Unit 12
The Public Private House Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Year 4 Christia Angelidou, Mariya Badeva, Emma De Haan, Mihail Dinu, Simona Fratila, Clare Hawes, Rawan Hussin, Yi Lu, Raphae Memon, Ilaria Rigodanzo, Henry Schofield, Meya Tazi, Ioana Vierita
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Year 5 Stephanie Brancatisano, Kacper Chmielewski, Holly Crosbie, Matthew Sawyer, Luke Scott, Zahra Taleifeh, Matthew Turner Thanks to our Design Realisation tutor James Hampton and structural consultant James Nevin We would also like to thank our critics: Eva Branscome, Ruth Bernatek, Emma Cheatle, Tom Coward, Edward Denison, Tina Di Carlo, Oliver Domeisen, Murray Fraser, Omar Ghazal, James Hampton, Colin Herperger, Charles Holland, Jan Kattein, Chee Kit Lai, Constance Lau, Ifi Liangi, Jon Lopez, Hugh McEwen, Lesley McFadyen, Hikaru Nissanke, Tom Noonan, Luke Pearson, Mariana Pestana, Rahesh Ram, Peg Rawes, Jane Rendell, Alisdair Russell, Oliver Salway, Tanya Sengupta, Ro Spankie, Eva Sopeoglou, Tijana Stevanovic, Elly Ward, Gabriel Warshafsky, Dan Wilkinson, Alex Zambelli
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In Unit 12, we recognise the history within the discipline of architecture – an internal dialogue of evolving ideas, forms and tectonics – and we equally acknowledge the history of architecture’s interdependence with social, cultural and political developments. Claiming a degree of artistic autonomy is as necessary to creative speculation as understanding and engaging contemporary conditions. In many eras, the most fruitful innovations have occurred when ideas and forms have migrated from one time and place to another by a process of translation that has been as inventive as the initial conception. Critical admiration of the past has often been a creative stimulus in the present. Erwin Panofsky even identifies the start of the Renaissance with the moment when “the whole classical sphere … became an object of nostalgia”. The unnecessary opposition between tradition and innovation was a modernist cliché. But the most celebrated modernists were more subtle in their approach, leading Le Corbusier to compare Platonic forms to cars and Mies Van Der Rohe to state: “I felt that it must be possible to harmonize the old and the new in our civilisation. Each of my buildings was a statement of this idea”. Vincent Scully concludes that the architect will “always be dealing with historical problems—with the past and, a function of the past, with the future. So the architect should be regarded as a kind of physical historian”. The most creative architects have always looked to the past to imagine a future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it. Twenty-first century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new. A recurring theme states that the house is the origin and archetype of architecture. The home of the home, as we understand it today, is seventeenth-century Netherlands, when domestic architecture became private and familial. In subsequent centuries, the segregation of functions within the home mirrored the segregation of functions within the city. Challenging this isolation, Louis Kahn recalled the Renaissance analogy of a house and a city to characterise the house as the smallest social institution, concluding that, “every building is a house, regardless of whether it is a Senate, or whether it is just a house.” Our project this year is the design of a house-institution for an international organisation or society in London, which as a place to live and work has a public and a private life.