Here East Exhibition Plan
Design for Performance & Interaction
Lifts to Ground Floor
Stairs down to Ground Floor
Floor 1 / Auditorium
Design for Performance & Interaction
Ground Floor
Stairs up to Auditorium
Lifts to Auditorium
Design for Manufacture
Design for Performance & Interaction
Entrance
Fifteen
05 – 11 December 2024
Fifteen is a public exhibition celebrating fifteen months of innovative work from graduating students on the Design for Manufacture, Design for Performance & Interaction and Situated Practice Master’s programmes.
The Bartlett Fifteen Show showcases the work of 80 students from across three radical programmes in a dual physical/ digital format. The projects on display within the exhibition and online are diverse and forward thinking, exploring and creating new forms of practice. Films, texts, photographs, objects, prototypes and live performances consider interactive and temporal architectures and the processes of making and designing.
For the first time, this year’s exhibition will take place across two sites – 22 Gordon Street in Bloomsbury, and our campus at Here East in Stratford where the three programmes are based. The show is centred around the theme Proximities, which explores the relationship between design conception and implementation across multiple sites and communities. What is the relationship between the place of a design’s conception and its eventual implementation? How do we gain proximity to the people we design for when embedded practices are not available? What new opportunities are created when they are?
The theme challenges exhibitors to consider various forms of proximity in their work, from local to global scales, while showcasing the diverse projects of
this year’s graduating cohort across different programmes and locations.
Exhibiting at Here East, our graduating Design for Manufacture students are pioneering designer-makers whose work is created with the making process at its core. They have used disruptive tactics, developing their ideas from concept to completion, to achieve complex levels of design evolution.
Exhibiting alongside them, Design for Performance & Interaction students have explored the intersections of performance and spatial design, the arts and technology, the physical and the virtual. Their collaborative, transdisciplinary projects challenge the conventions of performance, and consider objects, space, people and systems as potential performers.
Exhibiting in Bloomsbury, Situated Practice students have studied critical theories and concepts of place and situation to produce their own situated practices in a range of media. They have engaged with a plethora of places and publics, collaborating with local communities in London and critically commenting on wider social, cultural and geopolitical discourses.
Fifteen is accompanied by a programme of events detailed in the back of this booklet and projects are catalogued online on The Bartlett’s award-winning virtual exhibition platform: shows.bartlettarchucl.com
Design for Manufacture MArch
Programme Director: Professor Peter Scully
Bingbing Fan, Yu Li, Jiapan Sun, Yixuan Liu, ‘Adaptive Assembly and Disassembly’
Students Staff
Latifah Almohiza, Victoria Arancibia Retes, Shixian Bao, Pingle Chen, Bingbing Fan, Yuk Ying Ho, Zixun Huang, Hakyeong Jeon, Jianing Li, Ruoxi Li, Yu Li, Ping-Chieh Liu, Yixuan Liu, Chinlun Lu, Matias Ramirez Munoz, Hila Sharabi, Jawad Soueid, Jiapan Sun, Tianyi Xu, Rixi Ye, Aysu Yilmaz, Pengfei Zhang, Zhenghao Zhu
Pradeep Devadass, Sienna Griffi n-Shaw, Clara Jaschke, Nikoletta Karastathi, Shneel Malik, Daniel Rodriguez Garcia, Peter Scully, Charlotte Skene Catling, Ben Spong, Samuel Turner-Baldwin, Jonathan Tyrrell, Melis Van Den Berg, Hamish Veitch, Viktoria Viktorija, Barbara Zandavali
At the core of Design for Manufacture is a hands-on interest in the tangible qualities and intrinsic values within creative processes. The programme addresses pressing global challenges by nurturing students’ independent explorations of materials and production techniques. Through investigative research, it supports innovation within the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sectors.
For over two-and-a-half centuries, manufacturers have pursued resource consumption to maximise profit. Meanwhile, Design for Manufacture has emerged as a distinct discipline, formalising a design approach that integrates resource and contextual awareness to create diverse forms of value within design phases. The programme examines an expanded role for design in shaping the built environment – one that directly responds to the specific, observable challenges that have grown out of a misplaced confidence in markets to deliver.
Today’s built assets emerge from a sector plagued by rising self-employment, the highest rates of liquidation, erratic and unstable work, and a reliance on contractual risk management over best practices and innovation – resulting in buildings being delivered by large firms acting more like financial institutions than construction companies. Discourse and scholarship around design must engage with these realities as well as bring material and process innovation into the design phase.
The outcomes of much of the AEC sector reflect a collective imagination that is
tethered to the logic of commercial survival rather than change, where design stands for little against the forces within delivery that ultimately shape it. The programme seeks to empower design in positioning itself as an enabler, supporting the actors and players so often pitted against each other in a race to the bottom.
The programme’s design teams have advanced research in automated and CNC timber assemblies using a firstprinciples approach, steering clear of the pitfalls of unchecked automation that risks merely ‘building bad faster’. Projects this year investigate retrieving value from stone industry waste streams through computational tools, allowing minimal, unmodified materials to serve in civil projects. Further research explores textile tectonics, such as programmable knitted pneumatics for adaptive interiors, and examines the earth as a regionally responsive building material that can be tuned by geometric design towards its environment.
The programme has consistently aligned with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This year, research included design strategies that add value to timber waste streams through adaptive product definitions and rapid innovative assembly techniques aimed at creating environments quickly and sustainably.
Design for Manufacture explores an intervention in the AEC industries that is rooted in pragmatism and creative problem-solving, showing that emerging technologies and knowledge can provide solutions that transcend merely applying future innovations to past challenges.
Design for Performance & Interaction MArch
Programme Directors: Dr Fiona Zisch and Jessica In
Chuyue Hu, Luoyi Chen, ‘Conversational Chair’
Students Staff
Rabih Arasoghli, Mufan Bai, Luoyi Chen, Yanxi Chen, Yulu Chen, Yuting Chen, Swaraj Dhuri, Liming Dong, Ruonan Fan, Sakshi Galkate, Yutong (Demi) Gao, Zhaohan Hao, Yumeng Hong, Chuyue Hu, Linyi Li, Xiaolei Li, Xinglong (Leonard) Li, Xuan Li, Yu Li, Kimverlyn Lim, Dongni Lu, Fanjing Meng, Natsume Ono, Ruining Pan, Yue Pei, Anindia Pradita, Heta Shah, Diwen Shi, Miao Su, Jihang Sun, Ngai Lan Tam, Zimeng Tan, Vanessa Tang, Hayze Wan, Zijun Wan, Ruoru Wang, Wanqing Wang, Jin Xie, Keren (Nicole) Xu, Yih (Eva) Yang, Andrew Yu, Chenxiao Yu, Wenxu Zhang, Luhan Zhuang
Vasilija Abramovic, Georgios Adamopoulos, Ava Aghakouchak, Paul Bavister, Sandra Ciampone, Alberto Fernandez Gonzalez, Stephen Gage, Parker Heyl, Jessica In, Nikoletta Karastathi, Emma-Kate Matthews, Claire McAndrew, Daniel Rodriguez Garcia, Jonathan Tyrrell, Michael Wagner, Alice Whewell, Alexander Whitley, James Wilkie, Dominik Zisch, Fiona Zisch
At the core of Design for Performance & Interaction is the belief that the creation of spaces for performance, and the creation of performances within them, are symbiotic activities.
The programme questions conventional understandings of architecture and of disciplinarity and collaboration. Architecture is seen here as inherently dynamic, decisively interactive and performative, and as transdisciplinary.
The course challenges rigid conventions in considering the role of interaction and the interactive, questioning what constitutes architectural ensembles and how we might reform the presentation and format of performative events. To this end the programme expands the field of performance and interaction and understands space, objects and human and non-human inhabitants as potential performers. Student work, always considered in four dimensions, encompasses questions of behaviour, duration and changing environments to continuously reinvent the role of the architect. This makes architecture itself an active and interactive performer. Students can engage with often diametrically opposed fields of enquiry and methods, to achieve deeper understandings of relevant questions and create profound experiential designs.
A central theme of the programme is ‘radical embodiment’, a term which broadens traditional understandings of embodiment to include the embedded, enacted, extended and affective. Student work, directly and indirectly, embraces this understanding and is
further influenced by a deep appreciation of concepts and practices such as cybernetics, systems theories, cognitive science, feminist studies, as well as performance studies and choreography.
This year, students are presenting interactive installations, experimental soft robotics and kinetic sculptures, eXtended reality (XR) environments, performance pieces, wearable technologies, sound art, spatial games and speculative design inquiries. The performances and interactive artefacts that have emerged are as radical as they are critical, exploring ideas ranging from feminist studies to equity, diversity and inclusion, ethics in contemporary technoculture, the impact of robotics and AI on the behaviour of and in the built environment, and the everincreasing importance of critical design across the reality-virtuality continuum.
An important feature of the programme is exploring work by others at exhibitions and festivals, and testing students’ work in public settings. In April, the programme travelled to Scotland to spend time hiking and doing field work in the Cairngorms. In June, students collaborated with the Design for Manufacture MArch, BioIntegrated Design MArch/MSc, Situated Practice MA and the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch for the Bartlett in Situ event, hosted as part of the London Festival of Architecture. In September, projects were exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival – the largest and most prestigious new media art festival in the world. In October, students exhibited work at the Kikk Festival in Belgium, an event that explores the intersection of art, science and technology.
Situated Practice MA
Programme Director: Dr Polly Gould
Si-Pin Chen, ‘Real AIstate’. Photo: Tom Hall
Si-Pin Chen, Mia Gong, Wenyu Hu, Xiting Huang, Xieen Ji, Jiaqi Li, Zichen Li, Jingyi Liu, Julia Moreno Villaca, Sasiwimon Paosanmuang, Tabiah Qazi, Tejesvini Saranga Ravi, Zeinab Tannir, Shuning Xie
Fawzeyah Alsabah, Jhono Bennett, Amica Dall, Polly Gould, Ed Lawrenson, Claire McAndrew, James O’Leary, Jane Rendell, David Roberts, Merijn Royaards, Apolonija Sustersic, Henrietta Williams
Students Staff
Situated Practice foregrounds questions of site, situation, positionality and relationality to address the built and unbuilt environment. Through practiceled research, the programme supports the development of creative projects employing hybrid methods from art and architecture.
Through methods drawn from across art and architecture, urban activism and critical and creative writing, this fifteen-month Master’s guides students to become situated practitioners. With teaching that supports the development of critical awareness of spatial practices, audio and video production, site-writing and live interventions in public space, each student determines their site-related project through practice-led research. This culminates in a final work that might be a physical installation or a digital intervention, an audio or video work, a piece of critical writing, a participatory community project or a site-specific public performance.
The programme asks students to reflect upon their positionality and navigate the agency of their responsibility and ethics of working with and for others in social and political contexts, and across local and global scales. This careful attention is manifested in their diverse responses, while also demonstrating the commonly held commitment to examining the ethical and political nature of working in public space.
This year has been confrontational in more ways than one, laying bare the fallacies of the existing networks of capitalist patriarchy and bringing to attention the interconnectedness of global inequalities. The sites of study
for this year’s projects span various geographies, ecologies and sociopolitical contexts, from East and South Asia and the Levant to West Africa and South America. The culminating series of live interventions in London include material investigations into human–nature symbioses; spatial paradoxes echoing Brazilian Modernist architecture; the collective memory of the Lebanese diaspora in Côte d’Ivoire; the gender politics and asymmetries of power at the dinner table; gamified and walking performances tracing the histories of migrant Chinese communities in East London; and a performative lecture narrating the ongoing occupation of Kashmir through colonial cartographies. Further projects include a collective workshop calling for the preservation of built cultural heritage at Peckham, while another entails the sharing of oral histories and films addressing cultural taboos and feminism in China. Another set of interventions includes a parody of the capitalist desire for the ideal home; a critique of the alienation of workers under industrial discipline at a button factory in Thailand; a counter against the colonial legacies of a National Trust country estate at Osterley; and a test of the sonic conditions and experiences of urban spaces. These projects reveal the proximities of global contexts and situations to London and to each other, in an age in which the waves of change continue to break across borders.
The programme would like to thank all the collaborators and visitors over the past year who have helped to develop the projects on show, and the students themselves for sharing the culmination of their situated practice.
Events Visit us
Visit the exhibition
UCL at Here East
8-9 East Bay Lane
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
London E15 2GW
Hackney Wick or Stratford
Design for Manufacture MArch
Design for Performance & Interaction MArch
The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
22 Gordon Street
London WC1H 0QB
Euston or Euston Square
Situated Practice MA
Access
Our exhibition space is accessible, for any additional support please email architecture.comms@ucl.ac.uk including the subject line ‘Access’.
Opening times
05 – 11 December 2024
10:00 – 20:00
(Weekends 10:00 – 17:00)
Search Bartlett Fifteen to find out more.
Launch Party
Thursday 05 December 2024
17:00 – 22:00
UCL at Here East, E15 2GW
A celebration for the launch of the show with live performances, drinks reception and prize giving. Invitation required.
Design for Performance & Interaction Live
Friday 06 December 2024
13:00 – 17:00
UCL at Here East, E15 2GW
Design for Performance & Interaction students from an array of artistic, technical or scientific backgrounds will demonstrate their projects throughout the day at Here East.
Situated Practice in Focus
Friday 06 December 2024
17:00 – 19:00
Ground Floor Exhibition Space, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB
Situated Practice students will host an evening of talks, interventions, performances and screenings within their Bloomsbury exhibition space.
Design for Manufacture Conference
Monday 09 December 2024
10:00 – 19:30
Booking is required for entrance to Here East and all special events. Scan the QR code to book.
UCL at Here East, E15 2GW
Design for Manufacture MArch students will present the outcome of their research projects followed by a keynote address.
22 Gordon Street Exhibition Plan
Ground
Situated