Unit 11
Back to the Future Laura Allen, Mark Smout
Year 4 Bethany Bird, Laurence Blackwell-Thale, Emma Colthurst, Patrick Horne, Lex Liew, Joe Roberts, Ellie Sampson Year 5 Alexander Chapman, Chris Delahunt, Johanna Just, Anthony Ko, Ness Lafoy, Milo de Luca, Agostino Nickl
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2017
Thanks to our Design Realisation tutor Rhys Cannon Thank you to: Steven Foster Engineers, Ali Shaw at Max Fordham and to our critics Brendan Cormier, Edward Denison, Stephen Gage, Dan Hill, Joseph Grima, Rory Hyde, Zoe Laughlin, Holly Lewis, Peter Liversidge, Luke Pearson, Tania Sengupta, Tomas Stokke, Gwen Webber, Patrick Weber, Elly Ward Morris
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This year, we dreamt of future pasts. The natural tensions and antithetical relationships characterised by the struggle between preservation and progress provide lessons, opportunities and limits for the continuum of landscape and urban histories and, more importantly, determine their emerging futures. The zenith of preservation is the UNESCO World Heritage List for natural, built and cultural landscapes, cities and monuments. It seeks to record and preserve cities and landscapes, making them, to an extent, 'future-proof' – and at the same time inadvertently fossilised in their current states. The UNESCO list is diverse and wide-ranging, and includes Easter Island, 17 works by Le Corbusier, the Statue of Liberty and the industrial ruins of an Argentinian Fray Bentos Factory. Listing provides protection through international law, however, it has also been described as a lethal weapon deployed in the act of preservation’s crimes against cities. The Venetian Lagoon (the journey’s end of our European trip this year) is striving to maintain its inclusion on the World Heritage List, despite a developing battle between tourism and culture. The city hosts over 600 cruise ships and 20 million visitors per year, which, as well as pumping tourist money into the city, also endangers its physical fabric and cultural integrity under the terms of its UNESCO listing. Could the construction of replica cities and pseudo-landscapes, relocated across the world, be an alternative to the museumification of listed cities such as Venice? These embodiments of Umberto Eco’s concept of ‘Uffiziland’, such as the unfeasibly blue and chlorinated Grand Canal at the Venetian hotel-casino in Las Vegas, are designed to improve on the touristic rather than the authentic ‘experience’. The opportunity for the retelling and recasting of histories through copies, and their significance in preservation, is given credence via museum collections such as the Cast Courts at the V&A, which contain collections of historic plaster and wax replicas of monumental sculptural and architectural fragments collected in the 19th century. Their collection also reveals the contemporary role of copies in the preservation of cultural artifacts and global heritage threatened by war, climate change and societal pressures. The emergence of new technologies such as 3D scanning and digital printing mean that copies can now be ‘dematerialised’ to the hard-drive rather than to the museum gallery. One can imagine a future reprinting, like a Jurassic Park style recreation of cultural artifacts, cut off from their context and meaning, reanimated nowhere and everywhere, even at an urban or landscape scale. In attempt to recast ‘Wonderland’ and to create instant histories, inspiration for our year’s work included UNESCO’s list of intangible Cultural and World Heritage, model villages, alternative preservation manifestos, fakery, architectural graveyards, demonstration landscapes, cultural migration, monuments and their doppelgängers.