Unit 25
Activating Architecture Nat Chard, Emma-Kate Matthews
Year 4 Patrick Dobson-Perez, Ren Zhi Goh, Alex Kitching, Gaoqi Lou, Carys Payne, Toby Preston, Roshan Sehra, Ben Spong Year 5 Naomi Hui Au, Alya El-Chiati, Declan Harvey, Kar Tung (Karen) Ko, Demetris Ktorides, Yawen (Arwen) Liu, Vita Rossi, Dougal Sadler, Tatiana Southey-Bassols The Bartlett School of Architecture 2018
Thank you to our consultants: Geoff Morrow, Jerry Tate Thank you to our critics: Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, James Craig, Penelope Haralambidou, Mark Morris, Shaun Murray, Phuong-Trâm Nguyan, Thomas Parker, Frederik Petersen, Alex Pillen, Mark Ruthven, Neil Spiller, Jerry Tate, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Simon Withers We are grateful to our sponsors: Studio Mark Ruthven, Tate Harmer Architects, [Y/N] Studio Thank you to Mick Delieu, Hythe Ranges Safety Officer, for making his site available to us, and to The Bartlett’s B-made workshop staff for their help and support
302
The core of our unit involves helping each student to develop their own experimental practices, both in their approach to design and in the media through which they think and work. An experimental approach fosters rich design potential while also providing a productive educational method. We value the way that working experimentally through materials and processes can open up possibilities that might elude us when working with more conventional design methods. We encourage speculative risk and not knowing where the idea will end. To operate like this, we look for rigour when nurturing the relationship between idea and technique: seeking ways in which each student might develop or invent their own media and be in control of it on their own terms. We are much more interested in the literal and figurative manifestation of the idea than in the diagram. This year we speculated on how architecture might be implicated in between various realities. To help study this we visited Rome and Naples with a special emphasis on examples of architecture where there was a tantalising assembly of material and pictorial space. Most of the unit then proposed building projects on sites on England’s South Coast. These include the Hythe Ranges, that combine in equal measure the cultural marks and operational strictures of the military with ecologies hardly touched by humans during the military tenure. Above the Ranges, the soft cliffs of the Roughs present a realm of diverse geologies, inventive military listening devices and all manner of walkers. Our research teases out diverse ways of activating these sites, that question the obvious oppositions between nature and culture. Architects often feel the pressure to explain their work but we are interested in less reductive constructions. Each student has created their own worlds with apparent logics but also more hidden realms of invention. Many of the projects are developed through constructions or drawing methods that act more as tools for discovery than as illustrations of the designs. Much of the act of design depends on tacit knowledge, and so we have been looking at ways in which, not only the research instruments, but also the propositional tools can help develop such a capacity.