M ARCH/MA Architecture Degree Show Catalogue 2017

Central Saint Martins Spatial Practices Programme: M Arch Architecture MA Architecture: Cities and Innovation Introduction 03 Manifesto 04 Introduction 06 Fundamentals 12 Course structure Independent Projects 16 Introduction 18 Tom Atkinson 22 Fernanda Castelo Branco 24 Anna Fil 26 Marc Hargreaves 28 AndrÊa Helou 32 Dong Liu 34 Laurence Neal 38 Jyothi Pillay 40 Tiffany Waddill 42 Zhan Wang 44 Nicholas Woodford 46 Tingting Yu 48 William Guyang Zhou 50 Material Concerns Methodologies of Engagement 52

52

52 52

52

Studio 1: Demonstration Neighbourhood, Julia King Studio 2: Disentangling Space Carlos Villanueva Brandt Studio 3: Re-working Arts & Crafts, Takeshi Hayatsu Seminar: Not a Clean Slate Liza Fior Construction in Detail (2016) Watts Chapel: Takeshi Hayatsu & Gregory Ross

87 Appendix

Contents

1 We see the production of space as fundamentally social and political 2 We support not only the development of radical ideas, but also the radical potential of making and building 3 We use our name to rethink our profession, imagining roles beyond disciplinary limits, and actively engaging in our art school setting 4 We engage creatively with the reality of the city around us, and its legislative and economic constraints by undertaking live projects that have agency 5 We provide flexible, alternative pathways for study encouraging diverse careers and innovative future practices

Manifesto

4-5

Architecture is Always Political: Andreas Lang and Mel Dodd

‘Architecture is Always Political’, is an original quote by Sir Richard Rogers, printed on an A4 sheet of paper and handed to the Guardian architecture critic Oliver Wainwright. It became part of a BBC live interview with David Sillitoe before the announcement of the Sterling Prize in 2015. The motto is echoed throughout the Spatial Practices manifesto. How do we as a profession start to reclaim political and social agency; how can students form critical and independent positions which produce practitioners not only concerned with the formal aspects of architecture but also the social, political, economic and environmental forces which shape it. How can architecture and design contribute, resist or re-work those forces and help us design more equal and sustainable cities?

Architecture at MA and M Arch level at Central Saint Martins is only in its third year. The collectively drafted spatial practices manifesto provides an important point of reference for this emerging course which offers students a unique opportunity to contribute to the creation of a new, open and experimental, culture of learning. People are vital to the formation of this culture – students, staff and visiting practitioners, and importantly other collaborators and partners around London. We are actively building a pedagogical programme culture which encourages students to self-mobilise and take initiative. Importantly, we want to

Welcome

Intro duction

be outward facing in the world, making sure that projects and experiences give students an opportunity to engage with external communities and organisations.

In our art school setting we are as committed to engaging in critical discourse, as we are in physical making. The rich context of the art school based in the centre of London and the nearness to other art and design disciplines offers an invaluable opportunity to extend the field of architectural discourse, to explore the sensitivities and value systems inherent in those disciplines and carry them out into the places we choose to live and work in.

The course offers a clear point of departure from which to engage with the urgent and critical issues of our times, whether it’s Brexit, London’s acute housing crisis or the health of our environment. If we consider the architect’s role to be politically active (and not purely that of a service provider) then we should use our skills and tools to negotiate the sets of values we feel strongly about.

We encourage the students to take ownership and in the process become live agents in the field of spatial practices.

The students’ time at Central Saint Martins offers a great platform to explore these roles and allow their work to become the first step on their pathway towards a critical spatial practice. the work showcased in this catalogue offers a glimpse into the rich and layered inquiries undertaken by students.

6-7

Fundamentals: Oliver Wainwright reflects on a series of debates that tackled the fundamental forces shaping London

Go and work in the public sector, become a politician or start fomenting the next revolution. These were the unlikely conclusions that kept recurring during a series of debates I organised for Spatial Practices at Central Saint Martins this year, which seemed to leave many in the audience wondering how they could even hope to effect change as an architect. What are we doing simply designing buildings? Are we all in the wrong job?

Over six weeks in the spring term, Fundamentals aimed to take a sledgehammer to the fortified citadel of the property development industry and crack open how our cities and places are being made, exposing the mechanics of real estate for all to see. Tackling six fundamental topics of housing, planning, land, industry, public art and landscape, the series brought together 30 real-world practitioners from outside the architectural profession to inject a shock-dose of urgency into the architecture school, hoping to inform students’ work in turn. After a lecture I had given at CSM on the champagne-soaked property jamboree of MIPIM a year earlier – where councils rub shoulders with investors to sell off swathes of public land – some students apparently showed up outside the conference centre with protest placards the next day. So what could the outcome be after a six-part debate series that put these very same actors on stage?

Fundamentals

Council officers battled it out with community housing campaigners, economists debated with planning consultants, developers clashed swords with academics and artists fought with corporate art strategists in a series of discussions that generally left Architecture with a capital A at the door. Why? Because for architects to have any hope of changing anything, it’s crucial that they understand the context in which they are operating and develop the ability to interrogate and challenge the often invisible networks of power and money that actually shape the city.

It might be a cliché that every good project begins with questioning the brief; but understanding why the brief has ended up in the way that it has is even more crucial.

With London’s population set to reach 10 million in the next decade, the capital is facing pressure like never before and it’s more important than ever that we understand how and why our city is changing. We are continually told that the housing market is broken, and that the planning system is straining at the seams; that land values have spiralled out of control, while industrial space is being hounded out of the city; that public art has become a garnish to distract from the realities of development, while landscape is being used as greenwash, hiding crimes behind the shrubbery. But is there another way?

1

The Fundamentals debates showed that there could be. In the housing session we heard five different approaches to tackling the housing crisis, from a local authority director who had set up a council house-building company to build the first council housing in a generation, to the founder of the RUSS community land trust, which is currently building homes in Lewisham that will be affordable for local people in perpetuity. Two developers, Pocket and The Collective, showed how the market is responding to the crisis of affordability, both by building more compact micro-flats and providing

Intro duction

forms of serviced collective living, saving space and costs with communal facilities.

The planning debate focused on the challenges facing over-worked and understaffed local authorities, looking at innovative ways that the planning system could be reformed and modernised. Euan Mills from the think tank Future Cities Catapult offered an enticing glimpse of a digitised future of planning, showing how new technologies could be mobilised to make the planning process more open, accessible and efficient.

Finn Williams from the Greater London Authority made an impassioned plea for

8-9

the best architectural minds to go into the public sector – a call echoed by the rest of the panel. Might we see a whole new generation of local authority architects tipping the development balance in favour of the public good, seizing the initiative from the developers’ monopoly in which the private sector calls the shots? Could cities be developed in the interests of the people who actually live there, rather than in the interests of the developers’ shareholders expecting their annual return?

Land turned out to be the most fundamental topic of them all, taking the debate back to the very roots of our cities’ inequalities and revealing why new developments so often end up providing such a poor deal for the public. Sites are always sold off to the highest bidder, which is usually the one most confident that they can bypass the planning obligations, provide less affordable housing and squeeze every last inch of profit out of a site. Yet, once you have won planning permission, there is no incentive to build: it can be more lucrative to sit on land than develop it, spawning an industry of winning permission for sites, selling them on and inflating values out of all proportion in the process. The 2

Fundamentals

panel of speakers launched a fiery attack on the iniquities of the land market, offering radical solutions for how it could be reformed, from the introduction of a land value tax, to showing how community groups can provide viable bids for public land by measuring sustainable value over the long-term – not purely by offering an instant cash-in-hand sum.

We may all be obsessed with the housing crisis but the next big crisis that we’ve yet to wake up to, according to the panel in the fourth debate, is the dramatic loss of space for industry.

Over the last seven years, London has lost space for industry at almost three times the planned rate, with more than 600 hectares converted into other uses.

A functioning city depends on having its printers, car menders, parcel depots, scaffolders and builders’ merchants close by, but because land with planning permission for housing is worth around four times more than when its used for industry, there’s little incentive for owners not to sell out to the march of speculative apartment blocks. Bringing perspectives from academia and industry, the speakers set out ways in which new developments can combine productive uses with housing – most vividly shown in the Camley Street area, a stone’s throw from CSM, where the community has come together to plan a new development for photographic studios, mechanics, fishmongers, butchers, a commercial laundry and the largest organic muesli makers in the world, along with hundreds of homes, which will remain affordable forever.

With the debates taking place in an art college, it would have been rude not to include the artists. As a community they have always been the kamikaze pilots of urban renewal, the sniffer dogs of regeneration: wherever artists go to find cheap studios, the cranes are sure to follow. Rents rise, the artists move on

show how greenery can be more than just a side salad, revealing how landscape is at the very heart of how new pieces of city are conceived and how they evolve.

There were no clear solutions for fixing London’s inequities, but a range of potential tactics, strategies and arguments for how we might engage with and question the system – a glimmer of radical optimism that is evident in the provocative, challenging student work you see in these pages.

1 3

and the pre-existing residents are kicked out with them. Bringing together artists, curators and art consultants, this debate questioned how art could play a meaningful role in regeneration. Some public art practice was slammed for what it is: a token garnish used to distract from the mean-minded reality of commercial development, merely providing a soothing salve for the developers’ conscience.

Others showed how a more engaged form of practice can open people’s eyes to the places around them and empower people to change their communities for the better.

Finally the speakers in the landscape debate firmly grasped the nettle and aimed a canon of weedkiller at the greenwash which is so often used to disguise bloated developments. London is blooming like never before, sprouting sky gardens and pocket parks, garden bridges (no more!) and green links, but these green-fingered landscape credentials often turn out to be a decoy: developers are using the power of plants to ease their projects through the planning system. Bringing together “guerilla gardeners” with public space activists and corporate landscape architects, the debate probed behind the shrubbery to

Intro duction

2 3

Central Saint Martins students demonstrating outside MIPIM, London in 2016 Fundamentals: Housing, with Reza Merchant, Kareem Dayes, Amena Matin and Oliver Wainwright (from L to R) Oliver Wainwright introducing the series

OLIVER WAINWRIGHT is the architecture and design critic of the Guardian. Trained as an architect at the University of Cambridge and the Royal College of Art, he worked for a number of practices, including OMA in Rotterdam and muf in London, as well in strategic urban planning for the Mayor of London’s Architecture and Urbanism Unit. He has written extensively on architecture and design for a wide range of publications and is a regular visiting critic and lecturer at architecture schools internationally.

Many thanks to all the speakers who took part: HOUSING: Barbara Brownlee, Westminster City Council; Kareem Dayes, RUSS Community Land Trust; Amena Matin, London Borough of Croydon; Reza Merchant, The Collective; Marc Vlessing, Pocket Living. PLANNING: Liane Hartley, Planning in the Pub; Kate Henderson, Town and Country Planning Association; Adele Maher, London Borough of Tower Hamlets; Euan Mills, Future Cities Catapult; Finn Williams, Greater London Authority. LAND: Stephen Hill, C2O Futureplanners; Toby Lloyd, Shelter; Joe Sarling, Nathaniel Lichfield & Partners; Beth Stratford, University of Leeds; Kate Swade, Shared Assets.

INDUSTRY: Jane Clossick, Cass Cities; Jessica Ferm, Bartlett School of Planning, UCL; David Saxby, Architecture 00; Christian Spencer-Davies, Camley Street Neighbourhood Forum; Paloma Strelitz, Assemble. PUBLIC ART: Alex Chinneck, artist; Mark Davy, Future City; Hadrian Garrard, Create; Anna Harding, Space Studios; Verity-Jane Keefe, artist.

LANDSCAPE: Jo Gibbons, J & L Gibbons; Anna Minton, University of East London; Richard Reynolds, Guerrilla Gardening; Stephen Richards, Gillespies; Tim Waterman, University of Greenwich.

Films of the debates are available to watch online at: www.fundamentals-london.uk

10-11

m Su

m

er

a Br e

Autumn

k

l

Unit 1: M Studio 1 ethod o : Studio Demo logi 2 e Studio : Dise nstr s fo 3: R nta at r ew ng in g or Semin ki lin ng ar 1 +2

S um m e r

Term

mi Se

m e nt e rm gage gT l En rin u r a od s Sp c t r ho i te o u c h g hb afts A r e i ac e d C r N n Sp a g r ts r3 na A

e rof P 4: e t i ic Un r ac t P

na s s io

Term

Second Year

First Year

ar 4

Unit 2:

I nd e pe

t

nd

an t Pr o je

c

in

r+

s

r Sp

ak Br e c t i on er m s t ru m on C Su 3: l it t a i U n De in

Semin a

V i s it

e rm T g

Su m m e r Term Un it 2 : F i r st S Ter m P l a c em u mm e nt e r

Semin

Aut u m n T erm

Course Structure

12-13

1 Independent Projects

M Arch Architecture Tom Atkinson Fernanda Castelo Branco Anna Fil Marc Hargreaves Dong Liu Laurence Neal Jyothi Pillay Tiffany Waddill Zhan Wang William Guyang Zhou Nicholas Woodford MA Architecture: Cities and Innovation Tingting Yu Andréa Helou

Special Thanks Mikel Azcona Uribe Markus Bader Pablo DeSoto Catherine DuToit Charlotte Grace Sean Griffiths Clara Kraft Sven Mündner Adam Nathanial Furman Alicia Pivaro Kester Rattenbury Martha Rawlinson Greg Ross Rebecca Ross Christian Spencer-Davies Alex Warnock Smith

Tutors Andreas Lang Mel Dodd Mathew Leung Rosa Rogina Andrew Belfield

Introduction

Independent

The final year of the study on the M Arch and the MA Architecture focuses on an independent, student-led project. It is designed to enable the students to become self-sufficient and critical practitioners, with clear aspirations for their future role as an architect, and the confidence and independent ability to pursue their goals. The independent projects challenge the students to be explicit about their specific interest in the broad field of Architecture and conceive a thesis project which defines their possible roles as emerging practitioners. This in-depth exploration is design-led and explores architecure as an active and propositional component of contemporary city making.

On arrival students are asked to critically engage with alternative modes of practice and reflect on methods for architectural engagement which can give social and political agency to the architect and architecture as a whole. It challenges the students to expand their understanding of what constitutes spatial practice and asks them to define the kind of practitioner they might want to become.

Equipped with these questions students begin their independent project which lasts for four terms and kicks off with an industry placement. Students spend upward of six weeks embedded in a practice of their choice. The selection of host practices is broad and reflects the wide pallete of student interests. It includes positions with local government regeneration departments, not-for-profit organisations, collective self build groups, artists, music festivals, theatre designers, fabricators and contractors as well as a wide range of architectural practices, most of which are extending the boundaries of what constitutes innovative and spatial practice today.

The placement not only allows a glimpse into the workings of how architecture is being produced and what form

Projects

practice can take, it also gives the students an important opportunity to form relationships with practices and practitioners. In many cases the placement experience directly informs the direction of the final year project while the relationships to the host institutions often stay in place well beyond graduating.

The range of independent thesis projects which emerge out of the placement and the early engagement with architectural methodologies varies greatly in their scale and interests. What combines them is a strong desire to be situated in ‘the real’, in the realm outside of the studio. Students are encouraged to directly engage with the many realities of their projects on the ground, a step which is too often postponed to the hypothetical afterlife of a project. Instead we encourage all students to test their ideas and assumptions continuously in the field as part of their design process. This direct feedback not only gives important purchase to the work it also establishes the students as active actors and initiators.

By engaging with the people affected by their ideas as well as the institutions and actors which could make the project real, students lay the foundations for future practice which from an early stage engages with the agency architecture has in the world outside the college.

Alongside the independent project a series of workshops take place combining material production with critical and theoretical inquiries. Most notably this year was Material Concerns, a project run by Mathew Leung and Maria Lisogorskaya, introducing a fabrication component which culminated in a week of collective making which can be seen at the end of this section. Rosa Rogina worked closely with the students contextualising their work and ideas within a critical theory context and invited guest Andrew Belfield facilitated a series of workshops dedicated to drawing and representation.

16-17

Can micro-developments provide a new type of council housing integrating leftover plots of suburban land?

We believe there must be social housing That homes must be well designed and great for all Councils must be the nation’s house builders once again Local communities in suburbia are now on the front line of residential development The Micro-Developments Bureau addresses the need to create more social housing. We are currently exploring the feasibility of infill developments across the suburban landscape, finding typologies for left over plots and creating new micro-developed council homes visually suitable for any neighbourhood.

The Micro Developments-Bureau was established as a reaction to the current crisis of housing in London. We work as a subsidiary group of local councils. A not-for-profit body that enables councils to develop small plots of land to create more socially rented homes.

This enables them to meet housing targets and cut down social waiting lists.

We work as surveyors, designers and

Tom Atkinson

management consultants until the initial council investment is recovered.

We aim to marry good quality home design with pre-war council building schemes in a modern approach to improving suburban density. The Micro-Developments Bureau works predominantly in suburban areas of large cities. We are sensitive to the personal tensions and needs of the communities that reside in this predominantly postwar suburban neighbourhoods.

We value community and want each Micro-Development to be an asset to the surrounding area not a burden.

The scheme will aim to pay for itself over a maximum 50-year period. It will pay dividends into a community fund, as a percentage of the social rent. This ever-increasing fund can be accessed by local community groups for improvements, events and maintenance, increasing the developments popularity within each community and paving the way for more of its kind.

Placement: DK-CM Architects Project collaborators: David Knight (DK-CM Director and RCA Tutor), Roger Zogolovitch (Interviewed as Director of Solidspace and author of We Should all be Developers), Russ Edwards (Interviewed as Head of Design at Pocket Living), Aaron English (Detailed Design Collaborator works at Stephen Taylor Architects)

Independent

Projects

18-19

Tom Atkinson

Independent

Projects

20-21

How to enable craftspeople and manufacturers to remain in the city Manufacturing industry is diminishing in London. According to the Greater London Authority Study London Industrial Land: Supply and Economy, in twenty years the numbers of enterprises will decrease by half in order to accommodate the demand for land for new housing, which can generate much higher returns. As a consequence of high land value pressure and creeping gentrification, independent manufacturing businesses are increasingly priced out of central areas.

Williams Ridout Workshop, the main collaborator of this project, is a collective timber workshop set up by entrepreneurs, partners and bespoke furniture specialists. As Tottenham Hale, where they are based, will be transformed in the next twenty years they are facing another possible displacement. After being previously displaced from Dalston, King’s Cross and even from another unit space in Tottenham Hale, the workshop has organized secondary income by renting a bigger unit to sublet and provide infrastructure and equipment for other fourteen woodwork companies. Yet, in the near future that won’t be enough for them to resist the recurring expulsion.

To prevent automatic displacement of craftspeople and manufacturers under the processes of regeneration, the project reimagines underused opportunity sites alongside redevelopment areas as temporary semi-public spaces dedicated to making. Lewis Cubbitt Square in the heart of King’s Cross redevelopment has been chosen as the first site for the proposition to be tested. As the scheduled development moves towards completion, the proposed infrastructure is

designed in a way it can be easily moved to another place that is passing through a similar regeneration process. By promoting ownership over temporary environments, this project seeks to contest the right to the city and to reclaim the control for the making community.

Placement: Studio Cullinan and Buck Architects Ltd PROJECT COLLABORATORS: Joe Ridout and Alistair Williams (Williams Ridout Workshop), Carolina Khouri & Leia Bossom (Directors, Haringey Arts), Mikel Azcona Uribe (Hawkins Brown), Lily Kwong (Haringey Council), Ian Freshwater (Argent LLP)

Fernanda Castelo Branco

Independent

Projects

22-23

Can conservation go beyond the preservation of facades to a narrative of past, current and future use

As a piece of heritage ‘at risk’, how can attempts to protect the Caird & Rayner Warehouse, in Tower Hamlets, move beyond the preservation of facades to a narrative of occupation that frames past, current and future uses?

According to Historic England research undertaken in 2011, listed industrial buildings are three times more at risk than the national average for listed heritage. As one of the key examples of surviving monuments of the industrial era in the canal, the Caird & Rayner Warehouse is facing redevelopment by Rainbow Properties after more than 40 years of abandonment and decay. Today, however, around 85% of historic industrial buildings in the Limehouse Cut Canal in Tower Hamlets have been destroyed by redevelopment.

In order to foster new social ties and activate links between area’s industrial past and its regenerated future, the project explores an alternative to a commercial development approach. It proposes the Caird & Rayner Warehouse as a base for interaction between old and new communities and aims to build a connection to the history of the place by including narratives behind its historical fabric. Through series of live actions such as in-depth spatial and social surveys, organisation of local forums and material experimentations on 1:1 scale, the project transforms stories of building’s industrial fragments into elements of the proposal.

Anna Fil

The design proposal focuses on the long process of transformation and explores openness in approach via incremental repairs and staged re-use. By preserving the existing building elements and adding different equipment and elements to it, the building becomes partly accessible to the general public and future inhabitants, displaying diverse uses and spatial performances in various stages of decay and transformation, as well as making visible the various layers that record the past occupation and history.

Placement: Publica, www.publica.org Collaborators: Guy Ziser (Developer, Rainbow Properties), Iain Griffith (Caretaker of the Caird & Rayner Warehouse), Tom Ridge (Historian, activist & member of the East End Waterway Group), Mark Taylor (Member, East End Waterway Group), Peter Brownell (Member, Limehouse Townhall Consortium Trust), Elyssa Livergant (Member, Limehouse Townhall Consortium Trust), Paul Garayo (Member, Limehouse Townhall Consortium Trust), Kirsty Gilmer (Principal Planning Officer, Tower Hamlets), Andrew Hargreaves (Conservation officer, Planning Department, Tower Hamlets), Cllr David Edgar (Cabinet Member for Resources, Tower Hamlets), Karol Jurga (Artist, Cable Street Studios), Olga Geighan (Artist), Helen Moules (Artist), Lenny Newton (Veteran of war, Limehouse), Ksenia Timishenko (Interior designer, Limehouse), Sydneu (General Practitioner, Tower Hamlets), Andrew and Kathy Gray (Local residents, Tower Hamlets).

Independent

Projects

24-25

Can Virtual Reality enhance regeneration schemes and bridge the gap between practitioners and the local community

Can implementing Virtual Reality (VR) as a digital tool enhance large-scale regeneration schemes? Can this be incorporated at all levels of a new development proposal from the local community through to the practitioners and end users?

Architects are now able to work with larger amounts of complex digitally produced data than ever before, helping them address scenarios for large scale built environment projects with high economic values. New technologies such as VR are increasingly being seen as a helpful tool, with the boundaries being constantly expanded. Yet there is a hugely unexplored potential for tools like VR to deliver a more socially engaging and publicly beneficial development approach.

With a focus on Old Oak and Park Royal development area, the aim of this project is to create an enticing engagement and construction protocol that will communicate to all users from community level through to construction professionals and investors.

Placement: Hawkins Brown Project Collaborators: Hawkins Brown, Alexander Blackmore, Harbinder Singh Birdi, Lucy Webb (Senior Regeneration Manager, Peabody), Nelson Crespo (Tate Exchange), Vanessa Pilla (Interim Head of Networks, Future of London).

Marc Hargreaves

Independent

Projects

26-27

How can we help wastepickers to become urban craftspeople In nature everything is interconnected, but in cities there are many loose connections. 300 million tons of new plastic is being produced annually and less than 10% is recycled. All the rest ends up contaminating our food, polluting our water, clogging our waste systems and resulting in serious health and environmental harm. Meanwhile, most of the 15 million people involved in the informal waste economy live in poverty, are socially vulnerable and with their health and safety being compromised. This project aims to celebrate the economic and social value of waste and promotes an opportunity to empower the wastepickers and use their creative potential to (re)signify waste and transform their environment.

In Sao Paulo, 80% of the recycling material is collected by an informal system of independent catadores who use handmade carts and pull them around the streets to pick up cardboard, paper, glass and plastics. They often repurpose underused public spaces in the city centre and use them as informal workshops. The Cooperglicério, based

Andréa Helou

underneath Glicério Flyover, occupies one of those spaces. However, while owning the permission from the Municipality, the collective is endangered by the hygienist policy of the current Mayor and has to adapt their space in order to remain working.

Through live processes of making, the project is looking into methods of transforming discarded plastics locally, without making use of expensive machinery or bigger investments, into products and construction materials. The strategy of the proposal is to work on three different levels in order to rethink and resignify the role of wastepicking cooperatives in the urban environment. Firstly, to rethink the individual cart as a tool for not only collecting unused materials, but also as a mobile work station. Secondly, on the scale of the Cooperglicéri cooperative, to deliver the strategy for adapting the existing and proposing a new small-scale plastic hub. And finally, to reformulate the existing Municipality policy for occupying spaces underneath flyovers as an urban practice.

Independent

Placement: British Council Fellowship Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 Project Collaborators: Maria Aparecida Dias da Costa (President of Coopevrglicério), Andreia Ribeiro Emboava (Member of Cooperglicério and Dulcinéia Catadora), Lucia Rosa (Fouder of the art collective Dulcinéia Catadora), Mahima Suhkudev (Xyntéo), Gary Campbell (Sustainability Coordinator at CSM), Marcus Damon (Partner at CURA). With help from Shamiso Sithole and Krishan Pilch from CSM

Projects

28-29

AndrĂŠa Helou

Independent

Projects

30-31

Can Queen’s Yard provide an alternative workspace for its artists and creative practitioners to remain?

Hackney Wick has the highest concentration of artists per square foot in all of Europe. It is one of the largest artistic communities in London, providing more than 600 creative studios spaces.

Queen’s Yard, located at the east of Hackney Wick, is an example of a cluster of mixed-use spaces accommodating local artists and businesses within a defined heritage site, while offering many social activities to the wider community.

Today, however, the area is under great threat as the local council and the development sector are queueing up with high-end residential planning applications, which will demolish more than half of the warehouses in Queen’s Yard in order to make place for new residential units. The impact of regeneration will inevitably destroy Hackney Wick as a creative hub and artist community by forcing existing studios and businesses to move out.

This proposal attempts to challenge the current planning application by envisaging an alternative way to retain the character of the yard as a creative place.

Can artists and creative practitioners stay in Queen’s Yard as an integral part of the council’s new development plan? The project presents an alternative vision for Hackney Wick as a mixed-use area that, along with new residential units, provides affordable workspace for creative practitioners forming a further cooperation of the past and the present in Queens Yard.

Dong Liu

Can Queen’s Yard in Hackney Wick provide an alternative workspace for its artists and creative practitioners to remain?

1. Ar Produce 2. The Yard Theatre 3. RA Autos 4. Alias Hire Arbeit Project 5. Isokon Plus 6. Caplin Glass Crate Brewery 7. Celestial Church of Christ Crate Brewery Everything In Colour The Roasting Shed 8. Cheeky Tiki 9. Burger Hub 10. Art Services Grants Ltd Crate Brewery

Placement: public works Project Collaborators: Nick Durrant (Plot Studios), P. Clark (Caplin Glass), Nimrod (Arbeit Project Ltd), Ricardo Rendon Restrepo (The Roasting Shed)

Independent

Projects

32-33

How can Liverpool’s industrial heritage be mobilised to protect its World Heritage Site in the former docks

How can we use heritage to mobilise civic participation and through use create ownership of the Northern Docks, laying a claim on the land and planting a seed of resistance to the larger forces dominating their future? Can we create a buffer both physical, and in time?

UNESCO awarded Liverpool World Heritage Status in 2004 designating it as an: “Area of Outstanding Universal Value that belongs to all the peoples of the world”. Today, however, its heritage is under threat from Liverpool City Council’s support of the large-scale development of the northern docks. The project takes UNESCO’s threat to revoke Liverpool’s World Heritage Site (WHS) status as its starting point.

UNESCO has called for a two-year memorandum halting development in the WHS and its buffer zone in the city. The Mayor of the city has rejected this suggestion and claims that development in the city should not be put on hold for the protection of the cities’ heritage. Currently heritage in the Northern Docks is kept in a state of semi dereliction with only the listed elements being maintained to the minimum standard required by law. Most of the WHS is inaccessible to the public, within an industrial area without any public facilities, or information about the WHS available.

This project sees the docks as an inherently civic space, with a history and heritage that belongs to the world

Laurence Neal

and a future that belongs to Liverpool.

The proposal seeks to establish how this heritage should be dealt with over the next twenty-five years as development

by Peel Land in the docks slowly makes its way northwards towards this area of the WHS. Through a series of interventions declaring the docks as public and civic, the project foregrounds heritage as offering social and human value, rather than only as a potential for leveraging economic value.

Placement: Victoria & Albert Museum Project Collaborators: Kirsten and Liam (Make Liverpool), Gerry Proctor (Engage Liverpool / Liverpool WHS steering group), Roo Angell (Sayes Court Deptford), Business owners in Liverpool Docks including: John (20th Century Furniture), James (Diving Safety School), Andy (Allbony Canoe Club), Mike (Euro Clutch), Daniel (O’Tooles), Daniel (Kazimir Invisible Wind Factory Studios).

With help from Andrea, Rhea, Alistair and Simon (CSM)

Independent

Projects

34-35

Laurence Neal

Independent

Projects

36-37

Can incremental development help a Community Land Trust retain a public asset in communal ownership?

Proposal for the site: Phase 1 Unlocking the door Phase 2 Marking civic territory

To what extent can spatial appropriations help to enable and accelerate the realisation of StART’s Community Land Trust development on a future ex-public asset in Haringey?

Two thirds of St Ann’s hospital, owned by Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust, is soon to be sold, to fund the renewal of its retained facilities. Considering the national Housing Crisis, BEHMHT’s approved development offers an ill-considered response, through its proposal of 470 homes; 66 to be sold as ‘affordable’ and the remaining 404 to be sold at market rate.

This is at a time when the UK’s austerity-led retraction of welfare-state investment draws attention to the need for balance in the urgency of fundamental societal, let alone welfare, provision; hospital beds versus bedrooms. St Ann’s Redevelopment Trust – is a Community Land Trust, which exists to offer a community-led alternative development on the St Ann’s site, through its proposal of community facilities and up to

800 100% genuinely affordable homes.

Close involvement within StART led to a proposal building on their alternative redevelopment plan, and towards StART’s fundamental vision. This asks, how can shelter and community drive the temporary-use of the site, starting by addressing the disused spaces today, and considering the site’s legal and planning changes throughout the process?

The project proposes a five-phased plan of works for the temporary use of the St Ann’s site, filling the time period between today until the time when the redevelopment is fully built out.

The phases encompass an incremental growth in the permanence and extent of physical intervention, and shifting of welfare provision, to enable self-managed communal shelter. The strategy aims to establish a stronger relationship between local community and the site itself, towards making the link between site and community impossible to ignore, thus making StART’s case for land acquisition inevitable, not merely possible.

Phase 3 Re-utilising St Ann’s Phase 4 Embedding local control

1

2

4

3

Placement: GLA Regeneration Project Collaborators: StART (St Ann’s Redevelopment Trust), 6a architects, ReSpace Projects, New Economics Foundation. With help from Michael Kennedy, Conor Morris, Shamiso Sithole, Lucy Stapylton-Smith and Mikel Azcona Uribe

Jyothi Pillay

Independent

Projects

38-39

How redesigning the social and physical infrastructure of asylum camps can improve the living conditions within them

The project is an investigation of emergency re-settlement as a response to the ongoing refugee crisis, which is considered to be the biggest mass migration since WWII. The investigation looks closely at daily life in refugee camps across Greece, and specifically on the Diavata camp, which is one of the most organised camps in Northern Greece.

More than a million refugees have arrived to the Greek shores in the last three years. Since Balkan countries closed their borders there are now 70,000 refugees stranded in Greece.

Hotspots (unofficial asylum camps) and refugee camps have been built in various parts of the country. A closer look at the camp shows the living conditions to be below average putting people’s lives at risk and at times inhumane.

Diavata Camp, a former military base on the outskirts of Thessaloniki, serves as the main focus of this project.

Following the premise that education

Tiffany Waddill

does not have to be conducted in a traditional school environment and that the learning process can happen anywhere, the camp is reimagined as an “everyday school” where pedagogic processes are intertwined with day-today activities across the camp. The aim of this research is to propose alternative designs for refugee and asylum camps as places of transit, where people would be introduced to the European way of life, customs and culture before continuing their journey to their final destination. Refugees are “us” now, or in the near future, in the process of generating cities of the future, places of transit and reconstruction.

Placement: muf architecture/art Project Collaborators: Tsiakiri Olga (Creative Director), Antigoni Sfiri (Journalist, TV 100 Local TV Station), George D. Manolis (Professor of Civil Engineering, Aristotle University), NGOs and Volunteers from Diavata Refugee Camp

Independent

Projects

40-41

How can we provide affordable housing for urban migrants in Shenzhen?

Formed as a result of rapid urbanisation, the urban villages of Shenzhen are a fascinating urban phenomenon. The former rural communities, which were “swallowed” by the new city, retained private land policies that allowed the villagers to claim the right to use the village land for construction of private apartments on their “homesteads” and rent them to new rural-urban migrants. While providing a good location and a low rental, these urban village communities became a popular settlement option for new arrivals. However, with poor management and maintenance, poor quality infrastructure and illegal practices, these areas have ever since acted as a hotbed of urban problems.

In response, in the early 2000’s, the government of Shenzhen implemented a regeneration plan in order to regulate its urban villages. Yet, with the dramatic growth of land value, the renewal plans have been negatively manipulated by the real estate market. As a consequence,

Zhan Wang

Independent

Projects

the housing welfare system has been damaged, unfairly impacting the community of local residents.

Using Shixia Village as a specific test site, this project attempts to challenge the conflict between population growth and insufficient land supply in the urban villages of Shenzhen. It suggests an alternative spatial model for the urban village typology built along a vertical axis.

By implementing a new economic system and rebalancing the benefit of government, developers, landlords and the existing residents, the proposal explores a new, comprehensive financial and spatial solution of utilizing state-owned land and the real-estate industry while preserving the positive aspects of urban village life including dynamic systems of self-organized street enterprise.

Placement: Architecture 00/WikiHouse, Project Collaborators: Tim Huang, Master of Engineering Enterprise Management, Sunrise Brokers LLP. Special thanks: Hexi Li

42-43

The Peckham Coal Line: How to connect a community through shared spaces

Nicholas Woodford

Independent

Placement: Assemble and Peabody Thamesmead Regeneration Team.

Project Collaborators: There are too many to list, but you can learn more about The Peckham Coal Line project here: www.peckhamcoalline.org

Projects

Can cross-community commoning foster Civil Society outside its traditional structures in places like Peckham?

Bidwell Street seems an unremarkable place. A place used for parking, dumping, passing or forgetting. The space holds no perceivable economic value and is seen as a liability to the land owning local authority and railway that defer responsibility of the site to each other without ever speaking. However value is never one-dimensional. The project attempts to encourage Bidwell Street’s neighbours, a homeless shelter, a nature reserve, local authority housing and Victorian terraces, to re-engage with the space we might re-imagine Bidwell Street as a catalyst to connect separated communities.

Bidwell Street forms part of The Peckham Coal Line project, a wider on-going initiative that connects a series of new and overlooked public spaces and generates an opportunity to frame and stretch the potential programs possible in these shared places, with a chance to connect the diverse neighbours around them. Re-imagining Bidwell Street prototypes the first of these common spaces.

The project proposes a new field office shared with the sites neighbours. Here the Coal Line project team will learn what a common means to different user groups and how these groups can be engaged to participate in the creation and management of the space.

By bringing people together around the idea, we hope it will act as a catalyst for further social projects that may only be indirectly linked to the Coal Line itself – connecting schools with residents, artists with community groups, businesses with local authorities and all combinations in between. It will also be something to be enjoyed in and of itself, a place that’s free to use in which to amble, rest, cycle and play above the streets.

44-45

How can schoolchildren left-behind in rural China access better education

Placement: SCABAL (Studio Cullinan and Buck Architects Ltd), www.scabal.net Project Collaborators: Xuehua Huang, Sijing Deng and Dan Chen (Yangbang Primary School); Zhang Honghai (Gu Guohe Middle School), Dominic Cullinan (Founder, SCABAL)

Tingting Yu

Independent

Projects

Can radical forms of pedagogy and spatial practice challenge the role of the traditional rural school in the context of mass urbanization? Can this new fragmented educational framework have a wider civic purpose?

There are 61 million ‘left-behind’ children in China according to the sixth nationwide population census in 2010.

‘Left-behind’ children are a phenomenon of Chinese rural areas where the migration of parents to urban regions for work results in children left in the care of relatives, grandparents and family friends.

Around 80% of students in Yangbang Primary School are left-behind children, and most of the children take a long journey to school without the supervision of their parents or family. Under the situation of rapid urbanization, how can a spatial intervention challenge the role of traditional schools and teaching processes in rural China?

With an intention to create a wellconnected learning environment with openness to nature, this project attempts to integrate and make full use of the limited existing resources of the Chinese countryside. Building on an actual involvement in the site as a teacher, it proposes an alternative pedagogical framework that consists of a core multi-functional educational space and a network of dispersed learning fragments distributed across the landscape connecting different villages. Outside the school’s working hours, this network of scattered ‘classrooms’ operates as an alternative civic infrastructure and provides space and activity for local people. It attempts to bridge gaps among diverse villages and foster a greater sense of community.

The ambition of the proposal can inspire local people to value rural life and attract more parents to stay in their hometown and to ease the contradiction between a family’s needs for economic income and their children‘s education.

46-47

How should we balance urban planning against increasing individualisation

How should we organise cities to balance over-regulated urban planning and increasing individualisation? Is classical centralized planning still needed? Could a city’s inhabitants determine and develop their own environment? Is a more self-organized city possible?

The urban expansion of Beijing and the concentration of migrant populations has affected surrounding villages. The migrant influx has lead to the creation of hundreds of rented shops, industrial units and residential units serving the transient worker community.

Recent government policies control population growth through periodically expelling migrant labor and transient businesses, often using violent methods, which reconstruct and destroy the existing urban and social fabric of the village. In the name of safety and hygiene shops and factory units are cut off from infrastructural networks, services and power and incur fines and penalties. As a third party in Pi Village, the Migrant Workers Home (NGO) provides a voice for migrant laborers, but it is itself often forced to leave.

This project proposes to formulate models of spontaneous-growth for Pi Village. The proposal develops a spatial model for accommodating population mobility and transient communities of workers throughout China’s urbanized regions. ‘Spontaneous Village’ undertakes the task of calibrating how these systems of urban self-organisation could emerge through a method that combines psychological needs, technological capacities and spatial configurations in the context of numbers, space and time.

Placement: public works Project Collaborators: Migrant Workers Home (Tongxin Second-Hand Store, TongxinSchool, The Cultural Museum of Migrant Labor), Yi Song (LEAP Art Magazine), Cancan Cui (Curator of ‘Between the 5th and 6th ring roads, Beijing’)

William Guyang Zhou

Independent

Projects

48-49

Material Concerns Mathew Leung

1

“ The atomic substance of the virtual engine is white formlessness, a kind of milky ether on to which any texture is applied… it is against this bland smoothness we must struggle, against the generic clay, against the ahistorical, the amaterial, default grey.” 1 The city is not default grey. Its streets, its buildings and its rooms are all products of the human imagination, are all made things. However spectacular or mundane, these made things are created from materials, which give us clues about a place, its history, its future, its people.

The Material Concerns workshop runs parallel to the main studio, using materiality as a lens through which to interrogate existing conditions and situations, and as a means to explore the tectonic, tactile and representational potential of projects. Our preoccupation is with how things are made, put together, appropriated and shown, and how the act of making and experimentation may lead to unexpected possibilities.

This year began with a process of close-looking – a considered photographic study where the students were asked to investigate the material fabric of their sites and to think of themselves as lunar explorers or archaeologists, who use a meticulous recording of a fragment to piece together a bigger picture of the landscape. These elements are then

Workshop

physically re-created to produce a small artefact – a 1:1, 3-dimensional facsimile with the challenge to avoid pre-made products, to start from scratch, to work from first principles and to unpick the anatomy of the urban fragment.

The exploration of the relationship between form, material and meaning continued with a more generative slant within the framework of Gottfried Semper’s Stoffwechseltheorie, the German architect’s theory of material transformation, where objects or motifs retain their outward form, through changes in materials, modes of production and even function. Here, we imagined these fragments in alternative material realities, recreating them with humour, playfulness and a sense of adventure. The cast iron austere becomes jelly-wobbly comical and the ‘honest and unpretending’ becomes a paper-thin veneer.

For Material Concerns, the students work throughout at 1:1 scale, a practice which is expanded and shared with Making Week. This is a tradition at the school in its fourth year, where the whole period is given over exclusively to working directly and intensely with materials, where making becomes the primary way of working, testing and thinking for both BA and MA courses.

For the second-year MA students, this means working together with their firstyear peers in mini-ateliers, giving them the opportunity to develop their tests

Independent

with more hands and eyes, to accelerate experiments, to achieve what isn’t possible as an individual.

For some this was a point of departure, for some these material investigations remain as sketches or fragments; some of these things are objects in themselves, some are furniture, some are literally propositional, some succinctly represent the ambition of projects as a whole. All are born from an attitude to making and materiality where these things are seen not just as a means to an end, but – in the same way we consider drawing – as a critical way of understanding and practising architecture.

2

“ The “destruction of reality and of the material is necessary where form as a meaningful symbol, as an independent creation of humankind, is to predominate.” 2 Material Concerns is taught by Mathew Leung and Maria Lisogorskaya from Assemble.

1 2

1

Jack Self, Default Grey, 2015 Gottfried Semper, 13 Iaus Austrian New Wave Architecture 1980. Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies New York 1980

This page Jeremy Deller. Sacrilege, 2012 Inflatable Stonehenge Reconstruction of the wreckage of 11th Century Serce Liman Vessel, J. Richard Steffy

3 4 5 6 7 8

Following pages Bench by Fernanda Castelo Branco Material sample by Anna Fil Structure by Tingting Yu Material sample by Andréa Helou Material sample by Jyothi Pillai Tingting Yu (Detail)

Final Spread Andréa Helou making week workshop

2

Projects

50-51

4

3

Workshop

Independent

Projects

52-53

6

5

Workshop

7

Independent

Projects

8

54-55

Workshop

Independent

Projects

56-57

Methodologies

of engagement

We would like to thank the wide variety of organisations, companies and individuals who have hosted our students during their placements and offered a close up encounter with contemporary spatial practices: Estudio Teddy Cruz (San Diego), Bold Tendencies (London), Alex Schweder (New York), Garelli (Nice), AAA, (Paris) Jotta Studio (London), Sven Münder (London), Block9 (London), Southwark Regeneration (London), public works (London), muf (London) Brick by Brick (Croydon), Verity Keefe (London), Barking and Dagenham Council, Ponyride (Detroit), Roskilde Festival (Denmark), Greater London Authority Regeneration (London), Publica (London), Studio X (Rio de Janeiro), RUA (Rio de Janeiro) Recetas Urbanas (Seville), Urban Projects Bureau (London), The Decorators (London) Something and Son (London), Weber Industries (London), Royal Academy (London), Julia King (London), STORE (London)

Introduction

Studio 1: Demonstration Neighbourhood, Julia King Studio 2: Disentangling Space, Carlos Villanueva Brandt Studio 3: Re-working Arts & Crafts, Takeshi Hayatsu Seminar 1: The Future of the Architect Jeremy Till Seminar 2: The City, Kim Trogal Seminar 3: Not a Clean Slate – Observation is Proposition, Liza Fior

Methodologies

Architecture, as a profession, is only about 300 years old, and as a profession which is undertaken by ‘qualified’ practitioners, it is just over 100 years old. In the last 10 years, however, this role has changed dramatically in relation to shifts in the building industry, the growth of developing markets, changes in information technology and communications, cultural diversity and economic globalisation. The changes that these issues have brought will only accelerate in the years to come.

For architecture to continue to play an important role in the development of our cities’ architects must anticipate and respond to change in terms of both local and international issues. The practice of architecture and the role of the architect must expand to recognise new methods of interacting with clients and users to provide opportunities for sustainable development; recognising ‘sustainability’ as social, cultural, economic and environmental and, crucially, the interrelationship between these drivers.

‘Methodologies of Engagement’ emphasises the use of innovative approaches to design problem solving and architectural practice. To this end, through workshops, seminars, readings and lectures students experiment with multidisciplinary approaches, as a means to develop their own design process, and also to test methodologies which can engage the public in architecture and spatial practice: approaches that expand and challenge the conventional role of the architect.

The main point of focus for teaching are three studios which offer distinct methodological approaches. Julia King’s studio explored the relationship between built form and contemporary practices of city design using Barking and Dagenham as their main case study. Carlos Villanueva Brandt’s studio set out to carefully redefine context and find ways to

of engagement

speculate on alternative forms of urban transformation, experimenting with new spatial configurations that include physical structures, situations and strategies.

Takeshi Hayatsu’s studio worked closely with Grizedale Arts, an arts organisation based in the Lake District which directly engages with John Ruskin’s heritage and emphasises the use value for art.

Takeshi’s studio revisited the Arts and Crafts movement through the lens of the maker and self-builder in order to understand how it can still relevant today.

The three small studios offer a space for a focused discussion on architectural methodologies and contribute to a wider discussion amongst the larger peer group of first and second year students. This is supported by evening discussion, lectures and visits as well as a series of seminars and workshops. This year Jeremy Till’s seminar ‘The Future of the Architect’ discussed the role of the architect in relation to wider societal and cultural themes. Kim Trogal’s ‘The City’ seminar series provided an introduction to contemporary critical thinking on the phenomenon of the city.

Each seminar produced a written output which informed or critically reflected on the individual students’ work.

Running in parallel to all seminars and studio work is an exploration seminar with Liza Fior entitled ‘Not a Clean Slate: Observation is Proposition’. This drawing class and seminar ‘invites the students to start looking with intent and stop deferring the moment of design, by recognising that the very act of looking is loaded.

Describing is editing, revealing both how the land lies at a particular time and the filters you bring with you.’

The following pages showcase some of the work produced to illustrate and showcase the work of the studios and seminars, offering a diverse reflection on contemporary ‘Methodologies of Architectural engagement’.

60-61

Demonstration Neighbourhood Julia King

The huge changes that have swept the world economy since 1980s–globalisation, deregulation, the information-technology revolution and the associated expansion of trade, capital flows and global supply chains–has ensured that the “haves” would have more. And cities have played a central role as escalators for development linking economies with global markets to the backdrop of increasingly environmental and financial precarity. Architecture, or architects, have failed to respond to this growing inequality; furthermore it has been architecture itself which has been deeply complicit in entrenching and reproducing divisive hierarchies.

In order to respond to this condition the studio was underpinned by the four following principles: 1 When we engage with design as a process and not a thing, engagement becomes political 2 The myth of the creative genius questions the role of the architect as an ‘expert’, believing instead in networking and collaboration 3 Acknowledging that political ideology is spatial with material and physical properties, and thus the possibility for design itself as a form of revolution against current reality 4 Embracing the possibility for change encountered in existing conditions.

Studio 2

The site for our response was the London borough of Barking and Dagenham, an area that has changed greatly. The borough has seen a shifting demographic –the white British population fell from 80% to 50% between 2001 and 2011. It has lost half its social housing stock and has 50 times more people on the housing waiting list than properties available. It is one of is the top 10 most-deprived boroughs in England and simultaneously is feeling the effect of the London housing boom with local houses prices rocketing by almost 40% since 2008. All this has led to anxiety and resentment exploited by the BNP and more recently by UKIP. However, there is room for optimism: in what is believed to be the first initiative of its time the council bought 100% of a private development which it will rent out to private tenants at below the market rate whilst still producing a surplus for the council. It has also set up an independent company, Barking and Dagenham Reside, which will market and manage the block on the councils behalf.

Within this context the aspiration of the studio was to engage with processes that do not draw expertise from one single discipline, but operate across disciplinary boundaries with creative positions from art, architecture, public engagement, town planning, and even finance.

Matthew Brown proposed a ‘Public Bank of Barking and Dagenham’ and explored the kind of architecture that might result

Methodologies

from a new way of financing housing development [fig.6]. With a resurgence of interest in town planning, from within architecture, and reacting to innovations like Reside by the council Michael Kennedy’s project explored the extent of council owned land as an asset and how it is currently managed. Through a – publicly available – list of council land and property holdings Michael was able to map all the 153 green spaces managed by the Albion ward, equating to a yearly spend of £138,352. His proposal...”The Civic Development Bureau sits between the public and private sector ...[and] would focus on the tricky small sites in the built up area of Barking and Dagenham. An arm’s length organisation, the Civic Development Bureau would be able to make use of the councils land registry and borrow money for development.”

In order to explore the spatial and social implications of the Civic Development Bureau Michael explored through models alternative, and often piecemeal, possibilities [fig. 1].

Joseph Hamblin working more like an ethnographer delved into a study of the value of local expertise. Through multiple recordings over a period of time he developed a portrait of a typical street in the post-war estate, Beacontree and the residents who live there. His methodology was varied and creative: one of the techniques was to produce a portrait of an interviewees home as a way of getting a second interview [fig. 2].

Anouska O’Keefe and her project on the decline of the pubs in the Borough also used alternative techniques of engagement to record and explore possibilities as imagined by residents. Making an animation about the myths and factual explanations for the decline of pubs in the area she projected this animation on the side of a vacant pub [fig. 3]. For both Joseph and Anouska the method of engagement was the project but also set

of engagement

1

2

the groundwork for architectural propositions rooted in local knowledge.

Students in the studio were encourage to generate work for a real, physical site context as a lead in for their main MA project; and engage with local social and economic conditions, but also local stakeholders. Conor Morris began the year exploring and then mapping high streets in the borough documenting shop types, ethnographic data and spatial conditions through one-on-one surveys with independent retailers. He took his study and preliminary thoughts for a high street project to various people and institutions working in the borough. Following a meeting with Jon Cruddas, the MP for Dagenham and Rainham, and then David Harley, Head of Planning and Regenera-

62-63

3

tion, Conor was offered the possibility of taking over the Dagenham Heathway car park as a site. This way his studio project set the foundations for his main project where he will explore unionisation, social value and skills services in what is currently called ‘The Workshop’ located within the car park aimed at residents and shop owners [fig. 4].

Similarly Sebastian Benson embedded himself in a real project. During early mapping exercises Sebastian met Stephen Addison who runs an organization called Box Up Crime, a social enterprise that uses boxing to engage with young people caught up in gangs.

Crafting a relationship with Box Up Crime Sebastian started developing ideas, options and schematics for a more permanent boxing gym. Explaining the possibility of meanwhile uses and section 106 requirements to Stephen became critical to Sebastian’s project as an enabler which eventually ended up producing a scoping document for how to use a vacant building owned by the council.

A project which looks like it will get permission and funding, again setting the

Studio 3

scene for a long term, live, real project in the borough that Sebastian will take forward next year.

The ambition of the studio was to produce outcomes which include full-scale interventions, prototypes and structures but also co-design programmes and design guides. Gemma Holyoak began her project by researching every single planning application made in 2015/2016 for minor works in two wards. She then categorized them into typical conditions as per census figures and researched individual cases.

By doing this she could see how, for example, a joint planning application where the intention was to increase the density of people living there resulting in tight, substandard conditions. However, the planning was rejected due to aesthetic considerations. The result is a planning paradigm by which, “the [guidance] is subjective and understanding whether your adjustment complies is not so easy. This gives planners flexibility in deciding whether to award planning permission or not.” She followed up with extensive research on planning

Methodologies

4

rules, how to bend them and reactive reports aimed at councils to encourage community led planning. Using a single residential street – Raydon’s Road – as the site for her final proposal Gemma’s project, ‘Streets Ahead’, proposes a planning model that, among other things, unlocks Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) from the micro-developments put forward through joint applications and proposes that this fund is directly spent by the people putting in that planning application [fig. 5].

Krishan Pilch’s project proposes the creation of the ‘Office of the Civil Curator’, a public servant responsible for assessing needs and opportunities, across social, economic, cultural and education within the Borough. His proposal mapped out, and even created a code of conduct outlining this role and

of engagement

5

64-65

6

the kind of potential impacts that could be seen. Tzvetelina Iltcheva, interested in community assets, proposed a time banking scheme extending an extending a community asset.

Each of the projects challenged the relationship between architecture and participation, all too often an empty theatre performed by representatives of unaccountable managers. Instead resident associations (in the form of joint planning applications), shop unions (The Workshop), community organizations (Box Up Crime), and households can be given democratic decision-making authority.

Finally I want to reflect on what is the role of the university in social change?

Specifically, what is the role of our discipline and profession, architecture and urban planning? An intellectual commitment is insufficient – we must be in opposition to regressive forms of power rather than seeking its patronage. Inspired by the work of the Yale professor and architect, Keller Easterling: we must be double

Studio 3

agents who understand and are embedded in systems of power thus able to fight, challenge and importantly change the terms of engagement from within.

I would like to thanks Nicolas Herringer for running a making workshop where we collectively built a structure within the R-Urban site in Newham [fig. 7]. Also to Andreas Lang and Melanie Dodd for their incredible support throughout the year, and finally our Barking and Dagenham expert: Verity-Jane Keefe, for sharing her unparalleled knowledge.

Tutor: Julia King. Students:, Sebastian Benson, Matthew Brown, Joseph Hamblin, Gemma Holyoak, Lena Iltcheva, Michael Kennedy, Conor Morris, Anouska O’Keeffe, Krishan Pilch

Methodologies

7

of engagement

66-67

Disentangling Space Carlos Villanueva Brandt

I DISENTANGLING SPACE Before inserting anything into the city, we need to establish what the context for this insertion might be. Although we tend to culturally acknowledge and accept the complexity of the city’s context, we rarely apply the same reasoning when we set out to transform it. We, as users, recognise the effects that, let’s say, groups, trends, religion, terrorism and crime have on our experience of the city, but architects and city-makers rarely include these factors into their design equations. This raises the question: why not? If these factors truly affect our experience of space, we need to find ways of incorporating them into our designs.

II

REASSESSING CONTEXT, DISENTANGLING SPACE Learning from the city, we experimented with the representation and inclusion of the city’s more imponderable factors.

We deployed a random approach to the city that focused on an arbitrary city block and, concurrently, on a salient urban condition. This process took us to Somers Town, Portobello Road, Tottenham, Highbury, King’s Cross, the Barbican, Seven Sisters Road and Soho. We began by asking ourselves what makes up the reality of these spaces? We then proceeded to disentangle these spaces by identifying the physical and social variables that make up the true context of the city.

Studio 1

III

In Soho, Jessica Hartshorne used a film of a ‘girls’ night out’, combined with the description of a friend’s nocturnal experiences, to unravel the complexity of Soho’s social structures. A more pragmatic look at the current transformation of Soho, uncovered the hidden existence of an eternally resistant sex industry.

Changes of legislation, mechanisms of control and gender politics clearly form an integral part of the Soho space.

Shamiso Sithole’s careful observation of specific sites in Tottenham, informed by the use of a panoramic film, brought to light the convoluted interconnected network of legislative, political, economic and cultural structures that control this area. From the informality of a group of construction workers, waiting outside a Wickes store, to the formality of the historical social troubles of the Broadwater Farm Estate, her disentangling of space led to interminable tangles of physical and social structures [fig. 1].

In contrast to the gritty reality of Tottenham, Hanelore’s focus on the fictions of Notting Hill, encapsulated in the cinematic adventures of Paddington Bear [fig. 2] and in the brooding black-andwhite music videos that have used Trellick Tower as a backdrop, soon revealed the way that fiction intrinsically colours our perception of space.

Methodologies

TRANSFORMING CONTEXT CONSTRUCTING SPACE City space, with its formal, social, cultural, economic and political factors, undoubtedly encompasses physical and social structures, built forms and situations. But can these qualities be adopted in the making of architectural space?

After disentangling the composite nature of the city’s space, we continued to experiment. Our aim was not to produce a singular and unified project, but instead, we set out to construct spatial experiments that would continue to question the composition of experienced space. There was a refreshing variety in the approaches that were taken to construct space in the chosen parts of London and the three projects mentioned above, in Soho, Tottenham and Notting Hill, stand out for their inventiveness and clarity of approach.

In Tottenham, Shamiso Sithole’s dexterous manipulation of planning, strategic, governmental and legal documents proposed a very real and clear spatial transformation. Her direct involvement with individuals and agents on the site, including a stay at an airbnb in the Broadwater Farm Estate, identified the types of networks that would have to form part of any successful transformation of Tottenham.

Through a continuous struggle with the abstract and philosophical nature of fiction, Hanelore Dumitrache experimented with cinematic techniques, choreography and notation, but eventually opted for an approach that constructed space by the literal use of fiction. By writing a number of descriptive stories, she created a set of clearly defined spatial constructs and, simultaneously, proposed an urban strategy that formalised specific existing fictional spaces in Notting Hill by exploiting the mechanisms and procedures that are used in the listing of buildings.

of engagement

In her endeavours to construct space, Jessica Hartshorne chose to take a personal approach in which she situated herself in a critical way, as a woman with a feminist perspective, in the exploitative world of Soho’s sex trade.

Looking closely at the modus operandi of the sexual establishments, she devised a series of critiques and proposals that directly engaged with the physical spaces and the social interactions that make up Soho [fig. 5, 6, 7].

Produced in a short period of time and alongside the work done in the other areas of London, these projects constitute a successful experiment that challenges the accepted notions of what makes up space. Disentangling space and constructing space have, hopefully, set up a continuous process of enquiry.

Students: Hanelore Dumitrache, Ciara Fitzpatrick, Jessica Hartshorne, David Kay, Rhea Martin, Chirag Patel, Luiz Rocha Pereira Queiroz Conceicao, Shamiso Sithole. Thanks to: Alex Warnock-Smith, Saskia Lewis, Mark Prizeman, Jessica Pappalardo

68-69

1 Shamiso Sithole: To be able to refer directly to urban legal and political structures is an empowering tool for a spatial practitioner. Filtering the non-events of the everyday through a lens of spatial legislation is a method of unpacking the conditions we take as given and beginning to locate opportunities to intervene at a structural level.

Engagement takes place at different scales.

I chose to look at Wickes, in a very urban and public location; and the Broadwater Farm Estate, an enclosed residential area. Applying an architectural understanding of scale to my methods of engagement I was able to experience the two sites in depth in different ways. While my physical presence on the estate was key, a wider lens and even detachment from the pure physicality of the city allowed me to reconstruct the systems that had shaped its there now and what

Studio 1

2 could be.

My final proposition,‘Citizens Bureau’ brings together my learning from Tottenham. The notion of residency as an inhabited view from within, and re-appropriating of existing systems and structures to create new institutions with spatial justice and ethics at the core of their practice.

Methodologies

Hanelore Dumitrache: Paddington Bear meets High Rise – seemingly completely different. When investigated through the lens of a camera and in conjunction with fiction, they start to tell a similar story: a tale of resistance against culture and politics; their differences fuse together and become a prop for disclosure.

My journey started by acknowledging that fiction is part of daily life. Each event taking place inside the city has fiction embedded in its roots. The biggest challenge for me wasn’t necessarily highlighting fiction in the city space, but rather how to use fiction as a powerful tool in either space-making or perception of space. My disentangling of space through mapping choreography in space according to cinematic productions has made me think of the correlation between spaces that have fiction imposed onto them and spaces that generate fiction. This in

of engagement

return has generated a lot of questions: Can fiction create space or change it? Is fiction essential in the creation of space or is it something we simply accept as space-makers? During these experiments I’ve realised that space is not only a tool for city-making, but also a filter of myths and generator of fiction; it can become a powerful tool for resistance and a platform for shifting perception.

Perhaps space-making can go beyond the traditional physical boundaries and can become a social and experiential process. By speculating on certain intangible aspects of past, present and future events, the existing context can be transformed and perceived differently.

70-71

4

3 Jessica Harstone: I went to Soho as a 23 year old woman. A young architect, naively to disentangle space. What I did not expect was to become personally engaged with the space through my age, gender and profession. I used my femininity to break down the space of Soho and what it truly meant. The exposed and hidden physical realities, from a young female point of view. Space became personal and I expressed this through the choice of colour, which to me, expresses the female in Soho. I learnt that space is intricate and multifaceted but individually identifiable by everyone. Therefore we can each position ourselves within space and form a relationship with it.

5

Studio 1

Methodologies

of engagement

72-73

Reworking Arts and Crafts Takeshi Hayatsu

The Arts and Crafts movement was essentially a social reforming act, which responded to specific political and economic situations in the Victorian era.

Now, in the age of globalisation, climate change and advancement of digital technology, perhaps it is relevant to revisit the movement, in order to understand its original intentions to change society, its relevance to our lives today, and how we can best rework it for the future.

The conventional building procurement routes in the UK separate the roles of designer, maker and user, in the name of professionalism. The studio’s primary concern is to initiate the alternative working methods and strategies, which encourage the participation of non-professional people in the building process, as an educational means and a forum for collaboration where the boundaries between designer, maker and user become blurred.

The studio continued the working ethos and methodologies established in the annual summer workshop at Central Saint Martins called Constructing in Detail run by myself and Greg Ross, in which postgraduate architecture students work collectively in the workshop to learn and experiment with building materials and technologies. It is about learning through making with your own hands, combined with and, aided by, digital 3D modeling and CNC cutting technologies. The intention of the studio

Studio 2

is to establish an initiative for the production of the workshop to be used and implemented in the real site for real people outside of the university campus as a permanent installation.

We engaged with Grizedale Arts in Coniston, Lake District, a charitable arts organisation run by director Adam Sutherland with a strong philosophy emphasising a use value of art. The brief was to develop various propositions centred on Grizedale Arts’ emerging project called The Road conceived for the John Ruskin Museum in Coniston. John Ruskin once taught at the University of Oxford and initiated the self-building project known as The Ruskin Road in 1873, to improve the rough road between the disconnected villages of Hinksey. An army of undergraduate Oxford students took on the building work while Ruskin organised a series of on-site lectures.

It was Ruskin’s idea that the building project doubled up as an educational forum. The Road project by Grizedale Arts revisits Ruskin’s road experiment to rethink the public realm outside the Ruskin Museum.

Nine first-year postgraduate architecture students developed various strategies and small scale interventions for the Coniston, each exploring ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement and situating them on a larger conceptual road connecting Grizedale Arts with the Coniston Institute. The work culminated

Methodologies

of engagement

74-75

in a public event in March 2017 when the students’ work was exhibited in Ruskin’s Coniston Institute accompanied by a series of workshops, presentations and a Village Table – an elaborate dinner hosted

by Grizedale for local collaborators.

The students’ propositions range from a local bus stop combined with a sauna and a hearth, a community oven with a series of charcoal products, and a walkers’ kiosk for tourists leading up to the copper mines in the fell, Old Man of Coniston. Together they form a new vision for a larger landscape of the place, addressing the current social and economic issues locally, nationally and globally.

The students’ propositions and experiments will directly inform this year’s Constructing in Detail summer workshop, setting the brief for a collective build with the entire cohort of first-year students. The outcomes from the workshop will form the next step in an ongoing collaboration with Grizedale Arts and the Ruskin Museum, seeing the incremental fabrication of The Road leading up to its completion in 2019 marking John Ruskin’s 200th anniversary.

1 2 3

1

2

Model by Guillaume Choquard Drawing by Frederick Wiltshire Drawing by Alastair Mitchell

Previous page: Amy O’Shaughnessy presenting her rammed earth cricket pavillion at the Coniston Institute.

Tutor: Takeshi Hayatsu. Students: Billy Adams, Guillaume Choquard, Alastair Mitchell, Amy O’Shaughnessy, Jonathan Shmulevitch, Lucy Stapylton-Smith, Simon Wells, Daniel Wilkins, Frederick Wiltshire. SupporteRS: Grizedale Arts, Ruskin Museum.

Studio 2

3

Methodologies

of engagement

76-77

Studio 2

Methodologies

of engagement

78-79

Not A Clean Slate Liza Fior

Not A Clean Slate is the drawing class that points out that an education in architecture does not begin one autumn day – given that the student has been subject to someone else’s designed world from the first fuzzy image of a soffit or window seen at birth.

The seminar invites the students to start looking with intent and stop deferring the moment of design, by recognising that the very act of looking is loaded. Describing is editing, revealing both how the land lies at a particular time and the filters you bring with you.

Developing your own manner of looking and drawing is the means to circumvent the episodic nature of the unit system and of imposed, half-learnt techniques (whether from tutor or office).

Exercises included reflections on the history of the asylum, drawing half-remembered spaces, drawing on remembered spaces with the choreographer Gaby Agis, reading Foucault’s lecture on heterotopias, and – lastly – interrogating the claims made by architects for their buildings by looking at the Central Saint Martins building itself.

Stanton Williams Architects (whom originally designed the building) state in their website that ‘Our concept provides an architecture that inspires, a series of spaces that aim to liberate and make visible the energy… we call this shared space … wide bridges ... to draw different disciplines together, students

Seminar

talking, sharing experiences, seeing each other work.’

Students explored the college building to test the claims made and then to hold these claims to account by enacting them via a memorable crit with Alex Sharpe from Fine Art. The 26 students each proposed their own adjustments to make the existing college building do the things claimed for it.

They took in the adjustments which had already been made, notably the inspirational work of the library team and their creation of a carefully attenuated series of spaces – a library as both a “place to be messy” and a place of quiet retreat.

To generalise, the 26 adjustments proposed for the Central Saint Martins building are designs for base camps, promontories, hides, studies, places of safety, means for appropriation of balustrades, M&E units and window reveals.

Though there is a pathos about their modesty, they also, almost, amount to a proposal for a very different institution, designed with a deliberate unevenness.

But equally there are the pervasive proposals which recognise that management and use can be transformative.

And touchingly enough, in the finding out and the making of places to work beyond the spaces allocated to the Spatial Design programme, the students did encounter other disciplines and others’ knowledge.

Methodologies

of engagement

80-81

2

4

1

2

1 2 3,4

Seminar

Adjustment by Michael Kennedy Adjustment by Anouska O’Keeffe and Rhea Sonia Martin Adjustment by David Kay

Methodologies

of engagement

82-83

Spaces that become what you make of them Areas for learning unaffected by a terse definition of time An opportunity to look inwards for ideas Your own cushion in order to occupy any found space Spaces which do not feel like an institution A place to make mistakes and encourage failure A desk to call your own – even if it’s a foldable one Seed bombs, flag poles, rope ladders and fresh air Close distance learning for those too shy to open the door to someone else’s classroom Places to make mistakes The outside and will let the inside out A desk for each student Places of retreat with big vistas

14 A room for an archive in every department 15 Unbookable non-spaces, not drawn on plan, but usable if you spot them 16 Many spaces that ‘might be otherwise’ 1 7 A hole in the fourth wall so students can learn without signing up for a course 18 A mess 19 Autonomous zones 20 A genuine system for collaboration 21 A space for respite from the din coming from the front 22 Spaces to hide in plain sight 23 Spaces of grandeur for intimate and focused work 24 A periscope for every desk 25 Students who share their work and ideas with each other 26 Individual isolated spaces for the introverts to get their interdisciplinary fix

10 11 12 13

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

26 Adjustments. The new CSM will include

Watts Chapel Takeshi Hayatsu and Greg Ross Unit 3 is a six-week long summer workshop for the first year M Arch students run by Takeshi Hayatsu and Greg Ross at Central Saint Martins; a module component for the accreditation of RIBA Part 2 qualification. The intention of the workshop is to focus on construction in details, engaging with the practical and pragmatic aspects of architecture by making and building a structure in 1:1 scale collectively during the summer when the school’s workshop facilities are quieter. william Lethaby and the Arts & Crafts

This year, in Unit 3, we continued to investigate themes from 19th century Arts and Crafts movement introduced in the previous Unit 3 Summer Workshop Terracotta Yatai. We looked at the Arts and Crafts movement through the work of two main characters, both practitioners and teachers: W.R. Lethaby, architect and first principal (1896-1911) of the Central School for Arts and Crafts (later to become Central Saint Martins) and the artist Mary Fraser-Tytler who, with her students at Compton Pottery, designed and built Watts Chapel between 1896 and 1898.

Lethaby, unlike some of his Arts and Crafts contemporaries, was open to engaging with new production methods and skills, and sought, through his teaching and practice, to dissolve the distinction between artistic (intellectual) and production activity – a separation he viewed as unhelpful when trying to produce a well-designed and well-made piece of work. Inspired by this notion

of giving value to production, Unit 3 students were challenged to not only engage with production as part of the making process, but wherever possible to actively design their production process and tools. This gave rise to an iteratively designed clay tile stamping tool, multiples of which were made using computer numerical controlled (CNC) cutting of plywood.

Lethaby, his practice and pedagogic ideas, were introduced via an inspection of objects from the Lethaby Archive held in the Central Saint Martins Museum and Study Collection. Coupled with this visit to the archive was a workshop on object-based learning, led by Sarah Campbell, Curator at the Museum & Study Collection, where ceramic objects were selected, inspected and discussed from the point of view of ideas and information embedded in the physical objects themselves without students’ prior knowledge of a work’s title, authorship or other contextual information.

MATERIAL

Unit 3 seeks to re-engage students with the physical properties of an object and the materials from which it is constructed. The current reliance on virtual three-dimensional modeling and rendering in the contemporary architectural students’ design process, can, in this weightless virtual world, result in the lack of understanding of the physical properties of materials and the practical aspects of constructing with them.

Through the design and making process students engage with a material – the

Construction in Detail

Methodologies

reality of heaviness and how it behaves over time and under certain temperatures and conditions.

This process of engaging with a material or physical object was introduced early in the unit in various ways: through an early site visit and survey of Watts Chapel in Surrey; a factory visit to Keymer, a clay roof tile manufacturer in Ewhurst, Surrey; a test firing – adapting lessons learnt from the factory visit and producing clay test pieces in the college’s ceramic workshop; and the object-based learning workshop at the Central Saint Martins Museum and Study Collection.

Clay is one of the most primitive and basic building materials. It has been to hand since the beginning of human civilisation. It is a natural material, extracted from the ground and transformed through firing. Its tactile quality is deeply rooted in human psychology. It can be said that clay is the most fundamental material for building because it is accessible to everyone. The unit engaged with the college’s ceramic department and collaborated with the students to work with clay as a focus of the material experimentation and construction.

Physical Copy

Architectural students are accustomed to studying building precedents in various ways; at the most superficial level through the collecting of images, for example Pinterest boards, to more detailed analytical methods which might involve drawing and scale modelling. In Unit 3 we asked students to analyse and engage with an existing precedent physically by making a re-interpreted copy of a building – in this case Watts Chapel – at a scale where consideration of the detailed construction and assembly is required.

The unit started its intense programme by visiting and surveying Watts Chapel, followed by a visit to clay roof tile manufacturer Keymer’s production

of engagement

factory in Ewhurst, Surrey, to understand the traditional clay roof tile production techniques as well as the contemporary mass production line and the associated latest technology.

Students were asked to develop their own roofing component prototypes responding to specific functions in scale 1:1. This was about understanding the material properties and exploring its possibilities, as well as learning practical aspects of waterproofing and surface water management. The prototypes were tested prior to the mass production, culminating in a group construction assembling the individual pieces into one structure, a 1:4 scale reinterpretation of Watts Chapel.

By shifting the scale of the original chapel and its roofing tiles, together with transforming the original masonry structure into the plywood sandwich panel construction recycled from the discarded materials from the previous degree show, the chapel became a small seating pavilion where people can gather in a circle under the clay tile roof.

Students: Tiffany Waddill, Jyothi Pillay, Marc Hargreaves, Tom Atkinson, Hwa Yeong Lee, Nicholas Woodford, William Guyang Zhou, Laurence Neal, Anna Fil, Fernanda De Almeida Castelo Branco, Dong Liu, Zhan Wang.

TUTORS: Takeshi Hayatsu, Gregory Ross.

Guest Critics: Nigel Dyer, Wienerberger; Mara Weiss; Keita Tajima.

SupportED BY: Keymer Tiles, Surrey. Alluvial clay from Broomfleet; CSM Museum and Study Collection: Sarah Campbell, Curator; CSM Ceramic department: Tony Quinn, Simeon Featherstone, Andy Allum; 3D Small Workshops: Billy Dickinson, Johnny Wilkinson, Ricky Brawn; 3D Large Workshops: Pete Smithson, Mark Laban and Catriona Robertson; CSM Estates: Joe Plume.

86-87

Construction in Detail

Methodologies

of engagement

88-89

Construction in Detail

Methodologies

of engagement

90-91

Staff biographies ANDREAS LANG is course leader of the M Arch and MA course in architecture at Central Saint Martins. He is co-founder of public works, a non-profit critical design practice that occupies the terrain between art, architecture and research. Working with an extended network of interdisciplinary collaborators, public works re-works spatial, social and economic opportunities towards citizen-driven development and improved civic life. The practice, set up in 2004, uses a range of approaches, including public events, campaigns, the development of urban strategies and participatory art and architecture projects across all scales.

Andreas’ work has been exhibited widely in architectural exhibitions such as the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2012, the Change British Architecture exhibition at RIBA in 2013, and he was included in the Guardian’s 2012 portrait of key players in British Architecture. In an art context, he has exhibited in established venues such as the Serpentine Gallery, Folkestone Triennial, the British Art Show and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. He has taught architecture at numerous institutions since 2001 including the Architectural Association, Sheffield University, Royal College of Art and Umeå School of Architecture in Sweden.

Besides his overall responsibilities as course leader Andreas taught the final year Independent Projects (see p. 14).

MEL DODD is an architect and academic. She is Programme Director of Spatial Practices at Central Saint Martins. Her teaching, practice and research all focus on the relationships between social and political infrastructures and built environments. Mel’s pedagogical practice demonstrates the ‘joined-up’ relationship between teaching and practice explored in her book Live Projects: Designing with People published by RMIT Press in 2012). She is a registered architect and has been an ongoing

Appendix

collaborator with muf architecture/art since 1997 establishing a Melbourne based affiliated practice, muf_aus, in 2005. She was a contributory author to the practice’s publication This is What We Do: A Muf Manual and has been responsible for innovative projects in the public realm in both London and Melbourne, working with local government on social policy initiatives for public space, including Shared Ground for Southwark Council, 1999-2001, and Do-It-Yourself Park for Mornington Shire Council, Melbourne in 2008.

Mel is an Architecture Commissioner for Jersey, and regularly sits on design review panels, international juries and awards including the 2011 Australian National Architecture Awards and the 2013 GAGA Awards. She has curated major events and exhibitions, including the 2010 RAIA National Architecture Conference in Sydney – extra/ordinary – and the international exhibition Architectural Urbanism: Melbourne Seoul: Seoul Melbourne at the K-ARTS Gallery in Seoul in 2013. Mel has taught architecture at a range of institutions including University of Cambridge, Royal College of Art, London Metropolitan University, and RMIT University in Melbourne.

Besides her overall responsibilities as Programme Director Mel taught the final year Independent Projects (see p. 14) Liza Fior is a founding partner of muf architecture/art. The work of the practice negotiates between the built and social fabric, between public and private. muf authored Villa Frankenstein, the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2010, which took Ruskin and Venice itself as a means to examine how detail can inform strategy. Awards for muf projects include the 2008 European Prize for Public Space (a first for the UK) for a new “town square” for Barking, East London.

Co-author of This is What We Do: a muf manual, Liza’s research continues to be entwined into

every project. Previously a visiting professor at Yale, Liza explores – with her studio – an alternative legacy for London’s Olympic site, building on her role as an LDA design advisor.

Liza leads the first year seminar entitled Not a Blank Slate (see p. 60)

TAKESHI HAYATSU is a Japanese architect practising in London.

Takeshi worked at David Chipperfield Architects, Haworth Tompkins and 6a architects, where he was a Project Director for 11 years, before founding Hayatsu Architects in 2016. He led 6a’s critically acclaimed projects including Raven Row in Spitalfields, the South London Gallery in Peckham and Cowan Court, Churchill College in Cambridge. His research and practice focuses on craft, material, building techniques and self-build. www.hayatsuarchitects.com

Takeshi lead the first year studio entitled Re-working Arts and Crafts (see p. 72) and co-teaches the Construction in Detail unit with Greg Ross (p. 84) Julia King is a Venezuelan-British architect and an urban researcher at LSE Cities. Her work is currently part of a group show in the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale that proposes new designs for homes in response to contemporary live-work scenarios.

Her research is concerned with housing, sanitation infrastructure, urban planning, and participatory design processes. At LSE Cities she has contributed to Super-diverse streets: Economies and spaces of urban migration in UK cities, and is currently working on initiatives in India. She has won numerous awards including a Holcim Award 2011, SEED Award for Excellence in Public Interest Design 2014 and Emerging Woman Architect of the Year 2014. She has taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, AA and the CASS, where she recently completed her PhD.

Julia leads the first year studio entitled Demonstration Neighbourhoods (see p. 60)

Carlos Villanueva BrandT has been Diploma 10 Unit Master at the AA since 1986 and was awarded the RIBA President’s Silver Medal Tutor Prize in 2000.

The work of Carlos Villanueva Brandt Architecture, formed in 1984, has been published widely and exhibited internationally. He is a founder member of NATØ (Narrative Architecture Today), has taught in Housing and Urbanism in the AA Graduate School, was visiting Lecturer/Professor at the Royal College of Art and is currently a Visiting Professor at Tokyo University of the Arts. He has been a lecturer, critic and examiner at various international schools, has written numerous essays and the book London +10 published in 2010.

Carlos leads the first year studio entitled Disentangling Space (see p. 68).

MATHEW LEUNG is a designer and maker. He is a founding member of the Turner-Prize winning art, architecture and design collective Assemble and has led on projects including The Cineroleum, a pilot project for the re-use of the UK’s 4,000 empty petrol stations; Lina Bo Bardi: Together, an installation exploring the work of the Italian-born Brazilian architect hosted at the British Council in London and at numerous venues across the world; and Blackhorse Workshop, an open-access, public workshop in Waltham Forest, where he is also a member of the board of directors. Mathew studied at University Cambridge and University College London and has wide-ranging research interests, contributing to publications such as RIBA Journal, Performative Urbanism: Generating and Designing Urban Space and Don’t Get a Job, Make a Job. For his thesis, Oriental Orientalism in Japan: The Case of Yokohama Chinatown, he was awarded the RIBA President’s Silver Medal. Mathew has lectured on design and build practice, and designing in a time of austerity, at cultural and educational institutions across the world. He has been a visiting critic for Cambridge, Manchester and Chelsea schools of architecture, has taught at the Bartlett Summer School and

at the Cass School of Architecture with Cass Cities, Spatial Planning and Urban Design unit.

Mathew, together with Maria, lead the cross-course Making Week programme and designed the Degree Show setting. (see p. 50).

MARIA LISOGORSKAYA is a founding director of the Turner-Prize winning art, architecture and design collective Assemble, working across the differing scales of immediate hands-on material prototyping, architecture and urban strategy. Following Assemble’s initial projects, she has led on research into policy development of affordable workspace in London, establishing a publicly accessible workshop and fabrication venue.

Maria has subsequently been developing alternative approaches to housing development in the UK and abroad, focusing on affordable, self-determinant and collective living. She has lectured and delivered workshops internationally, and has been awarded the Winston Churchill Fellowship to research collective building projects in US and China.

Maria, together with Mathew, lead the cross-course Making Week programme and designed the Degree Show setting.

JEREMY TILL is Head of Central Saint Martins and Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of the Arts.

Previously he was Dean of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Westminster and before that Head of Architecture at the University of Sheffield.

As an educator he is committed to the wider role that art and design can play in society. By background he is an architect, best known for his work with Sarah Wigglesworth, including the much publicised house and office, 9 Stock Orchard Street, which won the RIBA Sustainability Prize as well as being featured in the first series of Grand Designs.

In recent years he has turned his attention to writing, looking at the social and political aspects of architecture and design. His books include Flexible Housing, written with Tatjana Schneider, his main statement of intellectual

and practical intent Architecture Depends, published by MIT Press, and Spatial Agency Other Ways of Doing Architecture, written with Nishat Awan and Tatjana Schneider. All three won the RIBA President’s Award for Research – a unique sequence of success for this prestigious prize. Most recently he worked on a major EU-funded research project on scarcity and creativity, resulting in the book The Design of Scarcity.

Outside of practice and academia, he has curated the British Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale, co-curated (with a team from Central Saint Martins) the UK Pavilion at the 2013 Shenzhen Biennale and participated in the 2013 Lisbon Triennale.

ROSA ROGINA is an architect, exhibition and publication designer with an MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art. After practising at MVRDV, Grimshaw and Farshid Moussavi Architecture, she is now working for the London Festival of Architecture while working on an MA in Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Rosa is also teaching critical theory seminars on the M Arch course at Central Saint Martins.

Rosa taught critical theory seminars as part of the final year independent project.

GREGORY ROSS is a qualified architect who has been working in the UK since 1996. Most recently he worked with Peter Beard Landroom on landscape, urban design, and architecture projects primarily on the Thames marshes in east London. At Landroom, Greg was project architect on the RSPB’s Marshland Discovery Zone which won a 2011 RIBA Award and was shortlisted for the Stephen Lawrence Prize in 2011.

Prior to this he worked with Pierre d’Avoine Architects on a range of architectural projects, exhibitions and publications. Before joining Central Saint Martins, he taught a design studio at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Architecture.

Greg, together with Takeshi, is teaching the Construction in Detail course (see p. 84).

92-93

Practitioner-in-Residence

The Spatial Practices programme at Central Saint Martins is delighted to welcome Markus Bader from Raumlabor Berlin as our Practitioner in Residence during the academic year 2017–2018.

Markus has been invited to develop a new project with students and staff without a set brief or any preconceived agenda. Markus will draw from his long experience with raumlabor, a group of architects and urban designers based in Berlin, Germany. Raumlabor began working on the issues of contemporary architecture and urbanism in 1999.

Markus Bader is a co-founder of raumlabor and professor in Architecture at Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK). He studied architecture in Berlin and London, graduating from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) in 1996. With raumlabor he builds relational situations between space, social action and political frameworks. His work spans from urban strategies, like the activation concept for Tempelhof airfield to performative and artistic insertions into existing urban contexts, like the fountain house in Montreal. In the academic field, he filled the position of Guest Professor at VSUP Prague (Architecture Research Studio), Peter Behrens School of Architecture in Düsseldorf and Kassel University (urban practice). He has been Professor in Architecture at the University of the Arts, Berlin since 2016.

Appendix

Markus will develop his residency around three themes: Public space, Exploration and Situation Public space Is a space of interaction. As space can be described as a product of social interaction, public space can be understood as a space that is coproduced between people, that creates the public and an action.

Exploration To start out and explore. discover the situation and the moment you are in and let the work evolve in reciprocal feedbacks between the work and the context. being curious and open.

Situation Situation is more than just a place, it includes time, presence, individualities, difference, weather, moods. it’s a combination of multiple layers and allows for complex readings.

Possible outcomes A public social action, set in a space that is co-produced, physically as well as socially. The setting of a discursive dinner in a place in London. three days preparation, one evening of being public. co-producing it together.

94-95

Our collaboration with Knight Frank and the Spatial Practices Prizes We are proud to introduce Knight Frank as our Programme Sponsor for the Spatial Practices Degree Show. We would like to sincerely thank them for their support across the Degree Show exhibitions of all three courses within the Spatial Practices programme: BA Architecture and M Arch Architecture / MA Architecture Cities and Innovation and MA Narrative Environments.

Knight Frank is a global property company which operates across 60 countries with its headquarters in London. Their passion for understanding and supporting the human aspect of property and nurturing future talent in the sector has led to this exciting collaboration, which is in its first year.

As part of this new collaboration we have initiated three Spatial Practices Prizes, sponsored by Knight Frank, which will be awarded to an outstanding student graduating from each course and will be celebrated at a prize-giving during the Degree Show in June.

Appendix

“ We are really delighted to welcome Knight Frank as the new Programme Sponsor for our Degree Shows this year.

We share a fascination for the forces that shape the city around us, and in how we can produce engaging and generous spaces and places for people to live in.

We have used this opportunity to initiate a series of Spatial Practices Prizes, and our students and staff are excited to celebrate excellence in our graduates, in collaboration with Knight Frank.”

Mel Dodd, Programme Director, Spatial Practices “This is a very important collaboration for Knight Frank and we are committed to supporting the programme. It gives the students a platform to showcase their evident talent and this year has produced some fantastic results. The Spatial Practices Prizes are a token of recognition for the work that has gone into the installations and I hope it will be an experience to remember for all that take part.”

Andrew Groocock, Regional Partner, Knight Frank

96-97

Central Saint Martins Spatial Practices Programme: M Arch Architecture MA Architecture: Cities and Innovation Editor: Andreas Lang Subeditor: Teleri Lloyd Jones Design: Villalba Lawson Central Saint Martins Spatial Practices M Arch: Architecture MA Architecture: Cities and Innovation Granary Building 1 Granary Square London N1C 4AA Follow us Facebook @CSM.M Arch Instagram @CSM_Architecture_M Arch Twitter @MArch_CSM