UG1
Fulfillment Centres Jon Lopez, Hikaru Nissanke
Year 2 Gunel Aliyeva, Daniel Boran, Sarah Jones, Dagyung Lee (Eeda), Vincent Lo, Gabriella Watkins Year 3 Ella Adu, Richard Aina, Natasha Blows, Clementine Holden, Dustin May, Edie Parfitt, Karina Tang, Connie Tang Koon Cheong
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2017
Thank you to: Miraj Ahmed, Mick Brundle, Matthew Butcher, Paul Cowie, Pierre D’Avoine, Max Kahlen, Chee-Kit Lai, Taneli Mansikkamäki, Sabrina Morreale, Douglas Murphy, Luke Olsen, Elena Palacios Carral, Colette Sheddick, James Taylor-Foster, James Ward
36
A few miles east of London, where the Thames begins to snake its way out to the ocean, sits a bewilderingly banal landscape of flood plains, docklands, sheds, landfills and light industry. Our unit was interested in the relationship between all of this, with particular focus on the ties between landscape, modernity and labour. Students began the year in East Tilbury, an unlikely modernist utopia on the marshes of Essex. It was built by the Czech shoe maker Tomas Bata in the 1930s to provide housing and social infrastructure amongst a set of vast, hulking factory buildings. Since the factory’s closure, the development and its subsequent decline is registered in the collective memory of its inhabitants and former employees. Students devised responses to the current state of the town, picking over the physical and ideological ruins of modernity. These first projects were structured around the idea of preparing and remaking the ground in anticipation of an incoming development. That incoming development was another bookend to the 20th-century capitalist project, the big shed. Responding to Amazon’s plans to build a large distribution hub in Tilbury, the unit was interested in the shed as a representation of an immediate, untapped and unchecked ecosystem which is rapidly defining large parts of the UK. Behind their anonymous façades lies an almost endless array of objects and processes, yet decisions about their operation, use and siting has largely bypassed the architect. The principal project for the year was thus to confront the contemporary relationship between private enterprise and state, and between individual and community. Using the framework of a Section 106, (the mechanism through which developers and landowners are required to mitigate the impact of large development), students were asked to appraise, critique, refine, confront or wholly reimagine how such a large building might meet the context via a more humane reworking of the land. Plurality of programme was encouraged, and projects sought to express how the big shed might be stitched into the town and landscape beyond, or were considered as new, large (ex)urban interiors. The rising threat of automation loomed over many projects, as students tackled what the new routines and rituals of labour might be in this landscape. We sought to examine a non-nostalgic reading of what a relevant craft and construction might be, exploring through drawn and physical constructions a new material expression for Tilbury. During the year, the unit travelled to Rome in the footsteps of Piranesi. We observed and surveyed the city from antiquity onwards, to better understand its continuing ability to shape our contemporary cultural imagination.