2014 AA Summer School Unit 7 - LONDON STUMPS

LONDON STUMPS Grafting new dreams on London’s unbuilt towers.

Unbuilt London AA Summer Unit 2014

by Anna Czigler, Aude-Line Duliere, Suzi Pain and Gabriel Sanchiz With the theme of this year’s AA Summer School program, we invite our students to look forward and to look back as the unbuilt towers of London will inhabit our mental speculative skyline. The point of departure is the ‘stump’: an abandoned structure that was destined to become a tower on the London skyline. Students will study and replace a failed London tower using their own imagination. They will build a structure that carries Victorian optimism and embraces a future vision for London.

Londoners love naming their buildings: the Gherkin, Walkie Talkie and Cheesegrater are all nick-names of highly innovative landmark buildings, each a formal and structural representation of what architects and engineers can do if given the opportunity. What happens if that opportunity vanishes and construction stops? Londoners will still lovingly name this building “Stump”. London’s two stumps, the Pinnacle and Watkin’s Tower were objects of their designers’ highest ambitions to create the tallest and most complex structure in the skyline of London. They do not only represent engineering ingenuity: they were meant to be an icon, a tourist attraction and a market-driven idea that fell just short of riding their wave of momentum.

Stumps are the materialized thresholds between the built and the unbuilt, where the dream stops and starts over again.

With an ever-evolving skyline and 236 new towers in the pipeline, how does one reinvigorate unbuilt London’s tangible trace: the stump?

The studio will investigate the failed visions of London’s stumps. Students will research the dreams and ambitions of their developers and architects, understand the motivations and market forces, the urban implications and the engineering background required for such an undertaking. The unit will ask what failure means in a structural sense and see how to test for possible failure. From the stumps, the students will repair history and propose a new structure to complete the unbuilt towers. They will then inhabit them with a new narrative-based program.

Our sites will be the two stumps, with Watkin’s tower projecting us in the past and the unbuilt Pinnacle into the future. We will travel to the 19th century, the industrial revolution, the time of optimism and utopia, where all fantasies were tested and where engineering was pushing the boundaries of steel to its limit. We will also investigate the concrete core of the Pinnacle in order to understand the spatial and structural differences of concrete and steel.

The original 1890’s entries for Watkin’s Tower competition were creative in many ways: the drawings where presented with a short narration describing an imaginative program, (“a captive parachute - to hold four persons”-, a sanatorium, a vertical village, winter gardens, a temple or a colony of aerial vegetarians) or an overly ambitious structural concept.

Using these entries format as precedent, the students’ imagination will occupy the shadows of the unbuilt tower proposals. Looking at the past will take us in the future, where the original narrative can be an inspiration for a proposed addition to the new fragments of London’s Skyline.

Project and output: Following an initial research period about the Pinnacle and Watkins’ Tower history, students will have a closer look at drawings and narratives of the competition proposals for the Watkin’s Tower. With these in mind, participants will then develop a spatial and structural concept and build upon the available stump to complete their tower. The unit final product will be series of towers large-scale models; these proposals will be the shell for student’s imagination. Participant will then create collages representing the most suitable, visionary program to inhabit their structure for future London.

?

Watkin’s tower 1891

?

Pinnacle tower 2008 LONDON STUMPS Unbuilt London AASummer school 14

Methodology and Schedule Part A: EXPLORE history and context

Part C. OCCUPY with a visionary program

Exercise 1:Participants will explore the past or the future by choosing for either the Pinnacle or for a tower among the 68 original designs submitted for the Watkins competition.

Students will be asked to analyse the vision, materiality and narratives of these towers. The research should address the following: what motivated the investors? What were the urban and infrastructural implications of such a project? What was the narrative behind the entries and designs? What was the engineering task? Why did the project become a stump?

Exercise 5: Photo shoot. Participants will take the time to carefully photograph their model and nicely edit and frame the picture, with the initial competition layouts for the Watkins towers as template.

Exercise 2: The unit will also gain a better understanding of the context by making the stumps models that will serve as a base for the large final models.

Part B. FABRICATE structural and spatial concept

Exercise 6: Programming and populating. With the spirit, vision and curiosity of the Victorian era but with a contemporary mind and London’s current urban context, energy and needs, this exercise is an opportunity for participants to question which innovative program could fulfill London’s ambitions and what the tower typology can offer our modern cities. With the model picture as a background and using a digital or analogical collage technique, students will populate the inner space of their structure with the imagined program. This image will be atmospheric, encapsulate the spirit of the proposals and be the money shot for each dream. A short descriptive story will accompany each vision.

Exercise 3: Prototyping an icon. E ach student will come with a diagrammatic proposal for a new tower that will re-use their chosen stump, a process that involves consideration on the design narrative, structural systems, ecological and environmental ideas and technological innovation. The structural and material differences between the concrete core of the Pinnacle stump and the metal frame of Watkin’s Tower will dictate different attitudes. The findings will be presented in form of concept models, analogical or digital. The most successful 4 proposals will be selected to be iron cast or 3D printed as iconic landmark (1/2000).

Exercise 4: Large crafted group models. In groups, students will build the selected concepts as large scale models (1/100) that they will literally graft on the previously made stump. Each model should be of a single material and use it in its authenticity and with a particular care to its physical and visual characteristics.

LONDON STUMPS Unbuilt London AASummer school 14

Bios

Bibliography

Anna Czigler works at ACME and is project architect for the high profile Minories Development in the City of London. Anna studied at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) where she received her M.Arch II in 2010. She was awarded her professional B.Arch degree from Cornell University, NY in 2006, with a concentration on architectural theory. Between her studies she worked in Hamburg, working on competitions as well as built commissions. After her studies at the GSD, Anna worked at Sauerbruch Hutton in Berlin. She was working on many international competitions and was an architect on the new office and retail development of Two New Ludgate in London, currently under construction. During her studies at the GSD Anna focused on fabrication techniques and has done many large scale installations. After her studies her work has focused on developments in London where she has to navigate between market needs and innovative design ideas.

The Architect’s journal “Skyline”, issue April 2014.

Aude-Line Duliere holds a Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Previously she studied in Brussels at the Institut Superieur d’Architecture La Cambre and at Sint-Lucas Architectuur. Since 2003, she has worked as an architect and movie production designer assistant in the U.S. and across Europe. Her academic interests build on the dual nature of her experience and explores the relation between architecture and cinema. In 2010, she co-authored Once Upon a Time... Monsterpieces of the 2000s!

(ORO Editions). Aude-Line was teaching assistant at the GSD and acted as design critic for student’s works at Kingston university and London Metropolitan University. Since 2010, she works at David Chipperfield Architects in London.

Suzi Pain’s first Bachelors degree was in Applied Art and she has strong interest and experience in metal work, ceramics and furniture. Following this she gained her undergraduate and post-graduate diploma in architecture at London Met and went on to work for Peter Zumthor in Switzerland and then David Chipperfield in London. She has taught interior design at Middlesex University and currently teaches a first year studio in architecture at Kingston University.

Barker Felix and Ralph Hyde, London, As it might have been, John Murray Publishers, 1982 Conzett Jurg, Bruno Reichlin, Mohsen Mostafavi, Andreas Hagmann, Structure as Space: Engineering and Architecture in the Works of Jürg Conzett and his Partners, Architectural Association Publications, 2006. Lynde Fred. C. for the Tower Company , Descriptive illustrated catalogue of the sixty-eight competitive designs for the great tower for London; Industries, London, 1890.

Di Palma Vittoria, Diana Periton, Marina Lathouri, Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subject in the Modern City, Routledge, 2008. Lefebvre Henri, the Production of Space, 1974.

Hirschman Sarah M. , Lindsay Anmuth, Testing to Failure: Design and Research in MIT’s Department of Architecture, SA+P Press, 2011.

The Illustrated London News, 1890-1892.

New London Architecture, Exhibition London’s Growing up! 2014.

Torre de David, Daniel Schrwartz, Markus Kneer, 2013.

Visual references From top left corner: Wembley stump; Pinnacle stump; Original competition entry for Watkin’s tower; Monsterpieces book; Beaux-arts Ball 1931; GSD studio 2009

Gabriel Sanchiz, after earning his undergraduate diploma at the Architectural Association in London, received a scholarship to study a master’s programme in Emergent Technologies and Design which was awarded with distinction at the same institution. He subsequently joined the geometry department of structural engineering firm Adams Kara Taylor where he worked alongside numerous architects in developing ambitious projects. In 2008, Gabriel joined David Chipperfield Architects where over 5 years, he focused on a number of high profile cultural and residential projects. Gabriel founded gsg architects in 2013 to pursue his own ambitions and is currently working on a number of retail and residential projects in the UK and abroad.

LONDON STUMPS Unbuilt London AASummer school 14