UG11
Process Matters Kostas Grigoriadis, Sofia Krimizi
Year 2 Teresa Carmelita, Du Hao, Michelle Hoe, Jie Kuek, Jiyoon Lee, Zhi Tam, Jun Yap, Renzhi Zeng Year 3 Kelly Au, Samuel Grice, Ana-Maria Ilusca, Olga Karchevska
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2017
Thank you to: Sean-Paul von Ancken, Biayna Bogosian, Ivi Diamandopoulou, Natalia Hayes, Michael Herrmann, Alvin Huang, Francesca Hughes, Rick Joy Architects, Claudia Kappl, Hanne Sue Kirsch, Costandis Kizis, Colby Ritter, Sylvie Taher, Roger Tomalty
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In the beginning of the 20th century, the art historian Alois Riegl wrote of a decisive change that took place at the time – namely the transition from the valuation of old materials to the valuation of new ones. This reflected the shift in early modern Europe towards a preoccupation with newness, which eventually paved the way for the constant invention of new materials that could be easily manufactured via mechanised mass production, as opposed to artisanal making. This shift effectively also triggered the modernist collapse of the links between design, form and materiality. More than a century later, the material invention paradigm that Riegl once witnessed is now happening at an exponentially fast rate, with new materials and production methods being concocted each and every day. In architecture, on the other hand, the age-old separation of the types of construction in tectonics and stereotomics are – surprisingly – still valid, illustrating quite clearly the fact that architecture, and the way it is designed and built, has yet to catch up with the exponentially advancing material innovations of today. In this context, the objective of the studio is to align with these developments, and to attempt to generate a new architecture in sync with contemporaneous material advances. Rethinking the ways in which space is conceived and designed, buildings are constructed, and architecture is inhabited generates for us an unprecedented opportunity for spatial and architectural innovation, informed by twenty-first century materials and materialisms. In pursuit of this, we initially looked into materiality in its malleable, liquid state. We explored different ways in which liquid materials can be physically admixed and cast, and their rheological properties – with flow and coagulation simulated digitally. In parallel with this, we pursued unconventional fabrication techniques that explored the reciprocal relationship between mould and cast, pushing the solidified materials to breaking point, and understanding both the inherent and unexpected properties of our admixtures. We then travelled to Los Angeles and Phoenix. In this land of extreme juxtapositions and odd notions of architectural normality, the truth in materials was whatever we decided it to be. Our search explored the banal, weird and wonderful ways that cast materials can be produced. The metropolitan architecture of LA was effectively juxtaposed with the utopic character of Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti and his concept of ‘Arcology’. Our aim was to formulate a firm architectural position through recursive readings of the habitat and instil some of these observations into the urban context of LA, where our buildings were situated. In this process of architectural transplantation, we aspired to rebuild the modernist collapse of the relationship between form, design, materiality and process in order to generate a new type of architecture, or a 21st-century Arcology that has finally caught up with the future.