Unit 22
The Post-Millennial Revolution Izaskun Chinchilla, Carlos Jiménez Cenamor
Year 4 Alex Anderson, Isabelle Tung, Laurence Flint, Rufus Edmondson, Timmy Whitehouse, Xin Zhan Year 5 Georgina Halabi, Hei Tung (Whitney) Wong, Huma Mohyuddin, Jack Sargent, Kuba Tomaszczyk, Laura Young, Supichaya Chaisiriroj and Yuen Nam (Elaine) Tsang The Bartlett School of Architecture 2017
Thank you to: Pedro Gil, Practice Tutor, Edward Hoare, Structural Consultant, and our magnificent crit panels during the whole academic year: Fany Kostourou, Kristina Causer, Marcela Araguez, Sol Pérez Martínez, Sabine Storp, Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg, Manolis Stavrakakis, Adriana Cabello, Cristina Traba, Eduardo Camarena, Bruce Irwin, Paolo Zaide, Sean Griffiths Thank you to our field trip workshop students and tutors from UDEM, Monterrey: Francisco Javier Serrano Alanís, Ana Teresa Furber Rodríguez, Sergio Gustavo Parroquin Sansores, Daniela Martínez Chapa, Rodrigo Gastélum Garza, Hilda Marcela Cabrales Arzola, Ana Paula Treviño Martínez, Alejandra Acuña Verano, María Catalina Gómez Elizondo, Lorena Guadalupe Cavazos Muñoz. Tutors: Arne Riekstins, Abril Denise Balbuena, Carlos García González (Dean Art, Architecture and Design) Thank you to our sponsors: Luis Vidal + Architects and UDEM (Universidad de Monterrey, Mexico)
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Those born between 1982-1996 (‘millennials’), and the generations born after this, are predicted to radically reform education and working systems not only via the massive resources of online activity and new relationships they engender, but also via a more qualitative aspiration: the search for new educational and working systems that also fulfil their potential. Millennials are the first generation that no longer require an authority figure to access information – they may enjoy external stimuli 24/7, be in social contact at all times, and learn more from a portable device than from a seminar. Unit 22 has explored how this will change the spaces in which we will play, learn, work and live in the near future. Every year, we use our brief to break the tension between the traditional axes of architectural design, still experienced by many as a set of technical achievements, or the outcome of an aesthetic manifesto, and understood generally as the core of the creative enterprise of the architect, or as a linear solution applied to a local problem. We aim to introduce a fourth dimension to our students’ work: people, and more specifically, people who are connected both to each other and to their environment. The first stage in our four-dimensional architecture is to understand all stakeholders involved in a given situation, and then to devise ways to represent their points of view and practices, and finally, to design on these grounds. Today, there is a pipeline of information available to everyone. The skills for making decisions have become dynamic. Co-working, for example, is the spatial translation of distributed decision-making. Our projects explore the political, spatial, urban and typological implication of such changes. Consequences in the architectural object have arisen: in most of the projects, the role of the furniture, soft materials and ‘software’ challenge the traditional role of structural elements. However, this has also allowed us to take a page from the analysis of power, as in the classic Bachrach and Baratz sense, and bring to the fore the relevance of nondecisions, in order to build isolated objects. We have discovered that transforming an existing building, offering the population better access to facilities, and providing services (perhaps not place-based) are sometimes much better solutions than a brand new building, in terms of reducing negative impact and creating benefits. A way to visualise this is to see the changing role of architects as part of the transition from an ‘empty world’ paradigm to that of a ‘full world’, a formulation which we borrow from Herman Daly, an ecological economist. This means that the tools, references, habits and criteria of excellence we use must be completely overhauled.