Unit 15
Operations of the Formless Aleksandrina Rizova, Stefan Rutzinger, Kristina Schinegger
Year 4 Ruxandra Gruioniu, Tomohino Sugeta Year 5 Katie Browne, Wang Fung Chan, Yin Hui Chung, Sam Dodsworth, Shinnosuke Takayanagi, Augustine Ong Wing
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2015
We would like to thank our consultants Christian Derck, Robert Hazell, Nick Ling and Mark Thompson. Thank you to our critics: Niran Buyukkoz, Marjan Colletti, Marcos Cruz, David Edwards, Leila Khan, Maren Klasing, Jeffrey Lee, Ricardo de Ostos, Johannes Schafelner, Andy Young
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This year Unit 15 explored the potentials of formlessness in architecture. Formless materials and phenomena like dust, mud or vapour are not devoid of form, since they have a physical body and material properties. Yet their appearance cannot be reduced to a figure or shape; they maintain a tendency towards change and transformation, openness and ambiguity. According to Bataille’s description of l’informe, its slippery character results in an operational force – as interesting as what the formless is, is how it performs and what it evokes. The instability of formless phenomena enables transformation and change in a most surprising way. Their spatial formations are indicators of the causes that modify them at an elementary level – they are variant and malleable yet predictable at a very high level of complexity. Nowadays, simulation tools allow us to understand architecture as complex and entangled formations that can be orchestrated and predicted, yet not entirely determined or fixed. Agent-based simulations do not only alter the conception and traditional notations of architecture, they trigger a radical shift: the direct control of the author on form generation is replaced by the manipulation of selected parameters and boundary conditions of complex systems. Unit 15 embraces this development, yet critically examines this voluntary relinquishing of control by architects as well as the social, cultural and aesthetic consequences. The testing ground for our spatial experimentations was Novi Beograd, or New Belgrade. Its modernistic masterplan was designed as an idealised image of society and took several decades for implementation, during which it was constantly adapted and altered. The underlying intention was to represent a new social and political order through selfreferential geometries and a clearly legible city structure that ignored the existing marshlands – a universal grid on a tabula rasa. The masterplan was never completed, New Belgrade became a sleeping town with a mixture of formal urban planning and informal sprawl. The aim of the individual student projects was to understand the city’s voids and incompleteness as a potential for densification and transformation. The formless was understood as a critical tool in order to question the inherent top-down approach of an urban masterplan. Students speculated on how the idea of formlessness can be applied to architecture in different scales and stages – from urban design to individual inhabitation, from performative strategies to emergent fabrication. Students were developing alternative typologies and formation processes that renegotiate the relation of top-down and bottom-up systems, consistency and adaptation, predictability and emergence.