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THE PROGRESS PARADOX
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The Progress Paradox Foreword Laura Allen and Mark Smout U11 revisits the paradoxes of preservation versus progress, and wilderness versus culture that preoccupy the unit. Radical and even revolutionary ideas that stitch together the past, present and future, and expose the cultural and political complexity of the built environment are our focus. This is ever more critical in a time of daunting environmental challenges. In a world more dangerous, yet open to opportunity than any other time, these notions are also affected by the progress paradox—which is to say that the more forward progress is made, the more problems are created. Our interest in environments that display displacement, restoration, redundancy, progress, dormancy, and future living is exemplified by the UK National Parks. Initiated by the 19th century ‘Freedom to Roam’ movement, large areas of land are now protected by law for the benefit of the nation due to their special and particular qualities of countryside, wildlife and cultural heritage value. Until relatively recently little acknowledgement was given to thinking about nature as a system with park boundaries laid out according to convenient political or economic interests rather than ecological realities. As keystone institutions of environmental conservation, they are operated as managed systems, ‘interactive ecologies’ of people, nature, landscape and infrastructure. Charged with protecting fragile ecosystems and vulnerable regional identities they also, now more than ever, act as outdoor playgrounds. They symbolize political entanglements and cultural paradoxes. Changes taking place outside park boundaries can render tremendous impacts on preservation efforts within the park resulting in damage to local economies and environments as well as overloading rural infrastructure and even threatening their conservation goals and nature reserve status, particularly where the weight of local
and international tourism is unsustainable; visitors are ‘loving the parks to death’. This year students looked at temporal and spatial cultural scenarios to reveal underlying processes that continue to affect our built and natural environment, our societal institutions and the fascinating consequence of adapting the cultural imaginary. They asked: How can legislated territories accommodate cultural and environmental changes? How will future transformations in society and the natural environment be reflected in the built environment? What is the role of architecture in an ‘interactive ecology’? What are the implications, and more importantly, the opportunities of designing architecture for uncertainty and alternative futures? Unit 11 encourages diverse attitudes to architecture, its representation and study. Our methods are iterative, inquisitive and above all imaginative. This publication is produced by Unit 11 students on the MArch Architecture programme at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. #unit11bartlett
Past, Present, & Post-Tropicality Annabelle Tan TOP Studies and analysis of past housing typologies and dwelling practices inform the design of housing schemes, disrupting normative domesticity. OPPOSITE The design scheme forms an infrastructural monument towards posttropicality, synthesising nature and culture, production and consumption.
The project is an investigation into notions of ‘tropicality’ in the context of Singapore. Historically, concepts of nature, comfort, civil behaviour and progress have been shaped by depoliticised agendas grouped under the umbrella of ‘tropicality’. Framing ‘tropicality’ in terms of scarcity and affordance, the project ‘unmakes’ colonial vestiges of ‘tropical success’ that linger in our infrastructure and ‘remakes’ a landscape of lost affordances. Spanning 4.2 km, the project is a socio-ecological continuum linking a threatened forest to a recognised nature reserve. Social and physical constructs of scarcity are
dissected, leaving behind a new imaginary towards productive and performative dwelling practices that synthesise nature and culture. Data on resource management inform the masterplan while local ways of construction and material performance shape details of aesthetics and structural logic. The technicality is balanced with an ethnographic approach to challenge normative domesticity through new housing schemes. At this scale, the affective and intimate experiences of infrastructure and resource prioritise actual tropical bodies in the investigation into post-tropicality.
Everyday Practices Towards Post-Tropicality
Annabelle Tan During the Covid-19 lockdown, my sister and I joined the many who took up gardening. While initially limited to single pots, our collection enlarged to include large fabric planters, micro-greenhouses and makeshift growing frames fashioned out of bamboo sticks and raffia string. Initially, when the collection existed as a handful of pots, my mother could continue with her cleaning regime by shifting them outside the path of her intense scrubbing. As the garden necessarily grew in size and mass according to the needs of plant growth and rhythms of propagation, this accumulated material eventually proved too cumbersome to move, forcefully reducing the extent of my mother’s cleaning. Alongside the reduction of certain practices, this new material culture also generated practices, like folding laundry outside while keeping an eye on pests. Ethnographic observations of the neighbourhood reveal a collective intensification of cultivation practices which transgress private-public boundaries. The awkward sliver of grass that is produced from urban planning – representationally, a no-man’s land that buffers between private and public – is fashioned into heterogenous spatial configurations of guerrilla gardens. Analogous to the use of leftover spaces in high-density public housing blocks (HDBs), the absorption of these interstices into the realm of care represents the continuous search for the more ecologically engaged and expressive socialities of kampung nostalgia amidst homogenising landscapes. People living in HDBs also partook in the ‘botanic boom’, with thriving crops creeping across the whiterendered facades of high-rise flats and whole microfarms assembled on the periphery of restricted grass fields. The increased interest in edibles rather than ornamental species is significant; regardless of urban condition, creative experiments are spearheaded by laypeople who suddenly experience the crippling legacy of modernist tropicality which razed all agriculture. Disruptions in global food chains reveal the material scarcity on top of which dominant ‘tropicality’ is predisposed, simultaneously uncovering the fallibility of modern infrastructures of service. The practical act of achieving needs becomes a site for radical imaginaries of recent past (or near futures) to manifest as the complacent monotony of the everyday is ruptured. Even as hard
infrastructures of global flows stood still, subaltern tropical cosmopolitanism tapped onto transnational waves of gardening, combining embedded tropical imaginaries with global resources and networks to make-do within the inherited logics of dominant infrastructure. Loftus argues that “there is no essential nature of everyday life, but there are activities in the creation of everyday natures that might form the basis for an immanent critique”.1 The emergence of resistive infra-structures disclose dominant infrastructure as a process that is made and remade. As everyday infra-structures of a lived, embodied tropicality are produced and maintained with every rogue sidewalk garden or bucket of collected rainwater, dominant infrastructures of an abstract, universal tropicality are unsubscribed and overwritten. In this Gramscian fashion, it is through the everyday acts of producing and engaging with nature that “embryonic conceptions of the world”2 emerge, in turn, constructing a radically progressive politics that is potentially post-colonial and post-tropical. Edgar Pieterse has expounded on this, describing how 'stumbling across what works and what does not' can build a politics of ‘radical incrementalism’.3 Without meaning to be reductive, the thesis catalogues, identifies and names elements that make up alternative tropicalities, in hopes to articulate a ‘practical-critical’ consciousness that begins to re-explore and re-assemble a life-world that consciously rejects dominant ‘tropicality’, drawing us closer to a post-tropical socio-nature that transcends dichotomies, abstractions and universals. OPPOSITE Housing types reflect new ecologies of material cultivation and corresponding habitus of care and maintenance, whilst still holding the potential to enact residual dwelling practices. 1 Alex Loftus, Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 2 James Joll, Gramsci, Fontana modern masters, (London: Fontana, 1977). 3 Edgar Pieterse, City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development (London: NBN International, 2008).
The Fantasy of Wilderness
Rory Martin Our understanding and experience of wilderness today may give the illusion of a landscape untouched and natural, but the reality is that these spaces are crafted to adhere to our internal expectations. In our search for authenticity and escape we actively seek out a form of detachment from modern civilisation in the wild, only to encounter a manicured and managed experience with very little being left to chance and happenstance. Instead, we are presented with a moment frozen in ecological time, one that often wrongly ignores the historical uses of the land by native inhabitants. The myth of an 'untouched' wilderness created by artists and painters of the 19th century engendered a romanticised, pristine, and Western view of ‘true wilderness’ that persists to this day. This ‘longing for the wilderness’ mindset in Western culture is a projection of 'people’s inner wilderness onto outer nature.'1 At this point 'wilderness' was constructed to epitomise humans' need to escape the constraints of modern civilisation, an antidote to re-centre and reconnect with nature. As William Cronon states, 'we too easily imagine what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires.'2 There is a significant imbalance to acknowledge 'between the immediacy of political struggle involving the imperative to act in the moment, and the invariably much slower process encouraging a collective reset'3, but first humans must 'surrender' wilderness as an idea and embrace a new paradox, that wilderness cannot be entirely free of civilisation. Our challenge is to create a new definition of wilderness through the 'World Garden'—to reshape the human imagination so that future generations can inherit a world that values wilderness and our connection to it. Supporting and championing wilderness to exist all around us will ensure we no longer draw a distinction between two competing perspectives. For if wilderness is all around us, overwhelming our urban lives, then we become part of wilderness, we become, by definition, wild again. 1 Kirchhoff, Vicenzotti, A Historical and Systematic Survey of European Perceptions of Wilderness, pp.443-464. 2 William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature (Environmental History, 1996) 3 Bartel et al, Rethinking Wilderness and the Wild (2020) p.26.
Tales from the Flood Rory Martin TOP A transit typology: A new adaptive, evolving building typology constructed by the community, for the community. OPPOSITE Tafarn Pedwar Wyneb: Although there are some familiar faces, the pub also conceals some unexpected turns. OVERLEAF Tales from the Flood : The story of one towns journey to safety, while also trying to preserve the soul of their community.
The people of Morfa Borth, West Wales, face an uncertain future. Labelled as the first ‘climate refugees’ in the UK following a report stating the community would not receive the necessary funding to protect the town from sea level rise, the residents bands together to preserve the soul of the community by mobilising to start their journey to higher ground and safety. The project explores how we combat climate issues surrounding coastal retreat as well as commenting and critiquing the way we live and interact in our current
communities. ‘Tales from the Flood’ speculates on an alternate future where coastal communities that are experiencing rapid change act as a test-bed to reevaluate the way we live and engender thoughts about the environment, as well as how we remember and immortalise these fallen landmarks. Grounded in communal ritual traditions that mirror the old, Morfa Borth will act as an example of progressive, environmentally conscious living, a symbol of resilience and hope, from which future developments can learn.
Casting Redcar Ka Chun Ng (Mark) TOP The industrial scars of the slag landscape are revealed through landscape concrete casting and tilt-up construction. OPPOSITE The flexible concrete panels located on the periphery of the complex are cast with silhouettes of different industrial fragments, thus serving as evidence of Redcar’s industrial heritage.
Acknowledging the inevitability of the complete demolition of the Redcar Steelworks Complex by 2022, the project addresses the paradox between the government’s idea of progress for new industries and the former workers’ and residents’ wishes to preserve the site’s industrial landscape and heritage. In reaction to the unique steel slag landscape at the South Gare and Coatham Sands from the Redcar coast, the project envisages a landscape archive and research centre where the industrial scars of the site will be exhibited and archived whereas research on
the contaminated soil scape and phytoremediation will be carried out throughout a 50 year span. The design explores the idea of landscape casting and tiltup construction both as ways of revealing the industrial scars of the contaminated site and as an opportunity for phytoremediating the polluted landscapes, and thus responding to Redcar’s paradox of preserving industrial heritage and developing a green economy. The rich geological and material history of the post-industrial town is thus cast, embraced and celebrated, in the new complex.
Snowdonia Plant-nation Pearl Chow TOP Studying the Welsh upland context in relation to the recent declination in the nation’s agricultural industry and the steep rising numbers of carbon offsetting projects by off-shore based large corporations. OPPOSITE The scheme sits in an excavated plot of the sloping landscape and houses three uses: the factory, the administrative office space and staff accommodation. The roofscape, an adaptation of the traditional folded plate roof, resembling origami, celebrates the building’s paper making function.
Snowdonia Plant-nation proposes a paper mill with integrated housing for e-commerce giant Amazon, set within a carbon offsetting tree plantation in Wales. It experiments with themes of exploitation and co-dependency between the urban and the natural, the power dynamic between the moneyhungry and the carbon-hungry. The central thesis of the proposal is rooted in a BBC article which found that mature trees contribute little if any to reducing carbon emission and would be more effective as construction material. The paper mill serves as a pioneer project in exploiting/maximising use of locally sourced timber sourced from the surrounding forest and
its derivatives produced as byproducts during the cardboardmaking process. The resource for long term maintenance and part replacements will be infinite as long as the mill remains operational. In response to Agnes Denes early social projects, the proposal offers up 'careful' exploitation without reckless disregard as a potential answer to the question she posed regarding power, it is neither here or there, neither you or I but rather must exist as a calculated compromise, exerted and executed under mutual retainer.
OPPOSITE An analogous model exploring possible architectural strategies of geopolymer cement within the Musanze/Burera Provinces. Mine tailings alongside volcanic rocks and lateritic soils driven through research into geopolymer cement was summarised through a totem of casting and experimentation in content and form.
Transboundary Massif Kit Lee-Smith Challenging the ‘necessity’ of Portland cement on the Albertine Rift against the potential of geopolymer cement from mine tailings in the artisanal slopes of north Burrera, the project integrates community construction within the Rwandan ‘extraction’ policy minimising footprints in the densely populated Rwandan rural. In reviewing a new ‘artisanal’ approach that responds to the current blood mineral trades and investments into Portland Cement production, the project is a critical reflection that develops
a strategy to prevent the regional reliance on concrete and promote a return to local material cycles. It proposes a constuctionarium to express, explore and educate inhabiting, utilising and stabilising past industrial scarring through geopolymeric lateritic soil blends and techniques. The design methodology employs an analogous making process that utilises actual mine tailings brought back from site and reflects the material and manufacturing conditions of the Bugarama mine district.
Beyond Cement
Kit Lee-Smith Mine tailings and waste increase along with the incessant extraction across the Rwandan KaragweAnkole Belt. The accumulation that results in excessive surface storage poses health and environmental issues, yet these could provide the low-embodied carbon construction material for the region. The introduction of geopolymer cement presents the possibility of using waste from locally sourced mine tailings alongside by-products from aluminium manufacturing. Set against the global scenario of Portland cement domination, the rare metals race and the political posturing that directs the central and eastern African nations; the material is analysed against the Rwandan green agenda, the juxtaposed political narratives and the underlying ‘concrete’ strategies.
TOP AND OPPOSITE The Musanze caves alongside local mines and communities formed the backdrop of a research trip into sustainable construction materials in the north of Burrera. The welcome interest and cooperation formed a rich conversation of different views across generations, professions and institutions.
Developing on recent research of geopolymers within local material cycles; through the lens of inclusive sustainability (sustainable construction methods and social justice), the proposal of a new tool applicable for different strategies for a socially and environmentally sustainable model of construction was summarised through on-site data gathering, discussions and material analysis of an artisanal/ small-scale mine in the North region of Burrera. This allowed for the feasibility and interest at a local level to be analysed against the complex jurisdictions and external investments within the region. The prevalence of the large range of aluminosilicate materials that are ubiquitous both geologically, and crucially, as a processed waste provides a reasonable alternative for both national infrastructure and local construction. Reviewing the ‘necessity’ of concrete in the developing world and the potential of geopolymer cement on the Albertine Rift, this study asked what is the true potential and feasibility in contributing to Rwandan dreams of a reconciled green economy, whilst minimising embodied carbon and managing controversial mineral extraction.
Culture vs Nature Kenny Tam, Annabelle Tan, Kit Lee-Smith, Zifeng Ye
Modern cities have a relationship with their infrastructural networks that might be described as 'locked-in': one cannot live without the other and the two can only become ever more co-dependent.
construction in the global race to become ‘modern.’ Concrete, the wonder material of modernity that spread across the globe, is now known as one of the biggest causes of the climate crisis.
What often gets forgotten is that the emergence of urban infrastructure was never a 'smooth' but a historically contingent process, its spread across the globe today being facilitated by an uneven geography of colonial transactions.
''People tend not to worry where the electrons that power their electricity come from, what happens when they turn their car ignitions, ...or what distant gas and water reserves they may be utilising in their homes.'' - Graham & Marvin, Splintering Urbanism
Historians of Shanghai have never failed to criticise the colonial and capitalist origin of the city’s modern urban form. The urban systems imposed onto the traditional city—namely, road planning, sewage and electricity networks, and block-like housing estates— were appropriated and reinvented by the residents into an ambivalent image of modernity.
Between the perceived necessity of infrastructural provision, and the consequence of environmental degradation, what alternative futures exist for architecture?
Singapore’s first encounter with modernity began in its early colonial settler period, when the colonial powers (in the form of foreign architects and engineers) utilized a systematic body of quantitative knowledge in an attempt to tame the tropical condition. Like the knowledge of sanitation and medicine, type-forms were distributed from the metropole outwards, establishing the core assumption of modernity—that Western architecture is a universal form to be varied according to context. In turn, Rwanda today looks east for its inspiration, its current model being Singapore: a high-density, smallscale global trading hub that stands at the centre of global transactions and architectural vision. It is in this image that the Rwandan regime sees the future of its nation, that of a concrete cosmopolitan. Modern cities do not exist in isolation but are under a constant pressure to remake themselves to the image of progress, which radiates out from the ‘developed’ centres to the ‘developing’ peripheries. Local and rudimentary practices are replaced by homogenous
Hijacking the Elan Valley Theo Clarke TOP The Buffering Village is populated by a series of diagrid mounds, offering raised, defensible plinths for inhabitation, leisure and nature. OPPOSITE The drawing divulges the journey water takes throughout the Valley; beginning in upland bladders, passing though pumpedhydro turbines and eventually torrenting across the quasibulwark/communal housing development of the “Buffering Village”.
Hijacking the Elan Valley leverages the existing rich hydrological landscape of the Elan Valley reservoir system to impose an additional infrastructural energy buffering stratum across the vast watershed. The proposal seeks to avoid the contentious historical implementation of the reservoir by supplying both the needs of the nation and the immediate rural context. The project questions our relationship with water and the infrastructures of control and manipulation associated with it.
A Buffering Village becomes the manifestation of the consequences of a carefully orchestrated pumped-hydro system; a series of diagrid mounds wait in suspense for a weekly torrent to erupt across the landscape, creating pockets of defensible space for inhabitation and leisure whilst simultaneously promoting attritional drag. The newly forged landscape becomes a place to experience the extremes of white-water rapids passing below your feet whilst attending to your allotment before a game of lawn tennis.
Fluctuating Landscapes
Theo Clarke The rapid uptake of rural Victorian hydrological infrastructure provides a cautionary tale for how we can implement the necessary energy buffering systems for the renewable energy shift in our rural landscapes. The boom of the industrial revolution led to enormous population growth in cities, placing immense stress on hydrological systems, which forced many council authorities to obtain water from further afield. Birmingham was a victim of such expansion during the late 19th century, resulting in the creation of a series of interlinked reservoirs in Mid-Wales named the Elan Valley. The drive to supply such a vital resource for the growing ailing population imposed terrible consequences for the inhabitants of the chosen valleys, many of which are still affecting the livelihoods of locals today. Wales is now beginning to shift towards a clean energy future and promises to deliver 70% of energy demand from renewable energy sources. However, to commit to such a system, we require a greater capacity of energy storage to maximise the full potential of renewable energy. Unfortunately, the volume of required energy storage is a challenge yet to be solved; we will likely demand more of our rural environment to contribute to this question. OPPOSITE The Baptist Church in the shadow of the Gareg-Ddu Dam, Coflein. Image source: the Welsh Archive Website, Coflein. RIGHT TOP The Gareg-Ddu Dam RIGHT BOTTOM Mapping of 19th century Birmingham villages affected by reservoir construction
The Forest Chia-Yi Chou TOP Reassembling The Forest with different building parts of different scales through modelmaking, to explore both the possibilities of architecture and the possibilities of representation. OPPOSITE Using folding drawing as an experiment to explore collage and scale, and to unfold a journey through the infrastructure.
Milton Keynes has always been an experimental city that heralds bold future-proofing schemes. Aligned with the city's ambition to integrate green technology with city hardware and software, the project envisages an exemplar infrastructure to capture carbon dioxide and carbon credit. The Forest captures carbon dioxide from the ambient air like a real forest, with its extensive surface area being a thousand times more efficient than an authentic woodland of the same footprint. It is also made from the same material as a real forest—the
timber structure sequestrates carbon dioxide. Responding to the urban planning of Central Milton Keynes (CMK), it is a public green space that reveals and demonstrates the human-induced carbon cycles. The infrastructure is a living ecosystem that synchronises with CMK, supplying waste heat to the city. The skin of the building unveils the carbon capture process at a monumental scale. The project integrates and displays new environmental technologies in an urban environment as radical infrastructure. The Forest creates a new city image for Milton Keynes on its fiftieth anniversary.
RIGHT Pearl Chow Progress and Reformation: the proposal of a new forestry calendar reflects the lifestyles and practices associated with the Snowdonia Plant-nation, and pays tribute to the nation’s historical agricultural industry; its design is based on four existing calendars: the Agricultural Calendar, the Shepherd’s Calendar, the Birch and Pine Plantation cycles respectively. BOTTOM Pearl Chow A diagonal wall divides the industrial production sections of the scheme from the administrative office spaces, the offset working spaces allow glimpses of the paper making sequence to be observed by non-factory employees, reinforcing a sense of synergy between industrial production and natural cycles.
TOP Chia-Yi Chou Section study in the early stage to arrange space and program, and imagine the experience. LEFT Chia-Yi Chou The Forest is made from the same material as a real forest— the timber structure sequestrates carbon dioxide during construction.
RIGHT Mark Ng Tipped slag, corrugated copper sheets and water pipes are reclaimed and reused as building components. BOTTOM Charlie Pye Study Developing a structural ambition to delineate ecologies into a raised terrain and undercroft, as well as respond with a unique drainage system for excess rainwater.
TOP Harry Andrews Taxonomy of local rocks used in the construction. RIGHT Mark Ng Water pipes are cast in the concrete slab on ground and lift up as gutters and downpipes. OPPOSITE Charlie Pye Brickwork study developing a tessellated ruinous form inspired by the materiality of the Smithfield Market area.
Ruining the Road Charlie Pye TOP The undercroft is a result of the excavation of London’s roads, used to unearth and display the historical remnants of the city. Designed to elude to the cities past as well as support a new rural terrain. OPPOSITE The rural terrain brought into the heart of London is utilized by the local hospital as a therapeutic landscape, with rooms providing activated space that engages with nature.
The project encourages the abandonment of petrol and diesel cars within the city, whilst saving the National Parks from increased tourism and the negative consequences that come with it. The roads of our cities undergo a transformation to nurture new National Park typologies within the city centre. The architecture pulls apart the urban fabric, revealing historical layers of the city below, and
elevates a therapeutic landscape above street level. The structures become a means to evoke curiosity in the hidden built heritage of London. By juxtaposing idyllic nature with the culture of congestion in the capital, the project provides a means of natural escapism away from the overburdened National Parks.
A Peat Protopia Michael Holland TOP Building the layers of the testbed investigates the observed physical, social, and cultural contentions addressable through wide scale restoration of upland peatlands.
Peatlands cover approximately 3 million hectares of the UK landscape(12% of the total land area). Within their soils is stored some 3000 million tonnes of carbon—as much as 20 times the UK’s entire forest biomass.
OPPOSITE Scale model of the proposed research and restoration facility constructed upon the existing quarry shelves of Buckton Vale.
Despite their significance, the peatland landscapes of the Peak District are among the most heavily damaged. Years of industrial pollution has rained acid on the land, raising the soil PH to levels in which nothing can survive. Elsewhere the landscape is systematically burnt, overgrazed with livestock, and heavily drained of water, inadvertently releasing stored carbon back into the atmosphere and denuding the landscape of vegetation in the
process, leading to catastrophic soil erosion. The Peat Protopia is a research and restoration facility dedicated to furthering our understanding of peat, peatland habitats, and their place as carbon capturing devices and sites of significant ecological importance. Sited in Buckton Vale quarry on the edge of Saddleworth Moor the proposal demonstrates the power of peat through an architecture in constant conversation with landscape. Acting as a mechanical mediator the building systematically shifts physical material through a cyclical process of saturation, while continually questioning wider discussions of land management, land ownership and rewilding.
Walking the Wildbrooks
Michael Holland Through exploring the village of Amberley in West Sussex, I attempt to demonstrate how the open field system of agriculture were dependant on the construction and maintenance of boundaries. My research reveals how the Enclosure Movement impacted, manipulated, and re-ordered the physical bounds of this landscape, and the social structure of the inhabitants, leading to the creation of the landscape of lines. Exploring the Amberley commons on foot, I initially traced the physical boundaries of the village, then interpreted them through a sketch map and other drawing methodologies. Both methods demonstrate how through movement of the body, the process of line making can both create and reimagine storylines based upon individual assumptions of place. The very essence of the excursion is one that is distinctly personal, premised on experiences of a psychological, emotional and bodily nature. Therefore, the investigation of the commons I have transcribed is perhaps not so much one of ‘The Amberley’. But rather one of ‘My Amberley’. It shows how even the smallest of commons remain an important feature of our landscapes and village communities and demonstrates multiple grounds for their continued expansion and protection.
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Keystone Architecture Kenny Tam TOP Wayfinders on the landscape and intuitive toys in the city, the five models explain the scheme through playable interactive components. OPPOSITE The architecture mimics keystone species that are missing in Ben Nevis, patching the ecological gaps and progressing from the old wild to the new. OVERLEAF Model making as an architectural methodology to explore the development of the scheme.
In the last century, the escalated effects of humanity on the planet in manipulating wild areas have dubbed the present epoch the Anthropocene, indicating that modern humans have since become the most dominant species in shaping the planet’s future. The exploitation of wild spaces has since incited a biodiversity crisis. Species now face extinction and mass migration due to the breaking of the ecosystem, these are also known as ecological tipping points. Since the crisis, scientists and ecologists have revived the concept of using 'keystone species' to manage other wildlife and ecosystems at large. Rewilding is the efforts of using keystone species as a conversational method; while a new term 'wilding experiment', first appeared in Jamie Loirmers book Probiotic
Planet, conveys the progressive idea of hacking ecological systems using or in reference to keystone species. The project challenges the role of architecture in the wild to mimic keystone species that are missing in Ben Nevis, patching the ecological gaps and progressing from the old wild to the new. The architecture will facilitate the missing ecological interactions and provide a threshold for people to mediate across wild places. The aim of the project does not merely echoes what a keystone species do but also an opportunity to connect anthropocentric humans back to wild places through participation of 'wilding experiments' and in hope to create empathy for the fragile ecosystem.
Interactive Ecology
Kenny Tam Today, in the biodiversity crisis, many hidden natural systems such as predators hunting or pollination have become obsolete due to species extinction. These ‘ecological tipping points’ and fragmentation in the food web demands anthropocentric humans to take action now more than ever before. Rewilding, a conservational approach, is popular in European countries to directly reintroduce keystone species that were extinct from their ancestorial sites to reactive missing ecological systems. Nonetheless, despite the positive ecological benefits, biosecurity is a problem in case studies such as the Yellowstone National Park; free-roaming wolfs and bears have destroyed many public goods and opened new problems for visitors and land owners. On the contrary, reintroducing herbivores without a predator has proven challenging; in Osstavaardersplassen Nature Reserve, large packs of herbivores were left starving due to the overpopulation of grazers. From the difficulties in reintroducing keystone species, Sergey Zimov, a Russian scientist, has developed an alternative approach to mend these fragile spaces in his neighbourhood; which is suffering from melting permafrost which contains harmful methane. He believes the extinct mammoth played a crucial role in lowering the temperature of the ground through their heavy trampling across large areas. Zimov decided to mimic the mammoth steppe by running mechanical tractors like a mammoth and bulldozing trees, similar to how mammoths forage for food. After a decade of research, scientist has confirmed that Zimiov has successfully reduced the ground temperature by 1.3 degrees centigrade. Learning from Zimov’s ‘wilding experiment’, the design research marries architecture and the concept of mimicking keystone species to provide a threshold for people to visit National Parks in the UK. By studying the hidden ecological interaction of wild bees and wolves, the ‘wilding experiment’ is reimagined onto the architectural scheme’s dynamic parts and mobile structures in the hope of facilitating the missing ecological interactions. Moreover, visitors are encouraged to participate by collecting pollen or manipulating landscape devices to generate predator noise as an educational tool.
The Park Ascending Harry Andrews TOP Showing the geographical area of the imagination, epitomising the horror of the modern condition. OPPOSITE This sketch is a palimpsest of social and ecological scars of the snowdonian landscape, revealed through surveying the site.
Over the course of the twentieth century, despite restrictions of access to rural areas experienced by the majority of people in Britain, attempts were made to reinvent the countryside. A moment of social democracy was the passage of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949, which helped transform some of Britain's most celebrated landscapes into widely promoted sites of leisure, their success seemingly posing a threat to their purpose. When contemplating these landscapes our emotional response is often one that cannot be defined merely as
nostalgia or patriotism. It is instead the realisation that something out of our consciousness remains undiscovered beneath the soil. The Park Ascending aims to restore an emotional connection with the landscape, revealing the networks yet to be discovered from lost methods of navigation within our National Parks. In turn, the scheme provides protective measures against the physical pressures and impacts of tourists ‘loving our parks to death’, by amplifying the sense of a place.
Simulating National Park Justin Lau TOP A series of bioswale ponds store, filter and mitigates the pressures of flash flooding and heavy rainfall. Over time, these ponds invite habitats and wildlife for visitors to interact with the imported ecology. OPPOSITE New hydrology across Park Royal is introduced to provide irrigation for the donor sites to incubate the newly imported ecology over time. The hydrology network also enables a new logistic circulation for canal boats transporting goods and services in and out of the site.
In the age of ecological emergency, is it time for our capital to become Britain’s newest national park to safeguard our agriculture, water, energy and people? 47% of London is green space and a vital asset to building a climateresilient country. If the Garden City movement was a response to the toxic pollution caused by the Industrial Revolution, the project reverses the tradition of National Parks in rural settings and applies swatches of ecology, beyond objects or material, as forms of architectural constructs onto London’s industrial landscapes.
Situated in Park Royal, one of London’s most deprived industrial neighbourhoods, the design negotiates the intersection between its industrial fabric of food production and manufacturing with a new stratum of ecology, in efforts to: 1) conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage, 2) promote public opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities of national parks, 3) foster economic and social wellbeing of local communities. Thus, the site is transformed into an ecological catalyst for a nationalbased approach to climate change across London.
Fight or flight?
Justin Lau Today, the warning signs of the climate crisis are increasingly hard to ignore. The world’s coastal cities are already submerging, displacing thousands of people, and destroying urban economies and infrastructural systems that allow cities to function. Over 90 per cent of urban areas are coastal, which exposes most cities across the globe to flooding, saltwater intrusion into surface waters and groundwater and increased erosion. Within 50 years, coastal cities and nations may vanish as displacement could happen immediately from a storm. Many cities have responded by developing resilience strategies such as New Orlean’s restored and upgraded network of levees and floodwalls postHurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, these systems will soon become inadequate as they quickly lose height to sea-level rise. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo confronted the inevitable catastrophe by deciding to relocate the sinking Jakarta to a jungled area on Borneo Island in Southeast Asia. Confronted by the reality of projected sea-level rises as high as 30 per cent above the global mean, capital relocation might be inevitable. Capital cities embody an ideal image of how the nation wishes to see itself and what it would like to become, amid the gradual political disintegration of the United Kingdom. While the discourse of capital relocations is often associated with poetic metaphors, utopian ideals and political motifs, the theoretical framework of relocation is a provocation that will facilitate an opportunity to construct a new methodology for integrating infrastructure, urban planning, landscape, and architecture beyond conventional understandings. If future cities were to be defined by global inundation, a relatively high site above sea level would become the foundation of city planning. Accordingly, the ambition of Britain’s capital city relocation proffers a pragmatic case for protecting the administrative, performative, symbolic and preservative functions of London. Lastly, perhaps the concurrent events of climate change and the crumbling House of Parliament provide a unique chance to reshape the country. The move would at large see a radical geographical redistribution of wealth, and thus symbolically and culturally ‘reunite’ the UK in the likely future where science fiction manifests into reality.
Moving Upwards
MERSEA ISLAND RESILIENT RELOCATION Iga Świercz
TOP Building the New Mersea Common OPPOSITE Film stills: living at the New Mersea Common through the citizens eyes
The diverse ecosystems and community of Mersea Island, off the south Kent coast, are under the threat of extensive coastal erosion and flooding. Coastal managers realize that in many situations attempting to stop erosion through structural or non-structural solutions is a losing battle. To address this issue a new managed retreat is proposed and the communication tools and language are investigated to support community. The self-built plan supports the community in creating a common methodology for the relocation. Designing with the community,
at local and bioregional scales, allows for multiple futures for the New Mersea Commons. The participatory citizen science recognizes and addresses the needs of the citizens of Mersea Island while enabling the renewal and preservation of the ecosystems and ‘Mersea Style’. The project act as a catalyst to introduce participatory tools in relocation projects and investigates how approaches with people and at local scales allow for preservation instead of the loss of traditional referents, while creating resilient relocation strategies.
Participatory design in academia Iga Swiercz Drawing on the idea of Donna Haraway’s ‘situated knowledge’ and its production, those who harbour our design science should be recognised and become valued contributors to knowledge understood not as Western scientic truth but as a knowledge manifested through the ‘multiplicity of voices’. As she writes, ‘only partial perspective promises objective vision’. The notion of participatory design suggests a collaborative understanding of the production and dissemination of knowledge. The potential for public participation in education may be greater than in any other discipline. The school system creates a significant presence in almost every community, and education often attracts more attention, allegiance, and concern than actual architectural objects and spaces. Incorporating participation in education can produce a wide variety of benefits—more responsible citizenstudents, nourishing neighbourhoods and design that meets the changes and challenges of society. The question is then not ‘Should we?’ but ‘How do we?’. Looking for new structures of working, new networks of mutual support, new forms of valorisation and (un)learning the years that the profession was being taught becomes crucial to evolving the participatory environment for everyone. OPPOSITE Design and anonymous cataloging of student & staff interviews
Anxious Nostalgia Zifeng Ye TOP Overall plan - The scheme stages and encourages spatial appropriation through leaving adaptable 'voids' in its formal and structural strategies. OPPOSITE The Collage drawing combines typological analysis and fiction to curate an alternative urban imaginary of Shanghai's residential neighbourhoods.
The proposal is a new urban strategy that readapts and augments Shanghai's disappearing historic neighbourhoods with a formal and structural system that allows for autonomous adaptation. It takes Shanghai’s urban center as its site of investigation to tackle the history, rhetoric, and discontents of rapid urban transformation. Pressured by urban densification, the enclave that housed Shanghai’s historic neighbourhoods—Lilongs— and their place memories are undergoing demolition. The design analyses and learns from the peripheral lilong buildings of Yangshupu as a typological exemplar that represents an
alternative spatial culture to the homogeneous residential landscape of growth-oriented Shanghai. An urban-scale design strategy is developed to restore the lost fluid social space of lilong-like residential neighbourhoods, in its form, material, place memory and spatial practice. The design is carried out through a process of palimpsestuous hybrid-drawing, where the same axonometric, plan or section is worked over multiple times—as model and as drawing— to achieve a representational technique that allows navigation across analysis, strategy, construction and inhabitation.
Tactical appropriation inside the cosmopolis
Zifeng Ye Discussing everyday life in Shanghai is to speak from the perspective of the xiaoshimin ( 小市民 , ordinary citizen), thus evoking scenes of boiling water, bathing, tea-drinking, courting, and chattering in the intimate spaces of lilong neighbourhoods. Theorist Zhao Chunlan argues that while the traditional courtyard acted as the centre for domestic life, where ‘children play and the elder and women members sit and chat’, the new sky-wells in shikumen lilong, enclosed and restricted, served only as a transit space between inside and outside. As Lu Hanchao meticulously documents in Beyond the Neon Lights, alleyways for ordinary Lilong residents in the Republican era were where people could come out to enjoy a breeze on a hot summer night, while eating, playing Majang, and so on. In a way, and continuing the late-Qing tradition of courtesan houses, the row-houses adopted the social function of the alleyway and were adapted into a form of shops known as laohuzao ( 老虎灶 , ‘tigerstove stores’). The term ‘store’ does not do justice to the variety of services they provided: as Lu notes, the same store could serve as a hot-water station, teahouse/restaurant in the day, bathhouse, and place of temporary lodging overnight—a practice referred to as yecha (‘night tea’). The cost of yecha was low as all that was provided was a pot of hot tea and permission to sleep on the shopfloor until the next morning. This kind of social provision was only possible within a permissive built environment where building uses were not strictly regulated, and public-private boundaries were freely transgressed on a mutually agreed basis. The dual process of demolition and reconstruction disrupts the rhythm of everyday practices in residential neighbourhoods, which had formed the social basis of appropriation of space from the Qing courtesan house to the Republican ‘tiger-stove stores’. Today’s urban processes as a denial of historical time corresponds to Jameson’s interpretation of postmodern subjectivity, whereby ‘(a) weakening of historicity’ (as perhaps the consequence of denying all ‘modernist’, master-narratives of monumental time) finds its cultural expression as nostalgia representing the past ‘through stylistic connotations, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image, and ‘1930s-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness’ by the
attributes of fashion.’ Appropriated spaces are hence ‘mediational’, ‘transitional’, ‘fixed, semi-fixed, movable or vacant’. In other words, a (positively) lived space is produced by permitting a free play of spatial functions, in contrast to the quantified distinctions of space conceived by modern systems of production. Through this conceptualisation, size or specific material palette no longer constrain the garden's imaginary link to nature. It can instead be treated as a space where the body can fulfil its ‘natural’ desires. As Lefebvre as well as Lacanian scholars like Slavoj Zizek try to argue, human desire—unlike need—has no particular object, and as such can be freed from material consumption. Balconies and rooftops of the Yangshupu Lilongs continue this tradition in their use of ersatz, sometimes recycled, materials to frame the balconies into gardens. The postmodern subjectivity outlined previously returns here in a positive light—material re-use and formal appropriation stand in opposition to the neoliberal rhetoric of modernisation—which sees infrastructural work and rapid urbanisation as the best bet for absorbing labour surplus and ensuring economic progress. In contemporary Shanghai, where modernist utopias and totalizing knowledge systems appear increasingly anachronistic, rooftop gardens follow an alternative route by framing concrete spaces for bodies to exercise a right to free-play.
UNIT ELEVEN @unit11bartlett
THANKS
GRADUATING
Tutors
Theo Clarke Michael Holland Justin Lau Rory Martin Kit Lee-Smith Iga Swiercz Annabelle Tan Kenny Tam Zifeng Ye
Prof. Laura Allen Prof. Mark Smout Practice Tutor Rhys Cannon (Gruff Architects Ltd) Engineers Stephen Foster (Foster Structures) Ioannis Risoz (Atelier Ten)
YEAR 4
Thesis Supervisors Aisling O’Carroll Kelly Doran Prof. Murray Fraser Daisy Froud Elise Hunchuck Dr. Tania Sengupta Oliver Wilton David Rudlin Gillian Darley Critics Doug John Miller Barbara Ann Campbell Lange Dr. Tim Waterman Alicia Pivaro
DESIGNED & EDITED BY Harry Andrews Theo Clarke Iga Swiercz Zifeng Ye
Ka Chun Ng (Mark) Chia-Yi Chou Harry Andrews Pearl Chow Charlie Pye