M A rch A rch U n i t 17
DO UNDO DO
Niall McLaughlin & Dr.Yeoryia Manolopoulou
Architecture is doing and undoing, filling and taking away, showing and masking. It is a way of thinking and an act of communication. This year Unit 17 developed practices of doing which were continuous, reiterative and critical. We made large physical models and performative installations which we occupied in the space of the studio. We produced rooms within rooms, inhabitable objects and relational spaces between projects. Drawing was a supportive and reciprocal activity throughout. This persistent process of doing, undoing and redoing was seen as analogous to inhabitation, everyday rhythms, cyclical repetitions, the rituals and irregularities that determine the social life of places. In January we went to Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, to study historic and contemporary situations, woven between old palaces, mosques, souqs, khans, new Kurdish settlements, the modern city, an extremely dry climate and the nearly lost Barada River. We travelled through the desert to Palmyra, Aleppo, the Dead Cities, and the castle of Krak des Chevaliers. We saw how the land has been formed by the constant making and erasing activities of previous and contemporary cultures and tried to develop a critical understanding of the manner in which each reiteration of the relation between landscape and human activity has thrown up unforeseeable variations. This year’s projects are in themselves processes of trial and error. They accept contradiction and physically manifest
the gap that exists between desire and outcome, between the previous and the next, the one and the other. They express doubt about the new politics and poetics of local environments. Doing again and again is about testing, staging, rehearsing, and shifting your point of view. As an architect, you are not outside the thing that you make; you form a part of it and with it you change. Many thanks to our critics: Jessam AlJawad, Johan Berglund, Anthony Boulanger, Murray Fraser, Olivia Gordon, Rob Gregory, Tilo Guenther, Mohamad Hafeda, Jonathan Hill, Will Hunter, Jan Kattein, Dean Pike, Sophia Psarra, Adam Richards, Felix Robbins, Michiko Sumi, Mike Tonkin, Nikolas Travasaros and Victoria Watson. For her great suggestions and help in Syria many thanks to Anne Marie Galmstrup. Design Realisation Tutors: Simon Bishop, David Hemmingway and Maria Fulford. Year 4: Pooja Agrawal, Alexandra Brooke Canzy El-Gohary, Chiara Hall, Katherine Hegab Gaafar, Emilie Henriksen, Danielle Hodgson, Mathew Leung, Paul Sidebottom, Richard Wood Year 5: Matthew Eberhard, Fernanda Fiuza Brito, Yong Lik Lee, James Palmer, Eleanor Stevenson, Emma Tubbs, Georgina Ward, Christopher Wong
Fig. 17.1 Emma Tubbs, Hajj Hotel, Mardje’s Square, downtown Damascus. An average of 400,000 Shia pilgrims reach Damascus for the ‘hajj-al-fuqara’ and on their way to Mecca annually each year, after having traversed hundreds of miles in packed minibuses and coaches. These crowds occupy the streets as large solid ‘black masses’ on a daily basis but Damascus lacks an infrastructure to support them. As an extension of the journey and like a modern day Khan, the hotel allows the buses to enter into and up the building, taking the travellers and their things directly to their rooms. Luggage comes into big quantities and is arranged vertically as a screening device. Two monolithic shrines are in the center of the circulating ramps, providing the structural core for the roads and two ‘courtyard’ spaces within.
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