UG10
Intimate Immensity Tamsin Hanke, Guan Lee
Year 2 Nur (Sabrina) Azman, Sam Grice, Clementine Holden, Carmen Kong, Shi Yin Ling, Elissavet Manou, Gabriel Pavlides, Sam Price, Sam Rix Year 3 Bingqing (Angelica) Chen, Hoi Man (Christy) Cheung, Romario (Yik Yu) Lai, Dunkaew (Pink) Protpagorn, Sheua Wei (Amanda) Tam, Xinyue (Angel) Yao, Michelle Yiu The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Thanks to Joshua Scott (Technical Tutor), Callum Perry (Digital Fabrication) Igor Pantic (Digital Modelling) and Jessie Lee (Ceramic and Glass) Thanks also to our guest critics: Alice Brownfield, Mollie Claypool, Matthew Butcher, Kate Darby, Holly Galbraith, Colin Herperger, Christine Hawley, Jonathan Hill, Nic Moore, Igor Pantic, Callum Perry, Stuart Piercy, Michael Ramage, Bob Sheil, Victoria Watson, Peter Webb, Ivana Wingham, Paolo Zaide
126
UG10 is interested both in making things and the environments in which they are made. Students have worked to make and think simultaneously at the scale of the tool and the scale of the landscape, to study the methods and materials from which architecture is produced and how these can be drawn from, and continue to respond to, a place. The unit considered the idea of a conserved wilderness, questioning whether continuing to focus upon preserving islands of Holocene ecosystems in this Anthropocene age is anachronistic and counterproductive. Human infrastructure and cultural context are changing as fast as their natural counterparts and allowing them to evolve in parallel is critical to the sustainable future of development. In Hawaii, the accelerated condition of dynamism allowed students to question whether it may be possible to be optimistic about the impact that we can have, by using an understanding of context to propose a positive way to engage with place. The unit travelled to the Big Island of Hawaii, a landscape of extreme and constant change. Lava flows perpetually alter and evolve the topography through volcanic activity bubbling just below the surface. Communities must adapt to living on the edge of destruction, and space is compromised by the protection of large pieces of the island for international conservation. Students started the year by considering ‘on what basis do we begin to build?’. They proposed a vessel based on a research agenda and a material practice that they took from sites around Hawaii in order to propose a new type of architecture that responded to both physical and contextual landscapes of violent change. Methods of construction moved between digital intentions and physical modelling to test the nature of materials alongside the computational generic. These ideas were developed through building projects that considered the issue of material use in a place that has to ship all of its construction materials at least half way across the Pacific. Some tried to find a new material language of extraction or harvest, working directly to propose landscapes of timber, and extractive methodologies of volcanic mud and lava rock. Others considered the island’s aggressive military history and the ongoing fight for independence after the highly ambiguous annexation to America in 1893. Questions were raised about the economic future and land ownership on an island where, day by day, the sea reclaims territory built on a soft and sandy bedrock of volcanic activity.