–1.18 Ellen Nankivell, Y3 Migrating/Making Ground: A New Settlement for a Flood Risk Community.’ The proposal is framed by the brief, whereby a radical new Scottish government takes a long-term approach to anthropocenic induced flooding. Within the first five years of a 100-year timeframe, a new settlement is built to stimulate the migration of a threatened low-lying community away from the ever-rising waters on the Firth of Clyde. The pilot site acts as a prototype or springboard for future settlement, utilising adaptable timber spaces and landscaping for water management, exploring how architecture in an age of climate change can withstand, embrace and enable changes to unfold through time.

1.19–20 Samuel Dodgshon, Y3 ‘The Charing Cross Theatre’. The project examines the M8 urban motorway in Glasgow, exploring its environmental impacts and planning its effective closure. Within this framework, the Charing Cross Theatre develops a precedent for how a set of closed motorway cuttings and flyovers in central Glasgow could be physically recycled and tied back to the city in cultural, programmatic and spatial terms.

1.21–1.23 Thomas Richardson, Y3 ‘Bridgeton: An Urban Agricultural Community’. Bridgeton, in Glasgow’s East End, is a ‘food desert’ and suffers from high unemployment, low life expectancy and a lack of essential community services. The project envisions a community-led agricultural transformation of the area, through the introduction of farming to low-density, car-dependent housing estates, offering employment, reducing food poverty, and improving biodiversity through stewardship of the land. Key to residents’ essential agency in this process will be the development of skills in farming, food preparation and construction. ‘Phase 1’ focuses on the construction of a new market, bakery and mill within a former shopping parade, seeding the wider regeneration of the area’s neglected high street. The transition sees Main Street as the new centre for community life: offering a space for industry, education and exchange.

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Between the Object and the Picturesque

UG2

Barry Wark, Maria Knutsson-Hall with Levent Ozruh In many cities our primary interaction with nature is through one of two perceptive models of appreciation, either as objects or as the picturesque. We commonly experience these objects of nature as potted plants and small items scavenged from their context and turned into sculptural artefacts. We consume images of nature through documentaries and social media feeds where we bask in their aesthetics.

Nature is neither object or image, it is a wide variety of environments and spaces in which we have evolved in and experienced for millennia. It is a complex ecosystem; it evolves over time and seasons; it is fragile and volatile; and it has the power to comfort and unnerve us. Our built environment has increasingly controlled and minimised the natural world to the point where we have become physiologically and perhaps psychologically separated from it.

With this in mind, we looked to challenge the way we experience nature in our buildings, between the object and the picturesque.

Continuing our investigation of cities in desert biomes, this year we travelled to Amman, Jordan. The city is facing many challenges, such as its lack of urban mobility due to poor planning and steep topography; the prevalent use of air conditioning to cool its buildings; and a severe water shortage. The latter has led to the government anticipating that Amman will run out of water by 2025. That said, Jordanians have survived its harsh conditions for millennia. The Nabateans were masters of both rock-cut architecture and water management systems, allowing them to build the spectacular city of Petra.

This year’s projects imagine what impact further environmental degradation might have on the communities of Amman. We propose buildings that could mitigate these projected environments through passive design whilst still offering new forms of public and private space that respond to the evolving needs of urban life. We explore what an immersive nature space would mean in Amman, working with its idiosyncrasies and challenging the notion of sustainable architecture beyond its current image. Projects control the sand blown into the city by dust storms to create spatial effects; celebrate the rain, turning it into a precious spectacle to be appreciated; and develop novel bioaesthetics derived from the Wadi Rum desert and Petra. The resulting buildings engage with nature in novel ways, in the hope of strengthening citizens’ sense of place within their beautiful but precarious landscape.

Year 2 Sahba Akbar, John Krenshaw Clayson, Crina (Bianca) Croitoriu, Jina Gheini, Serim Hur, Meg Irwin, Yushen (Harry) Jia Year 3 Hazel Balogun, Alisa Baraboshkina, Heather Black, Victoria Blackburn, Ocian Hamel-Smith, Evelyn Jesuraj, Yeree Kim, Luke Topping We would like to thank James Palmer for his continued invaluable support in teaching the technology module Thank you to our critics for their generosity in time, knowledge and spirit: Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Marcos Cruz, Gonzalo Herrero, Casper Johnson, Laura Mark, Justin Nichols, Hannes Mayer Thanks also to Mazen Alali for his expertise and guidance in Amman

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2.1 John Krenshaw Clayson, Y2 ‘Figures of the Picturesque’.

This project is a versatile market area that facilitates both formal and informal market vendors as well as aiding urban mobility in Amman. It uses convolutional neural networks to replicate drawn figures of nature and begin an exploration into a translation between analogue and digital tools.

The scheme acts as a criticism of the way nature manifests in modern cities, especially in the West, where plants are often experienced as objects or as the picturesque. This is emphasised in Western planning through its concentration on vista; a characteristic not present in Arabic planning and perhaps evidential in arguing for the inherent biophilic qualities of Arabic planning.

2.2–2.3 Heather Black, Y3 ‘Arab League Headquarters’.

The project explores notions of security architecture and its conservative approach to public interface. It challenges the traditions of secure spaces using the context of a new headquarters for the Arab League in Amman, Jordan.

The design strategy of the site is focused on ‘sand flooding’ which changes the accessibility and security of the building. During events, the landscape is flooded and it is subsequently drained when the event has finished, returning the space to public use.

2.4, 2.6, 2.19 Hazel Balogun, Y3 ‘A System for Urban Flow’.

Amman’s rapid expansion, topography and urban grid have contributed to poor pedestrian conditions. With the agenda of improving urban mobility in the city, the project provides an accessible route across one of the city’s hillside topographies. Influenced by modern and vernacular hydraulic technologies, the landscape captures seasonal stormwater to reduce the intensity of local flash-flooding.

2.5 Ocian Hamel-Smith, Y3 ‘Amman Marketplace’.

The market, and its square, serves the most vulnerable demographics of Amman’s population, especially those whose right to work formally is not permitted due to various tiers of citizenship. This project aims to solidify an existing market, located on a floodplain, as a democratic space, with added commercial facilities to allow the local skilled tradesmen a space to feel safe and fulfilled.

2.7–2.8 Evelyn Jesuraj, Y3 ‘A Workplace for Women’.

This project aims to address issues surrounding the high unemployment rates among female university graduates in Jordan. In order to bypass the law, many employers do not hire women as it triggers a policy where childcare facilities would have to be provided onsite.

The design for an engineer’s office tackles this head-on by proposing a building where the workspace and creche are integrated in a novel construction system.

2.9 Luke Topping, Y3 ‘A New Direction for Ornament’.

This project is a theatre in Downtown Amman positioned above the locally famous Jafra Café. The architectural investigation was inspired by a fascination with 21stcentury ornamentation in the Middle East, positioned from a contemporary digital discourse. The building is composed of geometries that tessellate between the scale of the building and the scale of the ornamental.

The geometry provides directions North, South, East and West through large architectural gestures and the composition of its facades.

2.10 Yeree Kim, Y3 ‘Amman Building Centre’. This project investigates how contemporary design and fabrication tools could recreate the aesthetic qualities and passive environmental strategies found at Petra, Jordan. These topics are explored in a centre for the built environment in downtown Amman. The building acts as exhibition space and construction laboratory where the public can navigate and experience the spatial conditions of Jordan’s ancient architecture.

2.11 Jina Gheini, Y2 ‘Nature Play’. This project is an after-school activity centre. It focuses on creating outdoor and indoor playgrounds for children, increasing their 50

physical activity, as there is currently a lack of play areas in Amman. The design aims to provide spaces in which children can experience nature that is overgrown and wild, which has been shown to be beneficial for both their mental and physical health.

2.12–2.13 Alisa Baraboshkina, Y3 ‘Wedding by the Water’. This proposal is a wedding and events venue that endeavours to create a building system that alleviates its water demands within the context of Amman’s water-shortage crisis. This is investigated through a collection system of fine mesh panels, drawing moisture from the air in the mornings and providing solar shading in the daytime.

2.14 Crina (Bianca) Croitoriu, Y2 ‘Bedouin Heritage Centre’. This project provides the nomadic Bedouins with a space in the city to temporarily inhabit. It is also a place in which they can educate others about their culture and traditions aiding to the preservation of a culture which is predominantly transferred through speech.

2.15–2.16 Sahba Akbar, Y2 ‘Civic Mobility’. This project explores the challenges of urban mobility in Amman which are a product of its challenging topography and rapid expansion over the last 50 years. A cable-car system which terminates in downtown Amman is designed for the city. The building proposal is focused on this terminus, which also integrates space for an informal market and eating spaces. As a strategy to collect pollutants from the air and form a new spatial identity for the network, the work explores bioplastic as a disposal building skin.

2.17 Yushen (Harry) Jia, Y2 ‘The Saltwater Hammam’.

This building is a bathhouse that uses filtered grey water to raise awareness of recycling water, an ever-dwindling natural resource in Amman. The building focuses on a journey of intensification. As visitors descend the spiral staircase, the concentration of space, light, vegetation, steam, and salt becomes denser.

2.18 Meg Irwin, Y2 ‘Alternative Health Centre’. The project for a healthcare centre in downtown Amman is inspired by the ancient architecture of Petra and how the Nabateans mastered their environment to provide passive thermal comfort. The project studies and implements these strategies, including the integration of water; working with hybrid construction and rock-cut spaces; and retreating behind the natural rock formations onsite which provide shade. The result is a building that opens a dialogue between natural and made, in the creation of a biophilic building.

2.20 Serim Hur, Y2 ‘Urban Cliff Techtonics’. This project explores the urban cliff hypothesis that states that our cities are akin to the habitat templates of cliffs. From observing the historic structures in Amman, the plant growth occurs where the stone blocks decreased in size, creating more gaps for water retention. Inspired by the iconic Hashem restaurant in downtown Amman, the building develops the ‘backstreet’ as a public space culture of the city in the creation of a kitchen and café.

2.21 Victoria Blackburn, Y3 ‘Al-Lweibdeh Preschool and Shelter’. The Al-Lweibdeh Preschool is an adaptable building, which delivers education for the local community and can transform to provide shelter and relief during times of crisis. The building both embraces and mitigates the increasing intensity of sandstorms in the Middle East, to raise local consciousness about the impact of global warming on the Jordanian environment.

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Birth and Rebirth

UG3

Ifigeneia Liangi, Ralph Parker, Daniel Wilkinson

In UG3 we are fascinated by the forgotten histories and alternative realities which could have, or should have been; we value playful processes which trigger bespoke architectures, and we like bodies: architectural, creaturely, or otherwise. As such, we use ideas of figuration and the figure to design spatial fantasies away from our preconceived notions. Within architecture, a figure can be literal – a sculpture, a painting, a projection – and it can also be allegorical in its telling of a story.

The idea of the designer-architect as we know it today is just 500 years young, born and borne upon a desire for change within that strange awakening of Western civilisation: The Renaissance. This year, we explored the possibilities of birth and rebirth as drivers for creative practice. For as long as we have been ‘we’, and for quite some time before, we’ve been occupying, impregnating and falling out of one another; the first spatial feat of our lives being our inhabiting of the womb. For architecture and society, ideas of birth and rebirth complicate notions of conclusion, but while their cycles may be guaranteed, their swollen bellies hang pregnant with the unset.

Taking our cues from an intellectual and physical practice where forms are figured and refigured, we created artefacts and drawings which are magical and critical. Our projects were approached experimentally through intersections of craft and technology, with fabric formworks, ceramic, wax, algae and salt investigations, amongst others, prior to their digital expansion.

We asked, how might these processes create futures of alternate preoccupation? How might an architecture gestate?

Our propositions are spatially, tectonically and programmatically figurative. We designed the stories they may tell, the symbols they embody and enshrine, the fluxing dimensions which they possess and shift within. We arrived at sensual architectures, housing spaces carved out by occupation, scenarios and surprise. Resisting conclusions, our buildings are embedded with wonder and the fantastic, and hold the ability to be born and born again; for as all sensitive architects know, the maturing of a building into adulthood occurs long after, and often in spite of, our designing of it.

Year 2 Benjamin Dewhurst, Ruoxi Jia, Alvin Lam, Yasmin North, Ewan Sleath, Joanna Van Son, Yuqi (Sunny) Wang, Oscar Wood, Kaiyi (Kelvin) Zhang, Year 3 Defne Kocamustafaogullari, Monika Kolarz, Natalie Rayya, Zuzanna Rostocka Thanks to our consultant Jason Coe Thank you to our critics Mike Aling, Harry Bix, Nat Chard, Elizabeth Dow, Stylianos Giamarelos, Anders Luhr, Sayan Skandarajah, Neil Spiller, Amy Sullivan-Bodiam, Gabriel Warshafsky, Simon Withers

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3.1, 3.4 Natalie Rayya, Y3 ‘An Evening of Erotic Diablerie’.

Taking place on an island in the Viennese Danube on the winter solstice, celebrating the longest hours of darkness when the sun is reborn, this project weaves a narrative of sexuality, theatricality and celebration into a building which menstruates in its symbolic change of gender. The project hones in on the tale of Krampus, a sadistic Yule-goat demon that wards off Austria’s evil winter spirits. It adapts and reconstructs this myth into a fairytale about Kralle, who is Krampus reborn as a succubus.

3.2 Defne Kocamustafaogullari, Y3 ‘Alma’s Embalmah’.

In taking the form of a hotel which represents the lives of the coquettish muse Alma Mahler and the men she captivated, this project takes its occupants on a journey of the intermingling relations of characters from fin de siècle Viennese high society. Located next to Gustav Mahler’s composing hut on the Attersee Lake, the building weeps into the water in its holding of Alma’s most passionate affairs. The spaces of the hotel are a reflection of its central characters’ lives through their celebrating and encouraging of the drama which went on between them.

3.3 Yasmin North, Y2 ‘Bath House of Purgatorio’. This project explores the gestation processes of the skin, through its cycles of purgation, with the designing of a bath house for Sigmund Freud Park in Vienna. The skin is a complex organ which can become swollen and irritated as it oozes and purges itself of toxins in relation to its stages of growth. In celebrating its abject qualities that are often deemed unclean and socially unacceptable, this building becomes a place to openly purge the skin.

The bathhouse is a journey of purgation, with its occupants openly experiencing the abject and the healing.

3.5, 3.10 Ewan Sleath, Y2 ‘Basiliskenkaffeehaus’. The Basilisk’s Coffehouse aims to achieve a metamorphosing architecture through the telling of stories and folktales.

Located in the centre of Vienna, it welcomes in travellers from all distances and backgrounds to share their knowledge and anecdotes while being seduced into conversation by the stimulant of coffee. Not only is coffee a drug for dialogue in the building but it is upcycled into ground coffee blocks which are carved and mounted onto the building by travellers wishing to leave their stories behind.

3.6, 3.11 Alvin Lam, Y2 ‘Das Ursakirche’. The Ursakirche is a migrational and rewilding facility designed for bears.

After being transported from the Tiergarten Schönbrunn, it allows the bears to learn to forage, fight and court through an artificial landscape created on the Sigmund Freud Park. The bears are migrated periodically from the Ursakirche to the Alps where further rewilding can be conducted. They traverse the surface of the building as its human researchers and pagan bear worshippers are kept inside, reversing the spatial relationships of zoos.

3.7–3.9 Zuzanna Rostocka, Y3 ‘Bier, Brüste, und Pisse!’.

Sited in Munich, this convent, brewery and bar reacts to Oktoberfest as a commercialised tradition which appropriates and adjusts elements of local culture in relation to popular taste and the kitsch. Central to the project is a closed-loop system where hypersexualised beer-maiden nuns ‘harvest’ drunken punters for their micturations. Beer becomes waste before becoming the product once more, with its passage being celebrated in a ritualistic cascade of consumption and urination.

3.12, 3.16 Ruoxi Jia, Y2 ‘Kinder Kunst Garten’. Informed by the Secessionists’ interest in the artistic imagination of children, the Kinder Kunst Garten is sited in Sigmund Freud Park, Vienna. In its use, the project elevates children to the position of teachers, as adults are assigned to observation points to study, document and learn from their freeform creative processes through their behaviour and artistic output. The project fuses itself with its surrounding park through an undulating terrain which 62

plays within and around the building, providing a landscape for exhibiting the work produced in the school. These interplays between landscape and building were guided in their development through a resistance to dead ends.

3.13–3.14 Monika Kolarz, Y3 ‘Salty Revival’. Positioned next to St. Rupert’s Church in Vienna’s Bermuda Triangle, an area known for its drunk revelry, this salt-therapy centre acts in a carnivorous manner as it lures local drunks into an ascending journey of healing. Inspired

by St. Rupert’s role in the regulating of salt for the area in the Middle Ages, the project explores its healing properties through the relaxation of the muscles in salt baths, its effects on breathing through the negative ions found in salt-crystalline chambers and the amplification of the senses in salt-based deprivation tanks. This journey of healing climaxes in its upper crystalline chambers, where one enters with amplified senses, experiencing a mesmerising display of stained salt-glass.

3.15 Kaiyi (Kelvin) Zhang, Y2 ‘Over Your City Angels Will Fly’. Angels is a PTSD treatment and care centre for children fleeing from warzones. The facility transmutes Vienna’s architectural legacy of conflict, informed by Nazi and Hapsburg fortifications, into a space of comfort and healing, through the use of pneumatics informed by The Inflatable Moment. Over a period of 14 days, the building grows and inflates at the joy of its occupying children, to reveal new spaces for therapy and views of the city’s own trauma.

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Inter Alia

UG4

Katerina Dionysopoulou, Billy Mavropoulos

UG4 is driven by the dialectic between the pragmatic reality of architecture as a profession of rules, restrictions and guidelines, and the deep creativity we as practitioners bring to our projects.

Without the former, the latter finds no resistance. Though we call on theory to reinforce our investigations, we find joy, beauty and levity within the confines of the real.

This year we challenged one of the principles of planning: the infill development. Awkward plots, leftover sites, the in-between, missing elements and fractured architecture: the infill takes on many forms and suggests myriad solutions. Our proposals have been forged within these parallel limitations, taking the London Borough of Westminster and its policy for infill development as a set of rules to be challenged and disrupted, on tricky, highly restricted sites.

Our tools emerged from the fabric of the city. In a moment when the rhetoric of ‘now’ and fictions of the future dominate critical thought, the value of the past can be overlooked. We focused our design solutions on the lost industries of manufacturing and making that have shaped the urban sites in which we find ourselves. Processes of craft and fabrication are devalued in an economy that demands the cheap and the throwaway. We provided a counter-narrative – uncovering the crafts and industries that have shaped the city and looked at innovation through a reawakening of the historic.

Covering a large area in the centre of the city, Westminster hides beneath its flagstones a rich lineage of craft and making which we will uncover through our research in term one. Histories of watchmaking, jewellery, printing, map-making and bookbinding can be found between Soho, Tottenham Court Road and St Paul’s. For our first project we worked collaboratively to map these crafts, and individually reimagine them to create ‘infill artefacts’, demonstrating historical crafts reinvented today. These were displayed in an exhibition at the Sto Werkstatt gallery in Clerkenwell.

We then visited Portugal, a country renowned for its history of craft, tracing a journey between Lisbon and Porto to discover pottery, tapestry, filigree, woodwork, metalwork and more. Through a consideration of their evolution and development, as well as their social and urban impact, we uncovered lessons that enhanced our findings back in London. There we synthesised our artefact and material investigations, our observations from the field trip and our site analysis, to design creative and unexpected architectural forms.

We harnessed the creative potential of our chosen crafts to challenge Westminster’s urban and planning restrictions.

Year 2 Noor Alsalemi, Chelsea Faith Dacoco, Mankiran Kundi, Jasmine Lam, Jacqui Lee, Parin Nawachartkosit, Elijah Ramsay, Jackson Saez Year 3 Albert Brown, Charlotte Carr, Cheuk (Felix) Lau, Sut (Eunice) Lo, Tao Shi, Sinziana Vladutu, Siyuan (Amy) Yao, See (Phyllis) Yu Thanks to our consultant Simon O’Callaghan Thank you to our critics Abigail Ashton, BarbaraAnn Campbell-Lange, Amy Croft, Ruairi Glynn, Neil Hubbard, Kyrstyn Oberholster, Simon Pierce, Deyan Saev, Emmanouil Stavrakakis, Sabine Storp, Timothy Waterman

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4.1 ‘Infill Artefacts’ by Noor Alsalemi, Charlotte Carr, Chelsea Faith Dacoco, Mankiran Kundi, Jasmine Lam, Cheuk (Felix) Lau, Sut (Eunice) Lo, Parin Nawacharkosit, Tao Shi, See (Phyllis) Yu 4.2, 4.18 Albert Brown, Y3 ‘Escaping Westminster’.

Responding to Westminster’s tourist industry and the rise in investment in personal security among the rich, this project proposes a design for an escape bunker, a multi-operational building that acts as an escape room tourist destination and a luxurious family bunker for when the apocalypse strikes. The escape bunker infills the five-metre slot above Exchange Court and excavates down to the nearby Adelphi Vaults.

4.3, 4.4 Jasmine Lam, Y2 ‘Garden Hospice’. This project proposes a poppy garden and residential hospice providing longterm palliative care for elderly patients of which nature and pain relief play a central role in the residents’ experiences. Opium poppies are cultivated in gardens and are processed into opioids which are then consumed by the residents.

4.5, 4.6 Parin Nawachartkosit, Y2 ‘Coalesce: An Architectural Reconstruction of the Decaying Essence of Old Mayfair’. A traditional bespoke butcher shop and picture palace, where both seemingly dissociated programmes interlock as infills, pervading each other’s idiosyncrasies. The building aims to rejuvenate Mayfair’s lost urban persona as London’s centre of amusement, escapism, and diversion.

4.7, 4.8 Cheuk (Felix) Lau, Y3 ‘Care for the Air’. The project is a speculative experimental facility which aims to educate and raise awareness of air pollution in London. The building is an air-filtering infrastructure and research centre, which also acts as an urban park and brings in the sublime quality of nature into the dense urban context. Through offering a tour around the building, the mesmerising journey of the building tells the story of air pollution in the city.

4.9 Elijah Ramsay, Y2 ‘Solanum’. This proposal, for an urban farm restaurant and a market, is a response to the lack of agriculture in Soho and the low number of urban farms in London. The project revolves around the way these two functions complement each other, through the journey of a person producing the crops, cooking, selling and finally eating, appreciating each process individually and as a whole.

4.10, 4.13 Noor Alsalemi, Y2 ‘Primula Gardens’. Through the exploration of historic and current site context, this project proposes a Visitor Centre that follows the process from flower to bottle. Glasshouses hold floral nurseries, with a perfumery and visitor area in the main building.

The project brings together the two aspects of St Johns Wood’s past to create a local space for relaxation and leisure. The materiality, history and context of the site provide a basis for the programme brief while also influencing elements of the building design.

4.11, 4.12 Siyuan (Amy) Yao, Y3 ‘Color Naturae’. A flower library located in Mayfair is inspired by the story of the vanished flowers in Green Park, when Charles II’s wife, Catherine of Braganza, ordered all flowers to be removed, having discovered the King had given flowers to another woman. The aim of the project is to bring back the flowers as well to as gather the community from different backgrounds in the same space so that they can engage in different flower-related activities.

4.14, 4.15 Tao Shi, Y3 ‘Ebury Fashion Community’.

The building, a community for recent fashion graduates, echoes the fashion industry of King’s Road, Chelsea, which inspired many young fashion designers in the 1960s and 70s. Its volume and character builds upon the history of the site, the traditions of its owners, Belgravia Garage, and draws inspiration from Shi’s first project of the year, an artefact created in response to the theme of infill.

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4.16 Mankiran Kundi, Y2 ‘Coffea’. Through research into the history of coffee, the brief of a coffee roastery and spa was extracted. Coffee has several uses in cosmetics and crafts, and can be transformed into biofuel and other materials after use. The project emphasises on how two functions can complement each other through sharing the same space, revolving around the coffee atrium that transports coffee through the building.

4.17 See (Phyllis) Yu, Y3 ‘Infill Tile: Dissecting Traditional Georgian and Japanese Pattern to Interrogate the Notion of Infill’. The London Borough of Westminster has a rich lineage of craft and making. There are two main patterns that embody 19th-century pattern design: the Imari collection and the Georgian collection. These were manipulated to become more modern and contemporary, resulting in a piece that highlights the importance of processes within the craft and fabrication industry.

4.19, 4.20 Chelsea Faith Dacoco, Y2 ‘The Chunee Conservation Centre’. The project centres around the story of Chunee the elephant, brought onto and killed on the building site in the 1800s. It responds to the site’s history of animal cruelty, attempting to encourage a changing relationship between humans and other species. The programme has three interconnected functions: as a city habitat for endangered birds of the British Isles made up of multiple rooftop aviaries; an education centre; and a research facility.

4.21, 4.22 Charlotte Carr, Y3 ‘Protheroe House’. Named after the obstetrician who established the world’s first women’s hospital in the area and inspired by this and the many members’ clubs in surrounding streets, Protheroe House, located in Soho, brings back a sense of relaxation and play that modern members’ clubs can often lack.

The club functions as a members’ club for pregnancy, parents and young children, focusing on the wellbeing of these groups.

4.23, 4.24 Sut (Eunice) Lo, Y3 ‘21st-Century Pleasure Garden’. Speculating leftover sites and fractured architecture through disrupting restricted sites within the City of Westminster, The 21st Century Pleasure Garden is an elevated escape reminiscent of historic entertainment centres in the city. The proximity of buildings on four sides have resulted in a radicalised building strategy in maximising the design potential of this new entertainment centre.

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Generation Anthropocene: UG5 Risking Everything Julia Backhaus, Ben Hayes

We are living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans are the dominant force shaping the planet and our own acts of design have forever changed the composition of the atmosphere.

Though the Anthropocene appears to mark the moment humans have overpowered nature, it is also an opportunity for radical speculation and innovation. Our transformations of urban, natural, and (post) human landscapes are changing culture and daily life. Soon, we will be surrounded by architectural spaces that are entirely empty of people, such as unmanned ports, data banks and server farms. Temporally, this requires that we imagine ourselves as inhabitants not just of a human lifetime, but also of ‘deep time’ – the profound eras of Earth’s history that extend both behind and ahead of the present. Currently, our globalised consumer society is risking rendering the planet’s surface beyond repair. What risks must we as architects take to facilitate an environment that supports a symbiotic coexistence between our buildings and ecology, and between technology and human beings?

What types of shared spaces and landscapes will emerge?

This year, UG5 pursued a creative understanding of risk and the unknown as a critical instrument and new form of design practice.

Risk-taking requires determination and persistence, but most of all optimism, trust and curiosity. Through the synthesis of making, drawing, animation and testing, we investigated the role of risk in architecture as a process and experience of design.

The Nordic Archipelago was our source of inspiration: we crisscrossed its islands, remote islets and skerries, exploring extreme seasonal and climatic shifts, from the proliferation of algae blooms, to rising sea levels, dead zones and frozen coastlines. The Nordic spirit of experiment and risk-taking is partly made possible due to isolation.

These countries cluster at the top of league tables of everything from economic competitiveness to social health to happiness, social models prioritising the concept of ‘Jantelagen’: a culture that emphasises the virtues of achieving things collectively over the individual, of shared risk. Welfare is not just an aid to those who are in need of it, but a central part of society. Its safety net offers freedom to innovate, experiment and cultivates an appetite for risk-taking.

Our research and architectural response situated between nature and technology, culture and instinct. Buildings exploring mixed-reality futures for biennales sit alongside living architectures that house sustainable slow-food production. Industrial landscapes are decommissioned to create bereavement and archival facilities for the new age of the Anthropocene. Stone quarries are repurposed to challenge tangible and intangible national heritage or transformed to harness ice passively in cities; bioluminescent plants explore humancentric lighting; and new forms of woodland architecture celebrate didactic methods of timber construction.

Year 2 Thomas Bloomfield, Rory Browne, David Byrne, Silvan-Mihai Cimpoesu, Benjamin Foulkes, Ioana Petre, Anastasiia Stoliarova, Jiayi Wang

Year 3 Jean Bell, Tengku (Sharil) Bin Tengku Abdul Kadir, Weiting (Terry) Chen, Ernest Chin, Ewa Roztocka, Hanlin Shi, Long (Ron) Tse, Kar (Tiffanie) Tseng Thanks to our consultants Anja Kempa and Jack Newton Thank you to our critics Laura Allen, Abi Ashton, Johan Berglund, Joshua Bolchover, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Megha Chand Inglis, Pedro Font, Stephen Gage, Theo Games Petrohilos, Ruairi Glynn, Kaowen Ho, Steve Johnson, Bruce Irwin, Markus Lahteenmaki, John Lin, Ana MonrabalCook, Kyrstyn Oberholster, Luke Olsen, Luke Pearson, David Roberts, Mark Smout, Emmanouil Stavrakakis, Sabine Storp, Tim Waterman

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5.1, 5.3 Tengku (Sharil) Bin Tengku Abdul Kadir, Y3 ‘One Tree Manual: Towards a Better Timber Architecture’.

A timber institute is situated as an extension of a forested area in suburban Stockholm. Its architecture critically revisits timber construction through the lens of a single tree to counteract inefficiencies of logging. By deriving specific parameters from a local pine tree’s properties, the processes of harnessing it as an architectural element are tactically rechoreographed. The project seeks a paradigm shift in attitudes and methodology towards the employment of timber and trees in architecture.

5.2 Ewa Roztocka, Y3 ‘Retreat into The Rock’. A microquarry is proposed for Källskär Island, which harnesses locally available pink granite as a building material to create a renewed local cottage typology. The strategy engages a sustainable double exploitation of the local granite as material and a new manicured landscape for better cottage living. A post-quarry period is speculated, through recycling quarry byproducts and implementing new stone manufacturing technologies. Ultimately, enabling cross-seasonal occupation of the island to revive the local community of Kökar Archipelago.

5.4 David Byrne, Y2 ‘Rewilding: A Feral Testbed’. The project aims to address what it means to become ‘rewilded’, a large-scale conservation movement aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes. Centred around a wearable rewilding device that incites a feral nature in humans, notions of what it means to be human are subverted. New, feral beings are produced, inhabiting the building and rewilding occupants. By refraining from governing nature, a rewilded space is produced: an artificial construct grounded in nature.

5.5 Kar (Tiffanie) Tseng, Y3 ‘Burying the Digital and the Physical’. An unused coal depository in Helsinki is transformed into a new-age crematorium and cemetery.

The landscape of death extends into the digital realm, where our identities exist via the Internet. A digital archival crypt remains, reducing burial land area. The scheme uses coal from a decommissioning coal power plant to form a malleable landscape, absorb heat from the crematorium and cradle the sunken archival and bereavement facility. Warm, tranquil interiors circumvent the chilly Scandinavian climate.

5.6 Jiayi Wang, Y2 ‘Cohabitating the Archipelago’.

Inspired by Shinrin Yoku (Japanese natural therapy), the project aims to use the forgotten allure of forest living to mitigate stresses in an urbanised world. Hidden within a dense coniferous forest on Stormälö island, the project proposes a co-housing scheme that promotes coexistence between community and ecology, by challenging conventional notions of rural cohabitation amongst locals, tourists, forest workers and fishermen.

5.7 Rory Browne, Y2 ‘Helsinki Institute of Biodiversity’.

The project proposes a storage facility to house and preserve seeds across Scandinavia, to future-proof unique archipelago ecosystems as we enter the Anthropocene. The scheme educates and engages visitors in the biodiversity of the site and the issues faced in a new geological epoch. The project proposes a coexistence between the environment, where one is grounded within the landscape and nature becomes the central focus.

5.8–5.9 Ernest Chin, Y3 ‘Save the Ice’. In the age of the Anthropocene, the answer for a new, sustainable building material could lie in different states of the material that constitutes 71% of our planet. A community hub for Hornstull is proposed on the boundaries of inner-city and suburban Stockholm, that transforms through the collection of winter precipitation. By harnessing winter precipitation in Stockholm as a viable building material for the future, the proposition aims to use these seasonal materials as a beacon to bring people across all walks of life together, bridging an increasingly divided city.

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5.10 Weiting (Terry) Chen, Y3 ‘The Future of Lighting: Biolights Research Centre’. A research centre for biolights is proposed for Stormälö. A pioneering light source that requires zero energy and produces no waste, biolight is produced by inserting bioluminescent genetic coding into non-toxic bacteria. The centre comprises research and testing facilities beneath a public observation deck, which allows visitors to peer into the prototypal lights beneath.

Through extensive light testing, the glow of the biolights is amplified and redirected onto the building, creating an illuminated landscape.

5.11 Jean Bell, Y3 ‘New Nordic Notoriety’. This proposal embraces ‘slow food’, in contrast to the fast food production context of the site, through spaces that facilitate testing and research into sustainable foodscapes and craft. Hosting an annual New Nordic Food Festival that celebrates Nordic Food, the building expands through a network of skins made of food. These skins concurrently highlight the intimate relationship between our food cycle, waste and craft. By promoting food councils and the communities surrounding them, the building seeks to simultaneously preserve and speculate upon the New Nordic foodscape.

5.12 Ioana Petre, Y2 ‘The Baltic Sea Safety Centre’.

Located in southwest Finland, a popular summer destination for water activities, the project proposes a tripartite communal facility comprising a sea-safety training centre, a library with climate change media, and a seaside café. The building encompasses a series of algae pools for low-visibility diving and salt-water enclosures that reflect the increasing eutrophication and salinity of the Baltic Sea, respectively. In light of climate change, the project aims to raise awareness about the impact of the Anthropocene on the Baltic Sea. 5.13 Silvan-Mihai Cimpoesu, Y2 ‘The Stacked Timber Workshop’. The project proposes an educational timber workshop, open to both students and skilled craftsmen.

In the face of increased mechanisation within the modern Finnish timber industry, the scheme promotes upgrading of skills through workshops centered around new technology in woodworking. Knowledge about analogue woodworking is infused into these workshops, using the strengths of both analogue and modern methods to stretch the possibilities of timber architecture.

5.14 Benjamin Foulkes, Y2 ‘A Red House in a Potato Field’.

The Finnish expression ‘a red house in a potato field’ encapsulates picturesque Finnish rurality, referencing the ubiquitous Finnish countryside red cottages. Taking the form of an artist’s studio and public gallery, the scheme aims to challenge Finnish ideals of rurality by visually deconstructing the surrounding landscape. This is facilitated through manoeuvrable reflective surfaces that alter perception of the landscape, allowing the painter to calibrate and reconfigure the site according to their artistic interpretations.

5.15 Long (Ron) Tse, Y3 ‘Vallisaari island: A Biennale of Projected Ephemeralities’. A visitor centre on Vallisaari is proposed for the Helsinki Art Biennial. During off-season, the centre’s bare framework is invaded by surrounding vegetation. During Biennial season, the centre uses the different states of water to create an intangible enclosure, augmented through projection mapping.

Through holograms of forgotten history, fog screens recreating abandoned tunnels, and water velariums as memorials to forbidden lakes, various historical moments of Vallisaari are recollected. By relying on virtual realisation, we build less, and return to nature.

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Material Cultures

UG6

Paloma Gormley, Summer Islam

UG6 begins from the position that in order to halt the progress of ecological breakdown we need to radically rethink the logic of current construction methods, the materials we use, our approach to growth and our understanding of both value and time. In doing so, it is likely that we will need to both recover some of our forgotten technologies and develop entirely new forms of architectural language.

We are interested in developing qualitative prototypical buildings, which are ecologically founded, economically viable, and positively impact their inhabitants’ lives through considered design and accessible adaptability. In a climate in which warranties dictate design, and the nature of construction contracts limit quality, we seek to redistribute the priorities of the construction process in favour of design and sustainability.

Our proposals are designed to be factory made, involving different forms of prefabrication and drawing on the material resources and infrastructure of the surrounding contexts. They combine the efficiencies, improved labour conditions and precision of the factory with ancient building technologies and materials. Each building is a model, a design that can be reproduced and reconfigured many times and in many different contexts.

Students’ proposals are sited as part of the Aylesbury ‘Garden Town’, a government housing initiative drawing on the principles of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities. The site is intended to be at once specific and generic, to enable the propositions to be tested against context and in relation to each other. Together the buildings form a broader urban proposition that constitutes a self-sufficient town with its own housing, community buildings and productive spaces.

Along the way, we have been modelling and testing at different scales, with an emphasis on the direct use of materials and 1:1 fabrication. We began our year with a trip to the brick factory HG Matthews, where each student designed and made a chair. We ended our time on campus at Here East, midway through the fabrication of a pavilion for the New Art Centre in Salisbury, for which the unit collaboratively designed a pavilion building using prefabricated timber cassettes with an innovative clay and hemp infill. Making brought us into contact with the tactility of these processes and enabled us to learn with our hands. We have interrogated how material and industrial cultures shape the world, and creatively challenged regulations, supply chains and processes in order to produce proposals that offer a radical yet viable alternative to the status quo.

Year 2 Nasra Abdullahi, Marius Balan, Sophia Brummendorf Malsch, Latisha Chan, Thomas Keeling, Sara Mahmud, Yerkin Wilbrandt Year 3 Maria De Salvador, Bengisu Demir, Christina Economides, Evelyn Salt, William Zeng Thanks to our consultants Simon Herron, Luke Olsen, Peter Laidler, Will Stanwix Thank you to our critics Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Mollie Claypool, Amica Dall, Lettice Drake, Sam Little, Bob Sheil, Richard Wentworth

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6.1 UG6 ‘One-Day Chair Project’. Using hand tools and palette timber, over the course of a single day each student designed and made a chair which reflected the structural principles of a different timber-framed building case study. These were built and photographed at HG Matthews Brickworks.

6.2, 6.8 Christina Economides, Y3 ‘The Homegrown Agora’ is a project which speculates on the possibilities which emerge from an integration of nature and architecture.

Reframing agricultural waste and the growth of fungi as valuable resources for the production of biomaterials, the proposal explores how we can build with locally produced bio-based materials as substitutes for the high-embodied carbon products prevalent in the building industry. It is both a building and a system which incorporates growing, producing, using and decomposing materials.

6.3 Evelyn Salt, Y3 ‘New Urban Plan for Aylesbury Garden Town’. This site plan shows a cooperative housing proposal in the context of an urban plan developed collaboratively by the unit, with a number of different prototypical housing models arranged in organic clusters around communal green spaces. The project is situated within the new ‘garden town’ development of Aylesbury, the masterplan of which UG6 have redesigned in order to create community-centred spaces, where the programme, position and design of the buildings gives the town a distinct sense of place.

6.4, 6.9, 6.18 Maria De Salvador, Y3 ‘Mass Timber High Rise’. This proposal explores the use of mass timber frame structures in high-rise residential towers, and the potential role of the column in this system as both a structural and a spatial device. The mass timber structural columns free up the internal walls to vary from storey to storey, forming a series of dynamic private and public spaces. The plan leaves room for potential change and unprogrammed activities to take place, anticipating but not prescribing its future uses.

6.5 William Zheng, Y3 ‘The Chill Garden’. This project addresses the complexities of societal stress, and the desire to be both part of and apart from, the group.

The proposal is for a densely occupied residential block with a carefully curated gradient of space, which navigates from the public social to the private realm.

The design was developed through the interrogation of viewpoints and the experiences of the viewer and the viewed. The enclosures and openings that define the spaces have been calibrated materially and formally to recognise inherent social choreographies and promote social ease.

6.6–6.7 Thomas Keeling, Y2 ‘Earthside Terrace’. In this project, conversations between residents over light, land and space are resolved in negotiation between the hills and the walls. The outcome is a 43% reduction in basic construction costs; and an affordable, tailored neighbourhood which is embossed into the hillside.

Construction techniques are exposed and celebrated: encouraging inhabitants to repair, retrofit and expand their homes as their relationship with the typology develops. This proposal aims to impact beyond the single instance of this development, shaping attitudes towards construction and reimagining our historically imbalanced relationship with nature.

6.10–6.12 Evelyn Salt, Y3 ‘The Bathhouse’. This project addresses how spatial and material decisions can help create the conditions for intimacy in an increasingly isolated society, explored through a prototypical co-operative housing typology composed of a primary in-situ timber frame and prefabricated hempcrete infill cassettes. Inward-facing openings are privileged over outward-facing ones, with large pivoting windows creating moments of connection across a courtyard allowing for relationships to be established at a distance and 98

generating an experience of togetherness. The ground floor of the building provides flexible social, communal and commercial space. In this instance it is shown occupied by a bathhouse, the communal spaces of which provide moments of encounter and interaction, places where relationships are formed and that foster a sense of community.

6.13, 6.15 Sophia Brummendorf Malsch, Y2 ‘Redefining the Rural’ investigates how our relationship to landscape and agriculture can define what living rurally looks like.

It is a response to the unavoidable tension between enforced control over landscape through traditional agricultural practices, at the expense of complex forest ecosystems. The project proposes a provocative strategy of densification of agriculture and housing as a way of liberating arable land for reforestation. The building is designed for reconfiguration as well as disassembly, using prefabricated components that sit within a larger timber frame, which allows residents to customise their living space to their current and future needs.

6.14 Sara Mahmud, Y2 ‘Revolutionising Post-Factory Culture’. In the context of a growing disconnect between the places where things are bought and the places where things are made, this project advocates the reintroduction of manufacturing spaces into residential neighbourhoods, where communities can better understand the impact of their choices on the environments in which they live.

The proposal is a series of small-scale fabrication workshops which coexist with one- and two-bedroom flats, exploring the interconnection of domestic and productive space and the potential for shared spaces between these two programmes.

6.16 Bengisu Demir, Y3 ‘The Talking Laundrette’. This project investigates how natural materials and passive systems can help create low embodied energy solutions for everyday life. The proposal is a series of apartment blocks, joined together by a communal laundrette where the residential community can gather, interacting with one another in the processing of carrying out often unacknowledged domestic labour. In exploring the social and ecological potential of rethinking the way we wash and dry our clothes, the building addresses both the material and cultural shifts necessary in a low carbon future.

6.17 Latisha Chan, Y2 ‘Healthcare at Home’. This project explores the notion of care, and the extent to which a building’s material palette and programme can positively impact the lives of its inhabitants. The proposal is a sustainable housing model, which integrates a series of social spaces promoting both physical and mental wellbeing. Natural and low embodied carbon materials were carefully chosen for the structure and finishes, and a central hanging garden creates a microclimate of purified air. Prefabricated systems allow the building to be constructed quickly. The project envisions a future where housing developments across the country incorporate this new typology.

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Voyages Extraordinaires

UG7

Pascal Bronner, Thomas Hillier

2020 marked the 150th anniversary of Jules Verne’s seminal novel 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. To celebrate this, UG7 sought inspiration from the writings of Verne, writings that had a profound influence on the trajectory of science fiction as we know it. Known as the second-most-translated author in the world, Verne’s work influenced writers from Jean Cocteau to Arthur C. Clarke, with his work foreseeing the arrival of submersibles, flying machines, skyscrapers and the moon landing.

As architects, we have a responsibility to dream and imagine a future unknown to us all. Buildings last for years, decades and even centuries. Without the imagination, and a curious impulse to discover the way we might live in the future, the buildings that we design and build today will be vacuous tomorrow.

To explore these new architectural futures, the unit travelled to the ‘Space Coast’ – Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA’s immense space launch campus was host to the first Apollo flights, with Apollo 11 paving the way for the first moon landing. Littered with over 40 largely inactive launchpads, alongside NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building – the largest single-story building in the world – this site of human space flight truly is a Vernean paradise.

Before this journey, and in preparation for it, the students adopted one of Verne’s 54 timeless stories from the series of Extraordinary Voyages. With book in hand, they were asked to explore, draw, map and classify the elements within and examine, extrapolate and reinterpret its events, characteristics and technologies to start creating a new world of their own making. Through rigorous research and simultaneous speculation they each wrote their own narrative and developed Vernean-inspired architectural interventions that focused on applying crafted drawing techniques in order to deliver a highly articulate architectural vision.

This vision was used as a launchpad for students to develop a unique mode of thought and new forms of representation, allowing them to explore how the agency of drawing could be used to communicate ideas and tell stories. It became a key tool in aiding their spatial narratives and speculations on their future building typologies.

Their architectures could be wholly fantastical or a distortion of what is real or has the potential to be so. Like Jules Verne’s visions, we wanted their buildings to be propelled into a new realm that feeds on the technological advances of the future.

As always, the work aimed to embody the unit’s agenda of craft, experimentation, wonder and delight whilst being equally as visionary, brave, eccentric and grand as the stories that inspired them.

Year 2 Anna Arzumanyan, Grace Baker, Wai (Winki) Chan, Betty Liang Peng, Maria Garrido Regalado, Katherine Ralston, Alexandra Sapte, Xinze (Sean) Seah, Leyun (Kitty) Zhu Year 3 Dominic Benzecry, Giorgos Christofi, Charlotte Cole, Sofya Daniltseva, Heba Mohsen, Freya Parkinson, Sarfaraz Salim, Bill Xu Thanks to our technical tutor Martin Reynolds and computing tutor Sean Allen Thank you to our critics Duncan Blackmore, Kyle Buchanan, Oliver Houchell, Huma Mohyuddin, James Purkiss, Rahesh Ram, Stamatis Zografos

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7.1 Giorgos Christofi, Y3 ‘Dear Moon’. The project explores the Ancient Greeks’ obsession with the Moon and its goddesses, representing our human desire for immortality. Suspended by a geostationary satellite, the building becomes a threshold between the celestial and ethereal realms. This temple of immortality holds a crematorium where the ashes of the dearly departed can be launched to the Moon, granting entry to the celestial realm. Above this lies a crater, recreated on Earth, that acts as a lunar shrine to allow loved ones to visit those lost and sent to the stars.

7.2 Heba Mohsen, Y3 ‘Florida Peak’. The project interrogates the emergence of an architecture through the principles of chaos theory, exploring the relationship between space and time through the construction of a hotel. Situated upon the highest point in Florida, a 114-metre stack of radioactive mining waste, from which the architecture is exclusively constructed. The nature of radioactivity is inherently time sensitive, and this allows the building to proclaim a temporal state, not exclusively a physical one.

7.3 Charlotte Cole, Y3 ‘Bobbing for Love’. “Unable to perceive the shape of you, I find you all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with your love. It humbles my heart, for you are everywhere.” This project is inspired by the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The physical embodiment of love bobs across the ocean, collecting lovers. At sunset, the universe confirms their souls are one and the heart of the Nautilus blooms.

7.4 Dominic Benzecry, Y3 ‘The Observatory at the End of the Universe’. This building is a celebration of the relationship between humanity and space that has persevered throughout human history; a relationship that began by simply gazing at the stars. This is done through referencing the technologies and experiences born from our astronomical past with the aesthetic optimism of the science-fiction books of yesteryear.

At the heart of the building sits a highly experiential space that seeks to both frame and track views of the night sky.

7.5 Wai (Winki) Chan, Y2 ‘Black Spring Vomitorium’.

Anchored on the ancient healing ground of White Springs, the Vomitorium proposes a unique treatment centre that specialises in cleansing a visitor’s digestive system through regurgitation. Inspired by the declining Green Corn Ceremony of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, black tea is drunk until it is regurgitated. This cleansing allows for the consumption of the sacred first harvest of corn.

7.6 Anna Arzumanyan, Y2 ‘Preserved to Ashes’. Located within the molten landscape of an active volcano, the building acts as an archive and library of treasured first-edition Jules Verne books. The artificial magmatic interior encapsulates the conflicting nature of fragile objects being nestled in unpredictable danger. The continual buildup of lava is eventually directed through the building’s entrance and central core, gradually filling and burying the spaces from within.

7.7 Maria Garrido Regalado, Y2 ‘The Space Opera House’.

Located on top of Bone Valley’s largest abandoned phosphate factory, the Space Opera House celebrates the world of science fiction, while preserving the site’s industrial heritage and regenerating the local mining community. An auditorium, rehearsal spaces and a bar are hung within a fine gauze-like structure. Inspired by the site’s existing analogue technologies and structural characteristics, these spaces are accessed through a tunnel that punches directly through the existing factory, creating a strange and theatrical journey from past to present to future.

7.8 Freya Parkinson, Y3 ‘The Arc’. Sited at Cape Canaveral, which along with most of Florida could be submerged in 50 years, sits the Arc. The building acts as a barometer for rising sea levels and as an ever-growing record of life on 110

Earth, preserved for a future made unpredictable by climate change. At the building’s core is a time capsule that allows Floridians to archive their history, whilst weather-data collection devices scratch information into the capsule’s skin. The project aims to create a picture of how the world will change before the building itself collapses, releasing the capsule into the sea like a technological message in a bottle.

7.9 Leyun (Kitty) Zhu, Y2 ‘Inhabiting the Cosmic Ocean’.

Shipwrecks are often considered one of the most underappreciated riches of the sea. These historic treasures will be brought to life once more through a museum and archive that locates, excavates, displays and preserves shipwreck fragments to educate us on their historical value. This cage-like building, situated in the swampy marshlands of the Big Cypress National Preserve, will hold the memories of these artifacts. Atmospheric tectonics allow the viewer to engage with the shipwrecks as if still submerged, while a grand central staircase takes them up into the the centre of the cosmic ocean.

7.10 Sarfaraz Salim, Y3 ‘The Bridge of Unity’. This building embodies the lives of two individuals bridging their differences to come together in celebration of their love. Inspired by the native Seminole tribe of Florida, who can only marry outside their own people, the chapel is for those who are in love with their opposite.

7.11 Grace Baker, Y2 ‘Corporeality vs. Hyper-Reality’.

Located in the Miami Everglades, this building is a commercial human pharmacy, exploiting the antibiotic properties of the White Mangrove, integrated into an artificial mass-propagation centre for genetically enhanced Mangrove species. Acting as a catalyst for continued growth, Mangroves are reintroduced into the destroyed surrounding landscape with the aim of rejuvenation.

7.12 Betty Liang Peng, Y2 ‘Epcot Forever’. Sited on a lake at the heart of Disneyworld’s futurist kingdom, Epcot Forever is a hotel that endeavours to recreate a fragment of Walt Disney’s original dream and vision for Epcot.

Prevalent in our society are issues such as individual and communal alienation brought about by the digital age and an overly fast-paced, stressful lifestyle. In response, the programme is a hotel and spa that encourages people to re-engage with communal activities, such as public bathing, to reconnect and rediscover a more intimate form of interaction with one another.

7.13–7.14 Bill Xu, Y3 ‘The Space Debris Cemetery’.

Located at missile silo 31B at Cape Canaveral, the building pays homage to the 1986 wreckage of the Space Shuttle Challenger, alongside becoming an archive and museum to the ever-increasing collection of space debris floating in Earth’s orbit. Part-building, part technological experience, the architecture is built around the ‘grave’ of Challenger, celebrating those lost in our intangible desire to explore the boundaries of space and beyond.

7.15–7.16 Xinze (Sean) Seah, Y2 ‘The Sanctuary of Disney’s Unloved’. Disney has shaped the world of animation with films such as Snow White, Pinocchio, and Cinderella. These films have achieved global acclaim with generations growing up influenced by the ‘magic’ of Disney. But all may not be what it seems.

Disney has faced allegations of abuse and mistreatment of its staff and park animals. Located on Disney’s abandoned Discovery Island, this project is an exploration into the ‘dark side’ of Disney through the creation of an architecture of redemption for forgotten victims. Inspired

by Cinderella’s dress, this new soft architecture now houses an industrious community, who, like Cinderella’s furry companions, build from the unwanted fabrics and beads deemed to be ‘trash’. With this dress, the forgotten will attempt to outshine the ‘tyrant’.

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Experiments in the Upside-Down

UG8

Farlie Reynolds, Greg Storrar

In UG8 we welcome the brave and the curious. We value a will to discover, rather than a need to prove. Interested in prototypical materials, structures, and technologies, we work between the drawn, the made and the captured to champion innovative architectural strategies rooted in the environmental challenges of our time.

Groundbreaking creative practice is rooted in radical experimentation. Take the maverick painters we call ‘Ain’ters’ who rejected deterministic methods of painting: Sigmar Polke with chemical reactions, Yves Klein with fire, now Lucien Smith with a fire extinguisher. Ain’ters experiment with the unknown to embrace the creative potential of chance, and this year UG8 dared to join them.

Our fieldtrip took us across the American midwest in search of intrepid testing grounds. We discovered bold architectures that opted for progress over convention and innovation over expectation, casting the world in a new light – just as the very first camera obscura experiment did – inverted, upside-down.

On our roadtrip we delved deep into all manner of marvels.

The lifting of an entire city block-by-block in homage to the rising shoreline of Lake Michigan. Mies Van der Rohe’s tradition-dismantling Farnsworth House. Frank Lloyd Wright’s gravity-defying Johnson Wax. The pioneering skyscrapers that grew from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1910. Looking down as well as up, we found tomorrow’s discoveries in the depths of Fermilab’s Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

The journey taught us that to progress our profession beyond that which is already proven, architects too can – and must – Ain’t.

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

We discovered that through the act of Ain’t-ing, each design methodology became a powerful tool for architectural invention.

Year 2 Zixi (Vito) Chen, Thuc Anh (Tia) Duong, Marie Faivre, Harrison Maddox, Mariia Shapovalova, Martins Starks, Supawut (Leo) Teerawatanachai, Zhi Qian (Jacqueline) Yu Year 3 James Della Valle, Diana Mykhaylychenko, Konrad Pawlaczyk, Cira Oller Tovar, Matthew Semiao Carmo Simpson, Theo Syder, Natália Sýkorová, Anthony Tai, Milon Thomsen Special thanks to Steve Johnson, Nick Meech and all those at Flimwell Park and the Woodland Enterprise Centre whose support and dedication made ‘The Flimwell Experiments’ such a success Special thanks to The Bartlett’s Architecture Project Fund and to our sponsor Refico for generously supporting our Flimwell expedition Thanks also to all our critics and skills tutors Theo Brader-Tan, Luke Bowler, Tom Budd, Ella Caldicott, Nat Chard, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Ryan Hakimian, Penelope Haralambidou, Ness Lafoy, Stefan Lengen, Emma-Kate Matthews, Lisa McSweeney, Ana Monrabal-Cook, Thomas Pearce, Vseva Popov, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Simon Withers and Michelle Young. A final thanks to Steven Pippin, whose otherworldly studio visit set the scene for a year of a great adventure and experimentation in the upside-down

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8.1, 8.15–8.17 James Della Valle, Y3 ‘Between the Frame’.

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

8.2 Harrison Maddox, Y2 ‘Scarcity Beneath the Canopy’.

Camouflaged in the ancient woodlands and waterways of Flimwell forest, an apparatus captures and reveals micro-shifts in humidity imperceptible to the human eye.

Derived from the geometry of native tree bark and lichen formation, the experiment is crafted from steam-bent ply, latex and residual moisture from the forest floor.

8.3, 8.13 Natália Sýkorová, Y3 ‘Sonic Tomography’.

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

8.4 Diana Mykhaylychenko, Y3 ‘The Generative Architecture of Predictive Hydrology, Or: How I Learned to Reverse the Flow’. A riverside clubhouse and rowing school on the Chicago River, famous for defying laws of hydrology when made to flow backwards in 1900.

Deploying algorithmic spatial and material negotiations between water and land, the architecture promotes a novel hybridised timber and carbon fibre structure derived from fluid dynamic simulations.

8.5 Zhi Qian (Jacqueline) Yu, Y2 ‘Depot Clubhouse: A Dressed Architecture for Social Acupuncture’.

A parcel depot and community centre sited on prime riverside real estate in Chicago. The building spreads awareness of social issues through an interplay of bold full-frontal gestures and discrete spatial interventions.

The architectural skin, an attention-seeking dressing, is informed by (and tailored to) a body that we typically turn our back on.

8.6, 8.22–8.23 Theo Syder, Y3 ‘Reactive Rehab’.

A physiotherapy centre challenges the status quo in American healthcare that rehab is a concrete process, deploying a dynamic and interactive architecture to offer a holistic and accelerated recovery experience.

The architecture implements key principles of physiotherapy – flexibility, balance, strength, buoyancy – both structurally and programmatically.

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

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

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

8.18 Mariia Shapovalova, Y2 ‘The Gallery of Reappropriated Light’. A photography gallery captures and exhibits Chicago’s past and present cultural identity, home to an otherwise dysfunctional family of exhibits, 122

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

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

8.20 Thuc Anh (Tia) Duong, Y2 ‘The Cast School of Culinary Craft’. A plant-based culinary school in the heart of Chicago’s former meat-packing district champions new sustainable means of food cultivation and preparation.

Addressing the history of the site, the architecture comprises tailored casts derived from the clothing of the meat packers and the geometry of cuts of meat.

8.21 Martins Starks, Y2 ‘Where the Spirits Come to Play’.

A downtown community centre upon the native lands of the previously exiled Algonquian people. Through the shared practice of woodcarving, all ages come together in the ritual of chronicling and reasserting their history.

Varying in scale between vast carved rooms and detailed engravings, these architectural acts manifest as shifts in resolution, translating an age-old analogue craft through contemporary digital fabrication tools.

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

8.25 Zixi (Vito) Chen, Y2 ‘Between Statis and Anti-Statis: An Architectural Duel of Market and Music’. A food market embedded with adaptive performance spaces for Jazz, revives the street culture lost to Chicago’s sprawl.

Programmatic contradictions play out through an architecture of balance, transforming daily from market to music hall. The building frame is weighted and calibrated to poise, shift, and reconstruct differing spatial conditions.

8.26–8.28 Cira Oller Tovar, Y3 ‘In the Shadow of the Sun’.

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

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

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

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Follow the Water

UG9

Jessica In, Chee-Kit Lai

This year, UG9 explored water as material, volume, inhabitant and participant. Our initial design projects involved the design of a drawing device that reveals a contextual relationship or phenomenon relating to water. Students considered the many forms water takes in the landscape – from droplet, ocean, cloud to glacier – and the different ways in which they can be measured, traced and quantified.

We explored techniques for mapping, scanning, and recording, and design methods for translating these into a time-based drawing, to be considered as a spatial/cartographic or political enquiry that negotiates between micro and macro scales.

We embarked on our field trip to explore the water towns of China near Shanghai, specifically between Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, also known as ‘the Venice of the East’. We visited architecture by old masters of architecture, such as I. M. Pei, as well as new masters Wang Shu and Luwen Yu. We explored the classical gardens of Suzhou – a UNESCO World Heritage site – and the tea plantations in Hangzhou, stepping back in time to low-rise water towns dating back 1300 years.

Our site investigations this year considered the importance that water has had in the landscape of these areas. Bordered by the Yangtze river in the north and divided through the middle by the Huangpu river, these towns have traditionally prospered from rice growing and trade routes. The area is under threat from global heating and vulnerable to serious flooding that could potentially displace tens of millions.

Our building projects this year consider the relationship between humankind and water, as it increasingly becomes both a precious resource and a threat. We explored how water can drive design ideas around the (im)material and ephemeral vs. permanent, to create architectures of agency that go beyond the control of the architect.

Key to the unit’s ongoing agenda, student projects consider how our design decisions can influence the lives of many people, how they move and how they live in their environments; the relationships between them, and the interaction and inhabitation of these spaces and moments.

This year for our technical skills development, we focused on photography, scanning, virtual and augmented reality, film and animation. We continued our interest in pushing the boundaries of architectural production and representation to bring the viewer or occupier as close as possible to the sensation of architecture.

Year 2 Sum (Victoria) Chan, Alfred Gee, Lucas Lam, Tianpei Wang, Jeffrey Wen Year 3 Anahita Hosseini Ardehali, Ian Lim, Yixuan (Aurelia) Lu, Nandinzul Munkhbayar, Chueh-Kai (Daniel) Wang, Yunzi (Zoe) Wang Computing Consultants: Alessandro ConningRowland, George Proud, Matthew Taylor Photography Workshop: Sophie Percival Year 3 Technical Consultant: Donald Shillingburg Special thanks to Guang Yu Ren and Xin Zhan in the organisation of our field trip Thank you to our critics Kirsty Badenoch, Theo Brader-Tan, Irem Bugdayci, Matthew Butcher, William Victor Camilleri, Krina Christopoulou, AnneHeloise Dautel, David Di Duca, Stephen Gage, Penelope Haralambidou, Jonathan Hill, Freddie Hong, Megha Chand Inglis, Kyriakos Katsaros, Constance Lau, Evan Levelle, Doug Miller, Tetsuro Nagata, Ian Ng, George Proud, Danielle Purkiss, Guang Yu Ren, David Shanks, Ben Spong, Sabine Storp, Nada Tayeb, William Trossell, Manijeh Verghese, Michael Wagner, Fiona Zisch

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9.1 Yunzi (Zoe) Wang, Y3 ‘Personalising Death – Decomposing Coffin’. Funerary rites in China typically follow strict conventions driven by unquestioned tradition and commercialisation, and lack a contemporary response to current ecological concerns. This proposal is a highly personal approach to burial. The coffin and death suit, made from processed crab shell, consumed in life in abundance in Shanghai, is entirely biodegradable.

Embedded with air pockets and mushroom spores, the suit intensifies decomposition in parts of the body that are slower to break down, such as joints. Given the country’s vast population, returning the body to the ground in this more natural way has the potential to make a significant positive environmental impact on burial in China.

9.2–9.3 Nandinzul Munkhbayar, Y3 ‘Seeping Through Time’. This device explores the physical properties and gestures of calligraphy with Chinese ink on layered ice.

Different layers of salinity in the ice cause the calligraphy to change unpredictably over time, resembling micro landscapes. The drawing is fed through an artificially intelligent generator, transforming the data into a seemingly real macro Chinese landscape painting.

The synthesised landscape is experienced in a virtual reality environment, allowing the viewer to inhabit an immersive and ever-changing Chinese landscape.

9.4–9.8 Ian Lim, Y3 ‘Tomb of the [Un]Known Soldier’.

A memorial for those who died in conflicts during the Cultural Revolution, this project deals with the perception of the history, where two realities are present – the local government view, and the view by foreigners and dissidents. Considered a dark part of China’s modern history, a physical memorial dedicated to the victims of the Cultural Revolution cannot exist within China, and as such the proposed physical design is a tomb for the Unknown Soldier that follows the conventions of Fengshui, which would be acceptable to the Chinese government. The use of virtual reality in the building provides an alternate reality which foreign visitors can access through the internet via a virtual private network, allowing two spaces to exist within one.

9.9 Jeffery Wen, Y2 ‘Butterfly Farm and Nursery’.

This project is a butterfly farm set in the Xixi Wetland Park in Hangzhou, which reintroduces native butterflies to the local area. The proposal focuses on the concept of duality, negotiating between inside and outside, light and heavy, butterfly and human, landscape and human-made. The building also offers spaces of contemplation inspired by the different stages of the butterfly’s delicate lifecycle, which is often used as a metaphor in Chinese aesthetics. Negotiating between spaces designed specifically for butterflies and humans, visitors are taken through subtle shifts in the datum and experience of the building in relation to the landscape.

9.10 Sum (Victoria) Chan, Y2 ‘Fabric Dyeing WorkshopGallery’. Sited in Wuchang, Hangzhou, China, this building uses natural and sustainable processes that minimise the impact on the wetlands. The programme rebuilds the wetland and fields for plantations to produce natural dyes for silk production in a responsible manner. The structure has been designed to collect rainwater for fabric dyeing, which will in turn be filtered by plants before being released into the main river.

9.11 Lucas Lam, Y2 ‘Hokutolite Mineral Laboratory and Museum’. Sited next to a natural stream in Beitou, Taipei city, Taiwan, water from the stream is pumped to recreate a hot spring to encourage the growth of the mineral Hokutolite on the roof. The form is inspired by studying the molecular structure of the mineral and photogrammetry data of the site. The architecture of the building and its joints are inspired by the additive process of Hokutolite forming, similar to 3D printing.

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9.12, 9.14 Yixuan (Aurelia) Lu, Y3 ‘Alibaba Business Incubator’. A campus building for Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba in Hangzhou as part of their ongoing investment in tech start-ups. Facilities include co-working and co-living spaces. The proposal sits on the edge of an artificially created pond that connects to existing waterways to reintroduce an area of wetland to the landscape. Water is used to cool computers that facilitate the automation of the architecture, which is in turn used for heating before releasing back into the cool waterways.

9.13 Alfred Gee, Y2 ‘A Microeconomic Fortress for the Preservation of Shanzhai’. Located in Huangpu District, north of Shanghai’s traditional fortified city walls, this proposal digitally reinforces the marketplace to provide a haven for the prolonging of Shanzhai in the face of increased legal scrutiny. Shanzhai goods are those that liberally borrow from an original product but contain an element of originality. Through shameless reinterpretation they unlock cultural remixes impossible in the highly regulated Western economy. The Microeconomic Fortress thrives in the legal grey area, playing with formal economies such as karaoke bars and informal economies such as shanzhai tech shops, as well as physical and virtual layers of security and visibility.

9.14 Jeffery Hao Wen, Y2 ‘Water Map Machine’. Designed according to real conditions in China, water is moved along different vessels interpreting the three main rivers, the Yellow River, Yangtze River, and the Huaihe River.

Pumps installed in the device lead to a chain reaction of water flow. Cones representing different cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, redirect water to different channels using fluid pressure. The device is annotated with projection mapping.

9.15 Tianpei Wang, Y2 ‘Digital Water Fountain’. Inspired by scenery paintings from a traditional Chinese Jiangnan garden, the Lingering Garden, digital water is used to create four overlapping scenes into the stair landing within The Bartlett’s building. The experience activates our brain to ‘see’ landscapes in the absence of object in between water particles. Digital water is manipulated in the virtual reality environment to reflect its different states throughout the four seasons of the year.

9.16–9.19, 9.21, 9.23 Chueh-Kai (Daniel) Wang, Y3 ‘Wetland (Re)treat’. A healthcare retreat sited in Wuchang, west of Xixi National Wetland Park in Hangzhou, this building fuses the natural and the human-made, and aims to heal both its occupants and landscape. Drawing on the traditional Chinese concept of ‘gui tu’ (meaning ‘returning ground’), through its construction process the project reintroduces water back to the wider landscape battered by neglect and urbanisation. Flooded in summer and dehydrated in winter, the negotiation of soil condition challenges methods of construction. At micro-scale, the project provides much needed aftercare facilities in the Chinese medical system. At macro-scale, the restructuring of earth reintroduces the wetlands to the wider landscape.

The project deals with the limitation of available materials in reality and speculation. Through the reuse of modelling material, the building is renegotiated repeatedly at various scales, as an analogy to the reality of the wetland’s appearance being constantly reshaped by water.

9.20, 9.22 Anahita Hosseini Ardehali, Y3 ‘The Eleventh Scene: Slow Fashion Silk Workshop’. Hangzhou is the silk capital of China but due to mass industrialisation, silk production has caused considerable damage to the landscape. This proposal is sited on the edge of West Lake, known for its ten exquisite ‘scenes’ or views. The project creates an eleventh scene by using atmospheric byproducts of slow silk production, many of which relate to water. When viewed from the lake, these elements combine to create the illusion of a surreal mountain range floating in the sky.

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Jackdaw Dream

UG10

Kyle Buchanan, Mellis Haward, James Purkiss

In UG10, we believe that to have agency, architects need to develop better ways to engage and communicate with people from a wide range of backgrounds. Recognising that how we communicate is as important as what we design, we started the year by making tools to start conversations around our core themes of ‘home’, ‘identity’ and ‘community’. We used these tools to explore fundamental questions around what makes a home and how it relates to our individual and collective sense of self and asked: Can a national housing crisis be interpreted as a national identity crisis?

We expanded on our personal experiences of home by visiting radical housing projects in the UK and abroad. On our field trip we travelled by train through the lowlands of Holland and Belgium to visit projects that demonstrate a collective ‘identity of place’.

Throughout the year, we have engaged with people who are working to address the housing crisis, including commissioners of housing and community projects, policymakers and people experimenting with radical new ways of living together. As well as being our critics and guides, these people have also been our clients.

We are indebted to our Year 2 students’ clients, the staff and residents of Phoenix Community Housing, a resident-founded, resident-led housing association based in Lewisham. By contrast, the Year 3 students identified and reached out to their own clients, ranging from healthcare workers to a recycling charity.

To get the most from direct engagement with these clients, we have had to learn to ‘speak to their language’. Gaining a first-hand understanding of our clients’ needs, priorities and the pressures on them has allowed us to speculate how we can contribute our skills as architects to help address their problems. All of our projects have been formed and iterated through conversations: we have drawn collaboratively with mothers, toddlers and nurses; we have presented our projects to residents and community leaders, charity organisers and board-game societies; and we have attended sewing clubs, coffee mornings and Transition Town meetings.

We had to adapt our methods of communication as a new crisis emerged in the second term which confined us to our homes. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the impact of housing inequality.

It has also instigated new community connections. We all intend to draw on our experiences this year to help facilitate community-led projects that will be crucial in shaping the ‘new normal’.

Year 2 Reem Taha Hajj Ahmad, Ho (Jeffrey) Cheung, Alice Guglielmi, Megan Hague, William Hodges, Charis Makmurputra, Wiam Mostefai, Jamie Stewart Year 3 Isabelle Gin, Maria Mendoza Guerrero, Olivia Hoy, Seng (Aaron) Lim, Barbara Sawko, Alice Shanahan, Amy Zhou Thank you to our technical tutors and consultants Ione Braddick, Tom Budd, Juliette Mitchell, Greg Nordberg, Frances Wright Thank you also to our critics Claire Bennie, Duncan Blackmore, Bill Hodgson, James Masini, Huma Mohyuddin, Elizabeth Owens, Paul Quinn, David Roberts, Claire Richards, Naomi Rubbra, Kathryn Timmins Our partners Phoenix Community Housing were extraordinarily generous clients to our Year 2 students. Thank you to Steve Connor, Pat Fordham, Angela Hardman, Anne McGurk, Leon Yohai and to all the resident critics

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10.1 Staff and residents of Phoenix Community Housing reviewing a Year 2 site model, March 2020.

10.2 Olivia Hoy, Y3 ‘Reconstructing Memory’. This project is a collaborative reconstruction of a grandmother’s spatial and material memories of a previous home.

10.3 Isabelle Gin, Y3 ‘Let’s Get Cultured’. This project takes the form of a board game exploring the intergenerational transference of knowledge, values and traditions at the Chinese dinner table.

10.4–10.5 Seng (Aaron) Lim, Y3 ‘Towards A SociallyEngaged Architecture’. This project seeks to develop tools to empower the public as co-designers. Taking inspiration from socially engaged art practices, the proposed tools aim to create transparency and foster trust between participants.

10.6–10.8 Maria Mendoza Guerrero, Y3 ‘Loneliness, An Epidemic with a Social Solution’. A pilot concept for a new suburban infrastructure to help the UK adapt to support an ageing population. The pilot project is sited in Galleywood, a suburb of Colchester in Essex. The current demographic of the village is representative of the predicted UK 2050 average but it lacks a GP surgery.

The design of the building, which accommodates a broad spectrum of intergenerational services, is centred around an experiential wait to see a GP. When someone like Ann, an older resident in Galleywood, spends time in the waiting room, she find herself at the centre of the village.

10.9–10.10 William Hodges, Y2 ‘(Re)defining Living ’ Responding to the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, this project addresses youth homelessness through prevention and rehabilitation, horticulture education and therapy.

10.11–10.13 Alice Shanahan, Y3 ‘Making Noise’. Responding to ongoing discourse regarding the representation and consideration of acoustics in planning policy and design, specifically Policy D13 of the Draft New London Plan, this live-work scheme, sited in Tottenham Hale, is designed with acoustics at the helm. Desirable soundscapes are achieved through alternative noise mitigations which facilitate otherwise clashing uses to coexist.

10.14–10.15 Isabelle Gin, Y3 ‘Intergenerational Living’.

This intergenerational cohousing community focuses on re-establishing the links between different generations. It promotes a more sustainable way of living by facilitating social cohesion of these generations for mutual dependence.

10.16–10.17 Olivia Hoy, Y3 ‘Playing at Home’. Co-located housing and kindergarten for 15 displaced mothers at the centre of FocusE15’s campaign for ‘social housing not social cleansing’. The project has been guided by workshops with children from the FocusE15 group, using playable models based on educational play materials known as Froebelian gifts.

10.18–10.19 Reem Taha Hajj Ahmad, Y2 ‘Echinacea’.

A culinary club and therapeutic garden for the Downham and Bellingham Young Carers Club. Echinacea helps young carers relieve their strain in a productive way through collective gardening and cooking. At Echinacea they can make new friends, gain life skills and regain their confidence.

10.20 Amy Zhou, Y3 ‘The Seen and Unseen’. A collaboration with Thames Water to tackle the ‘fatberg crisis’. Using methods of shock education, this public toilet installation project reaches out to the community by implicitly engaging them, educating them, and enticing them to change one small habit.

10.21 Charis Makmurputra, Y2 ‘Value: A Space Odyssey ’.

The scarcity of space within London has supported the assumption that more space equals value. However, with an ageing population, older generations are finding themselves living in homes that are too large for them.

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Housing. Working with Phoenix, this project proposes an intergenerational co-living scheme that reconnects a disconnected group of elders back into their community through shared living.

10.22 Wiam Mostefai, Y2 ‘Sewing as Therapy: Stitching Communities Closer Together’. A wearable tablecloth inspired by the Algerian La Nappe mixing bright colours from Algiers with earthy tones of London as well as traditional Kabyle and British quilting techniques.

10.23 Barbara Sawko, Y3 ‘Rituals of Everyday Life’.

A proposal to elevate the mundane routine of clothesdrying to encourage residents to reclaim and repurpose an underused communal space.

10.24 Ho (Jeffrey) Cheung, Y2 ‘A Communal Approach to Recycling’. This project challenges this hidden cycle of waste, and poses a new highly visible infrastructure where waste can be considered as a valuable resource.

10.25 Megan Hague, Y2 ‘Wellbeing’. A child-focused centre specifically designed to accommodate a range of targeted therapies using verbal communication, sensory play and creative expression to help children articulate their emotions and learn tools to aid the coping process.

10.26 Alice Guglielmi, Y2 ‘Phoenix’s Therapeutic Garden’.

Solitude and relaxation are increasingly becoming commodities in London, whilst rates of mental ill-health soar nationwide. Phoenix’s Therapeutic Eden is a scheme devised to better engage with residents of Phoenix Housing, in a ward where rates of mental illness are 40% higher than the national average.

10.27 Jamie Stewart, Y2 ‘Gardens on Our Doorstep ’.

A high-density housing scheme with a front garden for every property. Front gardens bursting with roses were once characteristic of the existing LCC estate. They were spaces for neighbourly interaction and a source of local pride. This project seeks to reverse the disappearance of front gardens to make way for parking. Front gardens will not solve all the problems faced by Phoenix Community Housing, but when it comes to strengthening a community, your doorstep is a good place to start!

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Eyes Wide Shut

UG12

Johan Hybschmann, Matthew Springett

We can all be accused of judging too quickly, of looking at the world around us through the skewed lens of naivety. This year, on the eve of Brexit, UG12 began a new trilogy of adventures exploring how we might view, and engage, with Europe and the world from afar.

Our current worldview is, in part at least, seeded in the information-saturated age in which we live. Stories and images are disseminated via social media and the internet in seconds. Without taking time to correctly frame an original narrative through wellinformed opinion, perspective and truth, the information is skewed by our collective lack of patience. This scenario now plays out, as much in in our everyday communications as it does in the quick-fired remarks of world leaders. Our social media presentation can be distorted with unanticipated results and misreadings, sometimes resulting in a hysterical culture of collective blame and shaming. A resultant narcissistic feedback loop of reassurance can be created, whereby we become convinced that our poorly assembled impressions are well-informed facts. If we are to resist this bias, we must now attempt the impossible by evaluating the validity of each and every presentation, statement and opinion we digest.

Via an increased bandwidth of received information our awareness of the world is now greater than ever. But is it naively formed on a more superficial, ill-informed basis and with less research-based enquiry?

In reality, our impressions are often heavily skewed and even false. It could be argued such distortions have always been, and may remain, part of Western cultures and societies. This often led to cultural misreadings and associated unconscious bias or prejudice about the world beyond their own. Those with the power and resource to educate themselves were more readily and accurately able to inform themselves about the wider world. The balance between received wisdom and direct experience is pertinent to all our learning and impacts all decision-making processes, including design.

This year, UG12 has explored these themes from an architectural perspective and questioned whether naivety is always bad. We considered whether the burden of deeper knowledge can, on occasions, hinder us as architects and examined how we make purposeful architecture in contexts of which we have no direct or lived experience. We speculated on whether architects are best informed to make these decisions and the role of architectural research informing them. The unit explored and tested these notions by working intuitively on each project before testing our assumptions in greater depth, and we commenced the year with our eyes wide shut.

Year 2 Selin Bengi, Xintong Chen, Lavinia Fairlie, Beatrice Frant, Matilda Grayson, Shyem Ramsay, Kirsty Selwood, Lion Tautz Year 3 Inez Acquah-Aikins, Renee (Soraya) Ammann, Long Yin Au, Niamh Cahill, Herui (Henry) Chen, Daniel (Eytan) Grubner, Sabrina Li, Su (Yen) Liew, Olivia Shiu Thanks to our consultant Rhys Cannon Thank you to our critics Margaret Bursa, BarbaraAnn Campbell-Lange, Rhys Cannon, Peter Culley, Fiona MacDonald, Duncan McLeod, Brian O’Reilly, Jonathan Pile, Naomi Rubbra, Nikolas Travasaros

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12.1, 12.10 Long Yin Au, Y3 ‘Personalaks – A Home for Life’. Situated next to the Vlatava River in Holesovice, Personalak is a social housing scheme that proposes a new low rise, high density solution in Prague’s housing landscape which adapts to residence’s changing needs while providing room for personalisation and self expression. The project was created with the intention of creating a home for life which can be inhabited by people of all ages, whilst fostering a community through shared social spaces between homes.

12.2, 12.14–12.15 Niamh Cahill, Y3 ‘Sponge City’. This proposal introduces a co-housing scheme for Prague’s ageing population, alongside a kindergarten, sited within a newly forested landscape in Holesovice, Prague.

The new typology of housing supports independent, community-orientated living with the benefits of celebrating intergenerational relationships. Young and old benefit from living and learning in nature, while engaging with one another. Sponge City promotes the introduction of natural water-catchment systems within the urban environment to accommodate the changing climate, welcoming the influx of water and celebrating its presence within the site.

12.3, 12.26 Su (Yen) Liew, Y3 ‘Innovation Depot’. This project proposes a district of innovation that provides a creative space for young professionals with companies in their infancies to live and work together. In addition, the close proximity to the new business district will encourage a relationship of education and progress. The district will be government led and funded, and government ‘scholarships’ will encourage people from the rest of Czechia (outside of Prague) to come into the city and partake in the district for a short-term period before returning to their own cities, developing business there.

12.4, 12.25 Renee (Soraya) Ammann, Y3 ‘Archive Island’.

An island in Vltava River tempts people away from the busy city streets to come and register births, deaths and marriages. The project aims to materialise bureaucracy in the form of paper and memorabilia, travelling throughout the building in correspondence to the owner’s point in life.

The stark contrasts between the celebratory, mourning and storage spaces hope to encourage visitors to share and celebrate their life experiences.

12.5, 12.22 Inez Acquah-Aikins, Y3 ‘Material Illuminance’.

The project proposes an integrated scheme of community spaces and subsidised housing for creatives. The aim of the scheme is to create a sustainable community centre that engages the public with craft, skill and creativity while providing artists with affordable housing for longer term residencies.

12.6–12.7 Xintong Chen, Y2 ‘The Hill Kindergarten’.

This design proposes an urban playground that facilitates both the adults and children in the residential area of Vinohrady, and to serve as a community hub for the Czech parents who are not on a parental leave. The building functions as a daycare centre in daytime and transforms into a folk-music hub at night, providing an intergenerational assembly space for the local community in Prague.

12.8 Lavinia Fairlie, Y2 ‘Aqua Rehabilitation Centre’.

Currently in Prague, people with disabilities are segregated from the rest of the community. This segregation began in the communist era and has been not been corrected since. This proposal is designed to break these artificial barriers down and encourage integration. The scheme is an inclusive aqua rehabilitation centre, open to disabled people for therapeutic purposes and for the wider community to use as a leisure facility.

12.9, 12.21 Olivia Shiu, Y3 ‘Cemetery for the Wanderer’.

A proposal for an underground urban cemetery and crematorium to target the growing issue of inadequate burial spaces in Prague. Inspired by the picturesque 158

landscape, the project is envisioned through the journey of a city dweller, wandering into an ethereal, camouflaged metal structure through cuts in the landscape.

12.11, 12.20 Herui (Henry) Chen, Y3 ‘Bridge Theatre’.

A proposal for a cultural centre located in Zone 5 of Prague, featuring three different types of performance spaces while functioning as a bridge to connect Císařská Louka island. The proposal aims to provide live-performance venues that were lacking in Zone 5 as an attempt to attract tourism and bring growth to the nearby area, to provide a stage for artists seeking for exposure, while attempting to diminish the privilege of performed arts.

12.12 Sabrina Li, Y3 ‘The Pause Button’. An annex to the University Hospital in Prague 10, the Pause Button is a centre and pavilion dedicated to bringing moments of calm and peace to those who need to take a break from the challenges of life. The project is an extension of the Czech culture of nature and escapism to deliver a space not designed as a place to pay visits, rather, it sits in site for those who are seeking a pause in their lives when they visit the hospital, for work or for help.

12.13 Lion Tautz, Y2 ‘Updating the Modernist Future’.

A prototypal exercise in redeveloping social(ist) housing estates, this project consists of a masterplan with the aim of revitalising Sidliste Dablice on the outskirts of Prague, and a proposal for a self-build community centre at the heart of the estate. The building proposal rejects the notion of the genius architect and instead aims to integrate the local residents into the design and building process, thus empowering them and fostering a sense of ownership and community.

12.16 Kirsty Selwood, Y2 ‘The Samizdat Archive’.

This project proposes a climate-controlled archive to store Samizdat literature (writings created during the communist era that were banned) which includes a functional exhibition and lecture space. The proposal allows the archive to become a visual reminder of the importance of Samizdat and consequently the importance of free speech in the current polarised political climate.

12.17 Selin Bengi, Y2 ‘Prague 10 Birth Clinic’. This project is a comprehensive campus catering to the needs of pregnant women before, during, and after labour.

Located in Czech Republic, a country notorious for distrespectful medical treatment during birth, the clinic promotes natural birth and aims to create a nurturing, empowering environment for women.

12.18–12.19 Daniel (Eytan) Grubner, Y3 ‘The Open Citadel’.

This defensive, yet open architecture seeks to provide a space for the journalists to navigate their changing identity through establishing an international forum for discussions about government influence over the press.

In addition, it contains accommodation for journalists targeted for their work and large plazas for public demonstrations, providing an urban haven for free speech.

12.23 Beatrice Frant, Y2 ‘Urban Women’s Sanctuary’.

The tourist-friendly capital of the Czech Republic is severely lacking in resources dealing with sex trafficking, a topic still considered taboo and widely overlooked.

To raise awareness and provide immediate short-term shelter and counselling to victims and sex workers, this refuge ensures the safety of its inhabitants while aiming to directly aid their mental and physical health.

12.24 Matilda Grayson, Y2 ‘Shelter’. This project aims to provide a space for rehabilitation and reintegration of the homeless population of Prague into the Czech society.

It acts as a hub for the homeless community to access safety and security in the form of shelter, while simultaneously engaging in the support necessary to rebuild a life with a secure income, job and home.

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In Decision

UG13

Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger

In UG13 this year, students began the year by looking at how decisions are made and experienced, both creatively and culturally. We were most curious about the potential of the interstitial period of time, when a decision has been made but the outcome has not yet formed. It is in this territory that the decision and its consequence are most fully able to be experienced, nuanced and understood. This much we knew at the outset: the ability to act decisively is valuable to move work forward with a pace and intensity that allows for continued learning within its development. Decisive acts empower us to make progress.

The process of making the decision and acknowledging its authorship of the terrain in which work emerges suggests an opportunity to test our intuition and identity as creative practitioners, helping to discover an individual methodology that will outlast a single year’s education. Decision-making is a skill that we practice throughout our lives. We develop our context, deepen our intuition, and yet as architects we remain free to adjust our mind in response to an outcome we did not expect. We must learn over time to identify opportunity, discover research and yet know when to trust intuition and simply jump into the dark.

The unit travelled to Portugal – to Lisbon and Porto – to understand how a contemporary European society approaches architectural progression culturally, and to consider the inherent value of existing decisions, or in this case buildings, in relation to future ideas. Students ventured to understand the foundations on which new ideas are built – and how young firms in Portugal are working decisively to make exciting new definitions, both in the cities and in rural areas. Buildings have been sited between these two cities.

In UG13, we value work that, although often simple in its programmatic and verbal description, is delightfully complex in its architectural proposition and inventiveness. Achieving clarity is firmly respected within our experimental and explorative agenda. The unit is proud to nurture a challenging environment of experimentation in the as-yet-unknown, where students feel supported and equipped to take the chances required to achieve the exceptional. Work is made in which the particularities of individual insight, interest and methodologies are embedded directly within the pieces and buildings.

Year 2 Ling Fung (Grace) Chan, Ioana-Maria Drogeanu, Zicong (Charles) Liang, Rebecca Miller, Kun (Anna) Pang, Sirikarn (Preaw) Paopongthong, Sharon Tam Year 3 Maciej Adaszewski, Dinu Hoinarescu, Dilara Koz, Ziwei (Philip) Liu, Jingxian (Jacquelyn) Pan, Kehui (Victoria) Wu, Yujie Wu, Suzhi Xu Thanks to our technical tutors and consultants Sophia McCracken, Sam Davies, Sonia Magdziarz, Minh Tran Thank you to our critics Alessandro Ayuso, Shawn Bailey, Matthew Butcher, Jun Hao Chan, Freddie Hong, Nina Jua Klien, Syafiq Jubri, Madhav Kidao, Luke Lupton, Zach Pauls, Patch Perez, Kevin Pollard, Mark West, Simon Withers

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13.1–13.4 Ziwei (Philip) Liu, Y3 ‘A School for Ages 3-7, Lisbon’. Using the bounds of a school, the project is an attempt to exploit a certain bodily expression. It is located in the landscapes of Botanical Garden of Lisbon. Children are allowed to interact in a liberating and protective environment. As a speculative exploration into the realms of unbound imagination, it is ambiguous whether the architecture houses the body, or the anatomy governs its structure. In the shadows of the wondrous landscape, comes the wrenching skeleton with a bustling scene of play; lurking through the layers of amorphous skin is the curious Principal; and from its undulating shell rises the unfettered playground for the little beings.

13.5–13.8 Jingxian (Jacquelyn) Pan, Y3 ‘The Wayfarer, Som das Virtudes, Porto’. A waterpark design inspired by a study into the relationship between humans and music created through band jamming, applying this practice to one’s own interaction with architectural design. The project challenges the stagnant quality of architecture, by applying the ideology of band jamming to the design of a water park, and to create experiences within a piece of architecture that only exist in the very present moment.

13.9–13.10 Dilara Koz, Y3 ‘Existential Subdivisions of Peripheral Space: A House Model for Four Generations, Porto’. Multigenerational housing, more popular across the Eastern hemisphere, presents itself as an opportunity to secure the development of an area, preventing further slum typologies such as the Ilhas that exist in the historic centre of Porto. The compactness of four generations living together is dissolved through a variety of threshold conditions across the spaces of dwelling. With each generation, there is a gradual progression from the private living space to the communal, explored through the spatialisation of the threshold (wall) that traditionally divides spaces within architecture.

13.11–13.12 Sirikarn (Preaw) Paopongthong, Y2 ‘Pastelaria of Play: Culinario Ludico, Lisbon’. Bridging the notion of precise inquiry and creative play, the culinary school and pastelaria serves as a space where the nomadic lifestyle takes over, to be engaged by the space through ones own tentative thoughts. Aiming to enhance the realm of a cultural culinary creation, architecture acts as a way of secondary rule-making.

13.13 Maciej Adaszewski, Y3 ‘Instituto Dos Vinhos, Porto’. An architectural proposal for boutique winery, situated on one of Porto’s signature steep hills, adjacent to the Douro river. Central to the vision of the building is the intersection between private, industrial side of a wine-making facility, hospitality areas for wine tasting events and representative function of the object. During the day, surfaces of this proposal bask in Portuguese sun, allowing natural daylight to reach areas of industrial production. After the sun sets, light from within the winery illuminates acts of inhabitation, revealing itself in a form of natural projections to be witnessed by outside bystanders.

13.14–13.15 Suzhi Xu, Y3 ‘Estudo de Deformacao – A Second-Hand Market, Porto’. As a common norm, a piece of furniture is deactivated when there is an absence of contact between it and the user. This project finds ways to utilise the nature of deactivation to form new connections with pre-owned materials, redefining and extending its boundaries. The crisis of abandoned housing in Porto provides an opportunity to look at unused furniture and other properties in this way. The proposal redefines the original purpose of collected materials through re-valuation and re-activation.

13.16 Kehui (Victoria) Wu, Y3 ‘Casa de Amplificação, Porto’. This project is a purpose-built venue for the experience of live performances, tailored specifically to the genre of rock music. The building seeks to counter the notion that environments in which amplified music is 170

performed do not need to be specially designed, instead arguing that the architecture of a venue has significant impact on the gig experience.

13.17 Ioana-Maria Droganeu, Y2 ‘Breathing Inside the Womb, Lisbon’. This surrealist exhibition space and hostel explores a way in which the idea of the womb, our first home, can be introduced in the building design by using inflatable structures. These structures create a constant exchange between the interior and the exterior.

13.18 Zicong (Charles) Liang, Y2 ‘An Art Centre for the Youth of Porto’. This project proposes an art centre: a community and a platform for students and young art lovers to learn art, perform art and exhibit their achievements to the public in Porto. The building presents a vision to rejuvenate the cultural life of the city that suffered from a lack of funding during the financial crisis.

13.19 Rebecca Miller, Y2 ‘The Love of the Land, Lisbon’.

The project is a chapel and auditorium with supporting facilities, referencing the changing agricultural landscape of Lisbon. Inspired by cartographic, agrarian and animist attitudes to landscape, the natural world and their uniquely spiritual qualities, this non-denominational chapel will allow for spiritual reflection within the urban city and highlight the spiritual, more ephemeral features of landscape.

13.20 Ling Fung (Grace) Chan, Y2 ‘Shelter of Who You Are, Lisbon’. This hostel is a response to a brief of confronting people’s self-cognition in a dynamic and interactive sensation exchange. It gives priority to the way in which people respond to each other in a space, and attempts to explore this through architectural proposal.

Level changes are used to create spontaneous social interractions across light-filled wells.

13.21 Yujie Wu, Y3 ‘The Decadents and New Nature; A Hotel for Golden Visa Applicants, Lisbon’. On a cliff surrounded by exotic trees, the hotel is trying to blend into the surrounding environment through blurring the boundary between manmade and nature, inside and outside. The building’s moving elements also incorporate with nature to make the building alive.

13.22 Kun (Anna) Pang, Y2 ‘Carving Flesh and Stone, Lisbon’. As large cities such as Lisbon continue to develop and urban populations rise, our civilisation is becoming more and more disconnected to the cities we inhabit.

Thus the aim of the bathhouse is to explore how marble carving could be modernised in order to carve modern, fluid forms, dematerialising the monolithic identity of stone to allow for a nonverbal dialogue between the visitors and the architecture; creating a sensory oasis in the heart of the busy city.

13.23, 13.25 Sharon Tam, Y2 ‘Biblio[TECH], Lisbon’.

Located near the port of Lisbon, this tech startup office embodies the concept of fragility and encourages socialisation. As a response to the Portuguese Financial Crisis, the provision of co-working spaces contributes to the city’s steps to economic recovery. While the design of a fragile workspace intends to motivate entrepreneurs through eliciting their vulnerabilities, the programme as a business agglomeration serves as an anti-fragile safety net for them to grow their businesses. The form of the building challenges structural lightness and heaviness, material thinness and thickness.

13.24 Dinu Hoinarescu, Y3 ‘Portuguese Short Film Festival, Lisbon’. On the peak of the old neighborhood of Alfama, overlooking Lisbon, lies the new site of the Portuguese Short Film Festival organised by the Art Institute of New York. The role of the film festival programmer and director is taken by the architect through camera direction and wayfinding using light and the existing topography. The key aspect and driver of the project is the duality of the everyday use of the building in contrast to the glamorous festivities of the film festival.

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Repeat, Recall, Rewrite

UG14

David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata

In UG14, we always consider architecture in four dimensions. Buildings only exist when they are experienced, and this can only occur through the axis of time. We believe in a design process with a focus on how people perceive, interact with and remember space – the connection between body, imagination and memory. This ‘temporal architecture’ can be described through the reading of drawings and models frozen in time, but is better experienced through films and animations, interactive models and installations. These modes of representation allow us to test out our theories and provide a method of storytelling that arouse emotional responses.

To complement these practices, we design our architecture as holistic ‘stages’ and ‘sets’: structures which can facilitate different experiences over extended lifetimes. This not only creates buildings of varying permanence and longevity, but also makes sense as a model of sustainable design. Buildings are able to exist for decades and centuries, hosting a plethora of relatively temporary events through minor modifications.

This year UG14 considered how societies remember. Shared memories are not only those that have been recorded in writing and images. They are the habits and traditions that are performed by people, which, knowingly or not, are reproduced to evoke an understanding of a narrative. When a society really wants to remember something as a community, it commits these stories into commemorative ceremonies. We began the year by identifying rituals that we observe around us, which remind communities in London of their past.

For our trip, we visited Georgia and explored the abandoned spa town of Tskaltubo. In its heyday, four trains would arrive daily from Moscow bringing thousands of visitors to its baths and sanatoriums.

The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the demise of the town, and the Abkhaz-Georgia conflict prompted the town to assume a new history, with its empty hotels and sanatoriums becoming makeshift homes for up to 10,000 internally displaced people. Today, the town lies mainly derelict: Tskaltubo is part museum, part amusement park, and part functioning town. It remains a fascinating reminder of the rituals of the past.

The building project questions what role these existing buildings in Tskaltubo can have for the communities that live and visit there.

The abandoned spaces are reimagined as homes (stages) to newfound or rediscovered traditional rituals and events (sets), in order to design a layered architecture that offers new histories and identities.

As designers, sometimes we need to decide what to remember, and what to forget.

Year 2 Finlay Aitken, Ivy Aris, Ye Ha Kim, Harris Mawardi, Rebecca Radu, Fergal Voorsanger-Brill, Prim Vudhichamnong, Xiaotan (Alex) Yang Year 3 Nicholas Collee, Paul Kohlhaussen, Oscar Leung, Aaliyah McKoy, Loukis Menelaou, Jennifer Oguguo, Zaneta Ojczyk, Evan O’Sullivan, Josef Stoger Thanks to our consultants George Adamapoulos, Alexis Germanos, Danielle Purkiss Thank you to our critics Abigail Ashton, Sarah Firth, Stephen Gage, Kevin Kelly

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14.1, 14.4 Paul Kohlhaussen, Y3 ‘Earthen Vinification’.

Inspired by traditional Georgian feasting (supra) rituals, the project proposes a winery in an abandoned sanatorium, which hosts an annual programme of collective production of wine and ceramics.

The building is structured to accommodate three key celebratory rituals, representing toasts dictated by the tamada (toastmaster) and the merikife (wine-runner).

14.2–14.3 Loukis Menelaou, Y3 ‘(Re-)Constructing Iosseliani’s Sonic World’. The project proposes a film residency which focuses on foley sound design.

Architectural elements are redesigned as instruments whose form and scale are not only informed by orthodox spatial requirements but also by their sonic qualities and ability to recreate sounds from local film director Otar Iosseliani’s sound palette.

14.5 Evan O’Sullivan, Y3 ‘Psychosis Rehabilitation Centre’.

The project aims to synthesise the evolving cognitive research on the relationship between the built environment and mental wellness. The building is designed through manipulating spatial qualities to favour the needs and desires of patients, thereby creating an opportunity for alternative treatment therapies that could alleviate the need for pharmaceutical intervention.

14.6 Josef Stoger, Y3 ‘P’arazit’i’. Inspired by the parasitic fungus Cordyceps, the Tskaltubo Cyber-balance Centre grows out from an abandoned Soviet-era bathhouse. Its mission: to protect the Georgian state from the threat of Russian cyber-attack. Designed as an individual organism, the funicular roof structure is packed with a myceliuminoculated substrate, which eats through and binds the building into a single monolith.

14.7 Fergal Voorsanger-Brill, Y2 ‘Tskaltubo Regeneration Station’. The programme is a portable construction school that teaches sustainable self-build skills through practical projects, and aims to teach students that construction can be as personal as drawing or painting in the design process. The brief discusses temporary and permanent material languages, as it is installed at each sanatorium for two years, but leaves behind repairs that will last for many more.

14.8 Rebecca Radu, Y2 ‘Indigo Dyeing Manufacture ’.

The project provides employment for the local internally displaced population and aims to uphold the Georgian custom of decorating traditional supras with indigodyed tablecloths. The design is inspired by the the draping of these cloths and is elaborated with dynamic mechanical elements, which are adaptable to the external environment.

14.9 Ivy Aris, Y2 ‘Medea’s Herbal Apothecary’. The project honours the ancient ritual of herbal medicine, a practice rooted in Georgian culture. The apothecary celebrates the fertile land of the region and commemorates the country’s healing heritage. The proposal pays homage to traditional religious rituals and explores how placebo effects can be enhanced through architecture.

14.10 Finlay Aitken, Y2 ‘Skate Hostel’. Informed by the documentary ‘When Earth Seems to be Light,’ the skate hostel aims to relocate the youth culture of Georgia from Tbilisi to the abandoned Soviet spa town of Tskaltubo.

The building plays with the relationship between old and new as it carves skate-able architecture into the fabric of the existing sanatorium.

14.11 Prim Vudhichamnong, Y2 ‘Art Restoration Laboratory’. The project proposes a conservation centre to reinstate the underappreciated art and identity of Georgia, along with the redevelopment of the adjoining semi-derelict Sanatorium Imereti as a gallery for their exhibition. The centre’s design is informed by the concept of layered transparency and controlled lighting to create interconnected but regulated restoration spaces.

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14.12 Oscar Leung, Y3 ‘The Curious Parasite’. This project is a hostel for urban explorers who romanticise and broadcast the decaying sanatoriums of Tskaltubo. The programme utilises controlled weathering by combining new building spaces which accelerate the disintegration of the architecture they are entwined with. It explores the parasitic relationship between ruin and the tourist industry, and the concept that imperfect structures can have greater value than faultless preservation.

14.13–14.14 Nicholas Collee, Y3 ‘Carving a New Language’.

This project fragments a Soviet-era bathhouse in order to demonstrate an active ownership of Georgia’s tumultuous past, and form a new cultural arts space. The design cuts away and replaces parts of the crumbling ruin with new elements which are stylistically informed by both the country’s traditional calligraphy and architectural ornamentation, as well as its contemporary art scene.

14.15 Zaneta Ojczyk, Y3 ‘Medea Teahouse’. There is a parallel between the decline of Tskaltubo and the Georgian tea industry; both collapsing with the downfall of the Soviet Union. Situated in the derelict Sanatorium Medea, this proposal functions as an educational visitor centre and aims to revive the forgotten local tea industry by devising a new tea ritual as a means to reinvent Georgia’s post-Soviet identity.

14.16–14.17 Aaliyah McKoy, Y3 ‘Khridoli Shadow Spa’.

This programme is a theatrical sports and spa complex, focusing on the traditional Georgian martial art of Khridoli. Inspired by the Roman bathing ritual which incorporated entertainment as well as healing, it develops an architecture that explores the dynamic relationship between performers and viewers.

14.18 Jennifer Oguguo, Y3 ‘Food For Thought’. This project explores the history and politics of tangerine production in Georgia. The building programme is a seed bank and spa focusing on deploying tangerine-based analogies within a pre-existing Soviet architecture. Set ten years into the future, the importance of preservation in agriculture is presented through seeds, the human body and the building’s ruins.

14.19 Harris Mawardi, Y2 ‘Tskaltubo Performing Arts Centre’. The project provides an opportunity to celebrate the history of arts and culture within Tskaltubo. Sited in an abandoned bathhouse that is overgrown by surrounding parkland, the theatre’s porosity aims to blur the boundaries of stage and nature as well as the threshold between its auditorium and public spaces.

14.20, 14.22 Xiaotan (Alex) Yang, Y2 ‘Palace of Sakartvelo’.

The ambition of the project is to revitalise an abandoned hotel complex into a multifunctional community and transportational hub, in partnership with an educational timber processing factory for displaced people to utilise the resources of the adjacent forests. Elements of traditional Georgian architecture and steam-bending techniques are central to the building’s design.

14.21 Ye Ha Kim, Y2 ‘Therapeutic Infrastructure’. The site is located adjacent to Lake Tsivi, which is heavily polluted with copper sulphate sludge materials. The project explores how waste materials extracted from the water treatment process can be incorporated into the design of a holiday retreat. The design proposes a water-cleaning landscape, where elements of the process are analogous to the detoxification organs within the human body.

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UG15

Ivana Wingham, Lucy Pengilley Gibb

This year, UG15 started to look at obsolete efficiencies, to turn them into present temporal delay by changing utilitarian objects into things that ‘talk’ to the present. Learning from objects that once transformed the lives of people as innovative pieces of modern technology affecting the home or work – typewriter, arithmometer, teasmade, sewing machine or apple peeler – the students drew ideas from these objects and their associated behaviours, turning operative investigations into individual responses to old technologies.

In the first term, students used these investigations to tease out ideas about behaviours that are in opposition to what is expected or predicted from such technologies. They launched into disobedient, accidental, playful, unexpected and emotional responses that provoked uniquely individual spatial constructions. The projects exploited technological obsolescence as a drive for locating indeterminate human behaviours and unusual engagements with architectural spaces.

During our carefully choreographed field trip across Northern Italy to visit remote, inaccessible and well-known modernist sites – such as dams and sites of disaster, viaducts and flood plains, palaces of labour and car test-tracks – we extended our understanding of obsolescence and innovation. Focusing on the once-iconic pieces of architecture that embody layers of temporal expiry, we revealed their potential latency, and quickly learned that when architecture becomes obsolete, it becomes liberated from its intended utility.

UG15 embraced this opportunity and proposed a disobedient practice that played on the notion of architecture that is never complete and pristine, but rather engages with time and the unfinished, while it rebelliously and innovatively re-jigs established cultural, technological or historical practices.

The final architectural projects see architecture as fluctuating, kinetic, flowing, dispersed, and expanding temporally, operatively and programmatically. The designs embrace the incomplete, the hidden, the fragile, the orchestrated, and much more. Buildings are seen as sites of exploration; activators within larger strategies that draw out planes of multiple temporalities, layers of materiality and combinations of activated behaviours, on obsolete sites.

We experimented with speeding and delaying time in designing architecture, creating conflicting strategies within our chosen sites, designing building projects that played with seductive registrations, in order to make spaces that nurture and inspire human life and create new atmospheres.

Year 2 Irene Entrecanales, Anna Knapczyk, Yutong Luo, Michela Morreale, Carmen-Theodora Noretu, Gregorian Tanto, Sevgi Yaman, Wenxi Zhang Year 3 Ana Dosheva, Ceren Erten, Marina Kathidjotis, Amy Peacock, Carmen Ligia Poara Thanks to our digital tutors Egmontas Geras, Omar Ibraz Thanks to our consultants Kostas Grigoriadis, Michael Hadi, Nick Hayhurst Thank you to our critics Irene Astrain, Asa Bruno, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Nat Chard, Maria Federochenko, James Foster, Egmontas Geras, Niamh Grace, Kostas Grigoriadis, Michael Hadi, Phil Hamilton, Kieran Hawkins, Nick Hayhurst, Marcus Hurst, Tim Norman, Teresa Stoppani

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15.1 Ana Dosheva, Y3 ‘Orchestrated Flow’. This project reworks obsolete site of Italian Paper Mill Factory famous for its copper vessels used for paper pulp-making, and transforms it into a museum of obsolete hydraulic systems.

The roof becomes a bespoke rain-activated museum artifact orchestrating water flow that creates unique sounds by double curved copper sheet tiles. This interior view looks towards Maglio Chamber.

15.2–15.3, 15.12 Ceren Erten, Y3 ‘Written on Water’.

This project explores the temporal obsolescence of a site on the river Reno, Italy. Parts of the site are submerged seasonally, and the space between two buildings overlooks the wall. The canal observes the river flow regulated by the sluice, and is a place of unfulfilled desire with unfinished, parallel bridge that may bring both sides to the river. The project recalls the famous quote from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius: ‘Existence is like a river in ceaseless flow, … scarcely anything stands still, even what is most immediate.’

15.4 Amy Peacock, Y3 ‘Restless Architecture’. This project proposes an alternative to the traditional urban workplace setting, seeking to create work and home environments shaped to the needs of the individual inhabitant. Working with an inside-out method, the first view shows how the activities of the building’s occupants are impressed into the inner surfaces of the architecture, and are expressed by the outer façade.

15.5 Amy Peacock, Y3 ‘Restless Architecture’. This view shows the assembly and community buildings on site.

15.6 Ceren Erten, Y3 ‘Accidental Encounters’ engages the obsolete complexity of the machine, creating dual applepeeler drawings that explore movement and time, designing novel apparatus and exploratory devices that allows for accidental behaviours when operated by two people.

15.7–15.8 Marina Kathidijotis, Y3 ‘Hungry for More’.

This project translates human desires for power, love or glory that embody inherent ambiguities, into architecture.

Engaging the means arising from inconsistency of the actions (jaw) and the words (tongue), the ‘Ventriloquist’ and ‘Tongue Device’ critically explore the idea of hunger for monetary gain through the dissociation of the two.

15.9 Ana Dosheva, Y3 ‘A Su Filindeu Stretch’. In the first project of the year, analogue manufacturing exploited the advancements in air-powered technologies and silicon casting tested in a 1:1 only to eventually become an unfolding dinner: a didactic space, creating experiential memory of the almost extinct pasta making performancecraft Su Filindeu. This device focuses on elbow movement creating body memory for the occupant of the device.

15.10 Marina Kathidjiotis Y3 ‘Hungry for More’. The ‘Prolonging Touch Device’ simulates the ambiguity of love, introducing chance within the possibility of interlocking the touch.

15.11 Carmen Ligia Poara, Y3 ‘Identity and Traces’ explores the way in which individual identity can be revealed by searching for patterns and traces that an individual makes. Changing the original typewriter letter function, a new method of pattern-making is discovered, with imposed restriction, offering a chance for new patterns to be engraved onto the canvas.

15.13 Yutong Luo, Y2 ‘Garden of Wisdom’. This project transforms Pier Luigi Nervi’s obsolete structure, the Palace of Labour, into a library with a large botanical garden.

This drawing of textured ‘wall’ layers in the library-garden area allows the reader to experience the view and the access to the garden.

15.14 Sevgi Yaman, Y2 ‘Moments of Preservation’ explores relationship between an instant and ever-receding past, creating a never-ending strip of images left behind. The proposal creates new memories by capturing moments, from preservation of photography, to preserving flowers frozen in ice.

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15.15 Wenxi Zhang, Y2 ‘Cinematic Tracks’ activates the Lingotto racetrack by reuniting it with vehicles and people as a place of cinematic experience and vehicle servicing. Suspended car access brings visitors in, to merge with diverse runways in rhythm, enclosures peel up from the road for restaurants and platforms stack to elevate views to cinema screens and city.

15.16 Michela Morreale, Y2 ‘Occupation of Breath’ is a museum of air inhabiting an obsolete concrete ramp of the Lingotto. A translucent kinetic pneumatic structure occupies the void in-between the ramps and spills out onto the roof-controlled and restricted by a tension cable ribcage to alter the internal space programmatically and atmospherically.

15.17 Gregorian Tanto, Y2 ‘Sight of an Eagle’ engages with the apertures of vision between man and eagle as they engage with each other around canyon of an obsolete dam. An Eagle observatory brings views upwards, outwards and through 360-degree immersions, with a landscape of golden eagle nesting areas and observation cabins.

15.18 Carmen-Theodora Noretu, Y2 ‘Healing Box’ Originating from a simple hourglass filled with grains of sand – a chamber of time and space vividly refracting light and shadows – this hand-held device explores light therapy in a spatial context with sequential kinetic elements, projecting outwards and within the space itself.

15.19 Ana Dosheva Y3 ‘Orchestrated Flow’. The distinct structural integrity of double-curved copper sheets allows a spatial arrangement free of any additional support elements. The method of topological optimisation used both on solid fragments and sheet surfaces extends the built strategy beyond the museum. This image shows a view from a car passing through Borgonuovo along Autostrada del Sole.

15.20 Carmen Ligia Poara Y3 ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: Anti-Mafia Investigation And Prosecution Centre’.

Inspired by the famous MAXI trials in early 1990s, this project creates a strategic game of hide and seek between the mafia and justice, and treats architecture as the ‘fingerprint of function’. Concealing architecture’s function from imminent threats, this view shows a building camouflaged by a biogas facility.

15.21 Amy Peacock Y3 ‘Restless Architecture’. This drawing explores the texture of the site, using pencil rendering and embossing to capture the experience of moving through the landscape, and highlighting key areas of occupation.

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Building The Bartlett Summer Show, 2019

Architectural & Interdisciplinary Studies BSc

Architectural & Interdisciplinary Studies BSc Programme Director: Elizabeth Dow Architectural culture has never been exclusively produced by certified architects but now, more than ever, there are many other people working in related fields – film, media, curation, design and creative practice – who shape debates and ideas around architecture in significant ways. In bringing together architectural research with design and creative practice, Architectural & Interdisciplinary Studies students are participating in these significant and complex debates.

The greatest strength of the programme is its interdisciplinary nature. We encourage our students to navigate their studies in a focused manner, whilst choosing from a diverse range of modules from across UCL alongside their architectural studies. They develop a range of skills and build a unique knowledge-set tailored to their interests, empowering them to go on to apply themselves to careers such as journalism, art, design policy and activism, environmental and urban studies. The programme also serves to form a foundation for postgraduate study, with our current graduating cohort already having accepted places on Master’s programmes across the UK and abroad.

This year, the programme has received an exchange student from the University of Toronto and three of our own students have travelled to study for a year at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and McGill University. Our study abroad placements continue to allow students to take advantage of the wider curricula offered by our partner institutions and experience different and exciting cultural approaches to their studies that not only inform their work, but also inspire and provoke a broader pedagogic debate amongst the whole programme.

There are two specially tailored modules for Architectural & Interdisciplinary Studies students at The Bartlett, ‘Design and Creative Practice’ and ‘Architectural Research’. Images from the resulting design projects and excerpt of work produced on this year’s ‘Architectural Research III’ essay-based module can be found on the following pages.

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Architectural Research tutors Edwina Attlee, Ruth Bernatek, Brent Carnell, Stylianos Giamarelos, Thandi Loewenson, Sophie Read, Caroline Rabourdin, David Roberts Design & Creative Practice tutors Kirsty Badenoch, Kevin Green, Tom Kendall, Chee-Kit Lai, Caroline Rabourdin, Freddy Tuppen, Gabriel Warshafsky, Michelle Young Computing for Design & Creative tutor Bill Hodgson Greening Cities tutor Blanche Cameron Programme Administrator Pani Fanai-Danesh Special thanks to our critics, workshop and seminar leaders: Vasilija Abramovic, Suifan Adey, Douglas Bevans, Alfonso Borragan, William Victor Camilleri, Nat Chard, Tom Dyckhoff, Oliver Evans, Holly Fisher, Steve Johnson, Marcy Kahan, Beth Kettle, Victor Mazon, Claire McAndrew, Sophie Page, Barbara Penner, Conrad Shawcross, Adam Shield, Emily Stone, Nathaniel Telemaque, Matt Tomkins, Sarah Wilkes, Tom Wilkinson, Oliver Wilton and The Story Garden

Architectural Research III: Module Coordinator: Brent Carnell

Architectural Research III is an advanced architectural research module allowing students to work on an interdisciplinary architectural subject of their own choosing, undertake rigorous primary research and write an 8000-word essay. Concurrent to individual research projects, students also work collaboratively on the production of a group output such as a website, zine or lecture series, for dissemination in June (this group component was interrupted this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic). This will be followed by an edited anthology – with an aim to publish after five years of student research, in approximately 2023.

Over the year, students hone their research methods skills, learned in the Research I and Research II modules, while distilling the fruits of their own unique interdisciplinary education gained at The Bartlett and other departments across UCL.

This year’s projects are truly interdisciplinary. They offer an impressive range of built environment investigations. The teaching team is profoundly impressed with the rigour, commitment and development of each study – a particular feat given the challenges students faced this academic year.

Module Tutors Sophie Read, David Roberts, Stylianos Giamarelos Students Rory Alexander, Isabelle-Maria Arusilor, Moe Atsumeda, Sadika Begum, Maya Garner, Mari Katsuno, Henri Khoo, Alexia Koch, Inbar Langerman, Ashley Law, Tseng-Han (Christina) Lin Hou, Pinyi (Joicy) Liu, Qiyin (Sienna) Liu, Nyima Murry, Mimi Osei-Kuffuor, Uliana Shesterkina, Constance Stafford, Eva Tisnikar

Our Memory: Architectural Memorials and the Reconciliation of Collective Memory in Post-Shining Path Peru Tseng-Han (Christina) Lin Hou Memory, its reconstruction, and reconciliation are acutely disputed notions in the discourse of the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso, Shining Path (SP) terrorism that afflicted the country from 1980-2000. In 2014, in Ayacucho, the geographical crux of the terror, an association mainly comprised of mothers, ANFASEP (National Association of Relatives of the Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared in Peru), vigorously campaigned to construct a sanctuary of commemoration for the victims of military violence, reclaiming the stretch of land that had been used as mass grave of those accused of terrorism. Two years prior, in Lima, the capital of Peru, communities gathered daily around a mausoleum for the deceased members of SP, protesting for its demolition. As of 2019, ANFASEP has successfully established the Santuario de la Memoria La Hoyada, Sanctuary of Memory La Hoyada, and the mausoleum has been demolished. Notwithstanding the antithetical aims of these disputes, both incidents have catalysed a national debate on architectural memorialisation of victims and terrorism in Peru.

The desire to establish a collective memory resulted in the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a truth commission established to formally investigate and report human rights violations committed in national territory by all 207

parties involved.1 The TRC was created to reconcile the splintered communities, and to place the blame unbiasedly so the nation could heal, for the violence was exerted not by an external force, but an internal one. Nevertheless, despite being hailed a benchmark by international bodies, the TRC achieved an uncertain reconciliation insofar as its conveyance could achieve.2 Stemming from the shortfall of the TRC and the consequent memory conflict afflicting the nation, this research essay examines how architectural memorials aid in the formation and the shaping of a collective memory of the 1980-2000 SP terror. The overriding argument is that architectural memorials are elemental instruments of truths and memory, capable of reconciling individual memories into a collective memory, for they bear the multifaceted mnemonic nature capable of honouring the complexity of the terror. Pertinent case studies were selected in Lima and Ayacucho, and primary research was carried out in the form of interviews and site research. Examining the selected case studies through three branches – architectural memorials as truth-telling mediums, spatial frameworks of collective memory and spaces of interaction – this research essay finds that architectural memorials communicate universally and inclusively, are formed, shaped and reshaped by communities, and contextualise the very act of reconciliation and remembrance.

“From this violence, we cannot reach a pure truth. Unless you have lived it all in your own flesh. The government cannot tell you that this is how things happened. No truth stands alone. Everyone has their story.

The best we can do is collect the memories of the communities – those directly and indirectly affected – and make a unified memory. Our memory.” (Guillerma, Ayacucho)3

1. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR). “Balance CVR”. Informe Final. http://cverdad.org.pe/ lacomision/balance/index.php (retrieved 20/01/2020) 2. Milton, Cynthia E. Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth-Telling in Post-Shining Path Peru. (Duke University Press, 2014). pp.1-37 3. Extract from interview with Guillerma from Ayacucho. Conducted 23/12/2019 208

Design & Creative Practice 1, 2 & 3

Design & Creative Practice enables students to undertake a mode of working that particularly interests them and an independent practice-based project in which they can research and pursue a subject of their preference. Students are asked to think of architecture in interdisciplinary ways, explore alternative approaches to design and situate their work within a broader cultural context.

This year’s Year 1 Design & Creative Practice students immersed themselves in a palette of raw materials, learning their logics, habits and quirks together with their associated cultural affect while applying a range of forming techniques. They went on to consider the ways in which these materials will, through the action of time, wear and weather, begin to deform. Students were challenged to re-frame these processes as creative evolution rather than a degradation, speculating alternative futures for their chosen materials.

In Year 2, we combined material experimentation with public interaction, moving from the laboratory to the workshop and out into the city. In the context of the Anthropocene, we interrogated themes of ‘matter’ and ‘process’ at a micro-scale, questioning the relational ecology of design through form, fabrication and situation.

Materials varied from wax and water, to bio-luminescence and wind; processes from ageing and replication, to tracking and translation.

Applying our experiments at 1:1, the students curated a public group exhibition and a series of physical and virtual site walks along London’s Regent’s Canal. Encouraging interdisciplinary methods and critical thinking, projects ranged from transcribing the canal as a musical symphony, misleading audio guides for getting lost, living luminescent bacterial colonies, and a holistic soil hospital. Together we explored our place and impact on the world as a group of scientists, artists, performers, architects and more.

Year 3 Design and Creative Practice has always been driven by an interest in interdisciplinary practice that looks outside of the institution and promotes public-facing, socially engaged projects.

This year, our Year 3 students explored the theme of magic and collectively explored the role that it plays in shaping the cities of today. Combining group work and individual projects, they explored and experimented with strategies for creative practice that addressed themes of sustainability and community within a wide cultural context, while collectively exploring more focussed themes and approaches to design, relating to architecture and the built environment.

Design & Creative Practice 1 Isobel Binnie, Anya Blanchfield, Margaret (Maggie) Chao, Zahra Chatha, Xuan (Faye) Fong, Daniela Gil Nieves, Richard Hardy, Patrick Howard, Jona Kabashi, Shiori Kanazawa, Haobo (Luca) Li, Clara Lyckeus, Daniel McCarthy, Mary McHarg, Laurie MiltonJefferies, Elina Nuutinen Vera Tudela, Siobhan Rothery, Alexandra Savova, Leyao (Vesper) Wang, Mina Wang Design & Creative Practice 2 Maya Adachi, Evelyn Cavagnari, Recina Chau, Chongyu (Victor) Chen, Yuge Chen, Anna Chippendale, Caitlin Drake, Tyler Ebanja, Sandra Engardt, Camille Eymieu, Minna Griffiths, Tsz (Bernard) Ho, Camilla Lozinska-Brown, Mungeh Ndzi, Erika Notarianni, Siobhan Obi, Morgan Pollard, Herb Ronson, Rosy Todd, Helen Visscher, Xie Yue, Aysesu Zapsu Design & Creative Practice 3 Hanna Abramowicz, Chaitali Ahuja, Moe Atsumeda, Mari Katsuno, Henri Khoo, Jack Lafone-Hill, Ashley Law, Eleonora Levis, Tseng-Han (Christina) Lin Hou, Pinyi (Joicy) Liu, Qiyin Sienna Liu, Khun (Ethan) Low, Nyima Murry, Eva Tisnikar

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DCP.1 Nyima Murry, Y3, ‘Slow Clay’, Pit firing ceramics for holding ferments during lockdown.

DCP.2–DCP.3 Patrick Howard, Y1 ‘Stitching Rubber’. Sheet rubber is variously tailored to occlude haptic, visual and auditory senses, exploring the boundaries of comfort and social reclusion.

DCP.4–DCP.5 Margaret (Maggie) Chao, Y1 ‘Weaving Concrete’. In a post-industrial near future, the process of forming concrete is repositioned as a domestic craft for patching and augmenting the ruins of the modernist city. A three-dimensional loom supports the weave in multiple iterations.

DCP.6–DCP.7 Clara Lyckeus, Y1 ‘Condensing Wax’. Drawing on the Surrealist ritual of carromancy, or casting wax, a series of test subjects uses a range of weighted tools and instructions to tease out the limits of individual authorship and our interpretation of visual and verbal languages.

DCP.8–DCP.9 Daniela Gil Nieves, Y1 ‘Fermenting Steel’.

Folded metal inserts allow an insurgent youth group to reclaim urban spaces through the pungent scents of sweat on rust. Here, a paper prototype is used to explore the contact between slouched back and wall. Adolescence and corrosion are intertwined in a process of co-evolution.

DCP.10–DCP.13 Daniel McCarthy, Y1 ‘Twisting Ink’. A ritual of extracting liquid inks from foraged plant matter acts as a means of investigating themes of balance within and between individual and environment, the urban and the natural.

DCP.14 Siobhan Obi, Morgan Pollard, Y2 ‘Lock and Key’.

Through the formation of a mechanical device used to open a canal lock, this project investigates an elaborate array of movements and mechanisms to complete an otherwise simple task.

DCP.15 Anna Chippendale, Siobhan Obi, Y2 ‘Future Fossils’.

Plastic, long since abandoned for decomposable, nontoxic alternatives, is an artefact; its extraction from the ground and fervent observation by keen archaeologists can help to uncover stories of those living at the turn of the millennium (AD 2000).

DCP.16 Maya Adachi, Yuge Chen, Camille Eymieu, Y2 ‘Thames Morphogenesis’. Water is a tool that shapes the aesthetics of the landscapes of the Thames. It is breathing life into the structure of natural patterns on the sand.

Here, casting explores the sculpting quality of water and how the river erodes the coast of London.

DCP.17 Tyler Ebanja, Rosy Todd, Y2 ‘Auditory Strata’.

Through audio recordings, this project amplifies underwater conditions in Regent’s Canal. The subaquatic recordings are translated into notations to create a musical score – highlighting the rhythmic qualities of the waterway.

DCP.18 Sandra Engardt, Helen Visscher, Y2 ‘An Architecture of Care’. Soil has been given a dirty name. This project explores an enhanced appreciation of soil through building an ‘architecture of care’, archiving and caring for our soil samples through the use of a medical toolkit.

DCP.19 Sandra Engardt, Minna Griffiths, Y2 ‘OCTD: Open Circuit Tracking Device’. A response to the use of high-tech surveillance, such as CCTV and face recognition. Investigating the process of tracking, a drawing machine captures the ephemeral and immeasurable lost in traditional tracking systems.

DCP.20 Recina Chau, Bernard Ho, Y2 ‘Canal Carpet’.

Sited between London and Hong Kong, and in response to Covid-19, this explores negotiation of public space through body movement and how micro-interventions can have a huge impact on people’s interactions.

DCP.21 Nyima Murry, Y3, ‘Cultures of Care’ is an ongoing project that uses fermentation as a way of exploring what sustainability within creative practices means. The project uses the process and uses of ferments, as well as the language around them, to grow, encourage and facilitate this ambition by occupying spaces within the school for 210

staff and students to discuss what creating sustainably, and embedding climate change means within architectural education at The Bartlett.

DCP.22 Moe Atsumeda, Y3, ‘Project Studio 5oC’, Studio 5oC is a satirical critique towards the treatment and exploitation that Japanese animators face just to pursue their dream career. It speculates on a future in which the production method of animation does not change and therefore the animation studios have to change in order to lure more animators into the profession.

DCP.23 Henri Khoo, Y3, ‘Drawing a Landscape of Conjecture’. Still from an animated filmic poem that reimagines Stourhead from an alternate iconography.

The landscape is read through the Temple of Apollo.

DCP.24 Moe Atsumeda, Quiyin (Sienna) Liu, Tseng-Han (Christina) Lin Hou, Ethan Low, Y3, ‘The Artefact’.

An installation that, through the manipulation of the audience, imbues a myth into an ordinary object, to display the notion that everything that we place value and meaning on has been constructed and is a product of society.

DCP.25 Henri Khoo, Pinyi (Joicy) Liu, Eva Tisnikar, Y3, ‘Navigational Evolution’. An installation that studies the modes and means for navigation, to better understand the human position within space, and inherently, the greater interior of the cosmos. Through fundamental filmic principles and elements, the installation explores the representations of the universe and of physical landscapes – an inquiry into the perception of distance, and its relative registrations.

DCP.26 Eleonora Levis, Y3, ‘Turning Inwards’. The garment mimics a life jacket’s ability to hold the wearer up by keeping the neck and head upright while wearing it.

The lifejacket similarity is used as a metaphor to illustrate how trauma cannot be removed, but can be moulded in such a way that the individual faces it and, directly addressing their pain, comes to terms with it.

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Engineering and Architectural Design Tribal Gathering exhibition, 2019. Photo by Kirsten Holst

Engineering & Architectural Design MEng

Year 1 Tara Abdol Hossein Zadeh, Jamila Aboueita, Kimia Alexis, Azman Azhari Rizal, Bianca Bodo, Rana Bulguroglu, Richard Caddy, Cheuk (Chester) Cham, Paraskevi Chatira, Yu (Phoebe) Chen, Tatyana Cheung, Miriam Czech, Jialu (Gabrielle) Fang, Danielius Grabliauskas, Fitim Hajdaraj, Masaki Hattori, Phoebe Hensley, Liana Hoque, Eddie Jones, Alajos Kiss, Andreina Kostka, Joshua Labarraque, Kexin Li, Jingchi (Jason) Li, Haiyun (Isabella) Long, Ekaterina Lopatina, Cynthia (Marjorie) Luque Escalante, Bihi Mohamed, Regina Muller-Uri, Gabriela Nycz, Max Ostroverhy, John (Daniel) Perski, Sanara Piensuparp, Bevan Pun, Logan Scott, Sara Sesma Costales, Aya Souleimani, James Standing, Thomas Steip, Sheung (Emily) Tse, Tahira Uddin, Igor Verkhoturov, Ciying Wang, Emily Wang, Isaac Wang, Yueyao Wang, Hanaa Yakoub, Tara Zadeh

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Year 2 Tamanna Abul Kashem, Yuval Ben-Giat, Wenhui (Alex) Cao, Yuzhe (Eason) Chen, Yi (Alex) Chen, Ruiyi (Renae) Du, Andreea Dumitrescu, Victoria Ewert, James Grimmond, Panagiota Grivea, Sarah Hassan M Alsomly, Jessica Ho, Iman Jemitola, Young Choel Moses (Bogeum) Jeon, Hans Kei Kaeppeler, Leo Kauntz Moderini, Maria Konstantinova, Julie Motouzka, Victor Noorani, Pedro (Antonio) Merino Ramon, Iuliana-Andra Padurariu, Sarina Patel, Franca Pilchner, Jakub Plewik, Mateo Rossi Rolando, Kimberley Rubio Ugalde, Ralf Saade, Samuel SeymourBlackburn, Nikie (Rosa) Siabishahrivar, Allegra Simpson, Johanna Stenhols, Harry Sumner, Emma Temm, Tahira Uddin, Yile (Aloe) Wu, Zhuofan (Marco) Wu

Year 3 Cecilia Cappellini, Zhe (Gigi) Chen, Federico Chiavegati, Kasikit Dumnoenchanvanit, Luke Duncan, Michael Fordham, Simran Khurana, Michal Kierat, Clement Lefebure, Cheuk (Peter) Liu, Yuhan Liu, Sheung (Marcus) Lo, Olivia (Phoeby) Narenthiran, Fatema Panju, Praefah (Muse) Praditbatuga, Jahnina Queddeng, Toekinah Sabeni-Lefeuvre, Xi Shen, Yan (Ellie) To, Tin (Jason) Tse, Rabia Turemis, Lan Wang, Kaia Wells, Sheryl Wylie, Yibin (Ben) Xu, Hetian (Jessie) Zhang, Yunxian Zhu

Engineering & Architectural Design MEng Programme Director: Luke Olsen Designed in close collaboration with industry leaders, Engineering & Architectural Design MEng combines the three major disciplines of architecture, civil engineering and building service engineering to teach future industry leaders. With the first cohort now completing their third year, this pioneering programme is crossing the professional, pedagogical and cultural boundaries between architecture and engineering to expand further the biggest ecology of all – innovative design.

Hosted by The Bartlett School of Architecture, the programme is taught by three UCL departments: The Bartlett School of Architecture, the Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering and the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering.

Our first-year students operate within ‘co-operatives’ exploring this year’s theme of ‘Mine-the-GAP’, working within state-of-the-art fabrication facilities at Here East to explore and deploy 1:1 experimental infra-structures at locations of interchange to operate on a cultural, social and scientific level to both awaken people from their commute and test engineering principles.

Our second-year students work within ‘studios’ to develop original buildings as a space of environmental and structural mutability.

Ideas this year explore and incubate in response to the theme of ‘Changes in State: Environment in Flux’ in Marrakesh, Morocco.

Our third-year students design within ‘units’ that operate as progressive laboratories to envision cohesive innovative building projects. This year Unit 1 was themed on ‘De-Growth’ and Unit 2 on ‘Drawing Ecologies on Thorney Island’.

Our fourth year, in which the programme will see its first graduates, begins in September 2020.

Programme Administrator Dan Carter Staff Sarah Bell, Santosh Bhattarai, Melis van de Burg, Esfandiar Burman, Tara Clinton, Matthew Coop, Pippa Cowles, Satyajit Das, Dina D’Ayala, Kate Davies, Yasemin Didem Aktas, Shyamala Duraisingam, Dave Edwards, Nick Elias, Sam Esses, Fabio Freddi, Laura Gaskell, Agnieszka Glowacka, Laura Hannigan, Jack Hardy, Mark Hines, Oliver Houchell, Aurore Julien, Ivan Korolija, Vasiliki Kourgiozou, Jonny Martin, Liora Malki-Epshtein, Josep Miàs Gifre, Dejan Mumovic, Luke Olsen, Caroline Rabourdin, Olivia Riddle, Klaas de Rycke, Sara Shafiei, James Solly, Sam Stamp, Michael Stacey, Farhang Tahmasebi, Jerry Tate, Jonathan Taylor, Amelia Vilaplana de Miguel, Michael Wagner, Alice Whewell, Isobel Why, Graeme Williamson, Marek Ziebart

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EAD.1 Sheung (Emily) Tse, Y1 ‘Solar Topaz’. A pavilion constructed of reflective and refractive tubes each held in place using tensegrity within the assembly of components.

The overall form is derived from the passage of the sun throughout the year, providing ever-changing patterns of light and shade.

EAD.2–EAD.3 Richard Caddy, Tatyana Cheung, Danielius Grabliauskas, Liana Hoque, Aya Souleimani, Y2 ‘Facet’. Cybernetic sirens that enhance and encourage passers-by, encouraging them to re-engage with their environment by borrowing views from other spaces.

A series of playful, attention-seeking objects that guide you through neglected spaces through animated reflections and distorted optics. Each of these living machines are embedded into the landscape, interacting with participants based on their proximity and movement.

EAD.4 Alajos Kiss, Kexin Li, John (Daniel) Perski, Thomas Steip, Hannaa Yakoub, Tara Zadeh, Y1 A 21st-century kinetic pavilion for the ancient and wise Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, at UCL at Here East.

EAD.5 Sanara Piensuparp, Y1 ‘The Squatter’. Provocative through its impenetrable height and unconventional form, The Squatter is a whimsical character whose full range of responses can only be experienced through the collective action of those who find themselves unable to resist it.

EAD.6 Bevan Pun, Bihi Mohamed, Sheung (Emily) Tse, Fitim Hajdaraj, Haiyun (Isabella) Long, Jialu (Gabrielle) Fang, Y1 ‘Periscubic’. A pavilion exploring notions of illusion and reflection through the application of a three-dimensional structure created with repeated and carefully arranged tetrahedral modules. The project conceived so that from some viewpoints, the local context is gathered up, allowing people to connect while maintaining appropriate social distancing. Its endless reconfigurable nature means Periscubic can be deployed to any site, promoting new perspectives on different spaces of transition.

EAD.7 Leo Kauntz Moderini, Ralf Saade, Y2 ‘Celebration of Rain’. Responding to the brief ‘States of Change / Changes of State’, the apparatus registers and quantifies the natural chaos of rain through sound data. Adjusting the frequency and the amplitude of the drops for all eight materials produces music.

EAD.8–EAD.9 Yi Chen, Yile (Aloe) Wu, Y2 ‘We Wear Wind’.

A wearable canvas garment is designed as an apparatus to capture and measure wind performance. The inflatable garment can then contact into a compact coat.

EAD.10, EAD.13 Leo Kauntz Moderini, Y2 ‘Terracotta Research Facility’. This project revisits the Moroccan Funduq by envisioning a contemporary research facility dedicated to innovating terracotta production.

A mechanistic building is generated by the assemblage of extruded terracotta elements. The fractal geometry within the facade creates a dynamic semi-permeable barrier responding to the meteorological conditions.

EAD.11 Hans Kei Kaeppeler, Y2 ‘The Felt Project’. This building creates both a factory for felt manufacturing and an intimate quiet space for self-reflection, addressing the need for psychotherapeutic spaces in the city. The design is driven by a rigorous and imaginative exploration of the structural, acoustic, light and thermal properties of felt.

EAD.12 Andreea Dumitrescu, Y2 ‘L’Ecole de Lumière’.

This project explores the beneficial impact of modulated daylight using coloured glass in an educational space for the young people of Marrakech. During the day, a composition of coloured planes is activated by the movement of the sun and projects a choreography of lights into the different rooms.

EAD.14 Harry Sumner, Y2 ‘Marrakech Tea(-Tree) House’.

An innovative urban social agriculture strategy in the heart of the Ancient Medina, providing a safe and inspiring hub for community interaction. Rethinking this 222

for a small site will result in six tall interlocking structures and a (not-so-)secret garden.

EAD.15 Tamanna Abul Kashem, Y2 ‘L’Atelier des Couleurs’.

This project proposes a zellige workshop and training centre in Marrakech. A vaulted shell is choreographed against strategic underground landscaping. Guastavino’s vaulting method is followed to use the zellige tiles as a structural form in addition to its traditional aesthetic value.

EAD.16 Panagiota Grivea, Y2 ‘Craft Garden Studios’.

The building proposal supports a sequence of integrated garden and studio spaces to facilitate wool processing and dying. Five specific flowers grown in the gardens are harvested, processed, and used in the dying of wool.

An invisible urban grid informs the spatial organisation resulting in two interconnected buildings.

EAD.17 Jahnina Queddeng, Y3 ‘Stewartby Knowledge and Community Centre’. A proposal imagining a new social fulcrum to rebuild the village spirit in Stewartby using food as a universal language.

EAD.18 Federico Chiavegati, Y3 ‘Drone Research and Development Knowledge Centre’. Environmental strategy overview showing interconnected systems to reduce energy consumption across different spaces and uses.

EAD.19 Kaia Wells, Y3 ‘Section Through Time’. A timebased section showing the evolution of a knowledge centre onsite.

EAD.20 Olivia (Phoeby) Narenthiran, Y3 ‘Plants Upon Plants’. Cut-away into a cascading aquaponics vertical farm as part of a larger research knowledge centre.

EAD.21 Sheryl Wylie, Y3 The CreaTIF Link on Westminster Bridge’. The structural strategy of this building draws inspiration from a barbell: the double overhanging beam system is supported by a large central truss.

EAD.22 Praefah (Muse) Praditbatuga, Y3 ‘Storey’s Gardens, the Flowering Symbiote of Thorney Island and The Inhabitable Wall’. A modern reinterpretation of the Roman horti perched on the Methodist Hall’s vacant pavilions. A rooftop garden demonstrates the sustainable growing of plants and the sustainable growth of the city by reconsidering the value of existing territories.

EAD.23–EAD.24 Yan (Ellie) To, Y3 ‘The Parliament of Plants: The Sunken Performance Lab. Interior perspective and the Inhabitable Wall’. A garden for policy-making on the doorstep of the Houses of Parliament, which places plants at the centre of the conversation surrounding climate change. Spaces in the building are staged to promote a greater understanding of global warming concerns among the public.

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PG17 students making a collaborative drawing at Le Corbusier’s Le Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, January 2020

Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA   Part 2)

Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2) Programme Directors: Julia Backhaus, Patrick Weber It wasn’t easy. When, in early March, Covid-19 forced us to navigate our learning and teaching into abstract space, it also urged us to radically shift and rethink our own practices, conventions of student life and pedagogies.

The past turbulent months of intensive Zooming, Skyping and glitched journeys into each other’s private spheres made our heads spin and our eyes sore. Being confined to our homes, we mourned the physical space and the tangible instruments that are all so essential to our discipline.

Our virtual emergency mode has revealed inequities, both in living conditions and access to technology, previously hidden in the system of our studio spaces. Yet, in the midst of these unimaginable constraints, we found a new and profound sense of community, alternative ways of collaboration and unprecedented acts of generosity, rendering remoteness into proximity.

Embracing our new methods of remote teaching, students articulated their critical thinking and projects with a sharpened sense of what matters: they tackled issues of climate change, cared for vulnerable communities and repaired unique ecosystems.

They spelled out new architectural grammars, augmented our physical realities with new technologies, provoked established dogmas and clearly set new agendas, robustly extending the profession’s realm far beyond architecture’s physical limits.

And while we distanced ourselves in the physical world, we found a new togetherness on the screen, where we shared our ideas with formerly impossible audiences: unit crits allowed us to travel far, across different time zones, geographies and cultures and into other people’s minds. Those hours not only provided us with intellectual rigour and fresh dialogue but also with a glimpse into how history is made and the acute awareness of being part of something everyone is experiencing, everywhere in the world.

Although the formats of delivery forced us to streamline our work into online submissions, it is clear that the diverse ethos and rich methodologies of our 14 units have emerged unscarred and perhaps stronger than ever. Our curiosity and appetite for renewal and innovation have taught us important lessons in resilience, self-reliance and resourcefulness. As architects we solve problems and adapt to new situations with open eyes. When we face complex conditions that are in flux, we invent, improvise and imagine alternative solutions.

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Programme Administrator Oliver Vas

In Year 4 this is achieved by focusing our study on the development of a comprehensive building project – building on the momentum students have gained in their practice year(s) out.

Year 5 is driven by rigour, freedom and excellence; a pinnacle of research-based professional education.

As Programme Directors, we would like to raise our glasses to this year’s cohort and their tutors: they moved through these unprecedented challenges with optimism, commitment, patience and generosity.

As we consider ways in which we are going to rebuild after the pandemic, it has become clear that we all rely on each other’s wellbeing and – more than ever – that of our planet. Who better to reimagine what comes next than this brilliant future generation of architects and creative entrepreneurs!

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What If? An Alternative Urbanism History

PG10

Simon Dickens, CJ Lim

In their 1971 song, John Lennon and Yoko Ono invited us to imagine: ‘…there’s no countries / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too / Imagine all the people / Living life in peace.’ After the Great Fire of 1666, five different architects drew up plans to rebuild London.

The Roman-style grid plan of Sir Christopher Wren, with large piazzas geometrically linked by long, wide boulevards was deemed not to be cost- or time-effective. But what if Christopher Wren’s architectural dream for London had been implemented? London would have missed the opportunity to be a kaleidoscope of smells and shadow of architectural styles. What if San Francisco had been rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake with a Japanese motif, and renamed Sansokyo as featured in Chris Williams and Don Hall’s film Big Hero 6 (2014). Similarly, history could have taken a different direction with Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America (2004) in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. If we maintain the same critical thinking as Lennon, Roth et al. – and focus on the imagining of alternative built environments – what could urbanism in Europe, southeast Asia, or the USA look like without inherited or imposed Roman, British Colonial, or modernist influences?

Humanity constantly holds a mirror to the present. The speculative concept ‘what if?’ can apply equally at the macro/ societal level and at the micro/personal level. In Frank Capra’s film It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), a desperately frustrated man is shown by an angel what life would have been like if he had never existed.

It is in the opportunity for alternative histories that the unit can better understand how to address the world in crisis, resulting in the evolution of resilient architecture and planning tailored for the determining factors of climate, resources and the idiosyncrasies of humanity.

In Project One this year, students identified the ‘what if?’ for an alternative history, and its related issues and consequences in the present day. Through research, analysis and critical thinking, students formulated a narrative with specific timelines and protagonists which provided a speculative programmatic framework for the year.

In Project Two, the narrative and critical thinking from Project One were applied to a location that is ‘undesired’ – due to climate, economy, geography, lack of inhabitation or indifference. Students were encouraged to present curious, bold and even naive alternative urbanisms and architectural polemics (and not necessarily sensible solutions or enlightenment values) to develop at least an innovative commentary on the crisis of the present day. Just imagine…

Year 4 Nnenna Itanyi, Joel Jones, Billie Jordan, Hiu (Hugh) Chun Kam, Yongwoo Lee, Jiashi (Jess) Yu Year 5 Xiaoliang Deng, Edmund Tan, Tyler Thurston, Ka (Karen) Tsang, Kit Wong Thanks to our technical tutors and consultants Jon Kaminsky, David Roberts, Chris Matthews, Philip Guthrie

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10.1–10.5 Tyler Thurston, Y5 ‘What if George Had the Recipe to Create EU-topia?’. The strategy, fiction as a tool for awareness, reconfigures the EU by protecting the Mediterranean Sea, and encourages an alternative participatory democracy. Inspired by Roald Dahl’s book George’s Marvellous Medicine, through the lens of George and other children from all EU states and North Africa, the architecture examines the thresholds between ideology and pragmatism when engaging with nature, landscape and weather, with the aim of eroding politics and geography. Environmentally-friendly ingredients including salt, eggs, plant pigment, beeswax, pea, and olive oil are cultivated to protect water safety and equality for all.

Looking towards the unconventional, the architecture is designed to be a series of delightful learning experiences, in a similar way to a Dorling Kindersley book, in which knowledge is delivered by inspiring curiosity and play.

In this synthesis of responsibilities and innocence, children are the champions of their own sustainable future, adapting the core message of love and hope for the EU. 10.6 Edmund Tan, Y5 ‘What if Civilisation were Given a Second Chance?’. What sort of society would we want to be, and how does nurturing nature help recalibrate our wasteland into a resilient Arcadia? Instead of shepherds in idyllic visions of pastoralism, the project finds WALL-E (and later EVE) in a hypothetical near-future urban scenario in Manhattan – inspired by the ‘Eye of Providence’ on the USA one-dollar note, symbolising faith watching over humanity. Drawing on climate change, environmentalism, and consumerism, the eventual symbiosis between nature and built form are events of urban ‘responsibilities’ at varying scales to be encountered in the future. The timeline is considerable and defines the new ages of evolution as the city cleanses itself of past neglect. Like a sliding puzzle, the city carefully shifts with repurposed public spaces and a filigree of new infrastructure. While the robots are the key facilitators, the idiosyncrasies and symbolism of the cats provide the heart and wit for this eccentric redefinition of the Arcadia romance. This cautionary tale does not promise ‘happily ever after’ in which a clean planet is handed back to humans, but aims to bring awareness, decelerate our current fast-paced society and embrace climate change as a resource. The characters of WALL-E and EVE are from Pixar Animation Studios’ animated film ‘WALL-E’ (2008).

10.7 Ka (Karen) Tsang, Y5 ‘What if Narratives Turn Environmental Tokenism into Genuine Sociopolitical Benefits?’. Globally, green groups have dismissed the glut of climate change forums and environmental largesse from businesses, cities and states. Narrative, rather than statistical scientific data, is the machinery for commentary and is more likely to capture the public’s awareness and expose philanthropic hypocrisies. The heart of this architectural story is where we discover the true potential of our human condition, especially for women of ethnic minorities. The protagonist, Aleqa, a Greenlandic woman exposes the hubris of environmental tokenism and a way to rise above it – adapting the ugly truth as a resource for independence, equality and social change in a larger context and for a higher cause – climate change. The strategy of the floating ‘Ice Garden’ in Odense, inspired by the two weavers in Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, exploits Denmark’s vanity and self-proclaimed environmental superiority. The unintended empowerment of the women outweighs the country’s hypocritical deceit, and ultimately, the project is a love letter to humanity.

10.8–10.11 Xiaoliang Deng, Y5 ‘What if the Tree of Life is not Science but a Nuanced Artform of Reincarnation?’.

It is our human right to decide our own death, and to pass onto the next phase of life’s journey. History is littered with deeply profound architecture relating to dying and death, 238

but perhaps ecological dispositions are better than philosophical translations? Embracing climate change the design weaves life into sunken histories and invites the landscape to participate in transcendental contemplation, offering sensitive spaces in which to reframe the belief in diverse interpretations of reincarnation. The vignettes on the Isle of Thanet adapt old values of Christianity into a new universal faith of atonement towards nature.

The conscientious interventions display a delicate and temporal relationships with the existing landscape – a reminder of our transitional existence on earth. As with karma and the cyclical transmigration of souls in David Mitchell’s novel The Cloud Atlas, the first vignette – the reception – is also the final vignette, the crematorium.

There is a symbiotic recurrence of time: at every hour when the clock’s bell chimes, a soul is embraced in heaven.

10.12 Kit Wong, Y5 ‘What if Liverpool is Never Winter, but Always Christmas?’. As with real social integration, effective environmental efforts are shaped primarily by a civil society. How can syncretic cohesion between foreign and domestic cultures rebirth a resilient urbanism?

‘Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!’

Unlike C.S. Lewis’ hypothetical question, the student’s grandfather, who arrived in Liverpool as an immigrant in the 1930s, is the embodiment of transcultural idealism that is always Christmas. Never restricted by existing contextual planning and cultural conservatism, the grandfather’s metaphorical narrative of acceptance and cohesion delivers a majestic northern powerhouse grandeur as the Mersey gateway. Protein-providing plants and bamboo are cultivated side-by-side to celebrate diverse values and identities in a romantic rebirth of the landscape which is vertical and on water. The bold agrarian sustainable economy erodes the negative culture of ghettoised urbanism with a new multicultural Sino-Mersey development that strategically ‘bridges’ Liverpool and Birkenhead. This heartfelt project is a legacy of climate change that would forever alter the perception of Chinese people in Britain.

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Incomplete

PG11

Laura Allen, Mark Smout

Incompleteness, whether intentional or accidental, brings opportunities for reinvention. This year, we rebooted stories of change and adaptation, of bold ideas and incomplete visions.

The intriguing qualities of the incomplete invite alternative futures.

Unresolved stories lead inevitably to new endings with substitute narratives. In the worlds of architecture, music and art, incompleteness carries with it tantalising indications of the creative process. Drawing on this back catalogue of defunct imaginings, unbuilt and incomplete buildings and the ruins of obsolete architecture, we listened, adapted and reimagined, creating alternative futures and future pasts, designing new relationships with historic and contemporary contexts.

Our work is informed by stories from Sicily – the site for our field trip and major projects – which demonstrate architecture’s responsive and fluctuating relationship with landscape, politics, culture and the environment, four critical territories of engagement. Partially constructed architecture – abandoned in a state of unreadiness – is so widespread in Italy and Sicily that there have been calls for it to be distinguished as its own architectural style: ‘Incompiuto’.

Deserted stadia, hospitals that were never occupied, and skeletons of structures forsaken mid-construction, their futures suspended in time, stand as ruins of modernity. Bridges, theatres, churches, and numerous other public works were planned to revitalise communities and capture available funds before they ran out. Hundreds of buildings were subsequently aborted at every stage of construction, these now obsolete architectures, their futures interrupted, became instant ruins. Some have been revived by unplanned-for activities, but most remain incomplete visions in suspended animation, the legacy of political hubris and economic recklessness. Prince Fabrizio, the protagonist of The Leopard, Sicily’s most famous novel, declares, “Tutto deve cambiare perché tutto rimanga lo stesso”: Everything must change in order for everything to remain the same.1 His proclamation refers to Sicily’s 19th-century struggle with social change, but seems equally apposite today.

But this change is territorial as well as societal. Short-lived volcanic islands in the seas surrounding Sicily, ghost towns, abandoned houses and patched-up structures which pepper the landscape are reminders of Sicily’s long history of geological instability and cataclysmic earthquakes. Rebuilt towns such as Noto stand as near-perfect examples of Sicilian Baroque, while the relocated town of Gibellina Nuova is a part-deserted postmodern experiment in town planning and cultural engineering.

Students have pursued individual research agendas and projects addressing landscape futures, water security, mass migration, corruption, environmental collapse, tourism, preservation versus progress, social inequality, archaeology and agricultural tourism.

Year 4 James Cook, Peter Davies, Meiying Hong, Thomas Leggatt, Rory Martin, Jack Spence, Sarmad Suhail, Ryan Walsh, Yitao Zhu Year 5 Siqi (Scott) Chen, Sacha Hickinbotham, Theo Jones, Karolina Kielb, Liam Merrigan, Rachel Swetnam, Maxime Willing Many thanks to Rhys Cannon for his inimitable practice teaching and Stephen Foster and Ioannis Rizos for their technical support Thanks to our critics Richard Beckett, Kyle Buchanan, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Rhys Cannon, Ness Lafoy, Claire McAndrew, Doug Miller, Kyrstyn Oberholster, Naomi Rubbra, Ellie Sampson

1. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa,The Leopard, (1957), 1960. Milan: Feltrinelli / London: Vintage 249

11.1 Rachel Swetnam, Y5 ’Opera Dei Lus’. The Sicilian Marionette, Opera Dei Pupi, is a dying but cherished art at the very centre of Sicilian storytelling traditions. Opera Dei Lus is a puppet theatre in Ortigia, Sicily that may be used as a repository or archive for stories from the community and a chance to contribute to Sicily’s story culture from a personal and contemporary perspective. The theatre is designed around suspension and layered frames designed to distort perceptions of scale – of a puppet, human, and theatre.

11.2 Peter Davies, Y4 ‘Carving Cusa: Sculpture School’.

The ancient limestone quarries of Cusa were abandoned in 409 BC. To this day the site lies incomplete, with half-cut columns embedded within the quarry and crumbling fragments strewn across the landscape. The sculpture school acts as a vessel to reactivate the site. The project uses all elements of the limestone extraction process from nose to tail: carving studios are nested within quarried voids, amphitheaters are forged from open bench quarry scars and byproducts are reused to create new landscapes, blending old and new.

11.3, 11.5 Meiying Hong, Y4 ’Zero Waste Ortigia’. In the last five years, Sicily has a serious waste-management crisis. In response to the unlawful management of waste, this programme directly utilises the recycled waste as key building components, showing the potential and value of these materials. As well as being a plant disposing of the sorted waste, the centre encourages public participation in the recycling process. Adapted to the traditional waste collection methods, donkeys work as ‘organic machines’.

11.4, 11.6 Sacha Hickinbotham, Y5 ’Civic Palimpsest for Future Learning’. As the European refugee crisis brings unprecedented amounts of foreign arrivals, this research studies the broad social integration of migrants and refugees into Palermo, Italy. Churches are historically one of the most dynamic architectures to exist in cities – altered, deconstructed and reconstructed with every new colonisation. The project deals with designing into this heritage, opening the building to its urban context and altering its function to serve a new purpose.

Fieldwork, site visits and interviews formed a foundation of knowledge, resulting in a series of models that were offered back to community members and politicians.

11.7 James Cook, Y4 ‘Pop-Up Parliament’. Parliament aims to deliver a temporary House of Commons facilities for MPs during the extensive refurbishment of the deteriorated fabric of The Palace of Westminster. This proposal is a critical constituent in the manufacturing of a modern government. The design reuses and manipulates waste byproducts and building technologies as part of its renovation programme. The drawings are a critique on the political muralism of Parliament that reveal the disparities and social injustices between MPs and the general public.

11.8 Siqi (Scott) Chen, Y5 ‘Unexpected Landscape’. This project looks at the incompletion of scale through miniature models, creating unexpected landscapes from different corners of the student’s flat. The study sets up different scenes with micro-environment using daily objects, constructing miniature worlds full of mystery and wonder.

11.9–11.11 Siqi (Scott) Chen, Y5 ‘Reimagining the “Incompiuto”: Siciliano Archaeological Park’. Sicily’s landscape is dotted with incomplete architecture – a representation of political corruption and planning disasters of the 1990s. This study identifies the ‘Incompiuto’ as an architectural resource for the construction in the town of Giarre, memorialising this period of Sicilian history and providing six new community buildings.

11.12 Sarmad Suhail, Y4 ‘Borgo Palermo’. Sicily’s agricultural industry has rapidly declined following decades of reduced rainfall and failed infrastructure projects. The Sicilian Agricultural Board has outlined its 250

revival through ’Agritourism’. Borgo Palermo, set in the heart of Palermo, is designed to achieve ‘accreditation’ despite its urban location. The typology of the urban block informs its design language, the building acting as a wall surrounding a landscaped farm, providing rurality, the first step in reviving the ‘incomputio’ Via Dei Borghi scheme that aims to link up 13 abandoned hamlets built

by Mussilini in the 1930s.

11.13 Yitao Zhu, Y4 ‘Collaging Euston’. The HS2 project, is the biggest construction site in Europe, with hundreds of homes, local businesses, and streets completely bulldozed. While generating considerate amount of building waste, HS2 also erases collective urban memories of the area. This project adopts various ways of material reuse and showcases a possible way where memories can be continued.

11.14 Jack Spence, Y4 ‘The Acqua Duomo’. Extreme changes to the global climate and ocean ecosystem are forecast in the coming years. This project outlines a speculative future environmental scenario in a Sicilian coastal town. The project creates a synergy with the landscape by mimicking the metaphorical ‘breathing in’ of the ocean, exploiting the tidal movements and solar distillation to generate potable water for the local community. The use of a salinity device to roam the highly saline waters enables the ocean’s everchanging ecosystem to be monitored.

11.15–11.16 Karolina Kielb, Y5 ‘Etna, Mountain of the Mind’. As an alternative to data-driven understandings of landscapes as signifiers of climate change, this project aims to restore the emotional connection between the mountain and the mind. This engagement is used as a protective measure to remove the pressures of tourism from fragile mountain environments. An alternative volcanic landscape is proposed to reduce the impact of tourism on the summit. A series of architectural and landscape interventions amplify specific qualities of site and our historical engagement with mountainous landscapes.

11.17 Ryan Walsh, Y4 ‘Re-Making Poggioreale’. The town of Poggioreale was ruined by an earthquake that struck the Belice valley in 1968. This project proposes a phased return to inhabiting the ghost town over the next century in the form of retention and self-supported structures, built from the debris left behind by the earthquake, to support a forest garden landscape. It uses 3D scanning to conduct the archaeological assessment and restoration of the ‘digital twin’ of the site, mirroring its dilapidated character.

11.18 Thomas Leggatt, Y4, ‘Generation Montagna’. With eco-corruption becoming a major threat to Sicily’s quest for sustainable energy, this project explores the ways in which energy can be covertly generated and stored. By applying a decentralised methodology, a self-sufficient energy network is created, disguised as sheltered accommodation for Sicily’s ageing population. A typical Sicilian town is compressed into the accommodation, thereby emphasising the capacity for architecture to sustain traditional ways of life within a modern context.

11.19 Maxime Willing, Y5 ‘Disjecta Membra’. Alongside China, Italy has the largest number of UNESCO World Heritage sites in the world, but with the wider economic issues afflicting the country and particularly the region of Sicily, there is a growing concern that this heritage will crumble to dust. The project considers the resolution of this issue through the application of a 19th-century form of education: the production of cast replicas of historical artefacts and fragments for exhibition. A landscape of copies that develop their own history, they become a record of an original that will only ever degrade further.

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Cultivating the Future and the Past

PG12

Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill

A building can be designed for the present, in response to contemporary contexts, needs and desires. A design can be a selective, critical and creative response to the past. Equally, a prospect of the future can be implicit in a design, which is always imagined before it is built and may take years to complete. Some architects conceive a design for the present, some imagine for a mythical past, while others design for a future time and place.

Alternatively, an architect can envisage the past, the present and the future in a single architecture.

Architectural time incorporates design, construction, use, maintenance and ruin. Rather than a temporal sequence, each stage can occur simultaneously. Demolition is essential to construction and building sites often appear ruinous. Ruination does not only occur once a building is without a function: it is a continuous process that develops at differing speeds in differing spaces while a building is constructed and occupied. Assembled from materials of diverse ages, from the newly formed to those centuries or millions of years old, a building incorporates varied rates and states of transformation and decay.

Our increasing appreciation of sustainability and limited resources can lead us to recognise that maintenance might be where some of the most impressive and challenging innovations are found.

Fluctuating according to the needs of specific spaces and components, maintenance and repair may delay ruination, while accepting and accommodating partial ruination can question the recurring cycles of production, obsolescence and waste that feed consumption in a capitalist society.

The inevitability of change – whether of use, climate, or governance – requires us to consider the future as well as the present. How should a building react to climate change when, for example, it is predicted that London will have the climate of Barcelona by 2050? How long should a building last? 100 years?

200 years? 1000 years? In response to anthropogenic climate change and in support of sustainable development, we propose that buildings should be designed to endure and adapt, emphasising longevity not obsolescence. Construction, maintenance and ruination are conceived as simultaneous and ongoing processes. Our designs are drawn in varied times and states.

In PG12 this year, the farm is a metaphor for a design project.

Combining construction and maintenance, growth and decay, a farm is always specific to the qualities of a place – its climate, topography, material and social conditions – and what is best cultivated there, whether that is food, wind, stories, health, architecture, community or ideas. A farm can build upon its past and cultivate the future.

Year 5 Amelia Black, Jonathon Howard, Laura Keay, Przemyslaw Rylko, Isaac Simpson, Serhan Ahmet Tekbas Year 4 Sabina Blasiotti, James Bradford, Jean-Baptiste Gilles, Elliot Nash, Callum Rae, Arinjoy Sen, Aryan Tehrani, Benjamin Sykes-Thompson, Chuxiao Wang, Yunshu (Chloe) Ye Thank you to our Design Realisation tutor James Hampton and structural consultant James Nevin Thesis supervisors: Stylianos Giamarelos, Anne Hultzsch, Sophia Psarra, Tania Sengupta, Oliver Wilton Thank you to our critics Alessandro Ayuso, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Ben Clement, Sam Coulton, Sebastian de la Cour, Stelios Giamarelos, Mary Vaughan Johnson, Jan Kattein, Perry Kulper, Constance Lau, Igor Marjanovic, Ganit Mayslits Kassif, Mario Pilla, Elin Soderberg, Eva Sopeoglou, Sumayya Vally, Dominic Walker, Izabela Wieczorek

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12.1 Isaac Simpson, Y5 ‘An Architecture Between Cultures: the Highland Council’. This project is an imagination of the African gaze mapped onto the British landscape.

The project’s ambition is to challenge existing landownership boundaries by constructing a ‘radical’ vessel that roams across the Scottish Highlands, rehabilitating the land and cultivating conversations in a way that requires communities’ cultural diversity and appreciation.

12.2 Amelia Black, Y5 ‘St Just State’. The landscape of Land’s End was forever changed by the human endeavour to extract tin and copper from the earth.

St Just State is a micro-nation striving to re-industrialise, rejuvenate and re-establish the local economy. A new vernacular of industrial buildings reclaim the tin mines of a now deprived area of West Cornwall. Sculpted from the landscape, they are constructed by the community that inhabit them. Forever evolving, St Just State not only produces goods, but a skilled construction workforce.

12.3–12.4 Laura Keay, Y5 ‘The New English Rural’.

This project is essentially the development of a code for living that proposes new and/or refined approaches to how we might construct a rural architecture, and how we might reuse and repair. This is applied to a somewhat counter-intuitive testbed site to what we might judge to be rural – a brownfield site in Rochester, that is struggling both socially and economically. The main outcome deals with the issues of unemployment, education and income, exploring whether a rural life can contribute to an urban community’s wellbeing and future development.

12.5 James Bradford, Y4 ‘Westminster Arboretum’.

The Westminster Arboretum is an architectural response to the threat of global warming, seeking to protect native British species of tree from extinction. Constructed and grown from the trees themselves using traditional horticultural methods, the project suggests a necessity that cities must adopt a hybrid between an architectural and a reforested landscape.

12.6 Yunshu (Chloe) Ye, Y4 ‘Operation Hide and Seek: The Ministry of (Anti)-surveillance’. As the UK hurtles towards a surveillance state during the Covid-19 crisis, this project seeks to create an anti-surveillance government body that is ‘hidden in plain sight’ by being temporarily ‘blinded’, ‘muted’, or ‘deafened’ with the help of a series of playful mechanisms inspired by children’s games.

12.7 Chuxiao Wang, Y4 ‘The Rebirth of Peng’. All things have spirits. This project narates a space as a living creature, recalling a spiritual connection among monster (shelters), nature (the local environment) and mankind (users). Born as a half-fish half-bird monster, ‘Peng’ uses its talent to guide the poet to sense the wind, creating an intimate dialogue between the poet and nature. This bond evokes the poetry of life.

12.8 Callum Rae, Y4 ‘The House They Left Behind’.

Consisting of a public house, a town hall and a private residence, this project is a reassertion of the political and social qualities of publicly owned social spaces and a reimagining of Victorian bar spaces and thresholds.

12.9 Sabina Blasiotti, Y4 ‘The Death, the Vine and the Soil’.

This project introduces a human composting facility and biodynamic winery in the abandoned island of Poveglia in the Venetian lagoon. Poised between the notion of the ‘terroir’, phenomenology and Gothic architecture, the design rises from the ground where it will return in the fullness of time.

12.10–12.12 Jonathon Howard, Y5 ‘A Liminal Place: the (Re)construction of Kilmahew’. This project considers the role of the architect and archaeologist in uncovering the peculiar past, present and future of St Peter’s Cardross, Scotland. Students of a hybrid school of architecture and archaeology propose and test new forms of construction 262

through the reconstruction of the forgotten Kilmahew house, exercising tectonic, archaeological and architectural palimpsest.

12.13 Serhan Ahmet Tekbas, Y5 ‘The Ruins of the Woodland Library’. Found within Sherrardspark Woodland in Welwyn Garden City, this project is inspired by the literary principles of Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Framed as a parafiction, the project explores fertile ground to find meaning between principles of literary fiction and the architectural imagination. It is a venture into a realm of dichotomies between architecture and literature, architecture and landscape, architecture and the wilderness.

12.14–12.15 Arinjoy Sen, Y4 ‘Productive Insurgence: Towards the Autonomous (Re)production of Common(s) Within and Against the State’. This project seeks to question the ways in which the people of Kashmir, India produce and reproduce themselves in order to create an apparatus for (re)production towards a circular economy independent of State-Capitalist systems, facilitated by the continuous construction, maintenance and development of built infrastructure. The project situates itself within the ongoing political crisis and conflict in Kashmir to propose a productive network of commons within and against State control, towards a form of emancipation and sustenance for the community in this struggle.

12.16 Elliot Nash, Y4 ‘The Imitation Custom House’.

This project proposes an architecture whose construction is rooted in the poetic. The Imitation Custom House is cast from the existing neo-classical Custom House, from which it derives its ‘copied’ physical character. The Thames is employed as both the building’s site and the medium of its construction; the concrete mix is cast with the rise and fall of the river’s tides.

12.17–12.18 Jean-Baptiste Gilles, Y4 ‘The School of Architectural Ignorance’. In the face of a climate emergency, this project rests upon the idea that sustainability can no longer be a step in the architectural process, but rather should become fundamental to its creation. In order to do so, a fundamental rethink of our relationship to the building, and our methods for creating buildings should happen. At the School of Architectural Ignorance, the curriculum turns academics specialising in climate research into teachers of students of architecture.

Their ignorance of architecture is turned into an advantage, allowing for inventive and unprejudiced thinking, influenced by the constant mutations of the clay-constructed school as it reacts to its immediate environment.

12.19 Benjamin Sykes-Thompson, Y4 ‘Re-flooding the East Anglian Saltmarsh’. The government’s new Environmental Land Management System (ELMS) programme is used to fund four architectural insertions, dwarfed in size by the expanse they form, which breach existing sea walls and curate tidal flows. These insertions return drained land to sea and reframe societal notions of landscape ‘stewardship’ and the role of architecture in mediating this conversation.

12.20 Przemyslaw Rylko, Y5 ‘The British Library North’.

This project investigates the relationship between ever-expanding knowledge and the physical experience of accessing it. Looking at the role of the library in the 21st century, the British Library North mixes the analogue and digital, the extraordinary and everyday, the monumental and intimate. Past and future exist together in a single building.

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Re-outottíα / Re-utopia

PG13

Sabine Storp, Patrick Weber

In PG13, we are interested in how we inhabit our cities. The places we live in, socialise, engage with others, building a community are immensely important for the functioning of our post-Covid-19 world.

At times of great uncertainty, we strive to find a way forward by projecting our dreams onto a better place – our own personal utopia.

Architecture students dream, they speculate on what ‘could be’ real, they dream of spatial manifestations of real-life problems. Work produced is often speculative, and although some is rooted in reallife situations it is not real, it doesn’t have a client, it will not be built.

Yet these speculations, these speculative architectures are incredibly important to bring about change, and to test out new innovative ideas.

As architects we (usually) strive to build a better world. This spirit created some of the most iconic housing developments of the 20th century in London: Alexandra Road and the Dunboyne Estate by Neave Brown, Robin Hood Gardens by the Alison and Peter Smithson, Trellick Tower by Erno Goldfinger to name a few. Sadly, other attempts to solve problems with buildings have failed and have created far bigger problems than the issues they were attempting to address.

Modernism was seen as a brave new world for a modern forwardlooking society. For many, the utopian ideas expressed in inner-city housing estates have turned into dystopian nightmares. But some examples have stood the test of time, and developed into living, even thriving, communities.

This year, the unit has been revisiting a range of urban and rural living concepts. We started the year with a real competition to ‘re-stock’ depleted London housing stock. Students were asked to analyse and decode an existing example and develop a new model paradigm, echoing the shifts in society, culture, community and environment. The ideas identified in the competition formed a seed to explore inhabitation in London further. The new/old paradigms were used to invent a substantial spatial construct, set within a real social, urban or rural context. Students tackled inhabitation in London on various scales. The projects proposed included extending the Alexandra Road estate; completing Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower ensemble with a self-built high rise; translating the ideas of the Bata Estate in Tilbury into a 21st-century independent community in the flood plains; rethinking Kilburn High Street into a ‘slow street’; and a post EU-topia proposal for the borderlands of Luxembourg.

PG13 students have embarked on a journey of speculation.

They have dreamt up their own utopias, harnessing the optimism embedded in the ideas and turning them into inhabitable spaces.

Year 4 Jonas Andresen, Nikhil (Isaac) Cherian, Dovile Ciapaite, Luke Draper, Victor Leung, Marjut Lisco, Issui Shihora, Jarron Tham Year 5 Alex Haines, Ka Chi Law, Shi Yin Ling, Mabel Parsons, Maïté Seimetz, Yip Wing Siu, Ryan Tung Thanks to our consultants Rae Whittow-Williams and Toby Ronalds Thank you to our critics Samson Adjei, BarbaraAnn Campbell Lange, Alice Hardy, Sara Martinez, Rae Whittow-Williams, Paolo Zaide Many thanks to our partners, Beebreeders

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13.1, 13.3 Yip Wing Siu, Y5 ‘New Doggerland: A Dynamic Masterplan for Enabling the East Tilbury Commons’.

Instead of working against the forces of nature, the ’commonity’ of East Tilbury has long sought to return to a nomadic way of life, forgoing the rampant pressures and excess of the neoliberal city for something more attuned; living with (and not against) the land. Returning to principles of the historic commons, their settlement has been designed with the foresight of adapting to change in both land and waterscapes, where the dynamic (master) plan is built across time, seasons and tides to speculate with new forms of living.

13.2 Ryan Tung, Y5 ‘Hacking RHG/Phygital Habitat’.

Hacking RHG is a testbed showing how gaming can be used as a methodology to explore a different way for residents to engage with architecture. By playing against the rules, the algorithm of the game is turned into a planning system, capable of evaluating the best strategy of the collective bottom-up approach.

13.4 Dovile Ciapaite, Y4 ‘Self-Built Assembly of Rammed Earth’. The Self-Built Assembly of Rammed Earth is a project based around the community initiative to encourage a change in estate management and empower residents to reclaim land through urban commons. The project focuses on the idea of self-buildability and the nature of handmade urbanism. This has been explored through model-making and researching alternative methods of construction that embrace a handmade quality.

13.5-13.6 Jonas Andresen, Y4 ‘Responsive City’.

Responsive City proposes a new way to inhabit our cities, where the boundaries between social distancing and daily inhabitation start to overlap and interact with each other. The project is particularly focused on the notion of overlooking. The ‘structure’ of overlooking, that is both how overlooking can mean to provide a view of and to oversee (as in not seeing), are translated into social interactions and architecture.

13.7 Ka Chi Law, Y5 ‘Therapeutic Landscape, Forest Gate’. This project continues the legacy of Forest Gate as a therapeutic location. Currently considered to be one of the most deprived and overpopulated areas in the UK, the project learns from the Queen’s Market at Newham and the Hong Kong back-lane typology, functioning to accommodate local micro-business as well as serving as a vibrant social arena.

13.8 Maïté Seimetz, Y5 ‘EUtopian Visions: Luxembourg’s Post-Territorial Borderlands’. The ‘EUtopian Visions’ critically engage with the EU’s current territorial cohesion strategy by reimagining the inhabitation of its open inner borderlands. Set in the Luxembourgish periphery, the project proposes post-territorial borderlands, which, in a time of Brexit and the rise of nationalist secession, choose neither Leave nor Remain and exist (in)dependent from inter-country differences. In this context, the borderlands are programmatically reinvented and hybridised, creating an eco-commercial, culturalindustrial and econo-domestic inhabitation network, with the first post-territorial community of its kind.

13.9 Mabel Parsons, Y5 ‘Lessons from the Peckham Experiment’. Drawing from the 1926 'Peckham Experiment' which endeavoured to challenge health and wellbeing to be considered a holistic practice, rather than pure treatment of ailments, this project aims to reinterpret the key values surrounding social, communal and physical activity as integral to the thriving individual. The project aims to create a phased, collective living scheme for single parents within the Peckham area which is becoming increasingly less accessible and affordable for diverse, marginalised communities.

13.10 Marjut Lisco, Y4 ‘(Re)Trellick 2.0’. This project features the endless assembly of the new self-built tower, which externally imitates the existing Trellick 274

tower. The community of residents is directly working and living inside the scheme, which appears always under construction.

13.11 Alex Haines, Y5 ‘A Quilt of Adaptive and Unbounded Care’. Initially comprised of a series of strategic architectural interventions, through the patching together of these smaller elements the quilt grows incrementally, adapted and repaired by multiple contributors over time.

13.12 Nikhil (Isaac) Cherian, Y4 ‘Ampthill Vivarium’.

Set within the contexts of the climate and cladding crises, this project seeks to retrofit three existing tower buildings in Camden to provide an alternative vertical living scheme. By using an inhabitable cladding catalogue, 240 households will reconfigure their towers to provide family living units, courtyard gardens, workspaces and vertical villages within the tower, thus enriching domestic and community life.

13.13 Issui Shioura, Y4 ‘Minimum Meanwhile Maximum – Movable Module Housing’. This project speculates an active and flexible way of living with the movable spaces as an utopian urban planning vision. The design challenges to make a moduler housing kit for the temporary living where all the components of the building being able to move away as meanwhile use and rebuild in a different lands. The project suggests a catalogue of inhabitation: comic strips show specific moments for different users, and the different types of panels and combinations of the housing kit.

13.14 Luke Draper, Y4 ‘Stocking Up’. This project explores whether a new London Stock Brick could once again provide housing stock for London. Can the housing crisis be brought to an end by using the very clay found beneath the buildings of London? Clay bricks excavated, formed and fired on site could be used to construct new dwellings and fill the spare rooms of London.

13.15 Jarron Tham, Y4 ‘Extending Alexandra Estate’.

What is the role of the architect in ‘homemaking‘?

The State of Alextendra discovers ways to extend Neave Brown’s iconic Alexandra Estate into the 21st century by redefining homemaking and proposes a form of affordable housing that reacts to changing tenants‘ needs and identities; creating a utopian vision of a form of housing that allows tenants to continually modify their environments using local, recycled materials.

13.16–13.17 Victor Leung, Y4 ‘Nueva Costa del Alexandra 2050: An Active Ageing Utopia Amidst Continued Carbon Offsets’. Costa del Alexandra 2050 builds upon the original council-led model to create intergenerational retirement co-housing directly across the railway (West Coast Main Line), north of the Alexandra Estate. The scheme redevelops the undesirable site into a carbonoffset building for High Speed Two (HS2) powered by waste railway heat. Here, active ageing extends from basement coppice-wood workshops to rooftop greenhouses, contributing to the prolonging of lives of mutual support and care and continued carbon offsetting.

13.18 Shi Yin Ling, Y5 ‘Kilburn Slow Street’. A two-part investigation into the overarching question: ‘What makes a street?’ Term 1’s investigation into reimagining Alexandra Road Estate resulted in the development of a playable toolkit looking at the physical elements of the street. Term 2’s project, Kilburn Slow Street, is a spatial exploration of an alternative narrative for the future high street, focusing on the ‘non-physical’ aspects of the street, and exploring the ideas of deceleration and slowness.

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Systemic Impact

PG14

Jakub Klaska, Dirk Krolikowski

At the centre of PG14’s academic exploration lies Buckminster Fuller’s ideal of ‘the comprehensive designer’, a master builder who follows Renaissance principles and a holistic approach.1 Fuller (1895-1983) referred to this ideal of the designer as somebody who is capable of comprehending the ‘integrateable significance’ of specialised findings, and is able to ‘coordinate and realise the commonwealth potentials’ of these discoveries while not disappearing into a career of expertise.2 Like Fuller, we are opportunists in search of new ideas and their benefits via architectural synthesis. Our work evolves around technological speculation with a research-driven core, generating momentum through astute synthesis. Our propositions are ultimately made through the design of buildings and through the in-depth consideration of structural formation and tectonic constituents.

Systemic Impact The focus of this year’s work is the awareness that architecture can affect society at a deep systemic level3 and the understanding that architectural proposition is in itself a system of interrelated constituents where the findings of interdisciplinary systems theory apply. This knowledge opens a way to a method-driven approach that can materialise in architecture of great performance and considered expression while driving architectural authorship and novelty.

Societal, technological, cultural, economic and political developments propel our investigations with a deep understanding of how they interlink. This shapes our strategies and heuristics,4 driving synthesis. The observation and re-examination of developments within civilisation enables us to project near-future scenarios and position ourselves as avant-garde in the process of designing a comprehensive vision for the future. This speculation has the potential to inspire significant change.

Our methodology employs both bottom-up and top-down strategies in order to build up sophisticated architectural systems, and is tailored to the individual problem. Pivotal to this process and to fighting charlatanism is the concept of practical experimentation: in this case intense exploration through both digital and physical models that aims to assess system performance and its direct application to architectural space.

Testbed and territory are critical to our proposals. Possible sites are both global and specific to the work. The brief and site are part of the individual designs, which demonstrate that the contribution of an architect – and architecture – to the progress of technology, and science is one of the keystones in shaping our society and the development of our culture in the future.

Year 4 Daniel Boran, Austen Goodman, Jack Hastie, Ivan Hewitt, Connor James, Jack Lettice, Andre Moraes Year 5 Lap Yan (Justin) Chow, Andrei-Ciprian Cojocaru, Iago Natan Ferreira Souza, Michael Forward, Rupinder Gidar, Adrian Hong, Myfyr Jones-Evans, Fan (Lisa) Wu, Qiming (Douglas) Yang Thanks to our consultants Joao Alves, Rasti Bartek, Younha Rhee Thank you to our critics Andrew Abdulezer, Joao Alves, Rasti Bartek, Shajay Bhooshan, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Florian Gauss, Martin Gsandtner, Thorsten Helbig, DaeWha Kang, Jan Klaska, Sara Klomps, Ho-Yin Ng, Igor Pantic, Saman Saffarian, Michal Wojtkiewicz, Dan Wright, Lei Zheng

1. R. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities (Baden: Lars Müller), 1963/2010, pp229-239 2. Ibid. p98 3. ‘Systemic’ refers to something that is spread throughout, system-wide, affecting a group or system, such as a body, economy, market or society as a whole 4. ‘Heuristic’ describes an approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method, not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but instead sufficient for reaching an immediate goal 285

14.1, 14.5, 14.20 Qiming (Douglas) Yang, Y5 ‘Reimagining Chinese Timber Frame ’. Based on research into the principles of the traditional Chinese timber frame, the project reinterprets the ‘Dougong’ system into a large-scale prototypical timber structure. Sited on the border of Malaysia and Singapore, the proposal brings traditional Chinese architectural language into a foreign tropical environment. As the result of China’s growing global influence, this project offers a vision of a neocolonial typology that is elegant and efficient.

14.2, 14.3, 14.17 Michael Forward, Y5 ‘Blackfriars Rail Bridge’. Comprehensive research into the historic applications of different timber species was a catalyst for systemic development. The project challenges the application of differentiated timber species in composite for performative objectives, tested upon a prototypical Blackfriars Rail Bridge. It develops an optimised system for structure and durability while considering circulatory aspects, presenting a large-scale timber infrastructure within London.

14.4, 14.10 Jack Lettice, Y4 ‘A New Airport For London’.

Airports today are poorly integrated into cities, their size and noise leaving them stranded outside the urban core, poorly connected to wider networks. But if the aircraft of tomorrow were silent and clean, operating vertically, the airport could be something very different.

London Victoria becomes a compact intermodal hub, as part of a distributed network of air terminals across the capital.

14.6 Jack Hastie, Y4 ‘A New Prototype for TfL’. The proliferation of materials like concrete has put a strain the environments they are sourced from. This project uncovers the importance of local material sourcing and the impacts of extraction. In the proposal, Transport for London utilises waste material from improvements and extensions to the current rail system, using much of this London clay in a new prototype station.

14.7, 14.11 Myfyr Jones-Evans, Y5 ‘Tŷ Pobl – A New Welsh Organic Architecture’. The ‘Gorsedd’ are the custodians of Wales’ Bardic heritage. The proposal is the first home for them and a centre of learning open to all – ‘Tŷ Pobl’.

A building of such significansce has to be a monument to its land and people. By studying the Welsh vernacular architecture and finding strong parallels with the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, a ‘new Welsh organic architecture’ has been created.

14.8 Fan (Lisa) Wu, Y5 ‘Alibaba Wunderkammer’.

Responding to the urban development of modern port cities, global capital flow and the New Silk Road initiative, a new Alibaba Group headquarters is born in Hamburg, Germany, combining futuristic logistics with a public Expo market. The design reinterprets traditional Chinese timber architecture as Vierendeel truss walls and engineered timber mega-cores, creating a new design within the existing building parameters, whilst retaining the warehouse district’s original neo-Gothic facade.

14.9, 14.16 Iago Natan Ferreira Souza, Y5 ‘Jutaí Explorer 3’. A carbon fibre reinforced plastic research centre hung from the canopy layer of the Amazon rainforest.

The project reacts to the current political atmosphere in Brazil and the future of its rainforest. The design intends to give researchers access to unexplored areas by innovating lightweight architecture focusing on form, material and integration.

14.12 Andrei-Ciprian Cojocaru, Y5 ‘Eternum’. As a response to the critical scarcity of burial spaces within London, ‘Eternum’ is a proposal for a large urban cemetery located in Hyde Park. To be developed over 20 years, the building offers a range of burial options and allows extension in phases. The large number of spaces required are accommodated underground, integrating the structure into its context.

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14.13 Ivan Hewitt, Y4 ‘Embankment as It Could Be’.

The proposal envisions a new social interface with the River Thames. Hydraulic cover hatches enable the activation of the river’s edge in response to ever-changing environmental conditions. Tectonic investigations explored how folded sheet steel structures could withstand hydrostatic pressure, while integrating key services to facilitate the performance arena and wine bar which inhabits the excavated spaces.

14.14, 14.23 Austen Goodman, Y4 ‘Operation Klondike’.

This project explores complex Kerfing – using research developed at the University of British Columbia called zippering. Zippering is the result of mating two pieces of timber to create a rigid structural member. Applying this structure to the Canadian lodge typology led to the development of a prototype which exhibits intent through performative structural design.

14.15 Andre Moraes, Y4 ‘Manaus Timber Market ’.

Situated in the capital city of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, the market is not only a trading centre for tropical hardwoods but also a catalyst for the use of engineered timber in Brazil. The proposal addresses ongoing mass deforestation through its structure and programme. Exclusive auctions of native species will be made possible by high rates and government support, with the proceeds from these inflated prices put directly back into replanting and maintaining the forest.

14.18 Connor James, Y4 ‘Monastic Outpost’.

This speculative merging of cultural and industrial infrastructure is situated within the Russian High Arctic, and responds to the international commodification of previously inaccessible resources. This approach of assimilating two basic human needs derives from the notion that the race to the Arctic is a modern gold rush.

Where the context is one of escalation, the programmatic and structural strategy aims to respond through means of reduction, drawing on almost elemental construction typologies, such as the stacking and interlocking of engineered timber members.

14.19 Rupinder Gidar, Y5 ‘The Barking Reach Wholesale Market Hub’. A vision for the future of London’s wholesale markets, combining them to create the UK’s largest wholesale market, sited in Barking & Dagenham. The project investigates the use of concrete, rebar and 3D-printed stainless steel to create large spanning structures which adopt funicular geometry. The digitally developed geometry, specific material properties and integration of these materials results in a system which achieves a state of equilibrium.

14.21 Lap Yan (Justin) Chow, Y5 ‘Neo-Mongkok’. A cluster of 400m tall ‘Pencil Towers’, this proposed Autonomous District in Hong Kong stitches together existing context through a terraced podium layer. The city’s land deficiency has prompted the integration of transit into residential high-rise towers. Structural analysis and CFD Modelling of the relationship between tower and podium allows even greater density of cultural and civic programmes along these elevated arteries. Autonomous vehicles and amenities inhabit the ground floor, servicing the pedestrianised upper levels.

14.22 Daniel Boran, Y4 ‘Community Spirit’. This project is a whisky distillery bridge over a gorge deep in the Scottish Highlands, directly linking hiking trails to two previously remote communities. The shape of the bridge is determined by the swing method, which involves constructing the bridge on one side, rotating it around a pivot point and finally locking it into place at the opposite end. The lower deck houses the whisky machinery whilst the upper is reserved for pedestrian use.

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Parallel Presence / Parallel Presents

PG15

Max Dewdney, Susanne Isa

In PG15, we are interested in architecture as a discipline of which the profession is part. The solutions provided by architecture do not always manifest in physical buildings. Architecture is a system of knowledge and properties. We are all equal stakeholders in this planet and need to act collaboratively. We encourage students to develop highly individual ways of thinking, designing and making work.

This year we focused on design research on interrelated modes of temporality in the context of our relationship to the umwelt (the self-centred world), deep history and investigations into ‘managed retreats’ within the UK. We are interested in transdisciplinary approaches to objects, architecture and curation. The year was structured within 16 research topics from which each student selected three to explore individually.

A1 is for Apophenia P2 is for Parallel Presence D3 is for Dwelling E4 is for Exosomatic Fragments S5 is for Sensorial Surrogates M6 is for Memory Engrams F 7 is for Forking Paths Y8 is for Year One N9 is for Now U10 is for Useless Usefulness B11 is for Barely Imagined R12 is for Random Excess G13 is for Glitches R14 is for Raum Z15 is for Zeitgeist T 16 is for Topological Historicity The project for the year was ‘Dwell/Dwelling’. To dwell is ‘to live in a place or in a particular way’. A dwelling is ‘a house or place to live in’.

The project consisted of three parts: 1. to design an object that relates to one or more of the research topics; 2. to design a room for that object; and 3. to design a dwelling for that room.

The site of investigations for Year 4 projects was Goole: a town and inland port in the north of England. It is part of a Homes England masterplan to build thousands of new dwellings, and the site of a major manufacturing plant currently being built by Siemens.1 2 Year 5 students were encouraged to develop their own polemic agendas within the framework of the unit. Our field trip to India explored ‘Parallel Presents’ though an investigation into a number of places, seminal buildings, landscapes and institutions.

Year 4 Deluo Chen, Jack Cox, Nichole Ho, Mei See (Joyce) Leung, Philip Longman Year 5 Stephany Govier, Oliver Hay, Luke Hurley, Wei Lau, Clement Laurencio, Nhut Nguyen, Luke Sanders, Phot Tongsuthi, Jia Min Wong, Mengqiao Zhang Thanks to our technical tutors Marcel Rahm, Martin Sagar, Alex Mark, Shane Orme Special thanks the following for their support for crits, field and site visits: Alastair Browning, Nat Chard, James Chatfield, James A. Craig, Bobby Desai, Katherine Desai, East Riding Council, Pedro Gil, Helen Hoult, IIMA, Ismet Khambatta, Stefan Lungen, Sean McAlister, Julian Mogera, John Ng, Tim Norman, Bimal Patel, Frosso Pimenides, Marcel Rahm, Martin Sagar, Anand Sarabhai, Ronak Shah, Samir Shah, Muhammad Shamin Bin Sahrum, Abhinava Shukla, Sarah Smith, Mohammed Syafiq, The Mill Owner’s Building, Yeena Yoon

1. Homes England is the non-departmental public body that funds new affordable housing in England.

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15.1 Nhut Nguyen, Y5 ‘A Manual to Confront and Reconcile with your Body’. A new dwelling condition of disembodiment is seen following the Covid-19 pandemic. The project questions this through a series of transformations between the body and the room, and through the design of an office for a plastic surgeon.

Situated on Harley Street, the office is an uncanny architecture of the body, for the body with the purpose is to allow the users a chance to confront and reconcile with their lost body parts.

15.2 Mengquiao Zhang, Y5 ‘Mr Smith’s Dwelling, 2020’.

In 2020, the age of surveillance capitalism, the predictions of George Orwell’s 1984 are arguably happening in an alternative way. The value of privacy diminishes, while humans’ behavioural data are monetised. The project, set against this issue, translates book’s storyline, symbolic objects and metaphors into architectural spaces.

Mr Smith is designed to be a parallel protagonist for a hybrid cupboard dwelling. The cupboard can be unfolded, showing the duality of appearance and substance. The final drawings provide unusual viewpoints and glimpses that recontextualise the dwelling with reality.

15.3 Philip Longman, Y4 ‘Turning the Tide‘. This project proposes a research centre on the banks of the River Ouse. Sitting at the centre of the confluence of two tidal rivers and the managed levels of the Ouse docks, the project seeks to explore water at multiple scales: at the scale of landscape, through speculation on what the future of water management may look like; as a networked installation at the scale of the town; and at the scale of the building, through its relationship with water.

15.4 Jack Cox, Y4 ‘A Bath House for Goole’. This project proposes a bath house and natural swimming lido for the old quarter of Goole, Yorkshire, while trying to explore the relationship between earth and water, which the town precariously survives on. The building tries to echo and reflect the long and embedded histories of the site, the cuttings and vertical drama within the building, recalling the expressiveness of the neolothic earthworks that litter the surrounding landscape of Yorkshire.

15.5 Oliver Hay, Y5 ‘The Twoday Room: Interrelated Temporalities on Northey Island’. During a time when we are under a global lockdown, the only interactions with other timezones and locations are online via a 2D screen. This project proposes a mode of dwelling that allows the inhabitant to register parallel and interrelated temporalities from around the planet, while reinforcing an awareness of their own isolated presence at a precise point on the surface of the Earth.

15.6–15.8 Wei Lau, Y5 ‘Goole Forestry Commission’.

At the time of climate crisis, the term ‘sustainability‘ is often overused and technical. The picturesque gives new emphasis to the environment. It demonstrates how we can create hope for the future, through the landscape.

The UK needs 1.5 billion trees by 2050 to counteract climate change. However, half of England is owned by 1% of its population. What if the Crown Estate – which owns rivers near Goole – bought a house and transformed its window view, then donated it to the National Trust?

15.9, 15.17 Clement Laurencio, Y5 ‘Apartment #5: A Labyrinth and Repository of Spatial Memories’.

In this period of lockdown due to the global pandemic, we are isolated in our homes, left with our memories of faraway places, with only our photographs to recall them. Sited in London, this project is set both in real and imaginary space. It seeks to recreate atmospheres and spatial conditions of the places remembered through memories from a recent voyage to India. Memories are rekindled by manipulating scale, forced perspective and recreating the atmospheric phenomena of the places.

However, they may become embellished, corrupted, reimagined; a labyrinth of memories.

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15.10 Mei See (Joyce) Leung, Y4 ‘A Celebration for Goole’.

This project celebrates the shipbuilding industry of Goole by linking the building with the shipbuilding industry. It gives a symbiotic meaning to Goole by protecting and restoring its lost shipping heritage.

By amalgamating all the different typologies of ships from each period, the new profile of the building celebrates the extinction of shipping industry. It is used as a wedding registry office for the people of Goole to celebrate in. It also receives blessings from visitors from other countries as they enter Goole. At the beginning of a new life journey, they are reminded of their roots and the glorious shipbuilding industry and look forward to their next steps.

15.11 Nichole Ho, Y4 ‘Liberty Walking’. The act of walking carves a mental map which enables us to walk without navigational assistance, to take liberties with the city and go against what it prescribes. To take shortcuts, alternative routes, to create our own desire lines, to ‘dwell‘. This project begins with a toolkit of elements that serve as walking markers. The initial study then manifests itself in a masterplan for Goole, proposing a music academy and a house for a musician-in-residence.

15.12 Luke Hurley, Y5 ‘Experiential Museum of London Folklore’. A series of Temporary Follies along the Parkland Walk, which curates an experiential museum, cataloguing London’s folklore. The museum mediates between the accessibility of digital museums and the physical nature of the traditional museum forming part of a distributed network of museums connected to the Victoria and Albert Museums. This makes physical art and culture more accessible, dissolving the walls of the museum by fragmenting it along a public walkway, creating open-air, accessible follies, which reconnect the citizens of London with their local, collective, cultural identities.

15.13 Luke Sanders, Y5. ‘Queen of Clubs’. Sited in London’s Soho, Queen of Clubs is a LGBTQ+ nightclub revolving around the artform of drag. The project responds to the 58% drop of London’s LGBTQ+ venues over the past two decades as remaining ‘safe spaces’ struggle to survive under the threat of gentrification.

Comprised of a series of interventions along Berwick Street leading up to the core venue, the project aims to reclaim Soho as a ‘gay village’ by celebrating queer culture through an architecture of performance.

15.14 Jia Min Wong, Y5 ‘Nowhere: How to Construct a Piece of Malaysia in London?’. This project explores the duality of the notion of ‘home’, that can be both familiar and foreign. The project constructs a territory that transcends national boundaries, where experiencing the transition between Malaysia and UK is compared to the psychological curve of cultural adaptation.

By referencing the Malay term ‘rumah’ that can mean ‘house’ but simultaneously a space within a house, the project is not only for curing homesickness by ensuring familiarity, but also gradually exposes users to new contexts.

15.15–15.16 Stephany Govier, Y5 ‘The Grieving Monuments’. Within the context of accelerating global environmental changes, this project investigates the interrelations between a planetary network of 360 monuments that circumscribe the globe, marking the intersection of the Earth’s longitudes to the Equator, while raising awareness of the global impact of climate change by mourning the loss of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Bringing environmentalists together from all around the world, The Grieving Monuments mark the uniqueness of the Equator while bringing people together in a moment of empathy towards Earth’s environments.

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What Matters and the PG16 Capabilities to be Sensed Matthew Butcher, Ana Monrabal-Cook

PG16 focuses on the exploration of an architecture that re-emphasises our physical engagement with, and relationship to, the environments we choose to inhabit. Specifically, this year we directed our interests in two key areas. Firstly, the experience and meaning of matter, manifest in the materials, objects and ecologies that frame and formulate our daily experiences; secondly, the exploration into the realm of the physical mediated by the realm of data. We investigated the ways in which both are sensed by us.

Our initial sites of enquiry were the vast automated agricultural landscapes of California and Arizona, increasingly being farmed and monitored by complex computational systems. We were interested in how farming – traditionally a mediation between humans, technology and nature – is being reinvented within the context of automation with the aim of achieving a more efficient, precise and responsive agriculture.

We questioned how this reinvention might change our notions of space, distance, time, landscape and architecture. We explored how the shift to automated taskscapes acts as a model for the manifestation of a post-work economy; a particular economic condition that questions a radical change in our relationship with work.

We augmented our research into ways of living and working with an expansive fieldtrip through Southern California and Phoenix. This allowed us to contrast our observations of modernised, controlled and data-mediated worlds of farming with contemporary experimental ideas of collective living and working embodied in the desert town of Arcosanti, and in Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural community at Taliesin West. Both are examples of initiatives that look to reconcile the distance between architecture, building and the wider ecology, and both were initially conceived as self-sustained, isolated communities in desert conditions.

The outcomes this year are proposals that examine and address a possible future re-balance in the relationship of technology to our environment as well as our attitudes towards current forms of working, recreation and creative collaborative habitats. Our students’ work ranges from case studies for experimental living, questioning our relationship with the rituals and objects of the ordinary everyday, to designing for the collateral effects of decommissioning the last nuclear power plant in California, to researching provocative communes disengaged from societal norms.

The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 challenged our working conditions and increased the intensity of our relationship with our immediate physical and material surroundings. Our ordinary habits and our state of mind have undergone a significant adjustment.

The work presented here now resonates with us in different ways as we have been forced to reconsider the context and meaning of ‘what matters and the capabilities to be sensed’.

Year 4 Ella Caldicott, Hoh Gun Choi, Christina Garbi, George Gil, Kaizer Hud, Hannah Lewis, Daniel Pope, Andrew Riddell Year 5 Jun Chan, Samuel Davies, Magdalena Filipek, Long Kwan, Ching (Albert) Leung, Achilleas Papakyriakou, Wing (Michelle) Yiu Many thanks to our Technical Tutor Will Jefferies, Structural Consultant Ollie Wildman and Environmental Consultant, Sal Wilson Thanks to our thesis tutors Polly Gould, Gary Grant, Anne Hultzsch, Zoe Laughlin, Luke Lowings, Oliver Wilton, Stamatis Zografos Thank you to our critics Ana Betancour, BarbaraAnn Campbell-Lange, Nat Chard, Alex Cotrill, Sam Gray Coulton, Kate Davies, David Flook, Pedro Gil, Agnieszka Glowacka, Andrew Kovacs, Jimenez Lai, Ifigeneia Liangi, Doug Miller, Shaun Murray, Ralph Parker, Stephen Phillips, Nina Shen Poblete, Emily Priest, Rahesh Ram, Bob Sheil, Matt Turner, Carl-Johan Vesterlund, Gabriel Warshafsky, Dan Wilkinson

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16.1, 16.19–16.20 Samuel Davies, Y5 ‘Sweat, Pant, Blush: Three Houses of Three Tomorrows’. The project examines the social and architectural stigmas that surround the notion of ‘comfort’. A cul-de-sac of three experimental houses is proposed in Palm Springs, on the edge of the desert. Within each house, everyday domestic conventions are dismantled to suit a different attitude to comfort.

The project holds the architect responsible, not for the development of new technologies, but new ideas of what it means to be ‘at home.’

16.2, 16.6 Daniel Pope, Y4 ‘Foundation House: An Experimental Housing Typology for California City’.

This experimental housing masterplan is sited in California City, a half-built complex of roads and infrastructure located in Southern California. The project proposes an experimental housing typology to restart the economy of California City. Using boron as a building material and the exploration of experimental ways of construction influenced by processes of mining, the typology seeks to become a new house-building mechanism, where the construction and firing of materials for one home generates the materials to begin constructing the next.

16.3 Long Kwan, Y5 ‘Southern California Water Chapels’.

Excessive water consumption in the agricultural industry has brought serious environmental damage to this landscape. To limit the damage the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) has been signed.

The building and landscape provide spaces to experience the rise and fall of water in the region and a space for local political discussion on the use and abuse of water resources in California.

16.4 Hoh Gun Choi, Y4 ‘The Trail Repair Outpost: Two Rocks Do Not Make a Duck’. This project challenges the ethics related to wilderness management, exploring the ramifications of building and the marks that humans leave on the wilderness. The project aims to touch the ground lightly. Six buildings each perform structural gymnastics in order to find a careful connection with the mountain.

16.5 Ella Caldicott, Y5 ‘Dirty Dozen: Strawberry Farm as an Urban Typology’. This project is an ethical approach to the future for strawberry farming innovation, infrastructure and architecture. Specifically, it addresses the efficiency of land use to optimise crops while also creating safe living conditions for the necessary workers. This is achieved through a plan for strategic land division and the introduction of ‘architectural buffers‘, creating an environment where farm, town and the natural environment can coexist.

16.7–16.8 Jun Chan, Y5 ‘The Predators and Preys for a Decommissioned Nuclear Power Plant’. Located in Diablo Canyon, California, this project investigates the collateral ecological effects that will be caused by the decommissioning process of the last nuclear power plant in the state. The proposed architecture becomes both a predator and a prey, feeding off and into the shifting ecological chain of the decommissioning process.

Specifically, it looks to provide a framework to experience these disturbances in the landscape, while acknowledging its role as part of a wider ecology.

16.9 Kaizer Hud, Y4 ‘Into Dust: Politics and Dust Mitigation at the Salton Sea’. Originating from the deceivingly pristine Salton Sea, tiny invisible polluted sand particles, picked up by winds as the lake dries up cause severe breathing issues. The recent re-instigation of dust mitigation measures calls for an operational facility that not only acts as the implementation office for these projects, but as a provocation to raise awareness about the problem. The building within this capacity sees the constructive (rather than destructive) potentials of dust.

16.10 (Ching) Albert Leung, Y5 ‘The Obsolescence of Highway Stops in the Era of Autonomous Driving’. The premise for this project assumes that we will increasingly utilise, for the transport of goods and people, self-driving 310

vehicles. A future 24-hour, non-stop world will emerge where there is no longer a difference between conditions of night and day. The proposal presents a new model town with a series of performative architectures to help heal those experiencing distorted effects of living and working in such an environment.

16.11 George Gil, Y4 ‘The Golden Datum’. This project proposes a gold prospectors’ outpost and campsite, seeking to rebrand the preconception of gold prospecting to appeal to all. With this wider client base, the greater revenue from visitors will ensure its economic viability and pay for the upkeep of National Forest Land.

16.12 Magdalena Filipek, Y5 ‘The State of Change: LA Aqueduct Water Purification and Re-use’. This project for a purification plant and spa located in proximity to central California’s Lake Tulare has direct access to the LA Aqueduct. The proposal incorporates water purification processes into an architecture as a way of addressing toxicity with the aid of a ‘hydrogel’ purification coagulant.

A chemically engineered hydrogel facade erodes over a period of 10 years, changing its presence in the landscape.

16.13 Hannah Lewis, Y4 ‘California City (Re)imagined: New Fossil Infrastructures’. California City was a failed Utopian vision of 1958. Following the lawsuit seeking a declaration that the fossils are part of one’s surface estate, the Mayor of California City turned to rare fossils to rejuvenate the economy. A ‘Prospecting House’ and other infrastructures sit above the landscape, as interventions designed to create a new culture, invigorated by architectural innovation and political manipulation.

16.14–16.15 Andrew Riddell, Y4 ‘Lakewood in Drag: Challenging the Heteronormative Ideal’. This project investigates the artform of drag and how its characterbased performance and radical self-expression could be used as a tool to challenge and subvert the heteronormative American ‘tract housing’ that was widely celebrated and mass-produced in a postwar California. Iconic ‘house mother’ Crystal LeBeija acts as a pioneering client.

16.16–16.17 Achilleas Papakyriakou, Y5 ‘Drop Out and Go Extinct’. Moros is a fictional anti-natalist commune, named after the Greek primordial deity, who is the embodiment of impending doom, isolated in the depths of the Mojave Desert. The proposed skeletal architecture acts as a memento mori and exposes its inhabitants to the visceral conditions of the Californian desert. Members of Moros engage in rituals and pageantry, while wearing elaborate uniforms and costumes that immerse the wearers and observers in unusual practices and interactions with the architecture.

16.18. Christina Garbi, Y4 ‘The Lake Powell Assembly: A Sediment-Trapping Instrument’. The Lake Powell Assembly provides a means to gather and collect sediment data through a series of seasonally flooded camping spaces for travelling explorers. The Assembly has been set up to investigate the excessive saturation of the lake with sediment, a condition caused by the construction and operation of the Glen Canyon Dam in the region.

16.21–16.22 Michelle Yiu, Y5 ‘East of Eden’. Set in California’s Salinas Valley, an agricultural school and museum interprets, and then manifests, the narrative of John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden (1952). Presented as a series of spatial journeys, the architecture helps visitors understand the ideas and meaning embedded in the novel’s historical storyline. Specifically, the building seeks to reinterpret and then illustrate the novel’s criticism around the over-industrialisation of farming of the 1950s.

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Prompt Score Ensemble

PG17

Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Thomas Parker

PG17 is an experience-based learning and design environment which fosters the role of autonomy and collaboration equally in architecture, encouraging our students to produce work inside and outside the university, both as individuals and as groups.

For us, the connection between architecture and experience not only exists in the relationship between building and life, but is also played out within the process of design itself. The Latin word experimentum reminds us that experiment and experience are twinned: to experiment is to experience through practice.

We are inspired by the ethos of Black Mountain College, where architect Buckminster Fuller, artists Anni and Josef Albers, composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham developed highly influential practices within a non-hierarchical and experimental learning community. We attempt to find an equivalent form of architectural pedagogy today.

While the unit supports individual whole-year projects, we also encourage working in ensembles. ‘Ensemble’ means a mix of separate things, actions and people, together forming a shared whole. For example, this year we stayed in La Tourette, where we produced a large collaborative drawing responding to Le Corbusier and Xenakis’ breathtaking building. Collectively, we turned drawing into an embodied action of site performance.

Accepting that no single governing author or approach can handle the complex environmental and social conditions we face, and recognising that architecture is a composing act, able to synthesise different considerations, we ask what role can an ‘architectural score’ play in enabling design ensembles and polyphonic structures? Scores aim to describe a process; they are works in themselves but also preparatory pieces for influencing further work. Time is the essential element of the score, through which relationships between parts are constructed. Open scores allow us to invent and adapt relations, both temporally and spatially.

Just as a musical score can organise sonic space in time, so an architectural score can structure time, materials and relations in space.

The architectural score can unlock new methods of communication, production and inhabitation in architecture, encouraging much-needed slippages between people, materials, tools and ideas. It can mix times past with times future, and human skill with other forms of intelligence, in unexpected ways. Through open scoring, we can associate and disassociate the parts of an ensemble, to create an architecture that while evoking oneness and inclusivity, may also be contradictory.

Year 4 Pravin (Richard) Abraham, Ross Burns, Hoyin (Jackie) Cheung, Thomas Dobbins, Naysan Foroudi, Nikolina Georgieva, Cherry Guo, Hyesung Lee, George Newton, Benedicte Zorde Rahbek Year 5 Eleni Efstathia Eforakopoulou, Veljko Mladenovic, Iman Mohd Hadzhalie, Ioannis Saravelos, Philip Springall, Harriet Walton Thanks to our Design Realisation tutor James Daykin and to our consultants Nathan Blades, Sarah Earney, Sophia McCracken, Richard Mildiner, Eric Nascimento Many thanks to our critics Kirsty Badenoch, Ruth Bernatek, Peter Bertram, Anthony Boulanger, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Nat Chard, Hannah Corlett, Sebastian Crutch, James Daykin, Sean Griffiths, Perry Kulper, Emma-Kate Matthews, Jörg Mayer, Niall McLaughlin, Thomas Pearce, Alex Pillen, Bob Sheil, Emmanouil Stavrakakis, Timothy Waterman, Victoria Watson, Patrick Weber, Simon Withers Thanks to Laura Mark and Matei Mitrache

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17.1–17.2 PG17 ‘Drawing La Tourette’. In January PG17 joined the Dominican community in La Tourette where students drew individually and collectively. This large inhabitable drawing was done collectively on the floor of the dining hall, and measures 3 metres x 5 metres.

17.3 Veljko Mladenovic, Y5 ‘Plum Puddin Island’. In this project, the found object and the landscape are pertinent to the understanding of architecture. Low-lying buildings and playfully-swept roofs are in play with flat field and windswept trees. Historically popular with artists and craftsmen, Thanet is once more attracting creative thinkers. Imagined as a crafts retreat, the programme is comprised of textile and woodworking workshops, a gallery, a tea room and nine residences.

17.4 Philip Springall, Y5 ‘Carlisle Alzheimer’s Foundation’.

This project proposes a network which connects individuals in creative practice with individuals at various stages of Alzheimer’s disease. By developing creative partnerships, the pair can engage in meaningful activities to respond to the challenges of personal identity, occupation, responsibility and inclusion faced by those with Alzheimer’s. Situated in the centre of Carlisle, the proposed scheme is designed through creative activities of making, constructing, performing, eating, cooking, wandering, conversing and socialising.

17.5 Cherry Guo, Y4 ‘The Inland Pier’. Located on the seafront of Pegwell Bay, Thanet, this project proposes an ‘inland pier’ with a school that celebrates the craft of stone masonry, whilst exploring the possibilities of stereotomic assemblage. Serving as a mediator between the land and the sea, the scheme aims to create a continuous geology with a series of interconnected chalk passageways and projective spaces.

17.6 Hoyin (Jackie) Cheung, Y4 ‘Reconciling the Terroir: Inhabiting Seaweed’. This project challenges the role of nature in the urban context of Margate. It uses seaweed as a natural material, and integrates it into both the programme and the architectural tectonics to create dynamic interactions between the coast, the building and our sensory experiences within it.

17.7 Eleni Efstathia Eforakopoulou, Y5 ‘Winds of Marseille’.

At a time of climate crisis, this project aims to understand the invisible choreography of the natural world as a basis for architecture. The proposal reuses the site of a disused acid factory, situated amongst the limestone foothills to the south of Marseille. It establishes a new settlement for a wave of people forced to leave their homes due to the effects of desertification in North Africa. It follows the site’s logic, organised around the prevailing winds, the sea, and the land contours.

17.8 Ioannis Saravelos, Y5 ‘The Walking School of Stackpole’. This project addresses the sociodemographic issues that face the dispersed communities of Pembrokeshire. It proposes a framework of interconnected walking schools that seek to re-establish the connections between the communities and the landscape. Through the use of novel digital media, the project provides translocational connections between the schools themselves and their local context.

17.9 Benedicte Zorde Rahbek, Y4 ‘The Lido’. The old abandoned lido on the edge between land and sea tells the story of the heyday of Margate as a traditional holiday destination, and the decline which so quickly struck and demolished the town’s livelihood. It holds great emotional value for the people of Margate. This project experiments with a way of developing a transformational language embodying the emotional content to come.

17.10 Iman Mohd Hadzhalie, Y5 ‘Towards the Sea: A Refugee and Conservation Centre for Cliftonville’.

This project is set in the Northdown Road conservation area, exceptional for its poverty and population of migrant business owners. The proposal encourages 322

the further integration of refugees, teaching the skills of conservation of historic shopfronts. Through framing the sea, it gives a sense of nostalgia to the landscape by which refugees have crossed to their new community.

17.11 Nikolina Georgieva, Y4 ‘Mosaic of Earthworks’.

By establishing an understanding of everlasting translation in the practices of archaeology and geology, this project proposes alternative ways of reading the land on which we built. The proposal for an archaeological centre on the coast of Stonar Lake, Thanet, engages with processes of soil pigmentation and ground excavations, to shape cultural landscape, growing as a mosaic of earthworks.

17.12 Ross Burns, Y4 ‘The Xenakis Institute’. This project celebrates the multidisciplinary techniques of the prolific architect, composer and polymath Iannis Xenakis.

Inspired by his scoring methods and investigations into sound and experience through drawing, the proposal for a research, education and performance facility in the tranquil setting of Domaine de la Tourette, France, is a result of the role of music in its design process.

17.13 Hyesung Lee, Y4 ‘The Waste Archipelago’.

This proposal aims to revive a once-ludic Margate by restoring its forgotten spaces. Abandoned buildings of the city become material quarries and the collected waste is reused to manufacture new objects that slot into neglected spaces, creating an archipelago of expanded public islands. Not only playful installations, but resourceful places where further material dérive creates the vibrant network of the Magic Circle of Margate.

17.14 Harriet Walton, Y5 ‘The Village’. This proposal is set in the rural community of Pembrokeshire village of Little Haven. Although tourism provides a large economic boost to the area, the village is losing its heritage and stories.

The project proposes an integrated film studio and set of theatre spaces, in which the performance documents the lives of the village. The stories of the settlement become the plot, and the villagers the actors.

17.15 Pravin (Richard) Abraham, Y4 ‘The Chalk Amphitheatre’. Drawing upon Kent’s rich history of quarrying, the idea of excavating the remnants of an abandoned Lime Quarry in the village of Peene was pursued. The project looks at quarrying of chalk as process for shaping the landscape. Resulting in a unique musical ground, excavated into the earth, the proposal pushes Folkestone’s musical endeavours forward.

17.16 George Newton, Y4 ‘Manual’. The Cliftonville Lido is a lost centre of faded tourist industry in the heart of Margate. The resuscitation of this landmark is both an educational and political opportunity. By involving the community in the process of architectural conception, construction, inhabitation, and obsolescence, locals can acquire key trades and design skills, and forge their own space within the shell of the Lido.

17.17 Thomas Dobbins, Y4 ‘The Wantsum Assembly’.

Confronting the complex relationship between the ecological and the human, the Wantsum Assembly is a transient citizens’ assembly for the people of Kent, where local environmental policies are created and debated.

Funded by the drying of its timber-stacked walls, and disassembled after 15 years, the architecture becomes a physical and temporal embodiment of the discussions that have occurred within it.

17.18 Naysan Foroudi, Y4 ‘The Wantsum Common House’.

A new form of architecture, inspired by the process of slip-casting and in tune with the natural rhythm of material accumulation, provides a place of collective gathering and shelter as the region changes. Spaces for conversation and meeting are formed around a series of baked in-situ hearths. Over time, the architecture gives way to a wider community participation, as new heritage trails, village fêtes and practices begin to take form.

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Moonchild

PG18

Ricardo de Ostos, Isaïe Bloch

Architecture, more than any other artform, consolidates culture in public space for most to see and for the curious to wander. The city is both a solid cast of historical moments and the ground where society erects its novel views and reactions about the world in the form of buildings, spaces and landscapes. In recent years, however, culture has been more of a drilling machine, carving spaces of protest, dispute and rights across the world. In PG18, we study culture as a dynamic force, evolving from tradition and innovating new forms of expression.

This year, the unit investigated cultural centres as spaces for mediation between old and new, tradition and progress. With projects ranging from art, dance, film, and literary manifestations, students investigated how culture is perceived, encrypted, performed and manifested in meaningful architecture. By exploring the connection between tectonics, materiality, space and atmosphere students worked with test models and expressive drawings and renderings.

We travelled to Colombia in South America in order to study how architectural, ecological and cultural tendencies coexist.

Focusing on the capital Bogotá, students investigated how the actual city is beyond sensationalist documentaries and polarising clichés.

We found a city with great buildings, diverse cuisine and high tension between richer and poorer areas. Based on interviews with architects, anthropologists and cultural institutions, students engaged in discussions about how Bogotá has created its new spaces of culture.

Students focused on adventurous design paths and tectonic expression to worked on projects bridging digital skills and vernacular sensibilities. Christina Grytten studied light pollution in her project ‘The Nocturnal Landscape’, proposing a complex ecological and atmospheric design. Between observatory and mixed public areas, the design uses natural light and form to suggest uses and reveal spaces. Andrei Zamfir focused on producing a compelling digital narrative about Colombian mythology and its deep roots in ecological sensibilities. In his film ‘Impossible Encounters’, Andrei narrates how natural and human worlds are interwoven, exploring storytelling as a resilient mode to convey intangible heritages.

This year, students asked complex questions about the role architecture can play in current cultural discourses. Together, we created a space of tolerance where ideas could be discussed from diverse points of view, avoiding fashionable jargon. Whether working from Bogotá, London, or from their desks at home, all the students created passionate projects that show how determined and inspired they are.

Year 4 Aya Ataya, Putra (Yusuf) Burhanuddin, Sara Eldeib, Alexander Kolar, Shoakang Li, Rory Noble-Turner, Niall O’Hara, Alexis Udegbe Year 5 Alex Desov, Christina Grytten, Maria Alessia Junco, Funto King, Lucie Krulichova, Joanna Rzewuska, Bogdan Stanciu, Andrei Zamfir Thanks to our consultants Paul Diller, Robert Haworth, Franck Robert, Anna Woodeson Thank you to our critics Teoman Ayas, Robert Haworth, Sonia Magdziarz, Ana Maria Fries Martinez, Theo Sarantoglou Lalis, Jimena Puyo, Michal Scigaj, Chiara Zaccagnini

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18.1 Shaokang Li, Y4 ‘An Archive of the Ciudad Perdida’.

This project focuses on an almost-lost civilisation: ’The Lost City’ (Ciudad Perdida) in Colombia. Conceptually, the building emphasises a profound coherence among construction, material, atmosphere and spatial qualities by controlling nature elements (light and water).

18.2–18.4 Christina Grytten, Y5 ‘The Nocturnal Landscape’. This project, a dark sky preserve and research facility in Colombia, embodies the need for darkness in urban areas while studying the indigenous Muisca culture. By carefully exploring the threshold of city and nature, it maps shades of dark where visitors can venture in safety, bringing a closeness to nature.

The proposal consists of a series of observatories, both scientific and analogue, for astronomic and anthropological research with the importance of preserving the dark sky to better understand and keep on investigating the cultural heritage and ritual manifested in the sky phenomena. Naked-eye (analogue) observatories enable open-air skywatching and open-air performances. The journey in space is augmented by both the material shift and the light contrast.

18.5–18.10 Andrei Zamfir, Y5 ‘Impossible Encounters’.

Using virtual reality, this project explores the creative potential of layered and hybrid realities. Magical realism attempts to capture reality by depicting life’s many dimensions, seen and unseen, visible and invisible, rational and mysterious. The project positions the users at the centre of the space and relies on their interaction to accept both realistic and magical elements of reality on the same level. Myths, stories of origin, and family histories are often interwoven and narrated in many different forms – from dances to songs or mythical creatures. The proposal merges facts with mythical tales to reshape them in a narrative space where architecture becomes a tool in telling the story of Mocoa and helps to heal Mother Earth. The final film embodies numerous elements of magical realism in portraying the native Amazonian Shaman’s perception of the indigenous natural environment. The natives believe in local tales and unseen powers, where the occident has a clear separation between real and unreal, factual and imaginary, science and myth. These clash together to form the designed geometry.

18.11 Aya Ataya, Y4 ‘Chambira’s Children’. Located in the province of Ciudad Bolivar, this design explores craft and atmosphere to create a place to represent the Indigenous Wounnan Community. The design uses grid-shell roofs, timber columns and a concrete base, reinterpreting modern and traditional sensibilities.

18.12 Sara Eldeib, Y4 ‘Antechambers for Storytelling: Reinterpreting Ancestral Pintas’. This project is a mass of walking rooms, providing discrete yet homogenous experiences for the visitor. It is set in a landscape to stimulate metaphysical and physical meeting, wandering, reflection, and sometimes isolation.

18.13 Shaokang Li, Y4 ‘An Archive of the Ciudad Perdida’.

This project embraces the idea from ‘Aluna’ while translating it into architectural form. The building is an archive of the Lost City of Aluna, which records messages and culture in an architectural language.

18.14 Rory Noble-Turner, Y4 ‘Unearthing an Emerald Trade Centre in Bogota’. A new cultural research centre, this building hopes to mark a new chapter Colombia’s relationship with the emerald, demystifying the trade, and providing a worthy home for the country’s most priceless jewels.

18.15 Bogdan Stanciu, Y5 ‘The Myth Labyrinth’. Looking at myths as a source of inspiration and a repository of knowledge shaped this project’s approach to context and form. The methodology explored acts of translation of myth or instances of craft into tectonic acts that later 334

evolved in the final building proposal. While avoiding the Disneyfication of tradition, the scheme explores how light and space can stir the imaginations of visitors.

18.16 Putra (Yusuf) Burhanuddin, Y4 ‘A Barrio’s Urban Canvas’. The objective of this design is to investigate ways to bridge the relationship between the locals, the tourists and the general public, to prosper the development of the favela. By expressing contextual relationships of colour, pattern and materials, the proposal also adapts to the compact and steep terrain, creating a sensitive siting.

18.17 Niall O’Hara, Y4 ‘Hybrid Sounds’. This proposal examines the indigenous Muisca people of Colombia, South America, and set out to combat the critical lack of communal space in low-income areas inhabited by the Muisca in the capital city of Bogotá. The design explores regional primitive timber architecture and urban vernacular brick typologies, to create spaces that balance acoustic history with modernity.

18.18–18.19 Alexander Kolar, Y4 ‘Council of Earth’.

This project investigates the reinterpretation of Spanish Colonial architecture in the context of an indigenous society called the Muisca. It establishes a permanent home for the Muisca Cabildo (town council) in Suba, Bogotá. It seeks to introduce a main library space, office spaces for the town council, as well a public Muisca garden within Suba Central Square. Materially the project was driven by the ambition to add another function to the tile other than that of rain-screening, changing its form, function and character.

18.20 Funto King, Y5 ‘A Song of the Pacific’. By creating a place for poetry based on the local Colombian Pacific tradition, this project is a model for regional improvement.

Following Pacific oral tradition, water plays an important role within the scheme as a material that defines thresholds, creates atmosphere and responds to the rainy context.

18.21 Lucie Krulichova, Y5 ‘Fogscapes’. Fogscapes is an experimental centre where the issues of water, plant and forest conservation are discussed. Through collaboration, action and discussion of indigenous and scientific knowledge, the project aims to mitigate biodiversity loss, deforestation and promote sustainable water exploitation.

18.22 Maria Alessia Junco, Y5 ‘Bosque Renace: The Centre of Intangible Heritage’. Aiming to explore the existing forest line and its future growth, this design integrates the ecosystems of flora, fauna and man. Permeable facades and living walls allow each to coexist and thrive with minimum impact to the forest floor and landscape.

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Out of…

PG20

Marjan Colletti, Javier Ruiz Rodriguez

Out of*…hand, mind, context, print, nowhere, Eden, breath, date, jurisdiction, love, reach, sync, touch, order, office, season, use, the box, bounds, focus, key, nothing, remit, time, place, control, sight, the blue, service, phase, curiosity, hours, line, question, range, here…

Architecture is not ‘out’ yet: humanity needs great design, but it must change and evolve ‘out of’ its comfort zone. *Architecture ‘out of’: 1) is no longer in a stated place or condition, i.e. it is no more a static stand-alone discipline but acts transdisciplinarily; 2) shows what something is made from, and is a form of material alchemy; 3) is used to show the reason why someone does something, with a purpose beyond narratives and pretty illustrations; 4) is from among an amount or number, approximating variables among multiple possibilities; 5) is used to describe where something came from or began, and so has an origin intrinsic to human culture; 6) is no longer ‘involved in’, but supersedes its own dogmas and doctrines.

In term 1, students explored current – and speculated on possible – relationships between landscape, data, nature and architecture.

They created digitally, and merged landscape and data, nature and architecture, making hybrids of one ‘out of’ or many. A series of specific skilling workshops on procedural design techniques, timebased generative systems and high-resolution hyper-real cinematic videos advanced students’ abilities to communicate their ideas in 4D.

After a field trip to the islands of Gran Canaria and Tenerife in Spain, a volcanic archipelago off the Atlantic Coast of northwest Africa, students looked at how climate geology, natural and manmade ecosystems have evolved. They envisioned how locals, tourists, future machines and automated systems may spread, not through aggressive and/or ‘classic’ processes, but through calculated and precise integration with and adaptation to existing scenarios, potentially with the involvement of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

In term 3, students considered how our proposed experimental and speculative architectures can play an active role in the real development of future sustainable hybrid conditions for a data-driven society in/formed by the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Facilitating a new high-complexity symbiosis between natural life and artificial life, they designed ‘out of’ architectures for the future, learning from past mistakes.

Year 4 Harry Hinton-Hard, Sze Chun Hui, Tony Le, Edward Tse, Lukas Virketis, Ning Ye Year 5 Madalina-Oana Blaje, Ross Gribben, Tzu-Jung (Dexter) Huang, Hanadi Izzuddin, Ziyu (Ivy) Jiang, James Kennedy, Viola Poon, Saria Saeed, Theodoros Tamvakis Thanks to our Design Realisation tutor David Edwards and consultants Tom Clewlow and Pablo Gugel Many thanks to our critics Charles Anderson, Marco Brizzi, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Matias del Campo, Tiziano Derme, David Edwards, José Luis Esteban Penelas, Georgina Huljich, Andreas Koerner, Tom Kovac, Elena Manferdini, Sandra Manninger, Hannes Mayer, Alessandro Melis, Paul Minifie, Mark Mueckenheim, Marcos Novak, Michele Pasca di Magliano, Yael Reisner, Karolin Schmidbaur-Volk, Theodore Spyropoulos

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All images are stills taken from animations.

20.1 Tzu-Jung (Dexter) Huang, Y5 ‘Meta-prosthesis’.

An alternative salt sauna explores the synthesis of the natural and artificial to augment the basis in environmental design. The proposal also challenges the conventional construction sequencing by proposing the hybrid of 3D printing techniques and therefore promotes a new vernacular envelope on Lanzarote.

20.2 Hanadi Izzuddin, Y5 ‘Out of Body’. This project explores an architecture for the digitally-nomadicised posthuman subject that reconciles three temporal domains of contemporary reality: the human, the natural and the technological. Comprised of intelligent voxels, the resort masterplan delineates a multi-domain architectural language generated through colliding algorithms that are spatially consumed across gradients of experience; from the embodied to the remote, the muscular to the ocular, at once moored in reality and suspended in virtuality.

20.3–20.4 Theodoros Tamvakis, Y5 ‘A .T. L . A . S .’.

A deep-space senatorial station in lunar orbit, that has embedded in its formal DNA a multiplicity of artificial gravities. A field generates habitable and shielding zones creating a space-habitat that becomes a political common ground for space colonies. A closedloop ecosystem creates a living and ever-changing architecture that nurtures and protects the inhabitants of the station by creating a symbiotic relationship between architecture and humans.

20.5–20.6 Ziyu (Ivy) Jiang, Y5 ‘Out of Space’. This project investigates the possibility of subterranean human habitation on Mars. It proposes an underground test facility in Lanzarote, to research, simulate and experience subsurface living, that may one day support Martian civilisation. Locally extracted minerals are processed and reinstated within the leftover caves to construct spaces of comfort and familiarity, exploring macro to micro landscapes, gradiating from hard to soft, dark to light.

20.7 James Kennedy, Y5 ‘Library of Memories’. This proposal stems from an inquiry into mental health.

What began as an attempt to find solutions to mental health through architecture evolved into a looser exploration. The library is an architecture that seeks to concretise intangible memories into physical space.

As the brief was concerned with ‘where something came from or began’, here, memories are discussed through built space as the foundation of mental health.

20.8–20.9 Saria Saeed, Y5 ‘Out of Work’. This project is a critique on modern-day office architecture, which continues to treat office spaces as factories and warehouses. The project proposes an alternative work-architecture typology, that employs the science of circadian rhythms and neo-baroque architectural language to design workspaces that are in sync with our mind and body during the day. It uses architectural experiences to evoke creativity and a sense of productivity, ‘greying-out’ the boundaries between work and leisure.

20.10–20.11 Madalina-Oana Blaje, Y5 ‘Tex-Tecture’.

A complex set of technical, social and cultural roles make fabric one the best-loved materials human beings have ever invented. An ancient technique of interlacing fibres allows us to make a textile anywhere in the world.

Inspired by the traditional craft techniques, this study investigates ‘knitting activation’, particularly multi-layer weaving, simultaneously merged to create a skin, a structure, and a form.

20.12 Tony Le, Y4 ‘Out of Coral: Artificial Ocean Future’.

As climate change continues to damage the world beneath the ocean, an architecture is speculated from the principles of coral, in a future where it has run out.

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Differential growth is utilised, with bathymetric models to generate breakwaters on vulnerable sites. At the boundary between city and sea, the tidal-powered fish market in Tenerife will allow visitors to be more conscious of the ocean as a ‘blue economy’ is developed.

20.13 Edward Tse, Y4 ‘The Abades Mycoremediation Research Institute: Mycelium Protocell Architecture’.

This project proposes an architecture formed from the integration of a mycoremediation-to-mycelium ecology and is achieved through a series of expressive and bio-integrated mycelium skins. Computational and physical research into fungal growth logics and mycelium construction is embedded within the integrated skins.

The environmental control systems and peripheral ornamentation are here used as an approach to transparent architectural cybernetics.

20.14 Lukas Virketis, Y4 ‘Deus Ex Machina’. This project is set in the dystopian future, in which an interactive fabrication laboratory emerges as a response to the desertification and sandstorm-impacted Tenerife.

Situated within the rock-strewn desert of Teide National Park, the facility explores the biological construction material through symbiosis between local sand and bacteria, enabling architecture to grow and adapt to the changing environment.

20.15 Sze Chun Hui, Y4 ‘Out of Addition and Subtraction’.

This project aims to develop an artificial extension of the natural environment. It is achieved through the investigation of subtraction and addition in forms of erosion, speleothem formation and the transition between both elements.

It emphasises the seamless transition between natural elements and the artificial construction and restores the balance between nature and architecture.

20.16 Ning Ye, Y4 ‘Anaga Ecological Research Station’.

This project started from research into water droplets in microscale and the hierarchy that exists in the water harvesting process and biological structure. The research station provides living spaces and laboratories for long-term environmental research. Due to the watershortage problem on the island, the research station also works as a generator to harvest water from mist.

20.17 Harry Hinton-Hard, Y4 ‘Deployable Architecture’.

A Hotel spa retreat, located in one of the most extreme and compelling sites of Tenerife, proposes a ‘reactive’ form of architecture which is directly informed by its natural surroundings. Through instrumentalising natural processes of evolution and growth of local flora within a computational framework, an architectural strategy is developed that renders the building adaptable to its unique local context.

20.18–20.20 Ross Gribben, Y5 ‘Out of Mind’. This project critically analyses the importance of memory, the power of association, and the benefits of nature in influencing architecture for the care of those with memory disorders. These spaces are designed to be both contained by nature and reactive to its fractalised landscape. The social and historical context is derived from the lifestyle contributions of Australian Aboriginal culture in developing memory-enhancing techniques through oral history traditions.

20.21 Viola Poon, Y5 ‘Datascape: Redefining Sustainable Architecture for Future Coexistence’. This project envisions a new understanding of the juxtaposition of ‘the cloud’ and ‘ecology’ within our built environment.

It posits a future design approach involving a machine landscape that comprises of servers and computers.

Through this, the philosophical shift from deterministic control to coexistence is symbolically represented as a ‘mesh’. The project redefines the anthropocentric relationship between humans, machine and landscape, and pursues the amelioration of both physical and psychological tranquility within inhabitants.

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Multiverse

PG21

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Andrew Porter

‘It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone’ 1 Facebook, Google and Instagram now render a highly distorted digital universe where no two people see the same. The algorithms understand our desires and dreams and present to us an echo chamber. Smart devices and AI increasingly manipulate our physical environment but also our behaviour. In a world of deepfakes, multiple realities are defined by what people will believe in, and not just what happened. Yet the multiverses of quantum physics need alternate systems. Machine learning uses adversarial networks to imitate the human experience. The superimposition of multiple cultures and ideas nourishes vibrant cities, economies and art. In PG21 this year we asked how architecture should offer multiple realities: how could it exist across different states, different scales or different perspectives? And in this fluidity, what aspects needed to remain constant and grounded?

We examined Venice: physically challenging and absurd; familiar but unreal. Few cities in history or culture have asserted such a grip on the imagination through their own invisible personality. It has been dreamt about, as much as visited; at times a ‘city of the heart’, sometimes just flooded. Canaletto constructs fake and distorted versions of the city. Italo Calvino explores Venice’s fictitious identities. The International Biennale hosts worlds within worlds across contemporary art, film, dance and music.

We invited students to develop radical spatial proposals through exploratory drawings, models and buildings that created multiple realities. Initially they were asked to identify and explore a ‘grounding’ mechanism – something that could be constant within a fluid architecture, with attributes as diverse as scale, history, an architectural, artistic or literary reference or a constant algorithm.

Students investigated the constant erosion of material and time, drew from the rich cultural history of Venice, and the extraordinary physicality of building in a lagoon; with islands that appear and disappear. They explored this attribute through moving drawings, physical models, scripting and animation.

Ideas existed in the physical and the digital, offered alternate realities of perspective, scale and competing algorithms. Resulting in architectural proposals enriched by internal contradictions, that intelligently nourished conflicting audiences, systems and realities.

Year 4 Thomas Band, Paul-Andrei Burghelea, James Carden, Shu Min (Michelle) Hoe, Edward Sear Year 5 Rahaf Abdoun-Machaal, Kelly Au, Julian Besems, Alexandra Campbell, Maya Chandler, Nicholas Chrysostomou, Qiyu (Jennifer) Ge, James Potter, Bethan Ring, Chengbin Shou, Ziyuan (Oliver) Zhu Thanks to our practice tutor Tom Holberton, structural engineer Brian Eckersley and environmental engineer Hareth Pochee Thanks to our thesis tutors Sarah Bell, Roberto Bottazzi, Brent Carnell, Murray Fraser, Abel Maciel, Richard Martin, Robin Wilson, Stamatis Zografos Thank you to our critics Roberto Bottazzi, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, Emma Carter, David Di Duca, Stephen Gage, Charlotte Reynolds, Kat Scott, Sayan Skandarajah

1. Erica Jong, ‘A City of Love and Death: Venice’, New York Times, March 23, 1986 357

21.1 Bethan Ring, Y5 ‘Algorithmic Compositions in Venice’.

This project is an investigation into using image-to-image translation algorithms to create an architectural outcome.

The many churches of Venice are used to build datasets that inform the algorithm in order to develop threedimensional buildings from two dimensional information.

This method allows for a design that is a mathematical ‘collage’ and visual amalgamation of the architectural history of Venice.

21.2 Alexandra Campbell, Y5 ‘Palazzo di Milioni’.

Through manipulation of 3D scans of the historic Caffè Florian, this project seeks to restore Venice’s identity within a post-digital age. The building was developed as a point cloud with an overall budget of 1,450,000 vertices.

As a House of Parliament for an imagined New Venetian Republic, adjacent to St Mark’s Square, the distribution of points follows a ‘resolution hierarchy’ based on the significance of the debates within each space.

21.3 Edward Sear, Y4 ‘The Steering Committee’s Capriccio’.

This project is a proposal for a new headquarters and debate chamber for the UNESCO Steering Committee of Venice. Four key ‘capriccio’ views have been set out as the heart of the project, defining what needs to occur in the framework of the building as a whole. The capriccio serve dual purposes throughout the project, as both a tool and outcome.

21.4 Nicholas Chrysostomou, Y5 ‘The Floating Procession’.

Using loopholes in laws created by Venice’s dependence on water transport, this project proposes a fleet of boats which allow greater autonomy in the way the city is inhabited. The project references processions in the 16th century Venetian Republic as manifestations of the government at the time. The boats follow these processions and configure differently in sites across Venice, making the canals and waterways inhabitable.

21.5–21.6 Ziyuan (Oliver) Zhu, Y5 ‘Epidemic Modelling’.

Using epidemic simulation to explore the propagation of spatial qualities, this project develops a unique architectural generative design process for the design of a Global Emergency Operation Centre in Venice, Italy. The system contains a hierarchical structure and a healing/ scarring system to allow design decisions to reflect each agent group. Several epidemic models were tested in the process, including a ‘genetically mutated’ Venetian facade.

21.7 Maya Chandler, Y5 ‘Tempo Torre’. This project examines scales of time within Venice – primarily relating to its many traditions – and frames those rituals as a basis for design. By using live input/live output animation for design generation, the project proposes a clocktower whose constituent parts change at multiple rates of speed; some respond to the centuries-long history of traditions, and others to the real-time activity on the canal, in the campo or within the building.

21.8 Thomas Band, Y4 ‘Fondazione Gucci’. Venice is experienced as a network of isolated image nodes, the intermediate space compressed in its perceived absence. The commercial Gucci Guilty (2016) becomes a tool by which to reveal this distorted city, whilst rewriting memories of occupation by providing a framework for the generation of new narrative experiences. The filmic grammar of Gucci Guilty informs the Fondazione, an inhabitable landscape housing facilities for the production and display of contemporary art.

21.9 James Potter, Y5 ‘Death in Venice’. This project tracks hard data from the cycles of our sleep to develop an architecture which works independently and continuously over time, day and night, with both user and architect.

Over 18 weeks of sleep data was used to create an extension to the cemetery island of the Isola Di San Michele, Venice. Through scripting and grasshopper algorithms, a crematorium is formed by the collaging together of both conscious and unconscious states.

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21.10 Qiyu (Jennifer) Ge, Y5 ‘Veniscape’. As a performative landscape, Veniscape explores the possibility of feedback systems in architecture by responding to users’ ratings through space transformations. With reference to the social credit system, it is a dynamic landscape with changeable volumes in which floor panels rotate to create water boundaries around stages for performances.

21.11 Rahaf Abdoun-Machaal, Y5 ‘Lagoonscapes: Venice National Park and Marine Laboratory’.

Composed of a lacy network of dikes and ponds, the proposed ‘lagoonscape‘ creates a national park for Venetians with indoor and outdoor spaces, in addition to a dispersed marine laboratory dedicated to the research into and harvesting of biochemical and genetic resources.

21.12 Kelly Au, Y5 ‘The Echo: A Music Therapy Centre’.

The Echo is a music therapy centre detached from the main hospital in Venice. Through the careful design of each acoustic space, the therapy centre is tuned with a variety of different material and acoustic qualities.

The conical roofscape frames only the sky, immersing visitors in the particular sound and light conditions, and heightening their spatial awareness. Due to its location next to the water, the courtyard is designed to flood depending on the tide levels.

21.13–21.14 Chengbin Shou, Y5 ‘Venezianella Castle, Veniceland 2020’. With the assumption that Venice could be saved under the operation of the Disney Corporation, this project creates a Disneyfied castle located at the lido inlet of the Venetian lagoon. The castle, inspired by Marinetti’s 1944 novel Venezianella e Studentaccio, will serve as the monumental entrance to Veniceland. By means of the CycleGAN algorithm, the architecture blends Venetian building façades with Disney cartoon characters.

21.15–21.16 James Carden, Y4 ‘Ministry of Ground’.

This project speculates on the importance of materials found in the Venetian canals and their re-appropriation within the lagoon. A constantly-evolving floating terrazzo landscape is formed out of dredged masonry debris, which is cast into square components based around Venice’s digital data as well as site-specific dredged artefacts. Each square is created in the specification of a performance space, which also forms a dredged archive.

21.17 Paul-Andrei Burghelea, Y4 ‘Transcending Gondolas into Architecture’. This project examines the traditional Venetian gondola, looking at its specific geometries, traditional and cultural importance to the city. The project combines the traditional craftsmanship of the few remaining gondola workshops with computational processes to develop a new event space in the northeastern canals of Venice, allowing the gondolas to live on in the form of a functional architectural concept.

21.18 Shu Min (Michelle) Hoe, Y4 ‘Terrain Play.’ Inspired by the Venice Biennale, this project aims to create a landscape that activates the Garden of Eden, a large neglected private garden located south of the island of Venice. The building promotes play unconventionally by creating abstract forms that celebrate the element of risk.

It is constructed from a variety of glass to boost the dying craft of glass-making, challenging its materiality to fit the unique performance requirements of the building.

21.19 Julian Besems, Y5 ‘Create Galleries’. This project utilises the principles of recommender systems to produce customised galleries for any given location, leading to 1,297 designs without manual interventions. First, an art collection is generated, corresponding to the visual characteristics of one location, as established by machine learning models trained on Flickr photos of that location.

From this collection a gallery is generated, tailored to its site, the collection it houses and its context.

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The Caring City

PG22

Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno, Daniel Ovalle Costal

After decades of industrialisation, our cities are places geared towards productivity, both in their physical and their legal dimensions.

They enable the daily marketing and distribution of goods, advertising and driving to work. In contrast, contemporary cities are hostile environments for non-productive activities: try to sleep; use a toilet; drink free, clean water; or have fun without consuming, and it will become evident how challenging the city can be. The normative interest in these practices has been marginal. Where regulations are in place, their main objective is generally to limit or even ban such behaviours.

Giving productive activities priority means citizens have been defined as individuals who contribute to that productivity, while their biological and subjective characteristics are not considered in the design, regulation or government of the city. This denial has been assimilated as part of our culture and, fundamentally, as a political principle. Our cities deny the right to rest, health or affection by considering them activities that need no protection, promotion, or collective agreement.

Women have historically performed tasks and jobs that are not given a market value, caring for others without institutional support or business regulation: reproductive activities. This has generated a unique and enormously rich capital: the heritage of care. Citizens who exercise reproductive activities have for decades been creating a hidden dimension in cities, in which biological and subjective aspects are fundamental. This year’s PG22 brief is purple: our students have developed projects that celebrate, recognise, and promote the capital of care and its intrinsically female character.

Students have worked towards building a live and active definition of care which addresses its complexity and diversity.

Based on that working definition, they have developed projects that increase biodiversity and local food production; introduce play and games; raise awareness about the climate emergency; facilitate the sharing of space among citizens with different bodies and subjectivities; help maintain a healthy body and adequate mental health; promote affection and pleasure; socialise childcare and care for other dependants; and intensify social gathering.

Most importantly, this year’s projects have built a collective critique of our cities and proposed alternative urban environments that empower caregivers, consolidate their use of cities and place reproductive activities at the centre of design. In PG22, we think that this is a contribution that, in the long run, all citizens can benefit from, which will facilitate work-life balance and a superior form of social organisation that guarantees a more satisfactory urban life.

Year 4 Jason Brooker, Rachel Buckley, Carrie Coningsby, Karin Gunnerek Rinqvist, Megan Makinson, Joseph Poston, Chun (Derek) Wong Year 5 Byungjun Cho, Siu Yuk (Daniel) Chu, Faye Greenwood, Janis Ho, Yan Ting (Lorraine) Li, Yuqi Liew, Yinghao Wang, Lewis Williams, Kate Woodcock-Fowles Thanks to our technical tutors and consultants Gonzalo Coello de Portugal, Kristina Goncharov, Nacho López Picasso, Roberto Marín Sampalo, Shane Orme, Rachel Yehezkel Many thanks to our thesis supervisors Jan Kattein, Anna Mavrogianni, Clare McAndrew, Harry Parr, Alan Powers, Sophia Psarra, Guang Yu Ren, Oliver Wilton Thanks to our fabulous critics: Alejandra Albuerne, Sarina da Costa Gómez, Pedro Gil, Marta Granda Nistal, Jonah Luswata, Matthieu Mereau, María Venegas Raba, Tumpa Yasmin

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22.1, 22.6 Lewis Williams, Y5 ‘The Climate Change Spectacular’. Climate change will affect humanity on an unprecedented level. This project takes a cynical stance, which accepts the slow and inadequate approach by the UK government and its unfortunate climatic conclusions.

Using an analysis of ‘spectacle’ as a tool for change, the architecture realises the now often meaningless shocking imagery generated by the media and transforms it into a politically powerful built extravaganza erected in anticipation of catastrophe on London’s Trafalgar Square.

22.2 Yinghao Wang, Y5 ‘The Resilient Urban Village’.

Rapid urbanisation has transformed Shenzhen from a small fishing village into one of China’s biggest metropolises within three decades. However, it has also posed a threat to the area’s ecological cycle. In this context, this project is a resilient design, questioning the possibility of applying an ancient local ecological circular farming system, the mulberry fishpond system, in the residential blocks of the urban village.

22.3 Kate Woodcock-Fowles, Y5 ‘Waiting and Transition’.

This project aims to create a more ‘caring’ city by reimagining the architecture which supports Nottingham’s public transport network, specifically spaces of waiting and transition. Taking privileges from car users, people are incentivised to travel in alternative active ways.

With fewer vehicles on the roads, the tarmac is gradually reclaimed to provide more green space in the city. In the city centre, transport hubs are designed to provide cultural and historical markers.

22.4 Yuqi Liew, Y5 ‘Harlow Housing Eco-operative’.

This project envisions a refurbished housing community, supported by shared ecological domestic infrastructures, which provide a sustainable, collective, and affordable way of living for the vulnerable tenants of Terminus House in Harlow, Essex. By deconstructing our laundry practices, a methodology to reconfigure domestic rituals through shared spaces was devised. These principles were brought back to the home and expanded into a new kind of housing cooperative.

22.5 Chun (Derek) Wong, Y4 ‘Fly the Flyover’. This project opens up the fenced-off lands underneath an overpass in Hong Kong for public enjoyment. Responding to the city’s ageing population, the project is a masterplan that includes housing for the elderly and playgrounds, using reminiscence therapy. The role of older people in society is challenged and reformulated as they are seen as both care receivers and givers.

22.7–22.8, 22.10 Faye Greenwood, Y5 ‘Cultivating Craft’.

This project aims to rediscover and support the heritage, skills and beauty of crafts in the UK, in domestic and public urban environments. The architecture creates craft communities that revive skills and businesses with access to knowledge, tools, processes and objects. In parallel, the project explores how studio crafts can be translated into the building fabric.

22.9 Joseph Poston, Y4 ‘Lost Springs of Linfen’. The project explores the lasting effects of pollution to the elderly in the city of Linfen, China, and aims to explore new building strategies that can create a clean environment to live in and care for the elderly. At its core the design looks at the elderly and their role in modern China. The key architectural strategies aim to provide a new model of care home.

22.11 Karin Gunnerek Rinqvist, Y4 ‘Westway Trust Community Centre’. In order to meet environmental goals and lifestyle aspirations, private car ownership in cities is set to decrease. This project investigates changes in car usage and speculates about how it will affect spaces previously only used by cars. This project closely investigates the Westway and how outdated roads can be transformed to have another purpose, considering construction, community and environment.

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22.12–22.13 Carrie Coningsby, Y4 ‘Hornsey Filter Beds’.

Blending landscape, infrastructure, building and hydrological processes, this project aims to reposition public opinion of wastewater treatment by inserting it into the core of a public space and allowing people to experience the regenerative properties of treated water.

Located in Hornsey, London, and partially submerged into the landscape of the redundant filter beds 22.14 Jason Brooker, Y4 ‘Gardens of the Northern Line’.

This project is a community-based ‘living’ urban biome, set in Stockwell, which aims to increase the life expectancy of residents living along the Northern Line. The hub looks to utilise deep-level shelters constructed during WW2.

Making use of the heat source that the underground provides, the project aims to create precise climates in which crops and plants can be grown as well as spaces for teaching, sharing and trading.

22.15 Siu Yuk (Daniel) Chu, Y5 ‘Tokyo Craft Village’.

Traditional crafts are under immense threat from globalisation and technological advancement. Taking crafts as the medium to create a caring city, this project explores the potential of translating traditional Japanese crafts into architectural design elements and bringing ‘domesticity‘ into the public realm. The village seeks to provide a space for the craftspeople to form a community in the heart of Tokyo.

22.16 Byungjun Cho, Y5 ‘Amalgamating the Two Worlds’.

This project proposes a design for empty peri-urban modern blocks of Fes, Morocco, using the traditional lifestyle learned from its medieval medina. Offering a new travel hub outside of the old town, it aims to reduce pressure on the population of tourists and craftsmen in the medina and to fill the infrastructural gap to empower low-income families in the peri-urban area.

22.17 Megan Makinson, Y4 ‘Community Food Centre, Tottenham’. Addressing growing food poverty in the UK, this project rejects the current models of food banks and engages with surplus food as an enabler to the already growing community agency around Tottenham, London.

The building mixes different uses to create a new typology: food bank, community kitchens, feasting, counselling and residential. The spatial organisation removes doors, barriers and corridors, with the programme organised around a multi-purpose dining hall.

22.18 Yang Ting (Lorraine) Li, Y5 ‘School Without Classrooms’. This project reinvents notions of play and learning to create more inclusivity in the city.

This is accomplished through a free school design proposal in Somers Town, London for an alternative learning environment promoting play for children, with parental support facilities. Using an existing defunct school building and the school network of Somers Town as a test bed, the proposed new school building design and curriculum seeks to reflect Reggio Emilia model.

22.19 Rachel Buckley, Y4 ‘Neckinger Festival’. The city has a role in caring for people’s imaginations; nurturing storytelling and memory, and a responsibility to keep its stories alive. This project looks to the past through performance, following the design of a floating theatre and exhibition/workshop space in a London dock, where the now underground river Neckinger enters the Thames.

This theatre becomes a travelling fair considering events recorded along this route – turning the city as we know it into an immersive theatre.

22.20–22.21 Janis Ho, Y5 ‘From Play to Community’.

The project addresses the decline in play spaces. It is inspired by the concept of a blanket fort where architects should work with the community, and especially children, to co-create an integrated and caring neighbourhood.

The test ground for this socio-architectural experiment is Webster Triangle: a neglected neighbourhood of terraced housing in the post-industrial town of Liverpool.

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Guilt Free

PG24

Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Tite

PG24 employs film, animation, virtual and augmented reality, and physical modelling techniques to nurture free thinking and architectural storytelling, and to explore and expand architecture’s relationship with time. As we emerge from a recent ice age, Earth’s atmosphere continues to heat up. Scientists protest that mankind is directly responsible, but the word of climate change is still not accepted as gospel. We must reduce, give up, fast and exercise self-control. We are guilty and our guilt makes us fallible. In the grey areas of doubt, a new kind of faith has emerged, unchallenged by fanatics and dismissed by heretics. Has climate change become a new religion?

While the male-dominated, white, proto-religious debates swell, global inequality grows and the planet pays the price. Within this febrile territory, what is the role and responsibility of architecture?

The built environment’s 40% contribution to our total carbon footprint is eye-watering, but it also presents a huge design opportunity.

Can the looming catastrophe of climate change be switched into a positive creative force? Can technology really save us? Can we design guilt-free?

As a direct response to the Architecture Education Declares open letter, this year we engaged with a deep study of the cultural and geo-scientific parameters of climate change. We questioned identity: How do we situate ourselves when we design and for whose benefit?

Can we think from a ‘post-human’ position, seeking radical new approaches that are more effective and inclusive, outside the guilty conscience of the ‘humanity’ that created the problem?

We redefined matter: Can we transform the current linear thinking of take/make/consume/discard, into a circular ecology of materials and building parts? Often in architecture we design perfect births, but this year we used long-term thinking to design perfect deaths and planned ahead for the end of life of buildings.

We employed technology: While the atmosphere deteriorates, another digital atmosphere, a digital twin of the Earth, has emerged, able to computationally monitor, predict and address future change.

How can we future-proof sustainable buildings by designing them in parallel to their intelligent and responsive digital twins?

We visited the swamps, cities and low-lying terrains of Florida, to explore a region that has both exacerbated the problems of, and is catastrophically threatened by, climate change. Here, retirement communities and ghettos coalesce where the flooded marshlands swell and huge metropolitan complexes sprawl; terrains of space exploration and luxury golf courses meet hurricane warnings, digital magic, fried food and voodoo. We explored this conflicted identity of culprit, victim and saviour to form our own design manifestos and propose new parables of evolving ecologies.

Year 4 Camille Dunlop, Viktoria Fenyes, Alexander Fox, Maxim Goldau, Yee (Enoch) Liang, Elissavet Manou, Lingyun Qian, Matthew Taylor, David Wood Year 5 Krina Christopoulou, Lucca Ferrarese, Hanna Idziak, Maria Konstantopoulou, Afrodite Moustroufi, George Proud, James White Thanks to our technical tutor Kairo Baden-Powell Thank you to our thesis supervisors Alessandro Ayuso, Ben Campkin, Murray Fraser, Stephen Gage, Tasos Varoudis, Simon Withers, Stamatis Zografos Thanks to our critics Ollie Alsop, Nat Chard, Kate Davies, Egmontas Geras, Alex Holloway, Jessica In, Greg Kythreotis, Sonia Magdziarz, Tim Norman, Nick Shackleton, Sayan Skandarajah, Jasper Stevens, Tasos Varoudis, Izabela Wieczorek, Simon Withers, Fiona Zisch

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24.1 Maria Konstantopoulou, Y5 ‘The Spirit of the Liquid Marshes’. Sited in Bayou Tortillon, a vast swamp region in Southern Louisiana, the project imagines a partsubmerged world, inhabited by low-tech hydroengineered infrastructures and peculiar humanlike scavengers called ‘Lossans’. In response to the mythic power of this threatened landscape and inspired by Donna Harraway’s ‘Chthulucene’, JG Ballard’s ‘Drowned World’ and the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Mary orchestrates an ambitious magical realist intervention, part poem, part architecture. A pair of ambiguous creatures emerge as cavernous inhabitable structures that relate to ancient mythological orders and straddle our middle world and the realm of the spirits. They are intended as pieces of infrastructure operating outside of human time perception, capable of healing, yet with unpredictable and potentially destructive behaviours.

Slippery interior worlds of mysterious organ-like forms give way to large animalistic exteriors with plasto-reptilian skins that finally merge into the swamp itself.

24.2 Afrodite Moustroufi, Y5 ‘Projections on Learning’.

Through a series of playful and immersive investigations with projections, this project developed a vocabulary of tools that allow an occupancy of illusory stereoscopic space as a working extension to the physical space that frames it. Using stereoscopy both as a design method and as programmatic catalyst, the proposal for an experimental school in Silvertown is capable of recording and then three-dimensionally projecting parts of the building onto itself, allowing the school to expand virtually.

The three-dimensional projective design method is coupled with precise physical modelling in coloured plaster inspired by Isamu Noguchi’s landscape models.

As a ‘machine for learning’ that exists in both physical and projected form the school occupies a realm of extra dimensions, where moving elements rotate and redeploy to form different teaching environments. The film becomes a promotional video for the school, including first-person experiences and the voices of the children, conveying a childlike sense of wonder that challenges our embedded ideas of space and time.

24.3–24.7 Hanna Idziak, Y5 ‘Garden of (Im)permanence’.

This project explores the past of Gdansk shipyard, as a tool for understanding the wider politics and history of Poland and imagines a redevelopment of the postindustrial site into a women’s centre. The architectural film acts as a protest against the patriarchal attitudes of the current conservative government, which uses architectural preservation and demolition to distort history. Drawing from UNESCO’s definitions of tangible and intangible heritage; the notion of Anti-Monument by architects Zofia and Oscar Hansen; and the undulating brickwork techniques of Eladio Dieste, the project commemorates the forgotten histories of the women working on the shipyard, which the heroine describes as a ‘mother’.

Architecture becomes a collective act, where the women disassemble the brick warehouse onsite to create a new form, which is slowly taken over by nature, becoming a time-conscious monument to the past, present and future.

24.8–24.11 Lucca Ferrarese, Y5 ‘Vauxhall Pleasure Palace’. Set in Vauxhall in the near future, in a postCovid-19 world, where the virus has been completely eradicated and local lockdowns have ended, this film sees two lovers reunited for the first time since their government-imposed hiatus. The project investigates the links between social technology, gender identity, performance, public space and the state. The work extrapolates the consequences of the pandemic into the future, but also tunes into the wider undercurrents that are seeing disenfranchised sections of society seek out new modes of occupancy within the city. Ideas of 382

reclaiming public space through reclaiming the body and fusing fashion with architecture are imagined within a reinvigorated nocturnal realm for the city. The project draws on the rebellious art/performance/fashion practices of Lee Bowery, Oscar Schlemer and Issey Miyake. The carnivalesque neon-lit world, the nervous behaviours of its occupants and the semi-automated glossy movements of the machine-building, are depicted with a nudge, a wink and gentle tongue-in-cheek wit.

24.12–24.15 James White, Y5 ‘Guilt-Free Homes’.

Guilt-Free Homes explores the increasingly intrusive role of Mega-Cap US technology companies in the domestic realm and speculates on the future commodifying effect they will have on housing. Located in Somers Town, the residential scheme encourages us to accept the experimental intertwining of virtual and physical realms, where we might be free from labour, engaged with local urban identity and where environmental responsibility is offset on our behalf. The work is grounded in a series of observations about our evolving relationship with consumption and technology and ‘feels for the beating pulse’ of what defines living in the 2020s. The project draws on a wide range of historical, theoretical and technical influences, including Harlow’s destroyed heroic modernism, Adrian Forty’s 1986 book Objects of Desire and contemporary object-oriented interior design. The film is an Orwellian ‘cat-and-mouse detective thriller’, immersing us in a disorientating and menacing 360° narrative.

24.16–24.19 George Proud, Y5 ‘The AR-k’. The AR-k is a long-term oral history archive located on the Somerset Levels, which is also composed as the architectural equivalent of a love letter to the author’s homeland.

Rooted in the rich mythical history and contemporary local culture of Somerset and Glastonbury the proposal takes on a monastic/sound recording and producing arrangement that imagines an innovative use of augmented reality. Head archaeologist, Dr Fouracres, is our guide in the far future setting of 2442, describing the gradual discovery of a mixed physical/digital ruin.

The project considers the material and immaterial aspects of architectural heritage, playing with scale and deep time to depict a warning for the future. Architecture becomes a reliquary, hosting the lost sounds of the past through audio as well as visual augmentation coded in matter. An ode to both the relationship between physical space and its digital extensions, but also to the design process itself, the film is a feat of architectural storytelling.

24.20 Krina Christopoulou, Y3 ‘The Third Space’. The Third Space investigates the evolution of the domestic realm, where 2D ‘point-and-click’ computer interfaces transition into intuitively operated 3D inhabitable digital environments. By designing both the physical home of the future and the virtual spaces it can host, this project speculates on a post-Covid-19 world where houses do not have computers in them, but are computers themselves.

The home becomes responsively robotic and rearranges itself to accommodate the resident’s virtual inhabitation, but also becomes a realm for global exploration, entertainment and deep-thought. This haptic installation, where physical anchors tether us to the ‘real world’, acts in tandem with dream-like explorations into what might constitute ‘everyday living’. Architecture’s role in learning, working, socialising and living communally online is redefined and spatial distance collapses, forming new worlds within worlds. With ‘George XP’ as our sassy virtual companion, we dive headlong into an ever-expanding architectural universe, without ever having to open our front door.

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On Expedition

PG25

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

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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 394

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 O ​ n 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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Design Realisation

Year 4

Module Coordinators: Pedro Gil, Stefan Lengen

The Design Realisation module provides an opportunity for all Year 4 Architecture MArch students to consider how buildings are designed, constructed and delivered. It provides a framework to facilitate experimentation through the design of buildings, and encourages the interrogation and disruption of technical ideas and principles.

Students propose their ideas at a variety of scales and represent them using drawings, diagrams, animations, physical models and 3D digital models. They are encouraged to take risks in their design thinking and strategy.

The module bridges the worlds of academia and practice, engaging with many renowned design practices and consultancies.

A dedicated practice-based architect, structural engineer and environmental engineer support each design unit, working individually with students to develop their work throughout the module.

This year, we have seen a magnificent bounty of projects that test, explore and innovate across a wide spectrum of principles and mediums. Students have produced an array of breathtaking work that pushes the boundaries of technical and professional practice disciplines. Projects include inventive structural systems, environmental strategies, buildings for challenging sites, community engagement proposals, infrastructural projects and entrepreneurial proposals, to name but a few.

Thanks to all the structural consultants who have worked with individual students to realise their projects; to Atelier Ten, Max Fordham, and WSP, environmental consultants to all design units; and to our practice tutors for their remarkable commitment and dedication.

Image: Daniel Pope, PG16, ‘Foundation House’

Lecturers Jenna Al-Ali (Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau), Matthew BarnettHowland (The Bartlett), Nat Chard (The Bartlett), Fenella Collingridge (Salter + Collingridge), Chee-Kit Lai (The Bartlett), Damien Eley (Expedition Structural Engineering), Pedro Gil (The Bartlett), Jan Kattein (Jan Kattein Architects), Dirk Krolikowski (The Bartlett), Stefan Lengen (The Bartlett), Joanna Pencakowski (Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners), Peter Salter (Salter + Collingridge), Andy Sedgwick (Arup), David Shanks (The Bartlett), Gordon Talbot (Ian Ritchie Architects), Jose Torero (UCL CEGE), Bob Treadwell (Watermann Group Structural Engineering), Oliver Wilton (The Bartlett) Practice Tutors PG10 Jon Kaminsky (Hawkins\Brown) PG11 Rhys Cannon (Gruff Limited) PG12 James Hampton (New Makers Bureau) PG13 Rae WhittowWilliams (EWE Projects) PG14 Jakub Klaska (The Bartlett) PG15 Marcel Rahm (Milk Studio), Martin Sagar PG16 Will Jefferies (Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners) PG17 James Daykin (Daykin Marshall Studio), PG18 Robert Haworth (Lineworks Architects), Anna Woodeson (LTS Architects) PG20 David Edwards (Dave Edwards Design) PG21 Tom Holberton (The Bartlett) PG22 Gonzalo Coello de Portugal (Binom Architects) PG24 Kairo Baden-Powell (Wilkinson Eyre) PG25 Jerry Tate (Tate Harmer) 405

Advanced Architectural Studies

Year 4

Module Coordinators: Tania Sengupta, Stylianos Giamarelos The Advanced Architectural Studies module, taken in the first year of The Bartlett’s Architecture MArch programme, focuses 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 disciplinary and knowledge fields – from the scientific and technological to the social sciences and the humanities. We explore empirics and theory, design and history, the iconic and the everyday.

Depending on individual interest, the module helps the students engage with architectural history and theory as a critical approach to augment design, as a parallel domain to test out design approaches or as a discrete or autonomous domain of architectural engagement.

It focuses on three key types of academic development: first, a reflective, critical and analytical approach; second, research instinct and investigative methods; and third, skills of synthesis, writing and articulation. The module also acts as foundational ground for the thesis that the students produce in the final year of the Master’s degree.

The module consists of a lecture series called ‘Critical Frames’, which examines six themes: the museum and the city; the home and the social; image and architecture; building systems, social and material relations; radical vantages; architecture, discourse, public sphere. These lectures are followed by the core of the module, which is a set of six tutor-led seminars. The seminars straddle, geographically, the architectural histories of various global contexts, and, thematically, issues such as buildings, urbanism, typology, ecology, politics, technology, production, public participation, urban regeneration, phenomenology, historiography and representation. At the end, based on their learning from the lectures and seminars, the students formulate a critical enquiry around a topic of their choice and produce a 4,500-word essay.

2019-20 Seminars – Flexible Bodies, Flexible Selves, Tijana Stevanović – Architecture On & Off Screen, Christophe Gerard – U-topographics: Utopic Journeys into Postmodern Culture, Robin Wilson – Architecture and The People: Unpicking the Politics of How Places Are Made (And What That Means for Practice), Daisy Froud – A Women’s History of Architecture, Anne Hultzsch – Senses and the City, Jacob Paskins – The River Thames as Semio-Ecological Entity – Ecology: Aesthetics: Semiotics, Jon Goodbun – Typology and Beyond: Architecture as Spatial and Cultural Practice, Tania Sengupta – Art, Architecture and the City, Eva Branscome – Architectural Splendour: The History and Theory of Ornament 1750 to Present, Oliver Domeisen – Architecture and the Image of Decay, Paul Dobraszczyk – The Dialogic Imagination: Landship and Practices of Worlding, Tim Waterman 406

Teaching Assistant Adam Walls

Spatialising Conflict: Decoding the Instrumentalisation of Space in the Ram-Janmabhumi Movement, India Arinjoy Sen Tutor: Tania Sengupta Abstract: On the 6 December 1992, during a political rally with two hundred thousand participants in the town of Ayodhya in northern India, the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque, was demolished by Hindu nationalist activists.

The event shocked the country and the rest of the world, culminating in vast communal conflicts across India.

The demolition of the Babri Masjid cannot be seen as an isolated incident. It marked the climactic point of a series of strategically orchestrated events within the Ram Janmabhumi movement. Launched and led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), this was a political-religious movement and an attempt towards mobilisation of Hindus by a section of Hindu nationalist ideologues.

It formed around the idea of the demolition of the Babri Masjid (which, the VHP argued, was built over a temple marking the birthplace of the Hindu God Ram) and the subsequent construction of a Ram temple on the site.

Within the landscape of extensive discourse related to the Ram Janmabhumi movement, very rarely have its spatial dimensions been considered. This research addresses this gap, arguing that examining the spatial nature of the associated sites and events will enable an understanding

the role of spatial agency in the politics of orchestration, production and proliferation of conflict.

The work first reflects on the Hindu nationalist notion of territory and its construction of a particular spatiality, arguing how this is intrinsically connected to the formation of a specific, monolithic Hindu identity. I then discuss the popular televised serial The Ramayana (late 1980s) and its spatial implications, which prepared the environment for the Ram Janmabhumi movement. I also examine the spatial implications and territorial aspects of the Ram Rath Yatra – a political rally modelled on a religious procession – which proved to be a crucial moment in the movement.

Finally, the work analyses the Babri Masjid as a site and space of conflict.

The Ram Janmabhumi movement’s success in mobilising support across India’s majority Hindu society could be seen as the championing of religious symbols through a series of improvised manoeuvres and the instrumentalisation of spaces and spatial practices in the strategic orchestration of conflicts. Such a reading, I posit, has wider implications in understanding the role of spatial agency and religious symbolism particularly in the politics and strategisation of conflict, communalism, religious nationalism and mass mobilisation, as well as in its role as a social instrument.

Image: Arinjoy Sen, Layering of imagery to deconstruct the Ram Janmabhumi movement’s political mobilisation of space 407

North Norfolk Soundscape: Landscape Preservation through Spatio-Acoustic Construction Benjamin Sykes-Thompson Tutor: Jacob Paskins Abstract: The threatened coastal salt marshes of the North Norfolk coast, in particular those around the town of Wells-next-the-Sea, support an array of anthropogenic, animal and climatic sounds whose shape, tone and form combine to carve out a unique soundscape: the shrieks of passing redshanks not only mark their presence, but express the width of space; the blustery winds mark coastal gales that blow onshore; and distant echoing gunshots reflect the irony of winter wildfowl shoots conducted adjacent to wildlife sanctuaries on this coast.

These features not only reveal facets that a purely visual record would overlook, but capture a sensory record of a space rather than a mere notational transcript.

Tracing the history of the term ‘soundscape’ from its earliest examples, through its initial linguistic definition, to its current usage in the realm of soundscape ecology and music, while simultaneously examining the spatioacoustic development of recording devices, this work aims to lay out a context within which a soundscape for spatial preservation might sit, and discuss how the field of architecture can employ and build upon established concepts and techniques in the construction of a spatio-acoustic record.

Incorporating Stephen Holl’s view of architectural perception as a combination 408

of back, middle and foreground, three new definitions are proposed: ‘acoustic horizon’, ‘acoustic plane’ and ‘acoustic body’. These are recorded onsite, each employing a specific recording methodology (monophonic, stereophonic and binaural respectively), and, reminiscent of musique concrète methods, form ‘blocks’ from which a soundscape is constructed. Combined, these offer an holistic perception of acoustic space, and serve not to replace visual representations in preservation, but act as the next step towards a complete sensorial recording.

Arguably a realisation of Barthes’ ‘treasury of rays’, acoustic recordings can move beyond the notational representation that is unavoidably framed and thus spatially limited in visual methods. An image does not emanate an identical ray that was captured, but merely transcribes it with ink on paper – yet a sound wave captured and reproduced still enters our ear and is resolved spatially within the mind. Binaural recordings also crucially rely on the preservationist’s body, specifically the pinna and concha of the ear, to direct the sound towards the inserted microphone.

Placing the figure in the space, they capture and progress beyond the spatially distanced ‘disembodied floating eye’ of the camera.

It is my belief that the construction of a soundscape can provide a unique and novel approach to spatial preservation, and an addition to that of the abstracted visual notation, before the tangible building or landscape is lost forever.

Image: Warham Marsh, Wells-next-the-Sea, December 2019. Photo by the author

Constructed Habitats for the Immortal: An Exploration of Lichens on the River Thames Matthew Taylor Tutor: Jon Goodbun Abstract: My fascination with fungi began one cold and rainy morning on the banks of the River Thames. While stumbling over the shattered remains of London’s history I was in search of something very specific: life. My research was led by a naive first glance of algae formations on the banks of the river, which were woven and stitched into every crack of brick, stone, timber and metal. Upon closer inspection, I realised these algae were far from alone. Bright orange foliose lichens, known as Xanthoria parietina hid amongst the masses of algae. Through initial studies of the species I began to understand the complexity and importance of lichens in our ecosystem.

‘A lichen is not a single organism; it is a stable symbiotic association between a fungus and algae and/or cyanobacteria’ 1

In times of devastating climatic change, I was inquisitive of the roles that lichens and fungi play within the ecosystem, questioning the negative stigma that surrounds these misunderstood species. Fungi was the first species to begin life on land, which was only possible due to its symbiotic partnership and the formation of Lichens. This is a very important stage in the development of life on earth. Under the flowering body of some fungi, known as the mushroom, a complex

web of mycorrhizal connections breaks down organic matter and turns it into soil, as well as allowing communications through symbiotic relationships between plants.

I was curious about the role that lichens can play within the built environment and how nature can be integrated into the design of buildings. To further understand the role that lichens play, I continued my search of the River Thames, discovering multitudes of lichen species on my tracks. Lichens are key indicators of climate change as they are particularly responsive to changes in atmospheric pollutants. In 1950, London was nicknamed the ‘lichen desert’ due to the inexistence of lichens caused by excessive levels of sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere.

The recurrence of lichens is a key indicator of improved air quality in central London.

Architecture is normally designed to contain, with a clear boundary between its internal and external conditions.

To understand how lichens can be integrated within architecture the essay questions how architecture can provide a more symbiotic approach. How can architecture learn from these complex species, creating a scenario where both humans and nature can mutually benefit?

1. British Lichen Society https://www.britishlichensociety. org.uk/about-lichens/what-is-a-lichen Image: Xanthoria parietina, Thames Embankment, 2020.

Photo by the author 409

Thesis

Year 5

Edward Denison, Robin Wilson, Oliver Wilton

The Thesis enables Year 5 Architecture MArch students to research, develop and define the basis for their work, addressing architecture and relevant related disciplines such as environmental design, humanities, engineering, cultural theory, manufacturing, anthropology, computation, the visual arts, physical or social sciences, and urbanism.

Students undertake the work in depth, supported by specialist tutors who are individually allocated to them based on their stated areas of interest, in consultation with their design unit tutors. The result is a study of 9,000 words or equivalent, that documents relevant research activities and outcomes, and typically includes one or more propositional elements that may include the development of an argument or hypothesis, the development of a design strategy or the development and testing of a series of design components in relation to a specific line of inquiry or interest.

The thesis is an inventive, critical and directed research activity that augments the work students undertake in the design studio. The symbiotic relationship between thesis and design varies from being evident and explicit, to being situated more broadly in a wider sphere of intellectual interest.

We anticipate that a number of theses from this year’s academic cohort will be developed into external publications.

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Thesis Tutors Hector Altamirano, Alessandro Ayuso, Andy Barnett, Carolina Bartram, Sarah Bell, Jan Birksted, Roberto Bottazzi, Eva Branscome, Ben Campkin, Brent Carnell, Mario Carpo, Nat Chard, Amica Dall, Gillian Darley, Paul Dobraszczyk, Oliver Domeisen, Murray Fraser, Stephen Gage, Stylianos Giamarelos, Polly Gould, Gary Grant, Kostas Grigoriadis, Anne Hultzsch, Elize Hunchuck, Jan Kattein, Zoe Laughlin, Luke Lowings, Tim Lucas, Abel Maciel, Richard Martin, Anna Mavrogianni, Claire McAndrew, Aisling O’Carroll, Harry Parr, Alan Powers, Sophia Psarra, Guang Yu Ren, David Rudlin, Tania Sengupta, Michael Stacey, Iulia Statica, Tasos Varoudis, Timothy Waterman, William Whitby, Robin Wilson, Oliver Wilton, Simon Withers, Stamatis Zografos

Unsettling Binaries: Architecture and Reimagining a Racial-Cultural Hybrid Space in Britain Isaac Nanabeyin Simpson Thesis Tutor: Tania Sengupta Abstract: Can spatial practice question racial-cultural identities? This thesis considers the relationship between architecture/space and culturalracial binaries in contemporary Britain. The interpretation, articulation and representation of space are key instruments through which cultural, social and racial demarcations are constructed. Yet if space can draw racialcultural difference, does it also hold the ability to construct connections? Can space be (re)composed to destabilise binaries rather than create them?

The thesis starts by understanding the historical dependence of the notion of the ‘nation’ on cultural-racial binaries, identifying three modalities – separation, simplification and ossification – through which cultural notions of ‘us’/‘them’ morph into racial notions of ‘white’/‘black’. I reflect on how these binaries manifest within architectural discourse and practice. The discourse on ‘black(ness)’, to counter divisive ‘white’/‘black’ categories, also warrant caution, being themselves founded on racial binaries, and potentially further amplifying them.

Instead, I posit an alternative architectural paradigm by considering Homi K. Bhabha’s notions of Third Space and hybridity that celebrate racial-cultural difference and liminality rather than aggravate their

opposition. Architectural theorist Lesley Lokko and cultural theorist Stuart Hall also suggest that binaries are unsettled by ‘hybridity’.

Articulating a spatial practice that unsettles cultural-racial binaries therefore requires a spatial-architectural articulation of hybridity.

Finally, I glean lessons for architectural hybridity from performative spatial practice – namely, Adeyemi Michael’s 2018 film-work Entitled – All Immigrants are Conquerors, which foregrounds the complexities of bi-racial-cultural identities. Michael films his mother’s journey on a stallion, in her native Nigerian Yoruba attire, through Peckham. Vignettes of immigrant adaptations of London’s urban fabric become legible and gain meaning. Drawing analogies from the film’s performative spatial practices, I suggest unsettling the three racialising modalities through spatial and performative orchestrations of hybridity: ‘the skin’, symbolic elements and materialities; architectural processes and inhabitation practices; performative space/s and the kinetic city; and the catalytic potential of architecture’s performative temporality for cultural negotiation. These, I propose, (re)compose a plural, dynamic, fluid, performative, agile architecture more representative of modern Britain, beyond racial-cultural binaries. The thesis opens up more evocative questions than it answers, but in doing so highlights architecture’s untraced potential in unsettling racial-cultural demarcations and separations.

Image: Portrait of Ama, the author’s niece, in Kaneshie,

,Ghana, November 2019. Image by the author

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Inhabitable Interfaces: The ‘Bits’ of ‘Distance’ in Non-Euclidean Virtual Spaces Krina Christopoulou Thesis Tutor: Tasos Varoudis Abstract: ‘How can we live if there is no more here and everything is now?’ 1 With the upcoming generation of HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) that will make use of immersive virtual-reality technologies, virtual interfaces will escape the planarity of computer screens and will start to inhabit physical three-dimensional space. This shift will move us towards a time when data and information is not accessed but experienced.

The research investigates how this will redefine the relationships between humans, environments and technology and how killing the distance between these will bring about the death of distance in architecture.

Virtual reality introduces the human brain to new, unexplored thinking environments.

Virtuality holds properties that contradict our preconceived models of space and distance, rendering the potential of mixed reality living limitless. Space no longer has to abide by the rules of physical reality and so neither does our understanding of space itself.

Overlapping spaces, infinite spaces, and imaginary spaces are all within our grasp.

So, when we can experience and interact with all those virtual places from the same physical space, what does spatial distance mean?

The research poses questions of emerging value to both the fields of architecture and HCI 412

by exploring the junction of the two disciplines.

Jumping from planar graphical user interfaces to inhabitable interfaces means technology ceases to engage with graphic design and starts to become of architectural concern. Any place becomes any place, redefining our understanding of Euclidean space and ultimately the world around us.

In this spatially unprecedented condition, architecture is reinstating its value as the guiding discipline through this surreal future.

In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, when citizens around the world are requested to distance themselves, questions about eliminating distance through technology are increasingly relevant. The future application of immersive technologies that bring people together and allow experiencing of distant places may not be as far away as we thought.

Therefore, bridging physical distance in a more human-oriented manner through immersive technologies could provoke the merging of architecture and HCI, allowing virtual inhabitation of digital interfaces to reconcile our invariably local bodies with our increasingly global minds.

Rejecting the imperatives of locality, and our depreciated understanding of context as our immediate physical reality, our relationships with our environment and technology will be redefined, nullifying the distinction between human, environment and technology, thus bringing about the ‘death of distance’.

1. Paul Virilio, Open Sky (New York: Verso Books, 1997) Image: Inhabitable Interface, mixed reality design experiment by the author

Readings of Medellin: A Story of the Transformation from ‘Murder Capital’ to ‘The Most Innovative City’ Joanna Rzewuska Thesis Tutor: Eva Branscome Abstract: The thesis analyses the case of Medellin, Colombia’s second-largest city, which until recently was dubbed the ‘murder capital of the world’. Today, it is a popular destination for tourists and academic researchers alike, who all visit in order to understand how Medellin has become a ‘model city’ of successful urban planning and design.

Moreover, in 2013 Medellin was named ‘the most innovative city of the year’ in a competition organised by the Urban Land Institute. Its radical transformation is widely associated with the municipal programme of ‘social urbanism’ consisting of numerous public architecture and infrastructure projects constructed during the past decade inside Medellin’s informal urban settlements as a means to battle widespread crime and socioeconomic inequality.

The structure of the essay is arranged as a conceptual triptych, investigating the subject of Medellin’s metamorphosis from three distinct angles, based on the roles I undertook during my trip to the city in January 2020. First, I analyse Medellin from the point of view of a foreign tourist, then from the perspective of a volunteer living inside one of the communities and finally as a researcher. The first section introduces the official mediatised images of the city which depict the most well-known of

the social urbanism interventions: the colourful escalators of Comuna 13, the iconic Spanish Library Park, and the renowned cable-car transport infrastructure.

Medellin’s transformation quickly appears to be far more nuanced and complex than the narrative presented to visitors by the tourism sector. Some projects remain incomplete or have been closed, others are only used by curious tourists rather than the communities they were supposed to serve.

The interviews I conducted with local residents and academic researchers on the subject exposed that, while the interventions have afforded the informal communities a degree of civic pride and sense of inclusion in the rest of the city, their material impact has been rather minimal and Medellin’s prevalent socioeconomic inequality is yet to be reduced.

This thesis also notes that at the same time the municipal administration was executing its large-scale development projects, the gradual decline of violence in the city allowed the communities to take back their urban realm and construct new spaces for themselves, such as the football field built by local leaders inside the Juan XXIII neighbourhood.

Medellin’s metamorphosis is a story of not only high-quality architecture and innovative infrastructure, but also of the power that a society acquires to effect profound transformation when it takes ownership of its public space.

Image: The author volunteering with the children of the Juan XXIII community, Medellin. Photographer: Simone Piccini 413

Towards an Experiential Understanding of Alzheimer’s disease: Empathising through Immersive Environments Philip Springall Thesis Tutor: Amica Dall Abstract: Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease that slowly strips away the notions of place, memory, identity and the self from individuals.

This thesis investigates the role that architecture and the built environment can play in improving the lives of those with the disease.

Rooted within contemporary understandings of how we should approach Alzheimer’s, such as Tom Kitwood’s Dementia Reconsidered, the research engages with people with Alzheimer’s, treating them not as victims but as individuals with personal and social worth.1 This thesis develops an understanding of how people with Alzheimer’s experience the world, investigating the key notions of spatial orientation, perception and memory. Exploring how these concepts break down emphasises the nuance and complexity, but also the fragility of the human experience.

The spatial and visual experience of Alzheimer’s disease is poorly understood and under-represented. This thesis identifies a gap in the current knowledge where the medical and neuropsychological fields engaged in Alzheimer’s disease lack an effective and appropriate methodology for translating the lived experiences of those with dementia. The thesis is an experiment in empathy-building and understanding, to try to build tools which will bridge boundaries of 414

alienation and misunderstanding. Using the tools of architecture, the thesis attempts to translate this experiential understanding by designing immersive environments to communicate these visual and spatial experiences. Creative practice and architectural tools are used to address the highly individual, complex and degenerative nature of the lived experience of those with Alzheimer’s disease.

This understanding can benefit architects and designers, and also those with Alzheimer’s, family members, caregivers, medical practitioners, and the broader research community. By growing multidisciplinary research networks, we can build a stronger knowledge base. Only then can we improve current design guidance and develop effective approaches to inclusive architecture.

Architecture can be a driving force to change society’s approach to mental disabilities.

Those with Alzheimer’s highlight the necessity for environments that are tailored to be mentally stimulating and spatially coherent. We have a responsibility to design inclusive environments that can address the fundamental emotional needs of occupation, attachment, inclusion and identity. To enable everyone to live as their complete selves and be treated as the human beings that they are, as architects we must never forget Kitwood’s 1. T. M. Kitwood, Dementia Reconsidered: The Person Comes First, Rethinking Ageing Series (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997).

2. Ibid., p.73.

Image: Collaborative creative practice alongside individual with young-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Photo by the author

Syncretism in the Sicilian Architectural Tradition: A Study of the Medieval Ornamentation of the Cappella Palatina and the Palazzo Normanni, its Evolution and Legacy Maxime Willing Thesis Tutor: Oliver Domeisen Abstract: ‘Part of the magic of architecture lies in the suggestion that an unmovable core exists beneath its ever-changing theories and modes of practice.’ 1 The thesis investigates the idea of the architect as both instigator of change and chronicler of ancient tradition, through the development and application of ornamental theory. Evolution as a means of developing an architectural tradition depends on learning directly from those who came before.

Whether legitimate or illicit, the act of referencing previous architectures and their values is as old as the field itself. Once that architecture and, more specifically, its ornamentation has been interpreted, the creative urge of the artist or craftsperson is then able to develop the referenced language into a new form, one that is better suited to their immediate concerns and context. This evolution of architectural traditions is not necessarily a linear process, from one style to another in the same location. Rather, it can often be seen to be a more cyclical relationship, with ideas and forms being transmitted from one culture to another, before a new refinement is returned

to influence the development of the original form, a process best encapsulated by the term ‘syncretism’.

The architectural ornamentation of Norman Sicily – a syncretic political state at the centre of the Mediterranean, at the meeting point of the great cultures of the Medieval Age – provides a potent case study for the development of such syncretic architectural traditions. Both the Cappella Palatina and the wider Palazzo Normanni, royal structures from the 12th century, offer perhaps the most concentrated expression of syncretism.

Through a detailed onsite documentation and the study of 19th-century lithographs held by the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the research involves the study of the evolution and combination of an integral ornamental vocabulary, towards an ever more abstracted form through time. Analytical drawings of the ornamental elements of the chapel are employed alongside Alois Riegl’s evolutionary theory of ornament to attest to the creation of a uniquely Sicilian architectural and cultural language, imbued with collective meanings and aiding in the dissemination of a distinct cultural narrative.

1. Antoine Picon, Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity, (Chichester: Wiley, 2013) Image: Detail photograph of the wooden ‘muqarnas’ or stalactite ceiling over the nave of the Cappella Palatina, Palermo. Photo by the author 415

The Bartlett Summer School, 2019

418 Architecture Education Declares 420 Alumni 421 The Bartlett Promise 422 Our Programmes 423 Public Lectures 425 Events & Exhibitions 426 Staff, Visitors & Consultants

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Architecture Education Declares: A Year of Radical Change

This year, in response to global crises, The Bartlett School of Architecture has seen an inspiring rise in student leadership and has itself begun a radical change process.

In October 2018, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that we had 12 years to avoid irreversible and catastrophic climate breakdown, that government action would be insufficient and social movements were needed. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services warned that severe and rapid loss of biodiversity caused by industrialisation, urbanisation, pollution and changes in land use was threatening the future of all life on Earth. Along with the rise in pandemics, disease and conflict, the global health crisis threatens a ‘sixth mass extinction’. Millions of refugees are already fleeing drought, famine and flooding, with the poorest and least powerful as ever the worst affected and most vulnerable to exploitation, harm and death.

Through 2019/20, movements like Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg’s School Strike for Climate and Black Lives Matter took root. Millions took to the streets to protest insufficient action. Councils, industry sectors and even governments began declaring a climate and ecological emergency.

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In Spring 2019, while also preparing for exams and the Summer Show, architecture students from The Bartlett, Architectural Association, Central St Martin’s and others created Architecture Education Declares (AED), now a powerful worldwide movement with over 2,000 members. On 3 June, they published an open letter calling for curriculum change and urgent action to align schools with the climate and ecological emergency. The letter called for a move from competition, exploitation and inequality, to collaboration, mutuality, respect and care.

It urged schools to teach the intimate link between ecological breakdown, social injustices and the economic and political systems that architecture enables, driven largely by private financial interests.

On 4 October 2019, after a school-wide campaign and the day of AED’s Climate Summit, The Bartlett School of Architecture declared an emergency: ‘Our planet is being driven towards catastrophic climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and profound suffering or extinction of future generations of living species… Committed to making an essential and vital contribution towards building an ethical, equitable, healthy, biodiverse, fair and globally prosperous future, we will implement actions in our academic, operational and management practices...’

These actions included forming a Citizens’ Assembly, creating a Staff Register of Intent, and recording, sharing and embedding change long-term through school strategies and management.

Two alumni – co-founder of AED Poppy Becke and coordinator of AED Negar Taatizadeh – were employed as Change Coordinators, and the first Citizens’ Assemblies were held.

Despite the immense disruption caused by the Covid-19 crisis, students, led by Nyima Murry, Siobhan Obi and Timothy Ryan, formed a new student union-affiliated departmental society, The Bartlett School of Architecture Society, to continue driving change through a stronger student voice.

The Ethical Architecture & Built Environment research network was created to help the school deliver on its commitments and a #BSADeclares website will record the change process. In June 2020, #BSADeclares won UCL Sustainability Gold Project Award, with special mention to Poppy Becke, Negar Taatizadeh and Blanche Cameron. AED’s co-founder, student Barney Iley-Williamson also received a UCL Sustainability Award in 2019 for co-creating AED. The ongoing change process has also had the visionary support of senior staff across the school, faculty and UCL.

People often claim action on climate and biodiversity takes years, but the almostovernight response to Covid-19, from governments, industry and institutions, shows this is untrue. It takes leadership and political will, but radical change and the resources to support it are possible when the scale of the threat is understood. We are deeply grateful to our inspiring students for challenging us and the profession to do better. Studentdriven change can make all the difference, as the ethos and work of the school and its impact on society will show in coming years.

Architecture Education Declares: www.architectureeducationdeclares.com Our declaration: http://bit.ly/BSA-Declares

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Alumni The Bartlett’s diverse and vibrant alumni play a vital role in the life of the school, as staff, visiting lecturers, mentors, sponsors, donors and participants.

Every year we organise several alumni events, including the R&V Dinner, founded by and for alumni as the ‘Rogues and Vagabonds’ over 60 years ago. The event offers great food, an interesting venue, thought-provoking speakers and a chance to catch up with friends. This year’s dinner took place at 22 Gordon Street, with guest speakers Bartlett alumnus Matthew Barnett Howland and The Bartlett’s Director of Technology Oliver Wilton, together with architect Dido Milne, co-designers of the award-winning project Cork House, which received the RIBA Stephen Lawrence Prize for the best building under £1m and featured on the fifth series of Channel 4’s Grand Designs: House of the Year.

The dinner is chaired by Paul Monaghan, Director at Allford Hall Monaghan Morris.

We also invite alumni to join us at The Bartlett Summer Show at an exclusive Alumni Late.

All Bartlett School of Architecture alumni are invited to join UCL’s Alumni Online Community to keep in touch with the school and receive benefits including special discounts, UCL’s Portico magazine and more.

Registered alumni have access to: — Thousands of e-journals available through UCL Library — A global network of old and new friends in the worldwide alumni community — Free mentoring and the opportunity to become a mentor yourself — Jobs boards for the exclusive alumni community aoc.ucl.ac.uk/alumni

Cork House, by Matthew Barnett Howland with Dido Milne and Oliver Wilton. Photo by Ricky Jones 420

The Bartlett Promise Across higher education and in industry, the built environment sector is not diverse enough. Here at The Bartlett, we promise to do better.

The Bartlett Promise Scholarship has been launched to enable UK/EU students from backgrounds under-represented in The Bartlett Faculty to pursue their undergraduate studies with us, with the aim of diversifying the student body and ultimately the built environment sector. We want a Bartlett education to be open to all, regardless of means.

The scholarship covers full tuition fees for the degree programme, plus an annual allowance to cover living and study expenses. All Promise scholars will also receive ongoing academic and career support during their study.

Professor Christoph Lindner, Dean of The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment says: ‘Society works for everyone when it is shaped by everyone, but right now that’s not happening.

We know that the cost of education is a very real barrier for many – The Bartlett Promise Scholarship will help to address that by removing this barrier to entry whilst providing additional support.’

Prospective students who are offered a place on an undergraduate degree at The Bartlett are invited to apply to the scholarship in the summer before they begin with us.

When selecting scholars, we consider the educational, personal and financial circumstances of the applicant, and how these relate to the eligibility criteria. Details of the application process and eligibility criteria can be found on our website. ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/bartlett-promise

Students at 22 Gordon Street, The Bartlett’s Bloomsbury home 421

Our Programmes The Bartlett School of Architecture currently teaches undergraduate and graduate students across 25 programmes of study and one professional course, with a new integrated Master’s, Architecture MSci, welcoming its first students this autumn.

Across the school’s portfolio of teaching, research and professional programmes, our rigorous, creative and innovative approach to architecture remains integral.

You will find below a list of our current programmes, their duration when taken full time (typical for MPhil/PhDs) and the programme directors. Much more information, including details of forthcoming open days, is available on our website.

Undergraduate Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1) Three-year programme, directed by Ana Monrabal-Cook & Luke Pearson Architecture MSci Five-year programme, directed by Sara Shafiei Architectural & Interdisciplinary Studies BSc Three or four-year programme, directed by Elizabeth Dow Engineering & Architectural Design MEng Four-year programme, directed by Luke Olsen Postgraduate Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2) Two-year programme, directed by Julia Backhaus & Marjan Colletti Architectural Computation MSc/MRes 12-month B-Pro programmes, directed by Manuel Jiménez Garcia Architectural Design MArch 12-month B-Pro programme, directed by Gilles Retsin Architectural History MA One-year programme, directed by Professor Peg Rawes Architecture & Digital Theory MRes One-year B-Pro programme, directed by Professor Mario Carpo & Professor Frédéric Migayrou Architecture & Historic Urban Environments MA One-year programme, directed by Dr Edward Denison 422

Bio-Integrated Design MSc/MArch Two-year B-Pro programmes, directed by Professor Marcos Cruz & Dr Brenda Parker (MSc only) Design for Manufacture MArch 15-month programme, directed by Emmanuel Vercruysse Design for Performance & Interaction MArch 15-month programme, directed by Dr Ruairi Glynn Landscape Architecture MA/MLA One (MA) and two-year (MLA) programmes, directed by Professor Laura Allen & Professor Mark Smout Situated Practice MA 15-month programme, directed by James O’Leary Space Syntax: Architecture & Cities MSc/MRes One-year programmes, directed by Dr Kayvan Karimi Urban Design MArch 12-month B-Pro programme, directed by Roberto Bottazzi Advanced Architectural Research PG Cert Six-month programme, directed by Professor Stephen Gage Architectural Design MPhil/PhD Three to four-year programme, directed by Professor Jonathan Hill Architectural & Urban History & Theory MPhil/PhD Three to four-year programme, directed by Professor Sophia Psarra Architectural Space & Computation MPhil/PhD Three to four-year programme, directed by Ava Fatah gen Schieck Architecture & Digital Theory MPhil/PhD Three to four-year programme, directed by Professor Mario Carpo & Professor Frédéric Migayrou Professional Professional Practice & Management in Architecture PGDip (ARB/RIBA Part 3) 7, 12, 18 or 24-month course, directed by Professor Susan Ware

Public Lectures Visit youtube.com/bartlettarchucl to watch talks and lectures.

The Bartlett International Lecture Series Attracting guests from across the capital, our International Lecture Series has featured over 500 distinguished speakers since its inception in 1996. Lectures in this series are open to the public and free to attend.

Many of the lectures are recorded and made available to watch online.

Speakers this year included: — Peter Barber, University of Westminster/ Peter Barber Architects — Alison Brooks, Alison Brooks Architects — Marjan Colletti, The Bartlett/Innsbruck University — Lina Ghotmeh, Lina Ghotmeh Architecture — Jonathan Hill, The Bartlett — CJ Lim, The Bartlett — Christoph Lindner, The Bartlett — Enriqueta Llabres-Valls, Relational Urbanism — Elena Manferdini, Atelier Manferdini — Josep Miàs, The Bartlett/UNISS/MiAS Architects — Boonserm Premthada, Bangkok Project Studio — Jesse Reiser, RUR Architecture — Ian Ritchie, Ian Ritchie Architects — Jenny Sabin, Cornell University — Barbara Maria Stafford, University of Chicago — Nathalie De Vries, MVRDV — John Wardle, John Wardle Architects

Constructing Realities An informal event series at UCL at Here East, Constructing Realities welcomes a diverse range of speakers on themes of performance, interaction, design and manufacturing.

Constructing Realities is generously supported by Populous.

— Valeria Muteri, MA Situated Practice Student; Anastasia Perahia Dede, MA Situated Practice Student; Anna Sergi, University of Essex — Bastian Beyer, Architect; Nikoletta Karastathi, Advanced Architectural Research Graduate; Jane Scott, Leeds University — Ilona Nemeth, Artist; Apolonija Sustersis, Architect — Jos Boys, The Bartlett; Sarah Jones, Arup Accessible Environments Consultancy; Abi Palmer, Artist/Writer — Oron Catts, SymbioticA — Merijn Royaards, PhD Student; Henrietta Williams, PhD Student — Ben Cullen-Williams, Artist Prospectives The Bartlett’s B-Pro history and theory lecture series offers a platform for presentation, discussion and theoretical reflection on the links between digital thought, architecture and urban design.

— Gabriele Gramelsberger, RWTH University — Venia Krassakopoulou, The Bartlett — William Latham, SoftV Ltd — Vahid Moosavi, Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich — Philippe Morel, EZCT (2000) — Ciro Najle, General Design Bureau, Buenos Aires — Poltak Pandjaitan, Architect and Researcher — Patricia Reed, Artist, Writer and Designer — Malgorzata Starzynska, Architect — Inigo Wilkins, Glass Bead

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Situating Architecture Situating Architecture is an architectural history lecture series, affiliated with our renowned Architectural History MA and designed for both current students and members of the public alike.

— Professor Lori Brown, Syracuse University — Dr Alexander Eisenschmidt, University of Illinois — Dr Ella Harris, Goldsmiths University, — Dr Anne Hultzsch, UCL — Dr Thomas Mical, Auckland University of Technology — Dr Catherine Rossi, Kingston University Here East Lunchtime Lectures This new series of themed online lunchtime lectures on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays was set up to keep our community connected during the period of remote work and study.

Performance Interactions: — Sougwen Chung, artist and researcher — Irini Papadimitriou, FutureEverything — George Profenza, disguise — Andreas Refsgaard, Copenhagen — Jose Luis de Vicente, Sónar+D — Matt Wade, Moving Brands

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Making Magic Happen: — George Adamopoulos, The Bartlett — Will Gallia, stillatplay — Amy Goodchild, artist and creative coder — Mariana Popescu, ETH Zurich — Maria Smigielska, HGK FHNW, Basel — Dominik Zisch, Jason Bruges Studio/ Innsbruck University Possible Futures: — Stuart Candy, Carnegie Mellon University — Anab Jain, Superflux — Mariana Pestana, The Decorators — Caroline Sinders, Convocation Design + Research — Elsa Sotiriadis, sci-fi writer Around the B-World in 8 Hours with Sir Peter Cook Hosted by Max Dewdney and featuring Professor Sir Peter Cook, founder of Archigram and former Chair of The Bartlett School of Architecture, this series connects our school community to leaders in architecture around the world. The events can be viewed on the school’s YouTube channel.

— Neil Denari, UCLA — Elizabeth Diller, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R)/Princeton University — Sou Fujimoto, architect — Jeanne Gang, Studio Gang — Martyn Hook, RMIT University — Thomas Payne, SCI-Arc — Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, China Academy of Art

Events & Exhibitions The Bartlett plays host to a range of events throughout the year, ranging from PhD conferences to workshops and hackathons.

In addition, a vibrant programme of exhibitions runs throughout the year.

You can visit our Summer Show online this year at bartlettarchucl.com, an innovative new digital platform created to showcase student work.

Exhibitions also include displays of student, staff and alumni projects, as well as work by invited guests. In 2019 we hosted ‘Rewiring Brutalism’, an exhibition of archive material surrounding the Brutalist architecture of Jean Renaudie and Renée Gailhoustet. The display was originally commissioned by the Barbican Hub Space in Summer 2019 and was conceived

by Nigel Green and The Bartlett’s Dr Robin Wilson. This reiteration of the exhibition was created in collaboration with a collective of Bartlett PhD students and graduates: Bartlett Doctoral Initiative Sound|Making|Space.

As well as our major Summer and B-Pro exhibitions, in winter 2019 we staged the second Fifteen show, celebrating fifteen months of innovative work by graduating Design for Manufacture, Design for Performance & Interaction and Situated Practice Master’s students.

Our ‘Kiosk’ is a permanent micro-exhibition space in the front window of the school, exclusively displaying student and staff projects, at street level.

Kiosk exhibitions this year included: — The Struggle for Existence, William Victor Camilleri — Drawing with code, The Bartlett Creative Summer School — Autonomy of Living, BSc graduates, Issui Shioura and Matt Taylor — Ad–Dressing the Landscape, Matei Alexandru, MA Graduate — Evolutionary Drawings to Virtual Reality, William Latham, Founder of SoftV Ltd

Mobile-Cell, ‘Aura’, by Issui Shioura 425

Staff, Visitors & Consultants A Thomas Abbs Ana Abram Vasilija Abramovic George Adamopoulos Phoebe Adler Visiting Prof Robert Aish Rezwana Akhter Prof Laura Allen Sabina Andron Arveen Appadoo Azadeh Asgharzadeh Zaferani Abigail Ashton Edwina Attlee B Julia Backhaus Kirsty Badenoch Sam Taylor Baldwin Stefan Bassing Paul Bavister Simon Beames Richard Beckett Ruth Bernatek Bastian Beyer Shajay Bhooshan Vishu Bhooshan Jan Birksted Prof Peter Bishop IsaĂŻe Bloch William Bondin Prof Iain Borden Roberto Bottazzi Visiting Prof Andy Bow Matthew Bowles Dr Eva Branscome Pascal Bronner Alastair Browning Kyle Buchanan Tom Budd Mark Burrows Bim Burton Matthew Butcher C Joel Cady Thomas Callan Blanche Cameron William Victor Camilleri Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange Dr Ben Campkin Alice Carman Dr Brent Carnell Prof Mario Carpo Dan Carter Martyn Carter Ricardo Carvalho De Ostos Tomasso Casucci Dr Megha Chand Inglis Frosso Charalambous Haden Charbel Prof Nat Chard Po-Nien Chen 426

Laura Cherry Prof Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno Sandra Ciampone Ed Clark Mollie Claypool Jason Coe Gonzalo Coello de Portugal Prof Marjan Colletti Emeritus Prof Sir Peter Cook Marc-Olivier Coppens Hannah Corlett Miranda Critchley Prof Marcos Cruz Lisa Cumming D Christina Dahdaleh Amica Dall Gareth Damian Martin Satyajit Das Kate Davies Tom Davies James Daykin Klaas de Rycke Luca Dellatorre Dr Edward Denison Pradeep Devadass Max Dewdney Dr Ashley Dhanani Ilaria di Carlo David Di Duca Simon Dickens Visiting Prof Elizabeth Diller Katerina Dionysopoulou Paul Dobraszczyk Patrick Dobson-Perez Oliver Domeisen Elizabeth Dow Georgios Drakontaeidis Tom Dyckhoff E Kimberley Eade David Edwards Gary Edwards Fatma Ergin Sam Esses Ruth Evison F Pani Fanai-Danesh Ava Fatah gen. Schieck Donat Fatet Timothy Fielder Lucy Flanders Zachary Fluker Emeritus Prof Adrian Forty Emeritus Prof Colin Fournier Prof Murray Fraser Daisy Froud Maria Fulford

G Emeritus Prof Stephen Gage Leo Garbutt Laura Gaskell Christopher Gerard Egmontas Geras Alexis Germanos Octavian Gheorghiu Dr Stelios Giamarelos Pedro Gil Emer Girling Agnieszka Glowacka Dr Ruairi Glynn Alicia Gonzalez-Lafita Perez Dr Jon Goodbun Dr Polly Gould Niamh Grace Marta Granda Nistal James Green Kevin Green Sienna Griffin-Shaw Dr Sam Griffiths Dr Kostas Grigoriadis Peter Guillery Seth Guy H Soomeen Hahm James Hampton Tamsin Hanke Dr Sean Hanna Dr Penelope Haralambidou Jack Hardy Visiting Prof Itsuko Hasegawa Emeritus Prof Christine Hawley Robert Haworth Ben Hayes Mellis Hayward Jose Hernandez Hernandez Colin Herperger Simon Herron Parker Heyl Prof Jonathan Hill Thomas Hillier Ashley Hinchcliffe Mark Hines Bill Hodgson Tom Holberton Adam Holloway Tyson Hosmer Delwar Hossain Oliver Houchell William Huang Dr Anne Hultzsch Elise Hunchuck Vincent Huyghe Johan Hybschmann

I Jessica In Anderson Inge Susanne Isa Cannon Ivers J Clara Jaschke Will Jefferies Manuel Jimenez Garcia Therese Johns Steve Johnson Helen Jones Nina Jotanovic K Jon Kaminsky Dr Kayvan Karimi Dr Jan Kattein Anja Kempa Jonathan Kendall Tom Kendall Maren Klasing Jakub Klaska Fergus Knox Maria Knutsson-Hall Kimon Krenz Dirk Krolikowski Dragana Krsic Sir Banister Fletcher Visiting Prof Perry Kulper Diony Kypraiou L Chee-Kit Lai Elie Lakin Linda Lam Lo Lanfear Ruby Law Jeremy Lecomte Roberto Ledda Dr Guan Lee Benjamin Lee Stefan Lengen Dr Chris Leung Sarah Lever Visiting Prof Amanda Levete Ifigeneia Liangi Prof CJ Lim Prof Christoph Lindner Enriqueta Llabres-Valls Alvaro Lopez Deborah Lopez Tim Lucas Abi Luter Genevieve Lum Samantha Lynch M Abel Maciel Sonia Magdziarz Nazila Maghzian Alexandru Malaescu Shneel Malik

Prof Yeoryia Manolopoulou Jonny Martin Robin Mather Emma-Kate Matthews Billy Mavroupoulos Claire McAndrew Hugh McEwen Prof Niall McLaughlin Dr Clare Melhuish Visiting Prof Jeremy Melvin Prof Josep Miás Bartlett Prof Frédéric Migayrou Doug Miller Sarah Milne Tom Mole Ana Monrabal-Cook Philippe Morel Shaun Murray N Tetsuro Nagata Elliot Nash Filippo Nassetti Rasa Navasaityte Chi Nguyen O Kyrstyn Oberholster Toby O’Connor James O’Leary Luke Olsen Andy O’Reilly Visiting Prof Raf Orlowski Daniel Ovalle Costal P Yael Padan Igor Pantic Marie-Eleni Papandreou Annarita Papeschi Ralph Parker Thomas Parker Dr Brenda Parker Andrew Parsons Jacob Paskins Claudia Pasquero Jane Patterson Gill Peacock Thomas Pearce Dr Luke Pearson Prof Alan Penn Prof Barbara Penner Drew Pessoa Frosso Pimenides Alicia Pivaro Maj Plemenitas Paul Poinet Danae Polyviou Andrew Porter Alan Powers Arthur Prior Prof Sophia Psarra James Purkiss

R Dr Caroline Rabourdin Marcel Rahm Carolina Ramirez Figueroa Robert Randall Prof Peg Rawes Dr Sophie Read Dr Aileen Reid Guang Yu Ren Prof Jane Rendell Gilles Retsin Farlie Reynolds Julie Richardson Sam Riley Rosie Riordan Dr David Roberts Felix Roberts Gavin Robotham Martina Rosati Karolina Rozkosz Javier Ruiz Rodriguez S Martin Sagar Dr Kerstin Sailer Prof Andrew Saint Dr Shahed Saleem Anete Salmane Sanyal Saptarshi Ned Scott Peter Scully Dr Tania Sengupta Alan Sentongo Sara Shafiei David Shanks Alistair Shaw Prof Bob Sheil Don Shillingburg Naz Siddique Maya Simkin Colin Smith Paul Smoothy Prof Mark Smout Valentina Soana Jasmin Sohi James Solly Harmit Soora Amy Spencer Ben Spong Matthew Springett Prof Michael Stacey Brian Stater Iulia Statica Emmanouil Stavrakakis Tijana Stevanovic Rachel Stevenson Emily Stone Sabine Storp Greg Storrar David Storring Kay Stratton Michiko Sumi Tom Svilans

T Jerry Tate Philip Temple Colin Thom Michael Tite Claudia Toma Martha Tsigkari Freddy Tuppen V Melis Van Den Berg Kim Van Poeteren Afra Van’t Land Dr Tasos Varoudis Oliver Vas Prof Laura Vaughan Hamish Veitch Emmanuel Vercruysse Viktoria Viktorija Amilea Vilaplana de Miguel Jordi Vivaldi Piera Dr Nina Vollenbroker W Michael Wagner Andrew Walker Adam Walls Prof Susan Ware Barry Wark Gabriel Warshafsky Tim Waterman Visiting Prof Bill Watts Patrick Weber Paul Weston Alice Whewell Amy White Andy Whiting Alex Whitley Rae Whittow-Williams Daniel Widrig Freya Wigzell Dan Wilkinson Henrietta Williams Graeme Williamson James Williamson Dr Robin Wilson Oliver Wilton Nick Winnard Simon Withers Katy Wood Anna Woodeson Y Sandra Youkhana Michelle Young Z Emmanouil Zaroukas Sepher Zhand Dominik Zisch Fiona Zisch Stamatis Zografos

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