Unit 11
Incubator Laura Allen, Mark Smout
Year 4 Alexander Chapman, Christopher Delahunt, Johanna Just, Anthony Ko, Milo de Luca, Vanessa Lafoy, Agostino Nickl, Grace Quah, Ho (Howell) Tsang Year 5 Felicity Barbur, Robin Farmer, Emma Kitley, Fergus Knox, Adam Lampon, Mohamed (Ali) Qureshi, Fergus Seccombe The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Partners: Luke Pearson and Sandra Youkhana Thanks to Rhys Cannon of Gruff Limited for Design Realisation teaching and Stephen Webster for Structural Consultancy Critics include: Shumi Bose, Kyle Buchanan, Margaret Bursa, Mel Dodd, Joseph Grima, Dan Hill, Johan Hybschmann, Holly Lewis, Vicky Richardson, Tomas Stokke, Sabine Storp, Finn Williams
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Unit 11 is established as a laboratory for research, invention and spatial imagination, pursued through an iterative, inquisitive and imaginative process where modeling is key. We aim to challenge normative architectural conditions through modeling by methods such as replicas, prototypes, science frameworks, operating protocols, and specimens. We are interested in developing individual approaches to design, posing real and hypothetical problems that are design-led and fed by research, curiosity and innovation, whereby design is guided by its own productive processes, which are intriguingly varied and dynamic and informed as much by questions as by answers. Recently, we have looked at new forms of habitation which draw on the contemporary condition, borrowing and adapting technologies, materials, typologies and conventions from the culture and processes of the city and those of the natural environment. Last year we looked at technological strategies, geographical environments, science facts, science fictions and myths, in conjunction with the extraordinary emerging realties that surround the life of the San Francisco Bay Area. This year we revisited these interests in Chicago, where we considered the city in its role as a historical and future incubator of speculative architectural and cultural scenarios. We scrutinized the built, the unbuildable and inbuilt environments of the city. The mechanisms of the inaugural Chicago Biennial and its typical tropes of public art, interaction, installation and pavilion design were contrasted with Chicago’s heroic city planning and gargantuan infrastructural schemes. Significant sites such as the city’s second shoreline, the much-abused Chicago River; the Loop and the ‘Forever Open Clear and Free’ Lake Michigan shore, were seen in parallel to the speculative physical and cultural constructions of the Expo or Biennal which use architecture as an agent and indicator of political, social and cultural trends and desires. We researched how these contrasting modes of progress incubate new ideas for urban life. In Unit 11, students are encouraged to develop their own robust research themes and architectural language, with the ambition that speculative design ideas, informed by research and developed through an iterative design process, seamlessly progress into tantalizing, exquisite and cognizant architectural projects on a multitude of scales. Briefs are real (see ‘Honey Run’ by Felicity Barber, or Emma Kitley’s Primary School ‘Design/Play’ Workshops), hypothetically real (see Fergus Knox’s self-propagating timber skyscrapers for Chicago), or exist in a parallel imagined simulacra of the city (see ‘Data Scape’ by Johanna Just, ‘Sim City Sprawl’ by Agostino Nickl and ‘Chicago Hyperlink’ by Chris Delahunt).