Year 1
Constructing Your Practice Nat Chard, Carlos Jiménez Cenamor
Year 1 Staff Lucy Leonard, Ifigenia Liangi, Emma-Kate Matthews, Frederik Petersen, Eva Ravnborg, Gavin Robotham, Emmanouil Stavrakakis, Catrina Stewart, Umut Yamac, Nick Westby Architectural Media Studies Tutor Joel Cady, Danielle Hodgson
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Year 1 Coordinator Emmanouil Stavrakakis Year 1 Administrator Izzy Blackburn We would like to thank The Bartlett School of Architecture and the Architecture Research Fund (ARF) for their constant support of and care for Year 1. We would like to thank Emma Flynn, CJ Lim, Hina Lad, Christine Hawley, Gergerly Kovács, Luke Pearson, Mollie Claypool, Matthew Butcher, Sara Shafei, Steve Johnson, Damjan Iliev, Blanche Cameron, Caroline Rabourdin, Joel Cady, Murray Fraser, Javier Ruiz Rodrigez, Chee-Kit Lai, Thomas Pearce, Dimitri Argyros, Danielle Wilkinson, Danielle Hodgson, Francesca Hughes, Regner Ramos, Jessica In, Sofia Krimizi, Paolo Zaide, Bernadette Devilat and Paz, Afra van 't Land, James Sale, Luke Olsen, Graeme Williamson, Natasha Sandmeier, Elizabeth Dow, B-made, ScanLAB Projects, Brian O’Reilly, Bob Sheil and the irreplaceable Frosso Pimenides. The Bartlett Architecture Office, with Emer Girling and Izzy Blackburn on the steering wheel, has made the year possible. Thank you so much!
16
Year 1 is a very special moment in every architect’s career – the time in which our creativity, passion and dedication meet a new challenge: to define the environment that nurtures the social context in which we all develop our lives. It is not a simple task, since it addresses all scales from furniture to urban design, from permanent to temporary constructions; and so perhaps our most important responsibility is to have an integral vision of reality. With this purpose we train our students to observe, analyse and respond through a series of projects. The outcome of these design questions will combine their radical creativity, their uniqueness and the technical expertise acquired in conversations with tutors, consultants and experts. This year students were asked how they might construct their practice. An introductory project teased out the personal knowledge they had already accrued about architecture from inhabiting it all their lives. This work also probed how the process of drawing might be particular to the content that was being discussed, a theme that was developed in the second project. Four groups of students invented and built a variety of drawing boards (or surfaces) imbued with 'opinions', and the rest of the students built idea-specific drawing tools that were related to at least one of the boards. The project related the processes of making and drawing as content-led media, putting students in control of the materials and processes through which they would be thinking about their work. To help this we spent a day drawing aircraft and their components at the aeroplane museum at Duxford – an opportunity to use drawing to carefully observe how precise artefacts can be made. In January we travelled to Madrid and drew on Carlos Jiménez’s wide range of contacts in the city. We visited and 3D scanned buildings by Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno, Andrés Jaque, Mi5 Architects, Langarita Navarro and Zuloark, architects who have forged a range of new types of practice during the recession. These encounters set the scene for the building project, set on a range of sites along the Regent’s Canal. A workshop at the start of the project helped each student set up their own framework for how they would practice. This introduction encouraged an experimental approach to the work, which was taken in different directions by the eight first year studios. The building projects also provided a vehicle for the students’ technical studies. Early in the year there was a strong emphasis on developing handdrawing skills as well as the connection between what was being drawn, and how. In the second half of the year we introduced digital modelling, 3D scanning and offered a 3D printing workshop. The goal of Year 1’s digital implementation aims to facilitate the combination of analogue and digital thinking as complementary design methodologies and languages in order to trigger students’ contemporary creative thinking.