Unit 19
Becoming-Ever-Different Mollie Claypool, Manuel Jimenez Garcia
Year 4 Che-Hung (Jasper) Chien, Rania Francis, Elliot Mayer, Sukriye Robinson, Tom Savage, James Tang Year 5 Maria-Cristina Banceanu, Yuan Xing (Lisa) Liu, Yiting Lu, Annabel Monk, Le Lin (Stacy) Peh, Tomas Tvarijonas, David Ward
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2015
Many thanks to our Design Realisation Tutor Manja van de Worp and our Structural Consultant Christian Dercks Thank you to our critics: Robert Aish, Kasper Ax, Isaïe Bloch, Roberto Bottazi, Brendon Carlin, Ryan Dillion, Vidal Fernandez, Evan Greenberg, Kostas Grigoriadis, Christine Hawley, Carlos Jiménez Cenamor, Alice Labourel, Theo Lalis, Guan Lee, Ricardo de Ostos, Christopher Pierce, Gilles Retsin, Rob Stuart-Smith, Bob Sheil, Manolis Stavrakakis, Manijeh Verghese, Daniel Widrig, Zaynab Dena Ziari Special thanks to our Summer Show sponsors RS Components and ABC Imaging
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The world today is the most dense, mobile and temporal it has ever been. As the edge of the so-called ‘city’ continuously grows, shrinks, becomes blurry and undefined, its inhabitants are more likely to need the city to be able to adapt and change with urgency than ever before. It is these conditions that Unit 19 was interested in exploring this year: where the architecture of the city begins and ends, shrinks and expands. Here the user or inhabitant is viewed as a stakeholder that holds agency, acting as a catalyst for architecture that can adapt to changing material, environmental or ecological demands. With this, we embarked into the second year of a design agenda of deployable housing. We pursued living spaces that are ‘becoming-everdifferent’ and have an in-built wildness, that are both multiplicitous and prototypical. Each student began the year identifying a material system, ranging from inflatables to fabric formwork, that they then developed through digital and analogue computational and fabrication methods to be able to react, respond and adapt in time to designed parameters and constraints. Through a steady and rigorous ‘scaling up’ process, the students began to extract a making, material and actuation logic which they then developed into new tectonics for dynamic architectures. The work harks back to the 1960s, 70s and 80s avant-garde experiments in living of Coop Himmelb(l)au, Haus-Rucker-Co and David Greene, to list some, but not all, of our favourite references. Later, this was scaled up again to that of a larger architectural proposition, with Year 4 working at the scale of a prototypical cluster of living spaces while Year 5 developed a making and fabrication logic specific to a wider polemic about inhabiting deployable structures and also related to their theses. This year we travelled to Japan, experiencing diverse and extreme situations in every location we visited – from the peacefulness of Kyoto to the hyper-reality of Tokyo to the recovery-mindset of Sendai and the smooth emptiness of Yokohama. We met with roboticists at the University of Tokyo, architects at the University of Sendai, members of the disaster relief organisation ArchiAID, and several architectural practices such as Kengo Kuma and Japanese design and construction giant Takenaka Corporation. The work of the unit this year is both speculative and critical, responding to fluxing densities of inhabitation in surprising and novel ways. The projects address issues such as natural disasters, fluxing environments and lifecycles, extreme lifestyles and surreal economic and social structures. Through the utilisation of novel digital design and fabrication methods, our work deploys, erects, suspends, hangs, inflates, deflates, ripples, bubbles, is continuous, composite and discrete.