UG7
The Drowning Crescent Pascal Bronner, Thomas Hillier
Year 2 Oliver Ansell, Grant Beaumont, Lauren Childs, James Cook, Mengzi Fu, Margarita Marsheva, Cherie Wong, Arthur Wong Year 3 Alexandra Campbell, Glen Heng, Hanna Idziak, Harry Johnson, Hannah Lewis, Harry Pizzey, Fei Yen Waller, Lisa Fan Wu The Bartlett School of Architecture 2017
Thank you to our technical tutor David Storring and computing tutor Sean Allen Thank you to our critics: Jenna Al-Ali, Peter Bishop, Matthew Butcher, David Edwards, Stephen Gage, Soomeen Hahm, CJ Lim, Shaun Murray, Justin Nicholls, Alan Penn, Aleksandrina Rizova, Joshua Scott, Alistair Shaw
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Humankind’s relationship with water has always been a fascinating one, one that has shaped civilisations, sculpted cities, inspired writers, artists, and captivated architects. But today the fundamental relationship between water and human habitation is being transformed in the wake of an escalating global crisis. To explore this, the unit travelled to New Orleans, a city virtually surrounded by water. Built on thousands of feet of soft sand, silt and clay on the banks of the Mississippi, the city actually sits within a bowl, surrounded by protection levees and floodwalls, with half of the city located eight feet below sea level. Paradoxically, these man-made levees reduced the threat of the great Mississippi River’s seasonal flooding, allowing New Orleanians to expand their metropolis over generations. But that same infrastructure also set in motion environmental shifts that made the city more vulnerable to storms. Today, the Mississippi Delta is sinking a centimetre a year, whilst sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate, and are predicted to be two metres higher by the year 2100, submerging most of New Orleans. Over the next 15 years scientists believe that, if nothing is done, over 300 square miles of Louisiana will disappear, with many fearing New Orleans might become one of the first cities of the modern age to face extinction, creating a modern-day Atlantis, lost to the sea. It is this ever-changing relationship between water and human habitation that we wanted our students to investigate, but before we set foot in the Crescent City, they were tasked with exploring, researching and (re)interpreting the specific effects of water on New Orleans in an attempt to understand its history, masterplan, neighbourhoods and most importantly, inhabitants. By extrapolating these findings they began to design their own drawn, modelled or collaged urban water narrative that culminated in an architectural or infrastructural innovation, allegorical or real in nature. These macro-scale interventions were, in some form, taken to New Orleans where they were applied as a strategic compass to discover their future programme and site for the main building project, the only requisite being that the building in some form dealt with water. New Orleans is a unique city and the students’ architecture had to be equally as bespoke, specific and tailor-made. As always, their work embodied the unit’s agenda of craft, speculation, experimentation, wonder and delight – with the only limit being their imaginations.