Experiments in the Upside-Down
UG8
Farlie Reynolds, Greg Storrar
In UG8 we welcome the brave and the curious. We value a will to discover, rather than a need to prove. Interested in prototypical materials, structures, and technologies, we work between the drawn, the made and the captured to champion innovative architectural strategies rooted in the environmental challenges of our time. Groundbreaking creative practice is rooted in radical experimentation. Take the maverick painters we call ‘Ain’ters’ who rejected deterministic methods of painting: Sigmar Polke with chemical reactions, Yves Klein with fire, now Lucien Smith with a fire extinguisher. Ain’ters experiment with the unknown to embrace the creative potential of chance, and this year UG8 dared to join them. Our fieldtrip took us across the American midwest in search of intrepid testing grounds. We discovered bold architectures that opted for progress over convention and innovation over expectation, casting the world in a new light – just as the very first camera obscura experiment did – inverted, upside-down. On our roadtrip we delved deep into all manner of marvels. The lifting of an entire city block-by-block in homage to the rising shoreline of Lake Michigan. Mies Van der Rohe’s tradition-dismantling Farnsworth House. Frank Lloyd Wright’s gravity-defying Johnson Wax. The pioneering skyscrapers that grew from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1910. Looking down as well as up, we found tomorrow’s discoveries in the depths of Fermilab’s Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. The journey taught us that to progress our profession beyond that which is already proven, architects too can – and must – Ain’t. Our first act of design began with a woodland residency in East Sussex. In the untamed landscapes of Flimwell’s ancient woodlands and waterways, we surveyed, constructed and deployed a series of experiments. Each one was an exquisitely made apparatus, designed to uncover and log a phenomenon not previously witnessed. We sought to find out without fear of failure, discovering new ways of designing through analogue and digital prototyping, tooling, and logging. We moved on to refine these methodologies and develop critical building proposals in Downtown Chicago. Each project employed our newfound understanding of experimental practice in a highly personal way: a photography gallery lamenting the death of timber construction in the post fire-raged city, slowly rotting as in the ‘vinegar syndrome’ of the film negatives it displays; an eco-therapy centre and shelter that expands to meet demand in ever-increasing extreme temperature events; an internet café veiled in skins of digital glitch-inducing anonymity, offering mixed signals to the passer-by, the street-view car, and the satellite; a municipal library constructed from kiln-cast glass that gives light to the voice of a storyteller. We discovered that through the act of Ain’t-ing, each design methodology became a powerful tool for architectural invention.
Year 2 Zixi (Vito) Chen, Thuc Anh (Tia) Duong, Marie Faivre, Harrison Maddox, Mariia Shapovalova, Martins Starks, Supawut (Leo) Teerawatanachai, Zhi Qian (Jacqueline) Yu Year 3 James Della Valle, Diana Mykhaylychenko, Konrad Pawlaczyk, Cira Oller Tovar, Matthew Semiao Carmo Simpson, Theo Syder, Natália Sýkorová, Anthony Tai, Milon Thomsen Special thanks to Steve Johnson, Nick Meech and all those at Flimwell Park and the Woodland Enterprise Centre whose support and dedication made ‘The Flimwell Experiments’ such a success Special thanks to The Bartlett’s Architecture Project Fund and to our sponsor Refico for generously supporting our Flimwell expedition Thanks also to all our critics and skills tutors Theo Brader-Tan, Luke Bowler, Tom Budd, Ella Caldicott, Nat Chard, Barbara-Ann CampbellLange, Ryan Hakimian, Penelope Haralambidou, Ness Lafoy, Stefan Lengen, Emma-Kate Matthews, Lisa McSweeney, Ana Monrabal-Cook, Thomas Pearce, Vseva Popov, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Simon Withers and Michelle Young. A final thanks to Steven Pippin, whose otherworldly studio visit set the scene for a year of a great adventure and experimentation in the upside-down
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