Unit 0
Exchange Murray Fraser, Kenny Kinugasa-Tsui, Justin C.K. Lau
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2013
Unit 0’s underlying aim is for students to learn how to carry out intensive research – into architectural ideas, urban conditions, cultural relations, practices of everyday life – and then use their findings to devise innovative and challenging proposals for the contemporary city. Students are asked to grasp the unique speculative space offered by academic study and combine this with a commitment to social engagement and urban improvement, as if their projects were actually going to be built. A clear understanding of the technological, environmental and developmental issues involved in architecture is also vital. Furthermore, in order to develop their designs, students are expected to capitalise on the full range of methods of investigation and representation: sketches, models, digital fabrication, photography, drawings, computer renders and animations. In their approach, students should allow for intuitive and spontaneous design-based responses. After all, strong design ideas produced by speculative or lateral thinking can stimulate theoretical investigations just as much as the other way around. The theme we set our students this year was the concept of ‘exchange’. This term of course carries many meanings. Exchange is used as the principle for the trade of goods and services, originally on a barter system, later as a financial transaction between buyer and seller – of currency, commodities, information data spread by modern communication technologies, and such like. Yet it could simply refer to an exchange of ideas, or of bodily contacts, among a small group or even just between two people. On a wider scale, when talking of processes like globalisation, it can also refer to sweeping cultural interchange between different ethnic groups or countries around the world. Unit 0 regards architecture as a discipline which is very much rooted in the exchange of ideas and material expressions on multiple cultural levels. Today, in our fast moving digital-techno-media culture, many fragments of the ‘foreign’, both material and 42
psychological, penetrate intimately into our daily lives. Instead of viewing this as loss of cultural authenticity or as a process of homogenisation, we see global exchange in architectural production as creative and positive. When it comes to buildings, the idea of exchange can be traced in a range of ways: aesthetics, economics, construction methods, thresholds between inside/outside, feedback cycles and user adjustments. It was hence up to each Unit 0 student to research into exchange and come up with an interpretation to explore through their design work. To start the year, we asked students to think about cultural interchange by studying various Londonbased collections of Chinese artefacts. At the same time they divided into groups to research specific themes in relation to the NoHo site in Mortimer Street – formerly the location of Middlesex Hospital, and undeveloped for many years following the 2008 economic crash. Students then began to design and make their own individual designs/ models/installations as their initial project for the year. They then were allowed to remain with this site for their major project or else find another site of their choosing which better suited their idea of exchange. The ensuing research encompassed many fields: anthropology, history, ecology, climate, economics, sociology, technology, etc. High-end computer modelling and communication tools associated were combined with more traditional design techniques, thereby addressing distinctions between actual and virtual, digital and analogue, scientific and artistic, and instrumental and philosophical. Several questions were posed to the Unit 0 students. How can your site become a place of exchange for the future? How might global influences shape a new identity for your chosen site, as well as for the rest of London? How might the different uses you are proposing enhance urban and cultural interaction? Design investigations were required to deal explicitly with issues of site, ground,