Unit 12
Occupying the City of London Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Year 4 Stephanie Brancatisano, Kacper Chmielewski, Holly Crosbie, Matthew Sawyer, Luke Scott, Zahra Taleifeh, Matthew Turner Year 5 Akhil Bakhda, Samiyah Bawamia, Larisa Bulibasa, Alex Cotterill, Benjamin Ferns, Helena Howard, Tereza Kacerova, Joseph Reilly, Adam Shapland The Bartlett School of Architecture 2015
Thanks to our Design Realisation tutor James Hampton and structural consultant Ben Godber. We would like to thank our critics: Abi Abdolwahabi, Gianluca Adamei, Alessandro Ayuso, David Buck, Shumi Bose, Nat Chard, Tom Coward, Alison Crawshaw, Maria Fedorchenko, Daisy Froud, Omar Ghazal, Manuel Jiménez Garcia, Rory Hyde, Adam Kaasa, Jan Kattein, Constance Lau, Ifigenia Liangi, Lesley McFadyen, Justin McGuirk, Tom Noonan, Luke Pearson, Francisco Sanin, Eva Sopeoglou, Jill Stonor, Michiko Sumi, Gabriel Warshafsky, Nina Vollenbröker, Fiona Zisch
In the early 18th century around 500,000 people squeezed into the City of London, with homes, businesses, industries and cemeteries side-by-side. Today, less than 10,000 people live there. The City’s massive buildings and tight street pattern make it the most urban part of Greater London but it is only a workplace, and empty at the weekend. Unit 12 proposes that the City’s population will increase to 500,000 so that its dense urban life will match its dense urban fabric. No longer will the City be dedicated only to the financial market. Instead, it will contain all the activities associated with metropolitan urbanism, as well as those that challenge familiar assumptions about urban life. Each student in Unit 12 has proposed a new building and a new programme that contributes to a socially, culturally and politically vibrant City of London. Monument and Ruin The early 21st century is often associated with ephemerality and transience. Without rejecting these qualities, we propose that monumentality should be celebrated too. Rather than only adulatory, the monument’s purpose is complex and questioning. The etymology of the term refers to the Latin monumentum, which in turn derives from monere, meaning to remind, warn and advise. The monument is interdependent with the ruin. Monuments can be ineffective means of collective remembrance, and their original meanings are soon obscured unless they are reaffirmed through everyday behaviour. Alongside the creation of monumental buildings that recall and represent societal values, there is a process of forgetting in terms of material decay and ruination, which may result from natural processes or human actions. Monumentality is a characteristic of the City but it only serves to glorify the financial market. Instead, we have inverted familiar hierarchies so that unexpected and everyday building programmes are celebrated. We have posed the question: what should we monumentalise today? And equally, we have asked: what should we ruin today? Rather than the monument and the ruin being conceived as conflicting, they are constructive themes interdependent within a single building dialectic. Designs on History To design, the architect must decide what to remember and what to forget. Vincent Scully concluded that the architect will ‘always be dealing with historical problems – with the past and, a function of the past, with the future. So the architect should be regarded as a kind of physical historian’.1 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. 21st century architects should appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new. 1 Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (1969), London: Thames and Hudson, p.257
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