Unit 15
States of Entanglement – Sensational Rio! Aleksandrina Rizova, Stefan Rutzinger, Kristina Schinegger
Year 4 Thomas Bush, Qidan Chen, Qiuling Guan, Juwhan Han, Yue Ma, Elena-Cristina Militaru, Helen Siu, Bethany Penman, Dionysios Toumazis, Ching Yiu Wong Year 5 Che-Hung Chien, Yulia Gilbert, Ruxandra Maria Gruioniu
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Consultants: Kyriakos Anatolitis (Atelier Ten), David Edwards (Herzog and de Meuron), Paul Officer (Design ID) Critics: Isaïe Bloch (UCL), David Campos, Sam Clark (PLP Architecture), Christina Dahdaleh (UCL), Oliver Domeisen (UCL), David Edwards (Herzog and de Meuron), Gianmaria Givanni (Studio Givanni), Pravin Ghosh, Jack Newton (RSHP), Paul Officer (Design ID), Ricardo de Ostos (UCL), Gilles Retsin (UCL), Javier Ruiz (UCL), Johannes Schafelner (Zaha Hadid Architects)
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This year, students’ projects were situated in Rio de Janeiro, a spectacular metropolis in a stunning natural setting. Rio is an amalgam shaped by cultural and economic extremes, such as the polarity of prevalent Catholicism and the intense physicality of samba and the carnival; the separation between extremely wealthy and impoverished groups; and the antipodes of dense urbanization and the tropical beauty of Rio’s National Park, to name but a few. Rio is also a fascinating mixture of cultures and ethnicities. It appears as a fragmented archipelago with segregated city parts on both sides of the spectrum – indigent favelas on the one hand and fortified buildings for the rich on the other. At first glance, Rio’s extremes tend to provoke shock and fascination. However, what turns it into a sensational and optimistic metropolis is its energetic public life and space, most tangible along its accessible beaches, which are populated by a large mix of different social groups. The dynamics that transformed Rio into a modern metropolis can still be seen in its abundance of stunning modernist masterpieces. Modernist architecture aims at harmonizing opposites (such as human and natural habitats, city and landscape, and buildings and infrastructures) whilst allowing them to retain their autonomous elements. Postmodernity favours overlapping of styles and the collage, thereby celebrating complexity and contradiction. At the turn of the century, digital architecture became interested in hybridization and seamlessness. Rio was our testing ground to develop contemporary strategies towards dealing with contradiction and fissures within the city. The notion of entanglement became our instrument to observe and analyse public space and the performative aspects of its related typologies. Students explored extreme conditions, natural and artificial landscapes and fringes of social interfaces in order to propose new multi-programmatic buildings and spaces. The year commenced with a short project in order to define an individual spatial interpretation of the year’s topic. After the field trip, students chose individual sites and developed a building project in Rio. Unit 15 students are asked to explore innovative fabrication techniques, dynamic digital prototypes and material intelligence. Students develop a broad range of digital and analogue making skills informed by adaptive environmental and natural systems. Our experiments drift between analogue and digital – the hand and the computer – thus creating a state of hybrid entanglement.