UG8
Precise Disasters: A Laboratory at the Edge of Failure Colin Herperger, Thomas Pearce
Year 2 Maxim Goldau, Millicent Green, Lola Haines, Florence Hemmings, Joe Johnson, Ying-Ying Lou (Iris), Oscar Maguire Year 3 Hohgun Choi, Thomas Chu, Christina Garbi, Georgia Jaeckle, Carmen Kong, Aleksandra Kugacka, Elissavet Manou, Felix Sagar The Bartlett School of Architecture 2017
Special thanks to our technical tutor Jerry Tate Thank you to our critics, speakers and supporters: Charles Arsene-Henry, Alastair Browning, Nat Chard, Ricardo de Ostos, Max Dewdney, Gary Edwards, Jurgis Gecys, Jack Holmes, Jessica Inn, Bálint Kádár, Korbinian Kainz, Luke Lupton, Mara Kanthak, Gergely Kovacs, Ifigeneia Liangi, Thandi Loewenson, Dora Mathe, Emma-Kate Matthews, Inigo Minns, Shaun Murray, Thomas Parker, Frederik Petersen, Caroline Rabourdin, Soma Sato, Peter Scully, Bob Sheil, Greg Storrar, Anna Tripamer, William Trossell, Athanasios Varnavas, Simon Withers Thank you to our sponsors: FABberz, ScanLAB Projects, Tate Harmer & Ultimaker
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“If I fail, I will fail so hard that I can never recover.” Werner Herzog, before beginning his first feature film, Herakles The lifeblood of any experiment in science or design is its potential to fail. Progress is all about being wrong. Searching for the horizon, we must be ready to find the edge of collapse as a place of excitement. To try is to fail and to fail is to discover. This year, Unit 8 sets out to explore the fringes of failure as a space of seduction and a vehicle for creative opportunity. In architectural education most are scared of the very idea of failure. Why? Perhaps it could be considered the point where learning begins – a liberated escape from the shadow of rehearsal. In our Laboratory at the Edge of Failure, we chased the subtle delights of this nimble edge, tempting us beyond assumption into the world of the unexpected. To do so, we operated with a sense of poetry and tenacity, but also with utmost precision, producing well-crafted failures on the edge of perception, collapse or consciousness. We hunted the boundaries of structural and material performance, chased the seduction of the glitch, the misaligned and mistranslated, the shadows of knowledge and common sense, the technological blind-spots and slippages of control. On our field trip from Vienna to Budapest and through the wild countryside in between, we tracked the experiments of a series of architectural and artistic misfits, outsiders venturing to the edges of failure, consciousness and supposed good taste: Adolf Loos’ notoriously ‘unfashionable’ buildings, Egon Schiele’s perverse character of line within figure drawing, Fritz Wotruba’s controversial sculpture-turned-architecture, Coop Himmelb(l)au’s technical challenge of a religious adherence to an intoxicated sketch, Imre Makovecz’s politically and structurally subversive architectural inventions, as well as the difficult material and conceptual junctions in the sculpture and architecture of Walter Pichler, created at his farm. The building projects continued our research into strategies of disturbance and failure by translating ideas into inventive architecture. Our projects were situated along the Danube trajectory in difficult topographies and various cultural conditions, in order to serve up a range of possibility and resistance to spatial ideas. In Unit 8 we like to make disobedient things and find curiosity within challenging ideas. This is delightfully hard but is nurtured within the studio through creative practice – a focused learning of architectural craft and technique through repeated prediction, attempt, reflection and iteration. This allows for the development of an intuitive ability to become precise in a manner that holds no responsibility to prove, but, more importantly, does have the will to find out. We seek pleasure in the precision of the unresolved.