UG7
Time goes, you say? Ah no, alas, time stays, we go Pascal Bronner, Thomas Hillier
Year 2 Ella Adu, Se (Elva) Choi, Lap (Justin) Chow, Joanna Hobbs, Ka Law, Alvin Lim, Margarita Marsheva, Ella Wragg, Douglas Yang Year 3 Iman Raisa Datoo, Stefan Florescu, Klaudia Kapinska, Liam Merrigan, Iman Mohd Hadzhalie, Panagiotis Tzannetakis, Michelle Wang The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
We would like to thank our technical tutor Nick Westby and our critics throughout the year: Julia Backhaus, Scott Batty, Matthew Butcher, Ed Clark, Mollie Claypool, Tina Di Carlo, Pedro Font-Alba, James Hampton, Bill Hodgson, Sofia Krimizi, Dionysia Kypraiou, CJ Lim, Tim Lucas, Adriana Massidda, Regner Ramos, Bob Sheil
During the Age of Enlightenment, French philosopher Denis Diderot co-founded, edited and compiled the first volume of his Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, cataloguing the cutting edge of contemporary technologies and ‘mechanical arts’ of the time. In his wildest dreams he could not have foreseen that, 250 years later, mankind would be living out a large part of its collective life inside virtual machines and electronic devices. As we enter the third generation of the Digital Revolution, we must ask ourselves if we are losing our affinity with the analogue, the physical, the crafted and the tangible. These questions were explored through the typology of the ‘archive’ in order to examine the value of our physical existence in an increasingly digital world. The notion of the archive is incredibly diverse and ever-evolving, be it the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, often called the ‘Doomsday Vault’ or the mass art reproduction factories of Dafen Village in Shenzhen, China, where thousands of classic western paintings are reproduced on a daily basis. The artist Joseph Cornell, who rarely ventured beyond his home in New York State, created an archive in his basement comprising thousands of objects he called his dossiers of paper ephemera ‘explorations’, which took him, his imagination and his work around the world – a route to armchair travelling. Disassemble The unit travelled to and through Russia, visiting Moscow and Saint Petersburg, both famed for their cultural history and deep tradition in technological innovation. Before this journey, and in preparation for it, the students were asked to research, discover and disassemble a historical object from Russia’s past, present or (hypothesised) future and archive it in an inventive way. Taking inspiration from Diderot’s Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, they classified, catalogued, drew and described everything about this artifact, creating a new architectural assemblage that was used as a research tool to help them discover their programme, site and brief for the rest of the year. Assemble Informed by their disassembled archive-architectures and field trip investigations in Russia, the students proposed buildings that aimed to question the meaning of the archive in the digital age, challenge the conventions of drawn architecture and speculate on the relationships between old and new technologies and their cause-and-effect on the built environment. They did this whilst utilising Russia’s dialogue between historical tradition and its thirst for technological advancement.
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