Unit 7
Workshop Cultures Ming Chung, Nick Tyson
‘At a point when I was stuck in my work, he asked me, “What is your guiding intuition?” I replied on the spur of the moment, “Making is thinking”.’ Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2013
Unit 7 continues to investigate architecture as a material practice whereby making is intrinsic to a way of working and thinking about design. With this in mind, students are encouraged to cultivate a material discipline over the course of the year, developing material prototypes to stimulate strategic design propositions. Working from detail to strategy challenges the conventional design process and offers speculative opportunities for material invention. Our aim is to directly connect the design studio to the places where work is made. We regard the fabrication workshop as the best environment for design ideas to be nurtured, where students can develop familiarity with both manual tools and digitally controlled machines and have contact with specialist makers. Thinking through making allows tacit decisions to be evidenced and seized upon in an open cycle of experimentation, an activity that aims to reposition materials at the centre of architectural production. Carapace The year began with material research and hands-on investigations for the design of a Carapace (an exoskeleton or shell) at 1:1 scale. The structure required a response to the human scale and hosted a light programme entitled ‘People Meet’. Carapace was developed through detailed prototypes and hand-assembled systems that were characterised by inherent properties of the individually selected material. An understanding of workshop culture was introduced with intensive design and make sessions, machine and software inductions and visits to unique fabrication facilities such as Grymsdyke Farm. To make visible the tacit decisions of a 112
material-led design process, the project was documented in the form of flowcharts and instructional manuals. The interpretation of Carapace was materially diverse and included deployable structures such as Kate Slattery’s kerfed oak tensegrity framework, Tracy Xiao’s woven cedar and steel gridshell and Frances Lu’s cellular paper furniture. Soft systems that were generated from interlocking components or looped stitches such as Suhee Kim’s non-woven body textile, Phoebe Nickols’s reinforced laminated cork screens and Sonia Ho’s copper and rope crochet nets. Tessellating component systems such as Julian Siravo’s CNC milled, cast and 3D printed bricks and Xin Zhan’s laser-cut, heat-formed acrylic trays. Field Trip: Copenhagen In November the Unit travelled to Copenhagen, a place with a rich tradition of design, craft and manufacture. As well as visits to seminal and contemporary Danish architecture, guided visits were made to Fritz Hansen’s furniture production facilities, GXN Studio at 3XN Architects and the innovative research environment at CITA, the Center for Information Technology and Architecture. The Unit also presented projects at the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. The former Burmeister & Wain shipyard in Refshaleoen is a harbour island close to the city centre of Copenhagen and is the site location for the second design project entitled Open Guild. With the shipyard decommissioned in 1996, Refshaleoen Holding has been tasked with managing the island’s future and has implemented a range of temporary strategies until redevelopment as part of the wider city plan in 2023. Regarded as a testbed for temporary uses, Refshaleoen hosts a series of creative programmes from open-air festivals to the provision of affordable work space and open source workshops. It is within this live context that Unit 7