Dip Unit 19 Yr 4: Neil Charlton, Linnea Isen, Pil Joon Jeon, Peter Nilsson, Harriet Roderiques, Richard Vint, Karuga Koinange. Yr 5: Christian Kerrigan, Lenastina Andersson, James Curtis, Melissa Clinch, Ben Sweeting.
Spelling Architecture Over the last fifteen years Unit 19 has been at the forefront of architectural education. Its basic premise is to educate architects that understand fully the implications of advanced technology (such as virtuality, biotechnology and nanotechnology) and its surreal ramifications. This year students and staff went to Rome to investigate Classical Architecture, the sculpture of Bernini, mythology and Popes and the pregnant fecundity of Borromini. The fourth year were inducted into the magic of the great architectural opus, the notions of the choreography of space, the split site and the collage of contemporary technology and how it slides along the virtuality continuum. The fifth year has been exceptionally successful this year. Its members have made the connection between hypertext and anamorphosis, grown a ship inside a willow copse, created a cybernetic memory theatre inside Grandma's derelict house and implanted the Greek myths into a butchers shop. Our MArch student, Ben, (now three years under the unit 19 banner) has bathed old ladies and made a paper knife for Satre. ‘Esoteric?' We hear the least imaginative of you mutter. But no, this is the architecture of the future. An architecture that is personal, mnemonic, philosophically based, cybernetically rigorous and loaded with symbol, which coerces itself from the virtual to the actual. Simultaneously these architectures seek a synthesis between the natural and the machinic that is not Luddite but creates cybrid ecologies of actions and objects that are driven by the vicissitudes of daily life and the movements and perceptions of observers.
Neil Spiller and Phil Watson
Clockwise from top left: Linnea Isen, Peter Nilsson, Richard Vint, Pil Joon Jeon, Neil Charlton.