Dip/MArch Unit 24 Y4: Maya Cochrane, Nicole Dixon, Thomas Ibbitson, Kevin Kelly, Tomonori Ogata, Asako Sengoku, Chun-Tai Tsai, Andrea Wong. Y5: Jonathan P Harvey, Christopher Hildrey, Milad Hossainzadeh, Gerald Huber, Bleddyn R Jones, Fei Meng, Thomas J Rigley
Migrating Thresholds Art protects us from the desert of reality, its one-dimensionality and the complete usefulness and banality of our existence. She achieves that by luring us into new and extraordinary emotional, experiential and intellectual states. In search of original pleasure, architectural designers often endeavour to challenge the unknown but feel restrained by the consequences of the known. We couldn’t care less. There are spaces where duration and memory are compressed. Thresholds can be spatial, chemical, social, etc. They always have potential and they are the sites of change. The term ‘threshold’ describes moments of transitions. How do we record it? How do we, as architectural designers, imbue thresholds with meaning? In its first year the unit has zoomed into transitional practices and observed rites of passage and their relevance to our coexistence and in turn invented new passage tactics and rites and responded with articulate architectural observations, experiments and propositions. We have explored thresholds between craftmanship and experimentation; between the excellence of the expectable and the failure of the experiment. We understand thresholds as sites of potential beginning, contact connection, immersion and their antagonists at the same time.
Michael Wihart and Uwe Schmidt-Hess
Top: Thomas Ibbitson, The beginning of architecture in the Garden of Eden Bottom: Asako Sengoku, Inflatable dress.