Dip/MArch Unit 12 Yr 4: Michael Wai Ho Hung, Villian Wing Lam Lo, Tom Noonan, Tom Reynolds, Erika Suzuki, Anna Vallius. Yr 5: Hakan Agca, Will Wai Lam Chan, James Church, Alex Hill, Kumiko Hirayama, David Potts, Francesca Wadia, Eva Willoughby, Alan Worn
“Perhaps when you cut into the present the future leaks out” William Burroughs, Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups, 1976
During the 1950s writer William Burroughs and artist Brion Gysin experimented with a new writing technique dubbed the cut up and later the fold in. These experiments involved taking an initial text that was then cut up at random and re-arranged to create a new text. The aim of these experiments was to alter certain given assumptions of our understanding of time, history and memory. They were later used by Burroughs as a means to predict the future. This year Unit 12 used the principles of this technique and its emphasis on the cut, incision and juxtaposition, both conceptually and physically, in determining architectures, readings of site and understandings of architectural history. Many of the most creative architects have looked to the past to im agine a future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to transform it, revealing its relevance to the present. Soane looked to ancient Greece, Mies admired Schinkel and the Smithsons absorbed the spirit of the picturesque. Modernism was supposedly based on the rejection of history but this is now known to be a myth. As a creative stimulus and narrative resource for twentiethfirst century architecture, Unit 12 focuses on earlier centuries as well as those more recent. When everybody else is looking in one time and one place, it’s always good to look elsewhere. “Berlin is a laboratory. Its historical richness lies in the prototypical sequence of its models; neoclassical city, early metropolis, modernist test bed, war victim, Lazarus, Cold War demonstration, etc” Fritz Neumeyer, ‘OMA’s Berlin: the polemic island in the city’, 1990 This year the site for this investigation was Berlin.
Jonathan Hill, Elizabeth Dow, Matthew Butcher
Above: Will Chan, City of London Saffron Monastery.