undergraduate
diploma 7
School Grammar When deciding priorities for rebuilding the destroyed town of Cabra in Kosovo the town chose to rebuild the school first. Schools are amongst our most important public buildings and the experience of school offers a defining and enduring moment in our personal and cultural development. Yet school design remains largely indifferent to recent approaches to teaching, technology and the broader agenda of the role of education within the social structure of communities – as a result, perhaps, of a certain antipathy towards any new kind of paradigm. Our interest lies in extending the design of schools to shape the many reciprocal relationships that can be established through all aspects of their settings – ecological, hydrological, material, climatic as well as cultural and aesthetic. The projects developed by the unit will survey a broad range of interactions to generate interventions at differing scales. Optimistically, we will also pursue a rigorously green agenda, one which by its nature is transdisciplinary and reliant on collaboration and context. The typological studies will be tested on a territorial level in multiple locations and climates, led by developing collaborative networks and partners. The set-piece focus is southern Lebanon, where the school building
Unit Staff Simon Beames is a director of Youmeheshe (youmeheshe.com) and architect for COTE, an NGO involved in construction and re-socialisation following conflict and disaster.
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Kenneth Fraser is a principal of Kirkland Fraser Moor (k-f-m.com). He previously worked with Renzo Piano Building Workshop, where he was project leader for the Rome Auditorium and the Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church.
Unit Staff Simon Beames Kenneth Fraser
undergraduate
is a focus for restoring communities and a safe haven in an area that has always known conflict. Diploma 7 will explore the philosophical, social, political and technical response to the provision of long-term development through the legacies of disaster-relief. Working with a research group that includes technologists, theorists and NGOs responsible for live-field projects, we will apply the emergent strategy in response to their requirements. Two technical ambitions will guide the unit’s work and research. The first involves an investigation into digital toolmaking (with the inherent obsolescence of high-end fabrication machinery broadening the scope for re-appropriating these machines and adapting them into low-cost analogue tools). Secondly, we will research methods of accurately predicting the behaviour of natural light, restoring (to the architect) an operational means of calculation and manipulation through digital and reality modelling. Expressed in these terms, the expectations of the unit are technical, social and critical, emphasising the development of workable systems for addressing a scarcity of resources.
School Building in Bint Jbeil, near the World Heritage site of Tyre, South Lebanon. Torn apart during the 2006 IsraelLebanon conflict.
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