BSc Unit 8 Yr 2: Yll Ajvazi, Cherry Beaumont, Ekaterina Minyaeva, Amanda Moore, Cho-Hee Sung, Jaymar Vitangol, Sandra Youkhana, Alexander Zhukov Yr 3: Nichola Barrington-Leach, David Rhys Jones, Christopher Mobbs, Stefano Passeri, Imran Matteo Perretta, Max Walmsley, Clarissa Yee
Weathermen ‘It is time to become part of everything.’ Unit 8 was interested in the potential for real buildings to incorporate strong poetic and experiential qualities, and to exist in symbiosis with the fabric of urban and natural landscapes they inhabit. We believe that architecture communicates the ideals and dreams of society, with the ability to respond to social, urban, and environmental problems. We put a strong emphasis on the stuff of buildings, their technologies and systems, and find great joy in exploring novel and innovative techniques of construction. This year, the unit challenged the relationship between the natural and the man-made. With an increasingly blurred boundary of definition between the two, how can one make a distinction between the ‘real’ and the artificial? What we see emerging is a new, synthesized version of nature, predominantly existing in relation to cities, where green space is no longer necessarily synonymous with natural space, and where human interaction has influenced, or in some cases radically changed, natural phenomena. We believe that buildings can be read in terms of weather (natural, political, cultural), with their own internal microclimates and zones of heat, pressure, and potentially also hurricanes, rain showers, blizzards and draughts. Acknowledging that both our natural and man-made worlds exists in a volatile and uncertain relationship, we looked at ideas of how to bridge or blur the artificial and the natural, and propose architectures that respond to these new and shifting conditions.
Johan Berglund & Rhys Cannon
Top: Cherry Beaumont, Harajuku School for the Almost Adult, Tokyo, timetable drawing. Bottom: Amanda Moore, Holborn Blood Bank, London, long section.