BSc Unit 9 Yr 2: Charlotte Baker, Alastair Browning, Connor Cunnigham, Emily Doll, Natalia Eddy, Maryna Kuchak, Nabi Masutomi, Joanne Preston, Arub Saqib, Hongmiao Shi, William Harry Tweddell Yr 3: Joseph Dejardin, Joshua Green, Vinicius Machado Cipriano, Rebecca Thompson
In From The Cold In from the cold is an idiom: ‘Out of a position or condition of exile, concealment, isolation, or alienation: Since the new government promised amnesty, fugitive rebels are coming in from the cold’. It has been predicted that within nine years the world’s supply of oil will have peaked and as we enter a new unknown energy economy, the UK must acquire new energy sources – potentially a threatening state of affairs. The threat of a diminishing fuel supply is coupled with that of climate change, and as Britain adjusts to longterm weather changes, its notions of architecture will also undergo change. A new set of preoccupations for architecture is evolving, which aims to define and construct buildings that offer their users not only an enclosure and protection but systems to negotiate an uncertain future. It is the contention of Unit 9 that the newly emergent energy economy brings with it a new ideological atmosphere, which has something in common with the one that developed during and immediately after the Cold War. The Cold War generated an atmosphere of high ideological tension, which, curiously, was very productive for architecture. Seminal proposals from Eastern and Western architects and designers alike stand today as proof of the Cold War’s creative charge, the implicit threat of total annihilation seemed to encourage countless visions of technology’s transcendence over humanity. We studied Cold War propaganda strategies, adapting, revising and reinventing them as a means to address contemporary concerns and to redefine the agency of architecture in the making of proposals for buildings.
Max Dewdney & Chee-Kit Lai
Top and bottom left: William Harry Tweddell, Instrument for Activisim in Ballet. Bottom right: Alastair Browning, Platform 10 Kursky Railway Station.