BSc Unit 4 Yr 2: Ioana Barbantan, Kim Foster, Alexander Joury, Anastasia Kaisiri, Anthony Lau, Daniel Lavand, Gregory Nordberg, Jen Feng Wang, Christopher Wong. Yr 3: Mayu Akashi, Antonia Hazlerigg, Brian Hoy, Elizabeth Mitchell, James Palmer, Sarah Syed.
Production + Consumption The film ‘The Long Good Friday’ led us to Smithfield market for a pre-dawn breakfast amongst the die-hard clubbers, meat-market butchers, blood, corpses, white vans and pints of beer. We split from the city to Dorset’s Portland, home to Portland stone quarried from this fragment of land sitting just off the mainland on England’s south coast. We walked the coastal path watching the darkening sky engulf the horizon and fire us violently with a freezing horizontal rain. We sat in the pub and listened to the conversations of regulars and thought about the prisons on the island in doubly isolated incarceration. ‘C’etait un rendez-vous’ a cult short film shot us through the streets of a1970s Paris dawn in a non-stop race to the Sacre Coeur, Montmartre, and we followed suit, dodging from boulevards to back streets, slipping into see the Fondation Le Corbusier, Nouvel’s newly opened Musee du Quai Branly and the Beaubourg to see the Movements et Images exhibition showing works from Stan Brackage to Moholy-Nagy and more, much more.
Through documenting what we observed and identifying our values, priorities and motivation we have been encouraged to define our design practice as individuals. We used this analysis to develop a brief dealing with issues of Production and Consumption, to examine the ways in which Architecture impacts on society and how we work to articulate the atmosphere of a space and the narrative sequence of a series of spaces. Thanks to all our critics for their engaging and sometimes confrontational but always astute opinions. Laura Allen, Miraj Ahmed, Kate Darby, Steven Gage, Bill Hodgson, CJ Lim, Heather Lyons, Tom Tatum, Neil Thomlinson, Matt White and finally our great friend Professor Barry Bell who died unexpectedly on 8th May 2007.
We took the train from Gare de Lyon and the ornate promises of southerly destinations painted on the ceiling of Le Train Bleu restaurant to the raw grit of Marseille. We travelled through freezing snow to pale winter sun and drank coffee over meetings in the Samaritaine Café that featured in ‘The French Connection.’ We took a boat past the Ilse d’If , had a midnight rendez-vous on the roof of the Unite d’Habitation, met up in Jazz bars, clubs, fish restaurants and flea markets.
Stewart Dodd and Saskia Lewis
This page: Ioana Barbantan. Facing page, clockwise from top left: Sarah Syed, Antonia Hazlerigg, Anastasia Kaisiri, Daniel Lavand, Ioana Barbantan, Elizabeth Mitchell, Sarah Syed, Christopher Wong, Daniel Lavand, Anastasia Kaisiri.