Unit 12 Catalogue 2012
12 Matthew Butcher Elizabeth Dow Jonathan Hill
Emily Farmer Jerome Flinders Patrick Hamdy Benjamin Harriman Ifigenia Liangi Yifei Song Gabriel Warshafsky
ISBN 978-0-9568445-8-3
9 780956 844583
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Wates House 22 Gordon Street London WC1H 0QB UK T. +44 (0)20 7679 7504 F. +44 (0)20 7679 4831 architecture@ucl.ac.uk www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk
Graham Burn Charlotte Knight Lulu Le Li Anders Strand L端hr Fiona Tan Cassandra Tsolakis Kieran Wardle Owain Williams Tim Yue
Unit 12 Catalogue 2012
A New Creative Myth Exceptional architects are exceptional storytellers. Denys Lasdun succinctly remarked that each architect must devise his or her own ‘creative myth’, a set of ideas, values and forms that are subjective but also have some objective basis that helps to make them believable. Lasdun concluded, ‘My own myth ... engages with history.’ Unit 12 has always looked to the past to imagine the future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it, revealing its relevance to the present.
Genius Loci A city also needs a creative myth, which allows its inhabitants to understand it collectively and imagine its future. A new creative myth generates a new genius loci (spirit of the place), an idea that originated in classical antiquity. It is made as much as it is found, formed from the fusion of new ideas, forms and spaces with those already in place. Edinburgh became the ‘Athens of the North’, and Rome is associated with la dolce vita, the good life. Sometimes one myth fades, and a new one must replace it for a city to prosper.
The Path to Istanbul This year, Unit 12 proposes a new creative myth for Istanbul: a city whose character, name and architecture have changed many times. Once the capital of the Roman Empire and later the Ottoman Empire, it is now the principal city of the Turkish republic. Istanbul’s most famous building, the Aya Sofya, exemplifies the city’s shifting image. First a church and then a mosque, it is now a museum representative of Ataturk’s secular republic. Located both in Europe and Asia, Turkey s future may lead towards the European Union or elsewhere.
Monumentality This year’s projects continue Unit 12’s developing interest in the contemporary meaning of the monument. A diverse range of influences, including social, political and meteorological, are allowed to play a part in the life and the material of the monument. Rather than static monuments, we have proposed buildings that are in a state of flux, caught between the monument and the ruin, the material and the immaterial. Mathew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
THE WRITERS’ HARBOUR Emily Farmer Centuries of contention have shaped the cityscape of modern Istanbul and made it dense with layers, an aggregated whole of fragments and gaps. The censorship of authors under a highly controversial article in the Turkish Penal Code creates corresponding gaps in Istanbulite society. The Writers’ Harbour is home to the European Writers’ Parliament, who advocate for persecuted writers within Turkey and help suppressed writers across Europe. By inhabiting the interstitial site of the city’s main foot-passenger port, the Harbour provides a safehouse for authors and their books and a means of promoting and distributing proscribed texts. The programme of the Writers’ Harbour serves as a basis to further develop a working methodology for an architecture produced through collage. Taking influence from the structure of the fragmented novel, the odd junctions, overlaps and gaps in the collaged drawings become the alternative routes and aberrant spatial sequence of the Harbour building, allowing an occupier to read multiple narratives, or explore multiple routes, through the spaces. Illustrative of the use of surrealism in storytelling, the broken and re-configured parts of building components in the collaged architecture often perform in unexpected ways. By manipulating the use of shifts in scale employed in novel writing, entrances and junctions may be concealed. Just as a reader interprets a story to find meaning, occupiers must be imaginative to deduce the architectural logic of the building. The Writers’ Harbour building, indicative of the conciliatory Parliament it accommodates, is truly open and accessible to those able to read its architectural language.
Emily Farmer
2
3
elfarmer@btinternet.com
Emily Farmer
4
5
elfarmer@btinternet.com
HYPOXIC COMPLEX Jerome Flinders Turkey was one of the few countries (with Afghanistan and the USA) not to ratify the Kyoto agreement in 1997 and it remains both culturally and politically apathetic, even aggressive, to climate change mitigation strategy. Although Turkey is an extreme case, it reflects wider difficulties governments and individuals face when trying to understand and respond to something that is an essentially undefined and sometimes contradictory problem. Despite myriad attempts to resolve this difficulty by acquiring ever more robust data, all data is meaningless until it is assimilated by an existing understanding of reality, call it cultural, religious or social. The hypoxic complex is a climate mitigation strategy that responds statistically whilst remaining aware of its spatial impact and spiritual connotations. By responding to the pre-scientific Islamic conservation system of hima (or inviolable zone) that dictates that any parcel of occupied land requires a counterpart piece of ‘inviolable, desolate or untouchable’ land to conserve the balance, the hypoxic landscape consists of a 500ha tract of barren dark-soiled oxygen-deficient marsh within Istanbul. By inhibiting the aerobic decomposition of organic matter embedded within it, it acts as a highly efficient carbon reservoir and climate change mitigator. In much the same way as the hypoxic landscape is the barren counterpart to the occupied city, chronic asthma makes its sufferers stand in pathological opposition to the ideal city dweller; although the city is both a cause and a trigger for attacks, asthmatics respond positively to the openness, low air pollution levels, lack of vegetation and lack of anxiety that are characteristic of the hypoxic landscape. In this way the landscape makes it ideal for a small population of asthmatics and supporting medical staff that monitor and maintain the marsh.
Jerome Flinders
6
7
jeromeflinders@gmail.com
Jerome Flinders
8
9
jeromeflinders@gmail.com
SALIFEROUS MONASTERY Patrick Hamdy Pilgrimage to shared sacred places in the Eastern Mediterranean is a significant expression of Christian and Muslim cohabitation, whereby the believer travels to shrines to accomplish an act of devotion. The urban/rural gap divides those who know of this current pilgrimage from those who possess no memory of the local tradition. These memories are nourishing a structural nostalgia, present-day representations and discourses about the past as a lost Eden. The Saliferous Monastery attempts to provide the city with a new urban pilgrimage site, incorporating an annual salt harvest, which will begin on an existing national holiday celebrated on 23rd April. Communicating the simultaneous act of harvesting salt and daily monastic rituals, results in moments of synchronized operation. The task of filling and transporting the salt in weighted salt buckets requires a minimum of two people in an attempt to force the monks to act collectively and implement a sense of unity. In traditional Turkish spirituality, decay and ruination signify the endurance of nature and submission to the passage of time, in this case reflecting the life cycle of monastic establishment. The architectural language remains fragmented, evoking a sense of both decomposition and construction. The natural occurrence of decay conflicts with the man-made task of daily construction and maintenance of the monastery. The salt will damage the building’s structure over time, uncontrollably fixing itself to the filigree-like architectural elements. The articulated open skeleton of the monastery, empty in the frontispiece, suggests absence and dereliction, while unfinished tasks within the architecture suggest the unseen presence of the monastic order.
Patrick Hamdy
10
11
patrick.hamdy@gmail.com
Patrick Hamdy
12
13
patrick.hamdy@gmail.com
A DISMOUNTABLE BRITISH CONSULATE Benjamin Harriman Since gaining power in 2010, David Cameron’s government has wavered between investment and divestment of ambassadorial buildings, Embassies, consulates, missions and high commissions have been left to partial decline, a policy which contradicts the UK’s desperate need for international trade and investment. The project aims to explore a language of architecture reflective of wavering investment in the ambassadorial sector. It aims to satirise the relationships between elitism, Britain’s international and economic relationships, diplomatic power and persuasion through an architectural proposition. The project focuses on a series of twelve dismantlable meeting spaces, translating twelve of Nietzsche’s ideas on power into persuasive spaces, examining how and if architecture can aid diplomatic persuasion, in the context of gaining Turkish investment in the UK. In addition, the building takes the form of a ‘store’ to house and frame the meeting spaces. The consulate is represented at the moment of a trade fair between British and Turkish businesses, upon the opening of the building. The architectural language aims to refer to the building’s potential successes and failings. The consulate’s use is at times slow, unwieldy, but, conversely, rapid to dismantle. In construction, the building employs local building techniques. After disassembly, parts of the building might be re-used in alternative, smaller scaled, dispersed, ambassadorial interventions around Istanbul and Turkey. The project aims to present this dismantlable consulate typology as an optimistic proposition. The project uses physical models, hybridised with computational drawing techniques, to explore the possibility of designing a consulate that appears to be able to depart, in part, at any moment. The architecture, paralleled by its representational techniques, signifies movement (departure).
Benjamin Harriman
14
15
benharriman@googlemail.com
Courthouse [Academic use only]
Public House
Ambulance
e only]
[Academic use only]
Information Kiosk
[Academic use only]
Police Station
Ambassador’s Balcony
[Academic use only]
Benjamin Harriman
16
Town Hall
Wedding Chapel
[Academic use only]
Cemetary
[Academic use only]
Reception
17
benharriman@googlemail.com
POLITICS OF THE IMAGINATION Ifigeneia Liangi In Athens 2013, a primary school inhabited by 300 students has formed its own ways of ruling one of the most devastated neighbourhoods of the city, and is about to expand its boundaries in the following years. The school’s strict architectural rules demand obligatory cooperation between the neighbourhood’s inhabitants for the production of a jam made from oranges found on neratzies, trees that grow throughout the city and that can withstand its pollution. Obligatory cooperation is applied equally to each of the twelve political teams formed within the school. Motivation for the school’s rules to be obeyed comes from the potential unlocking of closed playgrounds, guarded by the giant tree-man. These playgrounds are supported by the columns of the National Bank of Greece, which now make watermelon ice cream. Allegory is researched as a tool for an anti-propagandistic approach to socio-political criticism in uncertain times, and is designed through a porous, ruinous and magic realist approach. The notion of porosity is expressed in the unstructured boundaries between the private and public realm, while the ruin is seen as an essential fragment for the appropriation of the present. In order to design for a city in crisis, I am using a magic realist narrative: this is not a detailed projection of the future, but a socio-political poetic critique of the present, forming potential ways of dealing with it through possible but improbable realities.
Ifigeneia Liangi
18
Lover’s Tree
19
liangifi@gmail.com
Kitchen and central Parliament
Ifigeneia Liangi
20
The New school in Kipseli
21
liangifi@gmail.com
CIRCUS CITY Yifei Song The circus once occupied a novel place of wonder and excitement in Istanbul. Widely appreciated by all social classes, it broke through the isolation and alienation of civic society during the city’s modern transformation. Circuses provided a sheltered environment where histories could be told through traditional acts, while feeding the public desire for exciting entertainment. It was a warm and nostalgic environment, responding to the estranging process of contemporary urbanization. This swift transformation of the city results in a profusion of uncanny moments, imbued with the melancholy which Orhan Pamuk suggests is the essence of Istanbul. The proposed circus aims to exploit this melancholy as a positive architectural agenda. Its physical form differs from ordinary circuses, an analogy of the continuously shifting forms of the contemporary city as it changes beyond recognition which remains hidden under its construction. The project proposes bringing the circus experience back to Istanbul in a new form, reinterpreting the traditional circus, with an emphasis on traditional Turkish acts, while reflecting the contemporary society and particular character of Istanbul. In order to understand the story unfolding between the acts and the city, the circus requires the full engagement and participation of its spectators. A walk around the building imparts a real sense of adventure: the show demands decisive interaction between audience, characters and performances, rather than passive observation. The Circus City expresses visually the idea that a city cannot perform well alone, without the contribution of its people.
Yifei Song
22
23
oneno01@gmail.com
Yifei Song
24
25
oneno01@gmail.com
A GROTESQUE PUBLIC BODY Gabriel Warshafsky Exhibiting a scale of enterprise to match the city’s vast sprawl, Istanbul’s Municipality operates a diverse network of public corporations. Overseen by a single Directorate, these straddle a territory between capital ambition and public provision, producing vital transport infrastructure and basic foodstuffs while planning for exponential growth and export. The aesthetic tradition of the grotesque informs a language of grossly distended figuration for this fruitful extremity of Istanbul’s public body. The new Directorate headquarters is developed around the corporate sponsorship of Istanbul’s public festivals. Positioned at the western fringe of the historic centre, where a major road interchange sweeps over, under and through a pair of exploded public squares, the Directorate is an arena for transaction, privatisation, and the inception of new public corporations. New yeast cultures, asphalt mixes and concrete forms are prototyped within a cycle of food production for an annual public feast. Below street level, individual corporations are housed by fixing airform balloons within a framing grid of glazed ceramic cores and painted steel. Once sprayed with pigmented concrete and thoroughly lacquered, their undulating surfaces, warmed and moistened by boilers and ovens below, overlook the Directorate’s outlet artery and offer glimpses of its inner machinations. Overhead, a network of pedestrian overpasses span a canopy of date palm nurseries, its hessian sacking drooping to bind together the disparate scraps of land between roadways. Evacuations of steam, smoke, dust and insects are framed as joyous affirmations of the Municipality’s corporate activities.
Gabriel Warshafsky
26
Above: Date drying stacks Below: Edible spoon
27
gabrielnrw@gmail.com
Gabriel Warshafsky
28
29
gabrielnrw@gmail.com
ROCOR (MDF) CHURCH OF AKSARAY Graham Burn Aksaray, Istanbul, is a place of suitcase trading: the uniquely paradoxical means of trade between Turkey and Russia, which is at once government endorsed yet illegal. A prototype Russian Orthodox church is erected atop a dormant construction site. It exists initially as a temporary model for a future church, subsequently aspiring to permanency after a period of testing and appropriation through use. Orthodox Christianity, unlike some Western belief systems, views iconography as the embodiment of the Sacred, and not as solely representative. The church devotes itself to the power of the image: applied, evoked or induced through the architecture created. By building a drawing, perhaps a drawing of a model, the architecture playfully manifests itself as a series of orthographic encounters. Natural perspective is countered by volumetric warping; depth is challenged by three-dimensional projections upon two-dimensional surfaces. MDF is the building’s primary material and all its components are constructed from it using standard sheet sizes. Offcuts become decorative and layered structural elements, whilst shavings and dust are tightly packed into cavities as insulation. Istanbul’s climate causes the material to wilt, warp and blister; a constant process of surveying and repairing the building must be sustained. An exuberance is created through the application and further reapplications of gloss paint and varnish. Upon handover, the church is occupied and modified by the clergy according to liturgical needs. Architectural absurdities arise from drawing interpretations and programmatic needs. An architectural consultant, fortunately, is on-site to advise against any possible faux pas.
Graham Burn
30
31
02gburn@gmail.com
Graham Burn
32
33
02gburn@gmail.com
THE NAMELESS MONASTERY Charlotte Knight For 35 years the Orthodox Church and its theological schools have been closed, its remaining clergyman forbidden to teach. The Nameless Monastery conceals a theological school for the Eastern Orthodox Church of Constantinople, illegally continuing its teaching so that the ancient religion will not be lost. Within the Monastery’s walls, nuns live a contained life of solitude and community. The peals of bells in the outer world structure an inner life of prayer. The nuns view the city like a theatre, framed and observed from their interior world, while enriching their lives in prayer. As the nuns retreat from the outer world, they see only the sky and are thrown back onto their solitary selves. Spatial layering blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior, public and private. The design begins to distort the edge condition through a controlled visual porosity, as the exterior frames views of varying depths in a reference to the spatial qualities of Messina’s Saint Jerome in his Study. The building is not a timeless object: the architecture ages as the nuns seek the comfort of the historic and the old. Over time, some spaces grow while others are compressed, generating dynamic relationships between horizontals and verticals. The Monastery expresses a proposal detached from local politics and daily practicalities, operating on a more fanciful level. The aim is thus to study how the nuns have been framed as a symbol of hope in the effort to revive the monastic values of the Eastern Orthodox schools and its patriarchs. Its future still unknown.
Charlotte Knight
34
35
charlotteknight18@hotmail.co.u
Charlotte Knight
36
37
charlotteknight18@hotmail.co.uk
WATER THEATRE Lulu Le Li ‘We made from water every living thing,’ (Qur’an 21:30) The project explores the notion of an immaterial architecture: focusing on the poetic interactions between water and user, based on the Qur’anic notion of water as sacred and central to life. Located behind the busy Istiklal Avenue, Istanbul, the Water Theatre sits quietly behind a ruined façade, reflecting a parallel world of peace almost completely oblivious to the rest of the city. The approach, through narrow and dark alleyways, sets the scene. Inside, the sounds of dripping and cascading water and a rich materiality fill a series of spaces with a powerful expressive capacity, articulated by choreographed shifts in temperature. The Water Theatre is a public space open throughout the year. It is an instrument that collects rainwater and accentuates its performance. The building becomes a living body, breathing and sweating to modify its environment. The labyrinthine spaces within work with strategies of revealing and framing, blurring the distinction between performer and spectator as they engage with filtered and artificial weather conditions. The space becomes a stage-set of carefully crafted details where moments of interaction and intimacy occur. Water acts as a bridge to span the gap between physical reality and symbolic surreality: the spaces in the theatre engage with grander narratives of paradise through Qur’anic metaphor. A collection of ramps, stairs and doors, subtly woven into the space, serve the water features and pools, bringing the body into tactile contact with symbolism. Water is not an additional feature; it is the architecture.
Lulu Le Li
38
39
lulu_leli@hotmail.com
Lulu Le Li
40
41
lulu_leli@hotmail.com
THE NATION OF SIVRIADA Anders Strand Lühr ‘Uniquely in us, Nature opens her eyes and sees that she exists’ - Raymond Tallis ‘The image of nature we spontaneously accept - nature as a balanced harmonised circulation, which is then destroyed through excessive human agency - that nature does not exist. Nature is in itself a series of mega-catastrophes’ - Slavoj Žižek Sited on an island off the coast of Istanbul in the Sea of Marmara, this project introduces new and old programmes to an island with a complex history. The island is today abandoned, but ruins of a monastery and and a large quarry crater are evidences of human activity. Nature is often portrayed as an equilibrium that is disturbed by human agency. This project proposes that nature without human intervention is meaningless, in the sense that our perception of nature projects meaning and definition through our ideas and actions. The island will be, once again, quarried. Programmes involving all the aspects of refining the rock will be present: quarry, workshops, harbour and a market. These programmes will change the island’s topography, moulding it into an environment that is a symbiotic merging of nature (our surroundings and culture) with our shared mental landscapes. As Sivriada is exploited for its resources the island goes through a refinement process. The once hostile environment is transformed into a habitable one where we can dwell.
Anders Strand Lühr
42
43
asluhr@gmail.com
Anders Strand L端hr
44
45
asluhr@gmail.com
THE LOST AND FOUND POWER STATION Fiona Tan The rapid rural-to-urban migration has led to a severe energy and food crisis in Istanbul. Parallel to this is the issue of social marginalization and spatial injustice. In 2006, the Turkish Government released plans to redevelop Tarlabasi district by relocating its migrant communities to the periphery of the city. Evictions soon began and the power supply was cut off to force the residents out. The Lost and Found Power station is designed on this premise. It is a monument to the faceless migrant worker who built the city but remains excluded from it. It aims to be an allegorical response to the fragile existence of the migrant class, and the government’s refusal to grant them a settled identity by proposing a completely off-grid building which generates its independent source of power. It becomes a symbol for autonomy from the authority and power of the government. Programmatically, the building functions as a communal house, where private everyday domestic functions are exaggerated and played out on a larger scale. Energy is generated by the closed loop cycle of the occupants’ daily activities aided by a series of energy devices. Expanding on the traditional lifestyles of the migrant class, rearing of animals is encouraged. A total of 300 chickens and 30 goats reside within the power station on a permanent basis. These function not merely as a food source but also as thermal insulation - the animal residents and their various traits and habits inform the design of the building and its overall environmental performance.
Fiona Tan
46
47
fiona.tan24@gmail.com
Fiona Tan
48
49
fiona.tan24@gmail.com
GATEWAY INTO PHANAR Cassandra Tsolakis Challenging the perceived value of location, the Gateway into Phanar encourages the returning Greek to question the intrinsic connection between humans and home. Phanar is the old Greek quarter of Istanbul whose ill-fate was caused by the cultural rivalry generated by the idea of belonging. This neighbourhood which has witnessed the notorious extinction of the Greek community of Constantinople, a result of the mass deportations of the 1960s and ‘70s. Sunk between confiscated Greek homes on a crossroad in Phanar, the Gateway’s architecture is a language for communicating between times. On one level the Gateway resembles a time capsule in its effort to preserve the contours of the facades’ geometries and activities: geometries which suggest past human presence. Embedding the negative of the existing walls within the Gateway creates a memento mori: a reminder of death and absence. Indeed, the death and absence of the Greek community from the streets of Phanar is the outcome of struggles between Turkey and Greece over land ownership, conflicts directly linked to the glorification of place. The Gateway aims to communicate an attitude towards this reverence for place by unsettling the returning pedestrian’s understanding of their own location. Internally, a dreamlike world of disorientating spaces is conjured. Here, memory, fabricated memory, altered memory and pure imagination thrive on the ambiguous edges of the Gateway, encouraging the returning Greek to hallucinate what they need: a Freudian theory of hallucinating objects and processes that offer gratification. In this state, where the human desires for home are revealed and questioned, the only anchor point to be found is in a view to the sky: a body which offers a sense of security in its constant and humbling presence, thus encouraging the human mind to rise above and free itself of the myths of place.
Cassandra Tsolakis
50
51
cassandratsolakis@hotmail.com
Cassandra Tsolakis
52
53
cassandratsolakis@hotmail.com
THE COUNCIL FOR TERRITORIAL EXCHANGE Kieran Wardle Power cannot be seen. Indeed the existence of power is debatable. The material reality of architecture, on the other hand, is undeniable, and can become the physical embodiment of authority. Just as intangible as power is the notion of identity. Identity can be represented by many things, yet is also habitually linked to a place on earth, a language and a flag. The Council for Territorial Exchange attempts to govern questions of power and identity through discussion and compromise. This seemingly eternal structure houses fleeting moments, where the words of two people can change the lives of millions. Sitting starkly within its context, the architecture points to the council’s tentative relationship with international governments and political bodies. The Council was founded in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent partition of its territories and peoples led to the first attempt to discuss the peaceful exchange and division of a nation between victors. The Council now instigates discussion between affected parties, be they kings or beggars, in order to resolve disputes. The body has no military or political power of its own, relying on the collusion of nations to function. As with any political body, notions of solidity, consistency and strength sit at its core, yet this building moves beyond the simple expression of these qualities. Ultimately, the only power the Council possesses is through perception. The image is its mandate.
Kieran Wardle
54
55
kieran_thomas_wardle@live.co.uk
Kieran Wardle
56
57
kieran_thomas_wardle@live.co.uk
FINDKLI GARDEN FOREIGN OFFICE Owain Williams The recent crisis in Syria is only one headache for Ahmet Davitoglu, architect of Turkey’s ‘zero problems with the neighbours’ policy. A gentle departure from EU accession talks, and distancing from previous bedfellow America make it an increasingly identifiable state for the Arab world. In this guise, it is capable of transferring the type of democracy propounded by the West through the mouthpiece of an empathetic Islamic-born entity. A park on the banks of the Bosphorus becomes a loaded backdrop for a centre-piece meeting room for the Turkish Foreign Ministry. With its minimal footprint, the building must be rearranged to specifically accommodate each event that takes place, constructing carefully considered environments for staged photographs of each meeting. From the stern, formal setting that accommodates Hamas’ tentative visit, to the leafy informal arrangement that welcomes the Greek foreign minister, the meeting chamber acknowledges the importance of photojournalism in contemporary international diplomacy, through the all-pervasive media. For each of these meetings, defunct fittings are discarded, reconsidered and adapted to form small structures in the public park. Composed as a picturesque garden, choreographed walks through the landscape control relationships between the city, the garden and the structures within the park. Somewhere between greenhouse and White House, the proposal suggests a dialogue between the Foreign Office and the landscape, offering a critique of the institutional typology and destabilising the relationship between the political and public roles of the garden.
Owain Williams
58
59
odhwilliams@gmail.com
Owain Williams
60
61
odhwilliams@gmail.com
THE INSTITUTE OF LEATHERCRAFT Tim Yue The Institute of Leathercraft is made of four small-scale leather workshops intertwined with a larger school of leathercraft. Sited in Istanbul’s Zeytinburnu district, home to the ruins of the biggest tanneries in the world, the monumental proposal is made entirely of concrete. Fabric formwork casting techniques are employed in the construction of certain parts of the building to suggest bodily forms, skin-like textures and fleshy masses. This choice of material echoes the nostalgic nature of the project: the form of concrete is a reflection and memory of the process of its own creation. A forest of sculptural columns, an abstract interpretation of the destruction of bones and flesh that is the essence of the leathercraft industry, occupies the ground floor. Its shocking and nightmarish presence stands as a memorial to animal sacrifice. The workshop and school complex is raised atop the columns to the 1st and 2nd floors. Here the architecture becomes domestic, designed as an almost familiar environment, but of an unexpectedly enormous height. This studio space is devoted to creative thinking, wherein the architecture seeks to provoke a sense of aspiration as much as of despair. Furthermore, the skin of the ‘houses’ is a highly crafted assemblage of intriguing textures and forms. From destruction of flesh and bones to the craft of skin, from nightmare to aspiration, the image of the architecture is an allegory for the essential transition underlying the entire leathercraft industry.
Tim Yue
62
Plan and elevation of the abattoir
63
yuezihong87@hotmail.com
Elevation drawing showing the hybrid between the houses, odd objects, and chaos beneath
Tim Yue
64
Perspective drawing showing the connection between the house and the odd object
65
yuezihong87@hotmail.com
Special thanks to Hugh McEwen. Publisher Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Printed in England by Print on Demand Worldwide Copyright 2012 the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN 978-0-9568445-8-3 For a full range of programmes and modules please see the Bartlett Undergraduate, Diploma & Graduate Guides. Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Wates House, 22 Gordon Street London WC1H 0QB T. +44 (0)20 7679 7504 F. +44 (0)20 7679 4831 architecture@ucl.ac.uk www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk
66