Unit 19 The Living Spaces of the Algorithmics Mollie Claypool, Manuel Jiménez Garcia, Philippe Morel
Year 4 Shi Qi An, Maria-Cristina Banceanu, Yuan Xing (Lisa) Liu, Yiting Lu, Annabel Monk, Stacy Peh Li Lin, Ran Shu, Tomas Tvarijonas Year 5 Stuart Colaco, Matthew Lacey, Jeffrey Lim, Liu Meng, Sang Yong Seok, Shuo Zhang
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2014
Thank you to our Design Realisation Tutor Manja van der Worp, and thanks to Vicente Soler for technical support Thanks also to our critics: Nuria Alvarez Lombardero, Sebastian Andia, Torsted Broeder, Matthew Butcher, Brendon Carlin, Marcos Cruz, Marjan Colletti, Apostolis Despotidis, Ryan Dillon, Vidal Fernandez, Evan Greenberg, Christine Hawley, Carlos Jimenez, Katya Larina, Jorge Mendez, Drew Merkle, Gilles Retsin, Yael Reisner, Pablo Ros, Stefan Rutzinger, Carles Sala, Thibault Schwartz, Kristina Schinegger, Vicente Soler, Claudia Pasquero, Jeroen van Ameijde, Manja van de Worp, Naiara Vegara, Michael Weinstock, Manja van der Worp, Emmannouil Zaroukas Many thanks for the generosity of our critics over the course of the year, the workshop and DPL staff for their support as well as students of GAD RC5 and the Y5 students’ thesis tutors
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In 2014 the largest problem we face as designers is how to house the world’s exponentially increasing population. In 2050 it is estimated that the world population will surpass 10 billion and the world will become the most dense, and most temporal, it has ever been. Where will we house all of those people? How will we house them? What kinds of needs will they have? This year, we have continued a research agenda into the problem of housing, situating ourselves in Sicily, a site which has been a important geographic fulcrum for population shifts throughout history due to its position in the Mediterranean: it is the gateway to Europe from Africa and parts of the Middle East. Its ever-changing population due to migration has resulted in a new kind of domesticity and housing becoming necessary, one which must be continuously in flux, adaptive and temporal, as well as sensitive in terms of economic and social relationships. As a means of opening this as a design research problem, we began the year studying patterns of delinquency, nomadism, escapism, alienation, isolation and exile, and how this relates to these shifts and variances in population architecturally and spatially. With an exponential increase in the ways in which architects can understand the world due to the computational revolution, architects now have the capacity to design for this variability as well as difference. Each student designed a 1:1, 1:5 or 1:10 apparatus which had to transform mechanically, with several uses or functions designed into the piece. This was then simulated using algorithmic processes, and a structural, geometric or material logic was abstracted. This logic was used as the main driver in design research into novel material strategies, adaptable and kinetic structures and geometries and novel fabrication technologies, with the design of a housing ‘unit’ being the output of this work. As a result, almost all of the projects designed for a single inhabitable housing unit to be capable of being differentiated within an overall logic, enabling the same logic to be utilised for different functions. A single unit can achieve different kinds of inhabitable spaces when aggregated with density logics to form housing ‘clusters’ and then, on a larger scale, an urban strategy for housing. Each project brief is individual to the student’s own interests within housing, ranging from short-term or longer-term solutions for the housing crisis we are now in. For Year 5 this is a continuation of research begun in the unit last year and is tied to the work done for the Thesis. For Year 4 it was tied to the Design Realisation project as well as building a clear research agenda to take into Year 5 next year.