UG10
Vital Forces in Architecture Guan Lee, Arthur Mamou-Mani
Year 2 Poppy Becke, George Brazier, Young To (Toby) Chan, Camille Dunlop, Linggezi (Yuki) Man, John Mathers, Anna O’Leary, Edward Taft Year 3 Nour Al Ahmad, Yin Zara Chen, Wai Nam (Tiffany) Chong, Hanadi Izzuddin, Holy Moore, Ke Yang
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2017
Thank you to our guest critics: Robert Aish, Alisa Andrasek, Francis Archer, Anthony Boulanger, Andy Edge, Michael Hadi, Colin Herperger, Steve Johnson, Constance Lau, Mike Lim, Thomas Pearce, Stuart Piercy, James Pockson, Mike Tonkin, Mario Tsiliakos, Ben Sweeting, Toby Burgess Special thanks to: Riyad Joucka (SHoP Architects), Dewitt Godfrey, Gustav Fagerström (Walter P Moore), Michael DiCarlo (Associated Fabrication) Thank you to: Mike Lim and James Pockson (drawing workshop), Pamela Casey and Ralph Ghoche (archive visit at Avery, Columbia University), Paul Jeffries (technical tutor)
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The ‘Maker Movement’ is enabling young designers to learn how to collaborate with other designers and work with machines directly to materialise their ideas. Open-source and parametric online platforms are accelerating this process, turning each contributor into an active node of a much larger and ever-growing system. Design, engineering and fabrication processes are merging, giving birth to a new kind of digital polymath role which replaces the different related professions. Creative studios, minifactories and open workshops, dotted around the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Hackney, form an energetic and dynamic part of East London, an area of London declared by Time Out as the ‘maker’s new breeding ground’. More than one year on, a lot has happened, but most importantly in this context the UK has voted to leave the European Union. The question of how London’s local economies can adapt has emerged as a critical issue. Students started the year by considering ‘What is parametric design?’ They proposed a small architectural intervention based on simple digital scripts and material constraints. Methods of design moved between digital intentions and physical modelling in order to test the nature of materials alongside computational logic. The building projects that followed ask the same question at a larger scale, with the added challenge of programmatic considerations. Some students gravitated towards the design of construction systems, while others focused on the potential of formal possibilities. Questions were raised about the economic future of small craft-based practices in the East London area and how a community can work more collaboratively. This changing landscape of small industries has provided inspiration for students to rethink how we design and make. With the rise of digital fabrication technology, architecture is evolving into an ecosystem of codes. These codes can be interlinked to inform each other through the use of structural and environmental simulation as well as material behaviour. Similar to the empirical process that was key to the evolution of cathedrals, the design of building components can optimise itself via an accelerated digital process. If buildings become self-optimising codes and cranes become 3D printers, what will be the role of the client, architect, engineers, quantity surveyors, project managers and the contractor in the near future? Which vital forces will drive and infuse the humanless codes? In relation to questions of aesthetic and tradition, will these forces be naturally implicit within the systems?