Bartlett Design Anthology | UG13

Design Anthology UG13

Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1)

Compiled from Bartlett Summer Show Books

Our Design DNA

At The Bartlett School of Architecture, we have been publishing annual exhibition catalogues for each of our design-based programmes for more than a decade. These catalogues, amounting to thousands of pages, illustrate the best of our students’ extraordinary work. Our Design Anthology series brings together the annual catalogue pages for each of our renowned units, clusters, and labs, to give an overview of how their practice and research has evolved.

Throughout this time some teaching partnerships have remained constant, others have changed. Students have also progressed from one programme to another. Nevertheless, the way in which design is taught and explored at The Bartlett School of Architecture is in our DNA. Now with almost 50 units, clusters and labs in the school across our programmes, the Design Anthology series shows how we define, progress and reinvent our agendas and themes from year to year.

2022

The Vibes Are About to Be Immaculate

Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger

2021

Something Missing (and Almost Alive)

Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger

2020

In Decision

Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger

2019

Registrations in the Feral Ground

Tamsin Hanke, Ralph Parker

The Vibes Are About to Be Immaculate Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger

The Vibes Are About to Be Immaculate

Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger

This year UG13 learned from the disruptive creation of couture to develop a new process of architectural design.

Couture is the highest echelon of an industrial process. It offers a forum for goods beyond those which are wearable, saleable and practical and is set apart just sufficiently from the realm of the real world to exist entirely for the purposes of inspiration. Couture can interact with the cultural present in a way that is immediate, responsive and reciprocal, allowing it to benefit from advances in technology and cultural thinking.

Students were asked to research cultures of innovation –defining couture not as a contingent of fashion, but rather as a method of creative production that is present in all disciplines, from the sciences to landscape and across the arts. We are interested in the particularities of this mindset, including the people, their influences and contexts. We are also curious about how ideas around innovation are communicated through drawings, images and descriptions, as well as by the final pieces themselves.

For our field trip, UG13 travelled from York to Berwick-uponTweed via Lindisfarne. We explored a range of architectural projects and works of innovation including aviation, sculpture and landscape. Projects have been sited both in locations from the trip and from around London, varying in scales from the expanse of the flooding causeway at Lindisfarne to tight urban sites in Camden. Each project was developed with a rigorous respect towards architectural convention and an adventurous approach to spatial and aesthetic assumptions, We see opportunity in the type of innovation which looks at where culture might be able to move towards, rather than remaining where it is. We are interested in the elements that go into making an environment of true innovation, driving culture forward and advancing our thinking on what is possible.

UG13 helps students to find a way of working that drives them as individuals – one that can be sustained beyond the limitations of a graded project. We encourage students to find agency through clear and confident decision-making, and to explore and communicate complex ideas of architecture and design through simple architectural programmes.

Year 2

Chuhan (Paris) Feng, Edmund (Flurry) Grierson, Veronika Khasapova, Adam Klestil, Po (Tate) Mok, Peter Moore, Luiza-Elisabeta Oruc, Roland Paczolay, Fangyi (Erica) Zhou

Year 3

Bogdan Botis, Daniel Collier, Shyem Ramsay, Zhelin (Simon) Sun, Ying (Sunny) Sun, Peixuan (Olivia) Xu, Chan (Antonio) Yang, Ron Zaum

Technical tutor and consultant: Syafiq Jubri

Critics: Sam Davies, Niki-Marie Jansson, Madhav Kidao, Patch Perez, Kevin Pollard, Dan Pope

13.8–13.10 Peixuan (O livia) Xu, Y3 ‘Sweet Simulacra’. A chocolate workshop and museum transforms York’s confectionery history into sweet simulacra. Challenging Baudrillard’s view that the hyperreality of digitalisation loses its original meaning, the building intends to create an architectural hybrid of digital fabrication and analogue crafting, bringing back the driving force of desire.

13.5–13.7 Po (Tate) Mok, Y2 ‘The Nautilus’. The project is intrigued by the form of bone structures and how nature is predicated on the idea of ‘design’ – the correlation of structure with function that lies at the heart of the molecular nature of life. Through continuous exploration of bone and skin, aesthetic and material implications begin to present themselves in a newfound awareness of transparency, translucency and the exposing of structure and backlit forms.

13.11–13.15 Daniel Collier, Y3 ‘Children/Factory’. This project explores the definition of the sublime as the perception of danger from a place of safety. A primary school acts as a safe environment through which the industrial processes that support us can be viewed by integrating factories directly into the school, separated from the pupils by a thin, semi-permeable membrane. The project also acknowledges England’s transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy for this new generation of children. Steiner schools were originally set up as a response to the industrial revolution and looked to reconnect with a way of life situated in the landscape sublime. In the post-industrial West, they now have the opportunity to reconnect children with both the landscape sublime and the industrial sublime.

13.16 Ron Zaum, Y3 ‘4 Orsman Road’. The project is situated at 4 Orsman Road, a creative hub located in Tuscany Wharf, overlooking Regent’s Canal and surrounded by studios. The notion of scenography and creative spaces that reshape architecture’s purpose allows for the development of stone shell housing and a variety of flexible spaces for lectures, galleries or shows.

13.17 Roland Paczolay, Y2 ‘Duality of Absence’. The project bridges the gap between the deceased and the living through the use of dualistic philosophy. Duality pertains to a view of life which accepts the tension and paradox of human existence. The union of opposing forces is translated into a monumental architectural language which invites mourners in while impressing on them the importance of life.

13.18 Peter Moore, Y2 ‘More than Just a Post Office’. The Royal Mail has its roots as a bespoke courier service for the monarchy. As it expanded, it held onto its royal origin in its design and aesthetic. The postal system was at the forefront of industrialisation, and during this time, through beautiful craftsmanship and engineering, the Royal Mail was in its prime as a cultural and political symbol. The project questions the current march towards efficiency by proposing a romanticised, ornamented post office that revels in the luxurious. It seeks to be more beautiful and more designed than it needs to be – placing great importance on aesthetic pleasure.

13.19 Chuhan (Paris) Feng, Y2 ‘An Invitation to See My New Nose’. The project – a consultation hub sited in Harley Street, London – is inspired by the history and surgical procedures of plastic surgery. The main design motif in the project is a building that pretends to be a landscape, interrogating the challenge of harmoniously merging natural and man-made together in the surgery. It treats the vast plain site by digging into the ground and building upon it to create a raised landscape that hugs the sunken building. It questions how architecture can be surgically constructed.

13.20 Shyem Ramsay, Y3 ‘The Urban Ecology Sanctum’. The project is located in Millwall Park on the Isle of Dogs, and consists of an ecotherapy centre with accommodation and public allotments. The construction of the timber truss structures explores the iterative design of the roof and the connections of timber joints, forming an organic appearance.

13.21 Ying (Sunny) Sun, Y3 ‘Slipping into Fantasy’. The project explores the intimate relationship between architectural features and their inhabitants. It proposes a water park and holiday centre for people to relax and unwind, providing visitors with the opportunity to explore their subconscious fantasies in an obscure, intimate and illusionary environment. Located in Brighton, the building sits along the seashore. Unique structural spaces are created to allow building inhabitants, architectural elements and the site’s landscape to playfully engage with each other. This can be experienced through a series of designs, from the changing rooms to the water slides.

13.22 Fangyi (Erica) Zhou, Y2 ‘Breaking the Dogmatism of Learning’. The project, a new co-learning centre situated on the bank of the Lee Navigation in the vibrant neighbourhood of Hackney Wick, seeks to investigate future possibilities of learning by triggering constant curiosity in the learning process. The building provides a series of interrelated educational spaces, ranging from large lecture rooms to small individual studying units. The key motif of the design is to maximise the encounters between interdisciplinary activities by creating three tiers of discovery: looking at, looking through and looking past.

13.23 Luiza-Elisabeta Oruc, Y2 ‘The Repository of Childhood Imagination’. The project is an investigation into curiosity and imagination and looks at how adults can experience feelings of childlike excitement within architecture. Located next to the V&A Museum of Childhood, the building is an example of how embracing play can lead to unleashing creativity and imagination. The project invokes a sense of comfort and nostalgia, being equal parts familiar and fantastical, as well as a sense of discovery and curiosity in the unknown.

13.24 Edmund (Flurry) Grierson, Y2 ‘This is Going to Make Some Noise’. This project accommodates a new state-of-the-art wind tunnel testing facility in Middlesbrough, a post-industrial town in North Yorkshire. Middlesbrough is being simultaneously destroyed and rebuilt to enable the town’s ‘levelling up’. Wind sculpts the space, creating acoustic blocks between rooms that generate both privacy and intimacy. The architecture also considers complex team dynamics within elite sports, with the premise that not all teammates are team players.

13.25 Chan (Antonio) Yang , Y3 ‘Performing for the Surveillance Society’. As surveillance becomes more and more prevalent, inhabitants of the town hall continue to act out choreographed, regimented performances for the consumption of the observers nested within the voyeurs’ corridors that circulate throughout the building. In contrast, inspired by the current counter-surveillance design movement and its material influences, the project also illustrates how the inhabitants of the public circuses would rebel against this dominant voyeuristic system.

Something Missing (and Almost Alive) Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger

Something Missing (and Almost Alive)

Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger

This year, students looked at the nature of limitation and the cultural importance of occasional impossibility. Sometimes limitations manifest themselves as a tiny absence borne from an impossible script in the rendering engine. Sometimes it is an entire masterpiece that fails in the last round of fundraising. We are interested in the instances when limitation has been met with nonchalance, where the absence has been so completely considered that the yet-made project has become fully alive.

Students investigated unmade projects that have become, through persistence, no less whole than those that have been built, acted or shot. These works often contribute more actively to a genre as they attempt to realise a feat that is technologically, culturally or ethically ahead of their time. They must work harder to convince and answer questions of validity and possibility.

Nimbly and with persistence, students sought to construct a journey to achieve an invented vision. The development of the projects included the invention and construction of the site as a digital environment. This may be borrowed from reality or a found or invented narrative, and is ultimately communicated with exacting precision and utter belief in its existence. Students worked to consider a continuously growing range of cultural influences beyond architecture to find and build upon opportunities for insight.

In UG13, we help students to find a way of working and line of enquiry that drives them as individuals, which can be sustained beyond the limitations of the graded project. We encourage students to find agency through clear and confident decision making, and to explore and communicate complex ideas of architecture and design through simple programmes.

Year 2

Cosimo De Barry, Leonard Ide, Natthasha (Ying) Jintarasamee, Veronika Khasapova, Krit Pichedvanichok, Josef Slater, Zhelin (Simon) Sun, Yen Ting, Fangyi (Erica) Zhou

Year 3

Grace Baker, Selin Bengi, David Byrne, Zijie Cai, Alfie Gee, Ruoxi Jia, Mariia Shapovalova, Martins Starks

Technical tutors and consultants: Sam Davies, Patch Dobson-Pérez, Egmontas Geras, Syafiq Jubri, Sonia Magdziarz, Kevin Pollard

Critics: Nat Chard, Sam Davies, Freddie Hong, Madhav Kidao, Freddie Leyden, Kevin Pollard, Javier Ruiz Rodriguez, Simon Withers. A special thanks to Mark West

13.1 Alfie Gee, Y3 ‘My Partner, A Ghost’. An architecture that refuses a passive and static life, preferring instead the world of dolls and ghosts: bodies looking for life and lives in search of bodies. These studies explore the limits of sympathy and revulsion and their blurring into an architecture of punishment.

13.2 David Byrne, Y3 ‘Entrance to the Referenced Heterotopia’. Analysis of Mark Fisher’s work on cultural hauntology – a concept that considers how the present is affected by the metaphorical ‘ghosts’ of lost futures –leads to an exploration of referencing and plagiarism in popular culture. Through investigations of designers and their modes of referencing, the design produces a bewildering experience in which one can dissect and explore the references and precedents held within.

13.3 Josef Slater, Y2 ‘In Praise of the Berceuse’. Drawing initial inspiration from capsule hotel typologies, this project proposes a hotel that acts as a lullaby, while emphasising and manipulating the relationship between users and workers. Sited in Camden, the project considers how a capsule hotel might function in a London setting and comments on the obscuration and actualities of labour within society.

13.4–13.5 Leonard Ide, Y2 ‘Relocating Smithfield Market Tenants’ Association’. The proposal allows for the Smithfield Market Tenants’ Association – the trade union representing the market’s working body – to compromise on forced emigration, due to the expansion of the city’s financial centre, and relocate to a new site. The building takes on a defensive stance, acting as an anchor for Smithfield’s legacy.

13.6–13.9 Martins Starks, Y3 ‘Playce’. An inner London kindergarten provides children growing up in small flats in Haggerston a chance to roam freely and explore their urban surroundings. Through the application of parametric simulation techniques, a new mode of kinetic architecture is proposed, allowing the corridors of a school to transform into an immersive game world. 13.10–13.13 Mariia Shapovalova, Y3 ‘Blurring Performance’. The project is a performance space and gastronomy centre located at Trinity Buoy Wharf, the confluence of the River Thames and River Lea. The building negotiates the interaction between the performance and gastronomy space, questions the depth of space and architectural boundaries, and modifies how an audience transitions into a performance and a performer relates to the stage.

13.14 Alfie Gee, Y3 ‘My Partner, A Ghost’. A ballet school haunted by ghosts sits on the water’s edge at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London. Both host and occupant, the school dances in partnership with its students, provoked by their inhabitation and provoking in return. Applying animation as the main design process, both literally and conceptually, the school proposes a cohabitant architecture. A stage is an empty floor but the dancer’s posture can transform its resonance. This ballet school is an architecture for animists, not automata.

13.15–13.17 David Byrne, Y3 ‘Queering Vauxhall/ Disrupting Normativity’. Through the production of heterotopias, interior spaces allow for the experimentation and production of novel Queer identities, away from the homo and transnormative modes of identity produced through exterior surveillance.

13.18–13.20 Zijie Cai, Y3 ‘Dream at Trinity Buoy Wharf’. The film industry has developed various techniques and devices to describe the dream in visual terms since cinema’s invention. The hotel provides an architectural departure from the reality of urban life into the dream space of its interior. The project defines dream as the distortion of reality and challenges the physical constraints of architecture to propose a personal dream through digital media.

13.21–13.22 Ruoxi Jia, Y3 ‘Soft Immersion: Hotel in the aesthetic’. Drawing from the aesthetic movement in Britain (1860–1900), a hotel complex is proposed to investigate an artist’s formal softening approaches. The hotel intends to cure urban melancholy with recreation, bathing and landscape fusions onsite.

13.23 Grace Baker, Y3 ‘Decommissioning Fear Towards a Post-Nuclear Future’. Capitalism has normalised destructive forces. The global effects of climate change now outweigh the catastrophic risks associated with nuclear power. The proposal analyses the fears of past disasters and weaves a narrative of suggestions for a more harmonised and sustainable world, as a way to cultivate acceptance of future green technologies.

13.24 Cosimo De Barry, Y2 ‘Nourishing the Culinary Underbelly’. A restaurant in St James’s, London takes on a labyrinthine form of subterranean kitchens and bars. The intimate site allows for the underground world of chefs to flourish in the heart of central London, while appealing to a clientele seeking exclusivity and hedonism. 13.25 Krit Pichedvanichok, Y2 ‘Broadway Terminal’. Responding to the world’s gradual transition to electric vehicles, the project takes as its focus the longer time period required to refuel an electric car. The typical five-minute pit stop for petrol cars is reimagined and re-purposed to become a multi-purpose hub for car enthusiasts and passing drivers to utilise and unwind. 13.26–13.27 Selin Bengi, Y3 ‘Architecture as Landscape’. The building design envisions a new Farringdon Station in London, embodying a sense of adventure and the unexpected contrasted with the inherent order found in nature. Many repeating and interwoven habitats within the building reveal themselves along circulation paths and create a sense of dynamism. The new station turns the daily commute into a calming and inspiring experience as one moves from the alluvial forms of the ground floor to a dwarfing canyon, and into the nooks of the cavernous library that reach the vast valley of the Crossrail terminal, 30 metres below ground.

13.28 Natthasha (Ying) Jintarasamee, Y2 ‘The Next Phase of Trinity Buoy Wharf: A performative stage of its own’. A project that uses performance as a tool and understands it as a form rather than something that is a performance. It features a designer’s flagship store that focusses on the experience of the building’s users, and the building itself, to recreate performance.

13.29 Yen Ting, Y2 ‘On the Rocks and Under the Sea’. A hotel that explores the coastal character of the Broomway, a public right of way over the foreshore at Maplin Sands, off the coast of Essex. The architecture ties together notions of tide, changing sea levels, danger and accessibility. Parts of the building are allowed to flood and the presence and proximity of the sea is felt throughout.

In Decision Tamsin Hanke,

Colin Herperger

In Decision

Tamsin Hanke, Colin Herperger

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

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

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

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

Year 2

Ling Fung (Grace) Chan, Ioana-Maria Drogeanu, Zicong (Charles) Liang, Rebecca Miller, Kun (Anna) Pang, Sirikarn (Preaw) Paopongthong, Sharon Tam

Year 3

Maciej Adaszewski, Dinu Hoinarescu, Dilara Koz, Ziwei (Philip) Liu, Jingxian (Jacquelyn) Pan, Kehui (Victoria) Wu, Yujie Wu, Suzhi Xu

Thanks to our technical tutors and consultants

Sophia McCracken, Sam Davies, Sonia Magdziarz, Minh Tran

Thank you to our critics

Alessandro Ayuso, Shawn Bailey, Matthew Butcher, Jun Hao Chan, Freddie Hong, Nina Jua Klien, Syafiq Jubri, Madhav Kidao, Luke Lupton, Zach Pauls, Patch Perez, Kevin Pollard, Mark West, Simon Withers

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

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

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

13.11–13.12 Sirikarn (Preaw) Paopongthong, Y2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13.19 Rebecca Miller, Y2 ‘ The Love of the Land, Lisbon’. The project is a chapel and auditorium with supporting facilities, referencing the changing agricultural landscape of Lisbon. Inspired by cartographic, agrarian and animist attitudes to landscape, the natural world and their uniquely spiritual qualities, this non-denominational chapel will allow for spiritual reflection within the urban city and highlight the spiritual, more ephemeral features of landscape.

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

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

13.22 Kun (Anna) Pang, Y2 ‘Carving Flesh and Stone, Lisbon’. As large cities such as Lisbon continue to develop and urban populations rise, our civilisation is becoming more and more disconnected to the cities we inhabit. Thus the aim of the bathhouse is to explore how marble carving could be modernised in order to carve modern, fluid forms, dematerialising the monolithic identity of stone to allow for a nonverbal dialogue between the visitors and the architecture; creating a sensory oasis in the heart of the busy city.

13.23, 13.25 Sharon Tam, Y2 ‘ Biblio[TECH], Lisbon’. Located near the port of Lisbon, this tech startup office embodies the concept of fragility and encourages socialisation. As a response to the Portuguese Financial Crisis, the provision of co-working spaces contributes to the city’s steps to economic recovery. While the design of a fragile workspace intends to motivate entrepreneurs through eliciting their vulnerabilities, the programme as a business agglomeration serves as an anti-fragile safety net for them to grow their businesses. The form of the building challenges structural lightness and heaviness, material thinness and thickness.

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

Registrations in the Feral Ground Tamsin Hanke, Ralph Parker

Registrations in the Feral Ground

Tamsin Hanke, Ralph Parker

Our inquiry into landscape this year leaves aside the picturesque and the garden for the wilderness, the feral, and the visceral engagement of ground, depth, space and body, found through adventure. We are the new explorers, registering the ground afresh. We are the transcribers of its strange histories, those who listen for its peculiar resonances, the keepers of its countless time and cartographers of its unholy dreams. We are intrigued by the human desire for conquest and the search for an improbable and previously impossible relationship between man and ground. Architectural opportunity lies in the spatial idea of this relationship – how we discover adventures and mark territory.

Charting a path towards an archaeology of future architectures that have an inexorable correlation with the terrain, we find new ground hidden in old landscapes. We create works as spatial registrations into the landscape; interventions borne of congruences, syncopations, phase shifts and alignments, dualities, ciphers and sequences across the vast stratification of place and people, where strange and meaningful architectures coalesce. What discoveries can we draw from an infinitely stratified landscape, to then be modulated and refigured into architectural action?

The unit favours the ‘making’ of ideas and space because physical production carries with it a degree of difficulty that allows the work itself to speak back, as it is fashioned through its subtle procession of successes and failures. We value work that – although often simple in its programmatic and verbal description – is delightfully complex in its architectural proposition and inventiveness. Achieving clarity is firmly respected within our experimental and explorative agenda. We nurture a challenging environment of experimentation in the as-yet-unknown, where students feel supported and equipped to take the chances required to achieve the exceptional.

This year, we have purposefully sought out difficult places set in challenging landscapes, to stimulate inventiveness in response to those landscapes, and to achieve propositional clarity not subservient to, but in balance with it. The projects engage with a swathe of sites uncovered on an ascension across Europe; from the glimmering sea level of Gaudí’s Barcelona, via Ledoux’s sublime salt works, the historical grain of ancient Lyon, the susurrating vine-clad shores of Lake Geneva and upwards, into the echoing footholds of heroic Alpinists at the high roof of the continent.

Year 2

Rory Cariss, Herui Chen, Andrew Cowie, Henri Khoo, Oscar Leung, Seng (Aaron) Lim, Diana Mykhaylychenko, Konrad Pawalczyk, Theo Syder

Year 3

Vasily Babichev, Vladyslav Bondarenko, Alys Hargreaves, Yu-Wen (Yvonne) Huang, Maria Jones Delgado, James McLaughlin, Arina Viazenkina

With thanks to visiting tutor Colin Herperger and technical tutor Sash Scott

Thank you to our critics: Nat Chard, Olivia Forty, Syafiq Jubri, Perry Kulper, Javier Ruiz

13.1, 13.19 Alys Hargreaves, Y3 ‘In Conversation With: A Glacier’. Set within the scar of a rapidly retreating glacier, the climate convention centre establishes an international space of collective discussion for the long-term catastrophe and short-term states of crises that are symptomatic of climate change. Consisting of a lecture theatre, an assembly hall, libraries and accommodation, the building addresses the need for soft and hard discussions linked to the pace and syntax of conversation. The architecture has a spatial temporality translated through the process of slip-casting.

13.2 Yu-Wen (Yvonne) Huang, Y3 ‘Swan Lake: An Immersive Theatre Hotel’. Inspired by Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre productions, the public spaces of this boutique hotel transform into performance stages at designated times of the day. The architecture is the manifestation of performance as built pieces in space. An alternative approach to data-driven designs was explored by alternating between digital technology, 3D printing and traditional building methods, such as sand casting, and interpreted a contemporary adaptation of Swan Lake. The integration of structural and environmental building performance with theatrical productions, tests the intermediate boundaries between structure, form and function.

13.3 Arina Viazenkina, Y3 ‘The Institution of Dreams’. Taking inspiration from Carl Jung’s dream theories, this project aims to materialise a dreamlike experience in a proposal for a public walkway in Tring Park in Hertfordshire. The design of the walkway is based on the novel Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky 13.4–13.5 James McLaughlin, Y3 ‘The Theatrics of Paper’. This project creates visual moments of performative disruption within a theatre, whereby the audience is presented to itself, blurring the boundary between performance and reality. The building mirrors and divides these brief moments of objectification and voyeurism by layering the typologies of theatre and set production. Paper elements of the architecture and the stage are cast within the various programmed spaces, further subverting the role of the audience into having an active involvement with the theatre’s development, expansion and deterioration.

13.6–13.7 Vasily Babichev, Y3 ‘The Creature in the Arveyron River’. A proposal for an arts institution that fosters environmental responses to Mer de Glace, a melting glacier in the French Alps. As the glacier ‘weeps’, the building clings to the land with its tears.

13.8–13.9 Maria Jones Delgado, Y3 ‘The Harbinger of the Storm’. Born from the myth that dragons pre-empt and cause storms in the Alps, this botanical garden and seed bank research facility channels extreme weather into the building to preserve specimens threatened by the glacial retreat happening parallel to the site.

13.10 Andrew Cowie, Y2 ‘Post-Work Re-Education Centre’. A proposal for a community centre in Lausanne in Switzerland that fosters the re-education of pre-industrial Swiss crafts – specifically stone sculpture, sgraffito, tavillonage, wood-carving and decoupage. The centre aims to carve new histories into the land’s abundant resources of timber and stone in a ‘post-work’ society.

13.11 Seng (Aaron) Lim, Y2 ‘Play Atlas’. This project is an inter-generational playhouse bringing together families and artists-in-residence to inspire horizontal learning, collaboration and experimentation. Grounded by the Reggio Emilia pedagogy – a student-centred preschool education philosophy – the playhouse is a haven for imagination that subverts daily domestic elements, routines and scales to encourage residents to use their innate curiosity in understanding the world they inhabit.

13.12 Konrad Pawlaczyk, Y2 ‘Trans-Musical Realm’. This project explores the spatial possibilities of architecture in facilitating shifts of human cognition through the sublime experience of music (vibration), and represents a transition between the typology of a chapel (silence) and a club (sound). The project looks at physical engagement with the experience of music.

13.13 Theo Syder, Y2 ‘Concrete Latex Plastic Latex’. A proposal for a micro-hotel with an interior that subtly reconfigures according to the different groups of inhabitants and the unique configurations of the seven types of Greek love experienced by them.

13.14 Diana Mykhaylychenko, Y2 ‘The Search of Inflection Point’. This project asks ‘What is the best moment to perform the perfect shot?’, ‘How do you catch the inflection point between two different states and materialise opposite forces in the architecture?’ and ‘Can the sequential process of long-distance shooting be read as a transitional procession that helps you to understand the environment outside?’

13.15 Vladyslav Bondarenko, Y3 ‘Breath of the Landscape’. A proposal for an inflatable pavilion in Tring Park, constructed using a method of both metal and reflective fabric tailoring. The pavilion – constantly inhaling and moving with the air and wind – houses a meditation space creating a fluid yet tranquil experience using its materiality.

13.16 Oscar Leung , Y2 ‘BURD’s Onsen’. A design proposal for a hot spring emporium for visitors and locals of the resort town, based on a mechanised bird. Abutting a saltworks-turned-museum, the building utilises its neighbour’s original brine pipelines and stores its contents in iron basins to supply rust-infused saltwater to its various hot springs for a genuine ‘iron onsen’ experience. 13.17–13.18 Henri Khoo, Y2 ‘The Tringest Tring’. An invitation to explore the unseen territory of the composited spectacle: the reanimation of Tring Park. 13.20, 13.22 Rory Cariss, Y2 ‘An Archive of Alpine Misadventure’. The archive, situated in Le Trétien, Switzerland, is based on the history of man’s failed attempts to conquer the Alps. The building houses a collection of objects and digital recordings, celebrating and preserving these stories of misadventure. A co-housing scheme forms a large part of the project, providing a home for the ex-mountaineers that run the archive. 13.21 Herui Chen, Y2 ‘Land/Soundscapes’. Experimentations on developing musical compositions into landscapes or converting spatial settings into music. The objective of this project is to find an alternative iterative tool to generate spatial designs.