Bartlett Design Anthology | UG21

Design Anthology UG21

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 Finite

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Jasmin Sohi

2021 Uncertainty

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Jasmin Sohi

Finite Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Jasmin Sohi

Finite

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Jasmin Sohi

This year UG21 considered the finite.

The past 18 months of accelerated digital development have tested what can be achieved with less material consumption and physical movement. As we return to a supposed ‘normality’, urgent questions remain unanswered. As of 2014, humanity’s global ecological consumption is 1.7 times the Earth’s capacity. Apocalyptic deadlines suggest the world will be running out of sand (20 years), fresh water (28 years), food (18 years) and iron (64 years). Architecture increasingly looks beyond one moment of design to influence material supply chains and consider the entire lifespan of a space.

UG21 were asked to consider different aspects of the finite and the infinite. Can we create inventive architecture by imposing a strict limit on a material, a boundary, on time or perception? When do we use infinite digital space and infinite change to augment the fixed and finite? When do society’s rules create artificial limits and change the ways in which we design?

Architecture that values the finite needs to be created within time. Many systems around us operate as infinite games, with no ultimate outcome, measuring their value through incremental changes. New ways of drawing, modelling and filmmaking can consider architecture as a dynamic process of near infinite change and feedback. The Poincaré disk model, used by M. C. Escher, draws infinite space in a simple circle using hyperbolic geometry. Computer simulations and calculus quantify infinitesimal changes to provide certain predictions from many tiny moments of uncertainty. Fractal shapes contain never-ending patterns that resemble one another across different scales.

The students’ research this year straddled the material and immaterial, the physical and the infinite. They developed inventive design processes that not only followed strict rules of resources, materials and making but also provided architecture that was dynamic, reflective and thoughtful – and made best use of the digital infinite.

We travelled to the Isle of Portland on the south coast of the UK, an area described by Jonathan Meades as a ‘bulky chunk of geological, social, topographical and demographic weirdness’. Here students developed their own highly individual design processes and architectures.

Year 2 Ayisha Belgora, Nan-Hao Chen, Maria Gasparinatou, Ioi (Nicole) Ho, Ina-Stefana Ioan, Katie Karmara, Archie Koe, Zofia Lipowska

Year 3

Peter Cotton, Cosimo De Barry, Zeb Le Voi, George Neyroud, Jack Powell, Rafiq Sawyerr, Supawut Teerawatanachai, Walinnes (Air) Walanchanurak

Technical tutor and consultants: Jasmin Sohi with additional support from Julian Besems, Jatiphak Boonmun, Steve Webb

Critics: Julian Besems, Roberto Bottazzi, Naomi Gibson, Kostas Grigoriadis, Andrew Porter, Bethan Ring, Jasmin Sohi

21.1, 21.9 Cosimo De Barry, Y3 ‘Royal Academy of Music: Isle of Portland’. The project proposes a satellite facility for the Royal Academy of Music, based in London, on the Isle of Portland, in Dorset. The programme consists of a music studio complex for use by invited guests of the academy and for the local population to gain access to music equipment. The Portland stone façade of the building is resampled and remixed to create a colourful new face for the proposal which sits in a disused former Portland stone quarry.

21.2–21.8 George Neyroud, Y3 ‘A Chimeric Nursery’. In a disagreement over the preservation of Christ Church Spitalfields, a newly built nursery is now subject to demolition. The project introduces machine learning models that are derived from Nicholas Hawksmoor’s architectural designs, which have the ability to produce bespoke church plans for a new site. As the building must also satisfy the inhabitants, the children become authors alongside the architect and mediator. By oscillating between hand drawing, clay fabrication and digital modelling, the building becomes a chimeric object of a brand-new language, with the blended information of the three authors now distilled into a new nursery within the empty church walls of St George-in-the-East. 21.10–21.11 Nan-Hao Chen, Y2 ‘Time-Erosion’. The programme is a series of leisure facilities that work as observatory spaces along the coastal path in Portland for hikers and tourists. The project’s design is driven by the wave data of Portland, which informs how the geological features of Portland are shaped through time. With a combination of architectural elements generated by 3D modelling software and the composition of spaces inspired by the quarries, the project takes users on a journey to explore the geological features of the Portland Bill.

21.12–21.14 Ayisha Belgore, Y2 ‘Boundaries’. The project addresses the definition of architecture across administrative boundaries and questions how it changes as buildings develop and form. It focuses on the tangential relationship of boundaries and allows them to become an element in building design and construction. Materiality is fundamental to this project. The architecture, although functional, is at its heart a composition in, and a love letter to, stone. By being situated in the Isle of Portland, an area famous for its limestone quarries, the project remains true to this approach.

21.15–21.16 Walinnes (Air) Walanchanurak, Y3

‘A Butterfly’s Metamorphosis’. A butterfly conservatory that proposes to resurrect decayed and lost quarry grounds to bring back biodiversity through rewilding the landscape. By embracing a butterfly’s lifecycle, the space will re-enact a butterfly’s chronicle through its distinctive phrases: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly. This is done by incorporating the ideology of time and space through its superior qualities and structural colour.

21.17–21.18 Archie Koe, Y2 ‘Skate on Kintsugi: Belonging on the Isle of Portland’. A multi-storey skatepark in a quarry on the Isle of Portland. The project provides the younger generation of Portland with a skatepark and gives them a place to belong. By supporting troubled youths and instilling a sense of community, the project will mitigate potential mental health problems. Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, informs the materiality and skate-inspired pseudo-parametric design language.

21.19 Ioi (Nicole) Ho, Y2 ‘Post-Covid Healing Hub’. The project is focused on helping patients who are chronically ill with Covid-19, as well as providing data for scientific research, by creating a therapeutic architecture that blends seamlessly with its surrounding environment. The building explores how architecture and aesthetics can create an environment conducive to the healing

process. Plants serve as the healing centre of the building, promoting social interaction between residents and increasing physical, mental and physical wellbeing. The main feature of the building is a vertical perforated green-brick façade combining stone and plants, which challenges the idea of cohabitation and the coexistence of species. The Covid-19 pandemic is a turning point in human history. The new centre can provide a space for the public to enjoy a range of services such as counselling and physical therapy to help deal with issues before they develop into chronic health problems.

21.20 Ina-Stefana Ioan, Y2 ‘Resting in Myths’. The project brings together mythology and leisure in a storytelling environment buried deep inside a hill while also being lightly cantilevered off the ground. Its ambition is to create a dialogue on both sides of an existing hikers’ path and to draw on Portland’s rich culture by strategically presenting some of its long-lived legends in a mythology museum and resting area. These legends are told and represented through an image encryption algorithm that dictates the design when linked to the site’s topographic curves. The design language borrows from illustrated stories relating to the surrounding area to fuel the script with data, further contextualising the design. High spatial interconnectivity introduces a seamless transition between under- and overground platforms. Using the area’s topographic lines is at the core of the spatial arrangement, and the surrounding steep landscape is the dictator of the interior conditions.

21.21 Zofia Lipowska, Y2 ‘Dancing With the Landscape’. The relationship between cliffs, boulders and the human body provides the inspiration for a dance studio located between Bowers Quarry and Tout Quarry Sculpture Park. The experience of wandering among the stones, trying to stay in equilibrium on the uneven ground and feeling how the landscape influences movement are the main drivers for the project. The programme includes dance studio facilities, a kinetic sculpture park and a universal performance space that faces the English Channel.

21.22 Rafiq Sawyerr, Y3 ’A Preserved Current’. A building project that asks how historic buildings that have been frozen in time through the listing process can be adapted to satisfy the needs of the current environment. The project interrogates whether a fixed form of preservation is the only way a building’s architectural, programmatic and historical interests can remain intact.

In response to these factors, the design proposes an offshore library close to Portland Harbour, restoring the use of the Mulberry Harbour Phoenix Caissons by repopulating them with redesigned caissons, to replace the many lost during the war.

Uncertainty

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Jasmin Sohi

Uncertainty

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton, Jasmin Sohi

The mathematician Giovanni Cassini was a pioneer of accurately drawing the universe. In 1679 he produced the first scientific map of the Moon and concealed a tiny figure of a woman in the Bay of Rainbows. No one knows why he hid this fictional maiden within a scientific drawing. Perhaps it was a playful admission of the limits of truth? Despite painstakingly measuring the shadows and smudges of the lunar surface, the drawing still concealed an unknown and uncertain world.

We are living in uncertain times; the Covid-19 pandemic and political instability have shaken our collective sense of the world as relatively predictable. We crave social categories and identities as anchors that make our interactions predictable, surrounding us with shades of certainty. It is easy to live in the echo chamber that is the internet, where algorithms feed false certainty. News and truth are manipulated to group people using confirmation bias, offering the comfort of social categories and a digital environment that reinforces, rather than engaging with, the unfamiliar or ambiguous.

Science offers a different perspective, where the measurement of uncertainty is a vital tool for critical thinking. Quantifying what we do not know is as important as what we do. Artificial Intelligence allows machines to gradually make their dreams converge with reality and creates a succinct internal model of a fluctuating world; each iteration creating a new fiction where uncertainties are tested against real data.

Buildings offer the constants of shelter, structure and environment, but architecture often plays and manipulates uncertainties. Every drawing, model and building carries ambiguities through tolerances and translation.

This year UG21 was interested in designs that are not determinate or fixed but are instead uncertain. The unit looked towards the beautiful and eerie landscape of Dungeness on the coast of Kent. Frequently called ‘the UK’s only desert’ – an alternative truth –and ‘the fifth continent’, Dungeness is home to one third of all plant species found in the UK. 30,000 tonnes of shingle are manually relocated there every year to protect the land from the certainties of longshore drift. Strange buildings and military installations and infrastructure have all been created to confront and watch for the unknown coming over the horizon: smuggling, swamps and atomic fission.

Year 2

Yu Kan (Colin) Cheng, Junyoung Myung, Nicolas Pauwels, Eoin Shaw, Xavier Simpson, Benjamin Woodier, Ron Zaum

Year 3

Rory Browne, Zixi Chen, Ioana Drogeanu, Beatrice Frant, Lucas Lam, Gregorian Tanto, Zhi Qian (Jacqueline) Yu

Technical tutors and consultants: Julian Besems, Alex Campbell, Maya Chandler, James Potter, Bethan Ring, Jasmin Sohi

Critics: Paddi Benson, Julian Besems, Roberto Bottazzi, Calum MacDonald, Luca Dellatorre, Naomi Gibson, Andrew Porter, Kat Scott, Sayan Skandarajah, Priscilla Wong

21.1, 21.11 Rory Browne, Y3 ‘Orchestrating Geochronology’. Geochronology determines the age and history of Earth’s rocks. The project is orchestrated to quantify durations of time in order to construct a geochronology museum and research facility.

An artificial geology, based upon the formation of the landscape through computation of site tidal data, is constructed. It forms a stratigraphy that encodes time to create an architectural geological landscape.

21.2, 21.15–21.16 Zixi Chen, Y3 ‘Mise-en-Dungeness’. Promoting filmmaking as a way of preserving and growing local culture, the project explores how mise-en-scène (spatial staging), using layers, frames and views, can be applied as a process to create architectural experiences. The inhabitation and distortion of this architecture creates aspects of the intangible and blurred around each constructed moment.

21.3–21.5 Beatrice Frant, Y3 ‘Scattered Potential’. A seed-bank tower in the Dungeness Power Plant complex, paralleling the decommissioning of the reactor. The building is actively involved in the repopulation of flora through a choreographed seed release, controlled by the deterioration of paper over time, that reduces remaining radiation levels as the neighbouring area is demolished and emptied.

21.6–21.7 Zhi Qian (Jacqueline) Yu, Y3 ‘The Playscape Garden’. The project is conceived as an urban landscape with undulating interacting planes, mountainous structures, excavations, punctures and a ‘sifting roof’, where visitors can explore and discover the unlimited possibilities of the body and physical perceptions. The enclosed programme and mixture of spaces for adults and children to learn, play and interact with each other creates a fun and engaging environment for the community.

21.8 Nicholas Pauwels, Y2 ‘Laminar Horizon’. Located in Kent, on the coast of South East England, the structure induces an internal landscape that manipulates prevailing winds and is divided between negative, positive and neutrally charged climates. This establishes an infrastructure through which to conduct research on the relationship between meteorological activity, psychological wellbeing, cognitive ability and physical performance.

21.9 Eoin Shaw, Y2 ‘A Garden for Lost Queer Icons’. Sitting as a picturesque landscape garden behind the Dungeness nuclear power station is a scattering of pylons, towers and platforms dressed in bright green fabrics and blue inflatables. This is an infrastructure to support a mixed-reality landscape, using AI and choreographed digital architecture, and is dedicated to lost Queer icons such as the filmmaker Derek Jarman. 21.10, 21.22–21.23 Gregorian Tanto, Y3 ‘Reinventing Dungeness’s Photographic Icon: A photography gallery complex masterplan’. A masterplan for a photography gallery complex, situated within the boundaries of Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway in Dungeness. The project reinvents Dungeness’ iconic photographic identity and is built on a parametrically designed landscape that exaggerates the subtle fluctuating terrain of the coastline. It is an intervention that conceals and reveals, choreographing circulation and regulating significant view framing. Each gallery shows a distinct photographic genre and the design approach is tailored to evoke spatial atmospheric qualities in response to the work exhibited.

21.12–21.13 Ioana Drogeanu, Y3 ‘Building a Bathhouse at Scale 1:1’. The project is concerned with the scale at which people think, design and interact with architecture. It researches the ways in which designing a building at scale 1:1, using VR in conjunction with body-augmented tools, can create a new architecture.

21.14 Lucas Lam, Y3 ‘Dungeness RNLI Museum’. The building’s form is sculpted by the wind, making it fluid-like and creating extreme curvature in the building’s façade. A timber structure is chosen due to its malleability that narrates the site’s history with the RNLI Lifeboat. The steam-bending forming method was chosen as it provides strong structural integrity and less material waste.

21.17 Yu Kan (Colin) Cheng, Y2 ‘Acoustics – Music & Noise’. The building project promotes the magic of sound by exploring the certainty of a controlled environment versus the uncertainty of nature. The project focusses on the possible coexistence between carefully controlled acoustics and natural white noise. The contrast between the two extreme elements creates a programme for a recording studio. The building is embedded within a hill and its spaces are split into insulated acoustic and open natural environments.

21.18 Xavier Simpson, Y2 ‘Pumping for Lug: A fanatic’s fantasy’. A clubhouse for bait-hunting fanatics, full of contrast and textural nuances. It is a space where local fishermen can reconnect and share knowledge. Questioning the need for an entirely enclosed envelope, it reinforces the notion of a boundless Dungeness. Placing filigree structures amongst heavier cast concrete forms helps render these clear boundaries into uncertain ones.

21.19 Junyoung Myung, Y2 ‘Dungeness Obsidian’. Obsidian is a dark-coloured igneous rock, which renders the overall look of the building and creates a connection with the landscape of Dungeness. Children interact with diverse geological environments through educational activities. A colour spectrum is distributed according to height level and the climbable connectors act as triggers for children to explore and engage with the environment along a guided route.

21.20 Ron Zaum, Y2 ‘Dungeness – The Musical’. A sampling process for colour and form, developed as an architectural tool, inspired by the song ‘Think Pink’ by Funny Face (1957) used in Derek Jarman’s film The Garden (1990). Pre-evolved colours are turned into characters on a stage using theatrical placement.

21.21 Benjamin Woodier, Y2 ‘Imperial College Biotechnology Facility’. A biotechnology centre based on a design philosophy that uses steel frames to contain concrete structures, as well as glass and modular aggregations, influenced by the binary output of a neural network that analyses rice-seed data and genetic information. Mesh-like screens are created that only allow certain amounts of light through.