Bartlett Design Anthology | UG14

Design Anthology UG14

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 Memory of Work

David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata

2021 Remember to Forget David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata

2020 Repeat, Recall, Rewrite David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata

The Memory of Work David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata

The Memory of Work

David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata

This year UG14 continued its studies into how societies remember and forget through collective rituals, commemorative monuments and the built environment. This year we focused on post-industrial UK to consider how places rich in heritage and social identity reframe their futures while continuing to celebrate their past.

For the past half-century information technology has transformed lives in the UK and encouraged economic growth. The country has witnessed a seismic shift from an economy reliant on manufacturing to one dominated by the service sector, leading to the decline of the industrial heartlands and a desperate need for adaptation. As the government reflects on a need to rebalance the economy following the pandemic and considers options to increase investment in manufacturing, UG14 examined how these post-industrial communities are moulded to forget, but still able to remember.

We visited The Potteries in the West Midlands, one of the most important historical industrial sites in the world. The geology and infrastructure of the area led it to become a flourishing global industry – a seam of clay and coal supplied the raw materials required to create ceramics, while canals provided an effective means of transportation. We marvelled at the ornate Victorian architecture and were dismayed to learn how it was being disregarded by the local council. We visited active and former factories and redundant collieries. We questioned the validity of these buildings and challenged ourselves to reimagine the abandoned spaces as stages to newly found events. In so doing we sought to design a layered architecture that sculpts new histories and identities.

We took part in a ceramics workshop to learn some of the techniques passed down through generations and communicate ideas to people – the creativity, skill and haptic knowledge that forms the collective memory of work. All human-made objects embody the processes that created them, representing a moment in time, both for the artist and for society. In an era when LiDAR scanning and 3D printing are digitally incorporated into architectural design, UG14 is simultaneously interested in the intentional and unintentional clues and messages we leave through our hands, for others to discover.

Year 2

Ibrahim Charafi, Maria Hussiani, Chin (Shirley) Lam, Giulia Mombello Perez, Chisom Odoemene, Zeynep Okur, Charize Orio, William Tindall

Year 3

Chantelle Chong, Dylan Duffy, Jack Kinsman, Ling (Stefanie) Leung, Xavier Simpson, Libby Sturgeon, Hau (Charmaine) Tang

Technical tutor and consultant: Danielle Purkiss

Critics: Sarah Firth, Stefana Gradinariu, Mads Hulsroy-Peterson, Kevin Kelly, Eleanor Lakin, Benjamin Mehigan

14.1, 14.16–14.18 Dylan Duffy, Y3 ‘Where the Giants Walked’. The project inserts itself into the now unused Chatterley Whitfield Colliery in Stoke-on-Trent. The programme responds to the need for funding to maintain the historic site by creating a giant puppet workshop which holds a bi-yearly event to attract vendors and visitors. The workshop houses a series of specialist designers and ateliers manufacturing elements of the giant around a central construction table to form a reconfigurable building. The project investigates methods of efficiency and recycling in the construction of giant marionette puppets and buildings by utilising methods of material transformation and designing for the disassembly of different components at varying scales of construction.

14.2 Xavier Simpson, Y3 ‘Exploring Terroir’. Sited at the heart of Stoke-on-Trent’s ‘mother town’, the project reinhabits Burslem’s disused indoor marketplace. In order to shed light on the abandoned but not forgotten site, the programme proposes a community kitchen and garden with a central focus on the Staffordshire dish, ‘lobby’ –a stew traditionally eaten by poorly paid potters. The project also explores the potential of reusing the waste materials produced by cooking lobby to generate a new materiality that is unique to Burslem and its community.

14.3–14.4 Chantelle Chong, Y3 ‘At First, There Lay a Swamp’. The project explores a community space and wellness destination that provides tranquil yet surreal peat baths to visitors of the derelict Chatterley Whitfield Colliery. The bathhouse initiates a political discussion on the mining industry’s difficult relationship with public health and subverts ideas of dirt and preconceptions of coal, retelling its narrative as the product of fossilised plants being subjected to millions of years of heat and pressure, eventually leading to their decay.

14.5–14.6 Hau (Charmaine) Tang , Y3 ‘Non-Fungible Architecture’. In response to Stoke-on-Trent’s history and declining economy, the project researches trends in community currency, cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The project proposes a minting facility to produce an alternative clay currency and house a pottery workshop for six artisans to collaborate on unique ceramic artworks to be sold as NFTs. The programme celebrates the uniqueness and imperfection of ceramic handcraft through architecture, questioning the dialectics of financial and craft value.

14.7–14.9 Jack Kinsman, Y3 ‘The Community of Brass’. In the abandoned Chatterley Whitfield Colliery, the project uses the local mineshafts as a supply for geothermal water, combining programmes of a traditional brass band music space with a geothermal energy plant. The building design is formulated through a mixture of ceramic and laser-etched steel to control airflow and heat circulation through the space. As the building’s temperature increases, its bimetallic panel system causes the contortion and transformation of the generated sounds in the performance spaces. while alluding to the local historic steelwork culture of the potteries.

14.10 Chisom Odoemene, Y2 ‘Tintinnabulum’. The building programme is a handmade-bell and saggar factory and residency, which will revive Stoke-on-Trent’s past by supporting its near-extinct handmade ceramics culture. Traditional apprenticeships will be reinstated, as the craftspeople live, work and learn from each other until they graduate. This revival will be celebrated by the chiming of handmade bone china bells, swinging from a carillon. The bell tower will act as a timekeeper for the different processes and rituals taking place in the building and beyond.

14.11, 14.14 Ling (Stefanie) Leung, Y3 ‘The Earth Beneath My Feet’. Once known as the ‘Mother of Potteries’, the town of Burslem has deteriorated into a ghost town

marked by derelict bottle kilns. The project proposes a community centre including a ceramics studio and anagama kiln. In addition, a farm sustains the production of flour for the manufacture of the town’s iconic delicacy, oatcakes, made in a communal kitchen. This project proposes an alternative approach to traditional clay-based construction methods by integrating ‘cooking’ and ‘building’ to promote sustainable construction knowledge in the wider community.

14.12 William Tindall, Y2 ‘Reiterating the Potter’s Wheel’. A former pottery in Burslem is demolished and its parts used to construct the proposed building, imprinting the memories of the past onto the new. The building programme is a repair shop and gallery for the personal items of those heralding from Stoke. These objects will be repaired and curated into biannual exhibitions, telling the hidden story of those whose lives were drastically impacted by the decline in manufacturing in the region.

14.13, 14.15 Libby Sturgeon, Y3 ‘The Potter’s Senate’. Despite the 1910 federation of Stoke-on-Trent that combined six towns into a single borough, one of the long-standing problems of the city is its ‘six-town mentality’ and internal rivalries. The proposal is to introduce a local parliament building that has performance at the heart of its design methodology –translating stories of the six towns into performance and subsequently into architecture. By capturing these stories in the building, ritual and tradition become firmly implanted in the parliament and rekindle a sense of collective identity.

Remember to Forget David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata

Remember to Forget

David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata

Last year, UG14 studied how societies remember through architecture and rituals. This year, we looked at how we forget or, more specifically, the tension between collective memory and social amnesia. Modern society is built on the prevalence of change, making forgetting a key characteristic of contemporary life. The political economy encourages us to live our lives at a progressively greater speed, accessing and producing immeasurable quantities of data. We are urged to feed into a consumerist culture, which is increasingly industrialised and globalised. In tandem, the world today has been designed as a topography of forgetting. The size and extent of our cities make them immemorable to the human brain, while the speed at which we repeatedly construct and destruct our built environment has eroded the foundations on which we build and share our memories.

2020 brought a halt to these proceedings. Despite the collective efforts of governments, the non-stop processes of 21st-century capitalism have been stagnated by Covid-19, presenting us all with a moment to withdraw and reflect. Unsurprisingly, this has provided an opening for the restoration of our communities, as well as for political expression and an unprecedented level of introspection. Statues have been toppled and new ones erected and cancel culture has left controversial public figures and companies isolated. Collectively we are asking ourselves whether the things we are told to remember are what we should remember. This leads to a fork in the road: After the pandemic, do we return to the way we were or change our practices? What do we really want to remember and forget as a society? If we rip down our statues, should we also demolish our buildings that no longer fit our new histories? And how does this tally with our need for sustainable development?

UG14 always considers architecture in four dimensions: buildings only exist when they are experienced and this can only occur through the axis of time. We believe in a design process with a focus on how people perceive, interact with and remember space – the connection between body, imagination and memory. To complement these studies in temporal architecture, we participated in a series of online workshops, run by film and theatre professionals, exploring ideas and techniques in immersive storytelling to arouse an emotional response.

Year 2

Praew Anivat, Thomas Bloomfield, Marten Hall, Eugene Kulakova, Natnicha (Amy) Ng, Chisom Odoemene, Alexander (Sasha) Pozen, Orm Sivapiromrat

Year 3

Ben Dewhurst, Brendan Du, Yushen (Harry) Jia, Anatasiia Stoliarova, Sharon Tam, Tianpei Wang, Oscar Wood, Leyun (Kitty) Zhu

Technical tutors and consultants: George Adamopoulos, Danielle Purkiss

Thanks to our workshop leaders: Loukis Menelaou, Henrik Pihlveus, Daniel Sonabend, Josef Stöger, Punchdrunk Enrichment

Critics: Stephen Gage, Stefana Gradinariu, Kevin Kelly, Eleanor Lakin, Benjamin Lucraft, Benjamin Mehigan

14.1, 14.3–14.4 Yushen (Harry) Jia, Y3 ‘Urban Resurrection’. The project explores our relationship to death and memorial through an alternative approach to body decomposition: the transformation of human flesh into fertiliser. The resulting soil is subsequently cast into a façade, which dissolves over ten years. As the façade weathers into a communal landscape, the commemoration transitions from the specific individual tribute to an ambiguous terrain of mass remembrance.

14.2 Marten Hall, Y2 ‘Requiem for a Futurist’. The project offers an alternative history for The Hill Garden and Pergola in Hampstead, London, envisioning a series of three occupants over the 50 years since its original abandonment. The invented narratives result in a proposition for a building in the present day that serves as a tapestry of imagined uses and moments; each able to be re-read and re-told through the physical proposal.

14.5 Anastasiia Stoliarova, Y3 ‘Donskoy Cemetery’. Sited in the old Donskoy Cemetery, Moscow, the project brings back erased memories of the past and connects them with new rituals of the future. A new crematorium and columbarium delicately thread between the old graves. The building uses concrete in forms that are usually found in steel, functioning as a form of visual play on the precast constructions commonly found in neighbouring Soviet-era buildings.

14.6 Orm Sivapiromrat, Y2 ‘Rice Capsule’. There is a saying in Thailand that ‘rice is the backbone of our country’. The building programme is a rice museum and restaurant, designed as a place where people of different communities can come together regardless of their background. The site – originally the British Embassy in central Bangkok – is a heritage home nestled amongst skyscrapers and luxury shopping malls.

14.7 Praew Anivat, Y2 ‘Reimagining Kemthong Nursery’. Kemthong nursery in Thailand was abandoned eight years ago, however, the land is designated by the government for educational purposes only. Thailand’s education system is known for its conservativeness, with teachers having full control over their pupil’s activities. The reimagined nursery envisions an alternative school environment that embraces the risk of frequent flooding.

14.8 Brendan Du, Y2 ‘London Wall Workshop Museum’. In the City of London, the urban fabric has been constructed around remnants of the London Wall. Some of these fragments lie preserved but forgotten. The project investigates how providing functionality to the London Wall can facilitate community engagement and lead to a future of better maintenance and protection. The building is a conservation centre and gallery.

14.9 Alexander (Sasha) Pozen, Y2 ‘Contingency Centre’. The project is located in South East Spain, in an area where challenges of sustainability and changing social values are threatening communities. A community centre uses data to find trends and predict the evolving needs of the local community. It reappropriates four holiday homes, formerly left uncompleted following the global financial crisis of 2008.

14.10 Natnicha (Amy) Ng, Y2 ‘The Gateway to Bangkok’. Sited at the old Customs House in Bangkok – a significant example of architecture in Thai history – the project explores Thailand’s cultural heritage through the management of indigenous plants. Throughout the design of the building, the story of Nang Phom Hom (The Fragrant-Haired Lady) is told and acts as an allegory for the delicacy and beauty of Thai handmade crafts.

14.11 Eugene Kulakova, Y2 ‘Eating Order’. Medical treatment for eating disorders can involve behavioural and cognitive therapy. The project provides a facility for an emerging method of treatment: rehearsed eating in varying levels of privacy. The architecture creates a range of spaces with varying levels of privacy and

enclosure. The design employs experimental calcite materials that challenge preconceived aesthetic expectations for treatment spaces.

14.12 Tianpei Wang, Y3 ‘The Crystal Palace Gin Farm’. Inspired by the design of the Wardian case – an early type of terrarium – the gin distillery represents and explores global food cultures. Gin derives flavour from botanical ingredients; some of these are native only to specific regions. The appearance, smell and taste of the plants cultivated, and the subsequent gins produced by the distillery, become representative of their geological origin and regional culture.

14.13–14.14 Ben Dewhurst, Y3 ‘Lichen are Queer Things’. Restoring the abandoned Abney Park Chapel in Stoke Newington, London, the project is a proposal for a Queer bathhouse, comprised of lichen, mud, algae and fungi to create a natural space that challenges notions of Queer bodies as unnatural. Lichen, as an example of biological symbiosis, offers ways of thinking about sexuality beyond a heteronormative framework. Blurring the boundaries between buildings, bodies and organisms, the project challenges preconceptions about architectural categorisation.

14.15–14.17 Sharon Tam, Y3 ‘Silo D’. A derelict grain silo in the post-industrial district of Silvertown, Newham, is turned into a brewery and is host of an annual festival. The brewery acts as a community hub that helps to counter some of the negative effects of gentrification, e.g. the displacement of long-term residents through rising rents, and celebrates the area’s industrial heritage, which is in danger of being forgotten.

Repeat, Recall, Rewrite

David Di Duca, Tetsuro Nagata

In UG14, we always consider architecture in four dimensions. Buildings only exist when they are experienced, and this can only occur through the axis of time. We believe in a design process with a focus on how people perceive, interact with and remember space – the connection between body, imagination and memory. This ‘temporal architecture’ can be described through the reading of drawings and models frozen in time, but is better experienced through films and animations, interactive models and installations. These modes of representation allow us to test out our theories and provide a method of storytelling that arouse emotional responses.

To complement these practices, we design our architecture as holistic ‘stages’ and ‘sets’: structures which can facilitate different experiences over extended lifetimes. This not only creates buildings of varying permanence and longevity, but also makes sense as a model of sustainable design. Buildings are able to exist for decades and centuries, hosting a plethora of relatively temporary events through minor modifications.

This year UG14 considered how societies remember. Shared memories are not only those that have been recorded in writing and images. They are the habits and traditions that are performed by people, which, knowingly or not, are reproduced to evoke an understanding of a narrative. When a society really wants to remember something as a community, it commits these stories into commemorative ceremonies. We began the year by identifying rituals that we observe around us, which remind communities in London of their past.

For our trip, we visited Georgia and explored the abandoned spa town of Tskaltubo. In its heyday, four trains would arrive daily from Moscow bringing thousands of visitors to its baths and sanatoriums. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the demise of the town, and the Abkhaz-Georgia conflict prompted the town to assume a new history, with its empty hotels and sanatoriums becoming makeshift homes for up to 10,000 internally displaced people. Today, the town lies mainly derelict: Tskaltubo is part museum, part amusement park, and part functioning town. It remains a fascinating reminder of the rituals of the past.

The building project questions what role these existing buildings in Tskaltubo can have for the communities that live and visit there. The abandoned spaces are reimagined as homes (stages) to newfound or rediscovered traditional rituals and events (sets), in order to design a layered architecture that offers new histories and identities. As designers, sometimes we need to decide what to remember, and what to forget.

Year 2

Finlay Aitken, Ivy Aris, Ye Ha Kim, Harris Mawardi, Rebecca Radu, Fergal Voorsanger-Brill, Prim Vudhichamnong, Xiaotan (Alex) Yang

Year 3

Nicholas Collee, Paul Kohlhaussen, Oscar Leung, Aaliyah McKoy, Loukis Menelaou, Jennifer Oguguo, Zaneta Ojczyk, Evan O’Sullivan, Josef Stoger

Thanks to our consultants George Adamapoulos, Alexis Germanos, Danielle Purkiss

Thank you to our critics

Abigail Ashton, Sarah Firth, Stephen Gage, Kevin Kelly

14.1, 14.4 Paul Kohlhaussen, Y3 ‘Earthen Vinification’. Inspired by traditional Georgian feasting (supra) rituals, the project proposes a winery in an abandoned sanatorium, which hosts an annual programme of collective production of wine and ceramics. The building is structured to accommodate three key celebratory rituals, representing toasts dictated by the tamada (toastmaster) and the merikife (wine-runner).

14.2–14.3 Loukis Menelaou, Y3 ‘(Re-)Constructing Iosseliani’s Sonic World’. The project proposes a film residency which focuses on foley sound design. Architectural elements are redesigned as instruments whose form and scale are not only informed by orthodox spatial requirements but also by their sonic qualities and ability to recreate sounds from local film director Otar Iosseliani’s sound palette.

14.5 Evan O’Sullivan, Y3 ‘Psychosis Rehabilitation Centre’. The project aims to synthesise the evolving cognitive research on the relationship between the built environment and mental wellness. The building is designed through manipulating spatial qualities to favour the needs and desires of patients, thereby creating an opportunity for alternative treatment therapies that could alleviate the need for pharmaceutical intervention.

14.6 Josef Stoger, Y3 ‘P’arazit’i’. Inspired by the parasitic fungus Cordyceps, the Tskaltubo Cyber-balance Centre grows out from an abandoned Soviet-era bathhouse. Its mission: to protect the Georgian state from the threat of Russian cyber-attack. Designed as an individual organism, the funicular roof structure is packed with a myceliuminoculated substrate, which eats through and binds the building into a single monolith.

14.7 Fergal Voorsanger-Brill, Y2 ‘Tskaltubo Regeneration Station’. The programme is a portable construction school that teaches sustainable self-build skills through practical projects, and aims to teach students that construction can be as personal as drawing or painting in the design process. The brief discusses temporary and permanent material languages, as it is installed at each sanatorium for two years, but leaves behind repairs that will last for many more.

14.8 Rebecca Radu, Y2 ‘Indigo Dyeing Manufacture ’. The project provides employment for the local internally displaced population and aims to uphold the Georgian custom of decorating traditional supras with indigodyed tablecloths. The design is inspired by the the draping of these cloths and is elaborated with dynamic mechanical elements, which are adaptable to the external environment.

14.9 Ivy Aris, Y2 ‘Medea’s Herbal Apothecary’. The project honours the ancient ritual of herbal medicine, a practice rooted in Georgian culture. The apothecary celebrates the fertile land of the region and commemorates the country’s healing heritage. The proposal pays homage to traditional religious rituals and explores how placebo effects can be enhanced through architecture.

14.10 Finlay Aitken, Y2 ‘Skate Hostel’. Informed by the documentary ‘When Earth Seems to be Light,’ the skate hostel aims to relocate the youth culture of Georgia from Tbilisi to the abandoned Soviet spa town of Tskaltubo. The building plays with the relationship between old and new as it carves skate-able architecture into the fabric of the existing sanatorium.

14.11 Prim Vudhichamnong, Y2 ‘Art Restoration Laboratory’. The project proposes a conservation centre to reinstate the underappreciated art and identity of Georgia, along with the redevelopment of the adjoining semi-derelict Sanatorium Imereti as a gallery for their exhibition. The centre’s design is informed by the concept of layered transparency and controlled lighting to create interconnected but regulated restoration spaces.

14.12 Oscar Leung, Y3 ‘The Curious Parasite’. This project is a hostel for urban explorers who romanticise and broadcast the decaying sanatoriums of Tskaltubo. The programme utilises controlled weathering by combining new building spaces which accelerate the disintegration of the architecture they are entwined with. It explores the parasitic relationship between ruin and the tourist industry, and the concept that imperfect structures can have greater value than faultless preservation.

14.13–14.14 Nicholas Collee, Y3 ‘Carving a New Language’. This project fragments a Soviet-era bathhouse in order to demonstrate an active ownership of Georgia’s tumultuous past, and form a new cultural arts space. The design cuts away and replaces parts of the crumbling ruin with new elements which are stylistically informed by both the country’s traditional calligraphy and architectural ornamentation, as well as its contemporary art scene.

14.15 Zaneta Ojczyk, Y3 ‘Medea Teahouse’. There is a parallel between the decline of Tskaltubo and the Georgian tea industry; both collapsing with the downfall of the Soviet Union. Situated in the derelict Sanatorium Medea, this proposal functions as an educational visitor centre and aims to revive the forgotten local tea industry by devising a new tea ritual as a means to reinvent Georgia’s post-Soviet identity.

14.16–14.17 Aaliyah McKoy, Y3 ‘Khridoli Shadow Spa’. This programme is a theatrical sports and spa complex, focusing on the traditional Georgian martial art of Khridoli. Inspired by the Roman bathing ritual which incorporated entertainment as well as healing, it develops an architecture that explores the dynamic relationship between performers and viewers.

14.18 Jennifer Oguguo, Y3 ‘Food For Thought’. This project explores the history and politics of tangerine production in Georgia. The building programme is a seed bank and spa focusing on deploying tangerine-based analogies within a pre-existing Soviet architecture. Set ten years into the future, the importance of preservation in agriculture is presented through seeds, the human body and the building’s ruins.

14.19 Harris Mawardi, Y2 ‘Tskaltubo Performing Arts Centre’. The project provides an opportunity to celebrate the history of arts and culture within Tskaltubo. Sited in an abandoned bathhouse that is overgrown by surrounding parkland, the theatre’s porosity aims to blur the boundaries of stage and nature as well as the threshold between its auditorium and public spaces.

14.20, 14.22 Xiaotan (Alex) Yang, Y2 ‘Palace of Sakartvelo’. The ambition of the project is to revitalise an abandoned hotel complex into a multifunctional community and transportational hub, in partnership with an educational timber processing factory for displaced people to utilise the resources of the adjacent forests. Elements of traditional Georgian architecture and steam-bending techniques are central to the building’s design.

14.21 Ye Ha Kim, Y2 ‘Therapeutic Infrastructure’. The site is located adjacent to Lake Tsivi, which is heavily polluted with copper sulphate sludge materials. The project explores how waste materials extracted from the water treatment process can be incorporated into the design of a holiday retreat. The design proposes a water-cleaning landscape, where elements of the process are analogous to the detoxification organs within the human body.