Dip/MArch Unit 12 Yr 4: Steven Baumann, Oliver Bawden, James Crick, Omar Ghazal, Michael Hughes, Luke Jones, Na Li, Dijan Malla, Hugh McEwen, Erika Suzuki, Daniel Swift Gibbs Yr 5: Tom Noonan, Tom Reynolds, Anna Vallius
Time, Motion, Energy This year we explored time, motion and energy. On sites situated along the Thames, Year 5 students each proposed a building for a specific site that had a catalytic effect on London and a locality. The most creative architects have looked to the past to imagine a future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and 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. As a creative stimulus and narrative resource for twenty-first 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. Combining our concerns for immediate and historical time, we draw buildings in multiple states: under construction, as a recently discovered ruin, and with a future use. Representing loss as well as potential, the ruin is a means to represent time and reconsider monumentality. Combining a concern for subjective experience and environmental awareness, Unit 12 recognises a picturesque and romantic thread that began in the eighteenth century, continued in romantic classicism and was revived in the mid-twentieth century as a means to question one modernism – international, mechanical and insensitive – in favour of another – local, emotive and environmentally aware. Today, climate change ensures the increasing relevance of this evolving tradition.
Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow & Jonathan Hill
Top: James Crick, Egeus (the barn). Middle: Anna Vallius, Public Bath-house Along the Subterranean Walbrook, section. Bottom: Luke Jones, New Imperial Finance Ministry, sectional perspective; Daniel Swift Gibbs, IERS HQ: Calibrometric Projection Series III.