Unit 17 The Open Work Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Níall McLaughlin, Michiko Sumi
Year 4 Emily Doll, Justine Dorion, André Kullmar, Jonathan Paley, Paloma Rua-Figueroa, Chris Worsfold Year 5 Alastair Browning, Joel Cady, Alicia González-Lafita Pérez, Uieong To, William Tweddell, Kirsty Sarah Williams, Mika Helen Zacharias The Bartlett School of Architecture 2014
Thank you to our consultant William Whitby and our Design Realisation Tutors Joseph Mackey, David Hemingway and Anne Schroell Thanks also to our critics: Matthew Butcher, Hannah Corlett, Mary Duggan, Murray Fraser, Will Hunter, Jan Kattein, Constance Lau, Guan Lee, Sophia Psarra, Peg Rawes, Bob Sheil, Henning Stummell, Mike Tonkin, Victoria Watson Thanks to Mihail Amariei, Alberto Redolfi, Emiliano Rizzotti, Carlo Ostorero, Alberto Pottenghi, Phil Tabor, and Jan-Christoph Zoels for their fieldtrip support
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Unit 17 designs contextual buildings that interplay with the social, political and material cultures of specific places. Each project is research-based, aiming to construct an architectural thesis that is explicitly manifested in the design proposition. We are interested in each student’s imagination and original voice, and seek diversity in the work produced by the Unit as a whole: projects complement and sometimes intentionally contradict each other to form a multilayered dialogue about the nature of architectural thought and practice today. Design iteration through drawing and making is a constant activity that we encourage. Stimulating fieldtrips, critical debates through open reviews and tutorials, and an osmosis of ideas and techniques in the studio are vital aspects of the Unit’s culture. In The Open Work Umberto Eco discusses the role of openness in modern art by asking what it means for authors to understand their work as incomplete, left open to the public and to chance. We see buildings exactly in this way: as ‘open works’ experienced and changed over time. Buildings are exposed to accidents, the environment, myriads different interpretations and modes of occupation. They are vulnerable to decline and collapse, human intervention, extension and demolition. Prescribed programmes often change or become obsolete. Our degree of openness towards the evolution of buildings over time determines our design approach and eventually the kind of architecture and cities we produce. This year we questioned architecture’s excessive programmatic specificity, welcoming propositions for buildings that are less ‘programmed’. We explored buildings that have had different purposes over the course of time, gaining quality through enduring, despite changes of use and circumstance. In November we travelled to northern Italy, a place of contradictions that denies any singular or fixed meaning. We visited the Olivetti complex in Ivrea, and buildings by Nervi, Ponti, Terragni, Rossi, Mangiarotti and Grafton Architects among others. No matter how themes change from year to year, our emphasis is always on the design of buildings as spaces to experience, and as meaningful public artefacts in culture and in history. Excessive metaphors, narratives and other overloaded signifiers are questioned, since our view is that the building should not be explained but experienced. The relationships between ideas, materials, places, environment, political life and the contemporary everyday will continue to preoccupy us.