Unit 18
Portraits of Nature Isaïe Bloch, Ricardo de Ostos
Year 4 Arti Braude, Maisie Chan, Anjie Gu, Man Jia, Aleksandra Kravchenko, Matteo Mauro, Nicholas Stamford, Risa Tadauchi, Samuel Whiting Year 5 Anthony Awanis, Shu Ran, Thomas Reeves, James Tang, Man Tai (Adrian) Yiu
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
With thanks to our consultants and critics Julia Backhaus, Christina Dahdaleh, Christine Hawley, Michelle Hudson, Nannette Jackowski, Manuel Jimenez Garcia, Jakub Klaska, Abel Maciel, Yael Reisner, Javier Ruiz, Stefan Rutzinger, Kristina Shinegger, David Tajchman, Athanasios Varnavas
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Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of the planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive. Frank Herbert, Dune Instead of asking what nature is, Unit 18 investigated the politics of thinking about nature in the context of Brazil, in order to test digital architectures of cultural expression and sensorial surprises. Unit 18, or Generational Phantoms, is interested in researching how architecture translates and expresses culture with a focus on digital media and practices of making. Students operate between reading, writing, digital modelling and fabricating and are encouraged to create critical arguments via architectural form and ornamentation. In this year’s brief, whilst studying radical ecological agendas from ecofeminism to eco-marxism, Portraits of Nature found opportunities and contradictions within which architecture could operate. In Brazil, the Unit travelled to the state of Rio de Janeiro and found cities, neighbourhoods, natural reserves and institutions working on the edge of man/nature relationships. Working between shaping landscapes and building massing studies, projects addressed thresholds of a changing cityscape due to mega sport events and rapid urban development. Risa Tadauchi created a Fatigue Rehabilitation Centre in Flamengo Park, inspired by Roberto Burle Marx's landscape design in combination with the recent Olympic Games. Her design mixed objects and landscape concepts, bringing surrealism and color exposure to translate not only body fatigue symptoms but also urban fatigue to sporting events. Investigating the edge of city and rainforest, Nic Stamford proposes a complex set of elevated experiential buildings, in order to explore the threshold between the urban and the natural fabric of Rio de Janeiro. Tree buildings of different heights explored an earth-like materiality between top and bottom vistas, enabling a time-base adaptation with the fauna and flora on the site. At the edge of a favela, Anthony Awanis explores a syncretic culture that proposes an architecture of lines versus volumes for an Afro-Brazilian religion. Similarly, Adrian Yiu based his investigation into Brazilian anthropophagy on designing a economical and expressive way to quarry in a urban set. Between physical and digital, natural and urban, thinking and making, Generational Phantoms explored architectures based on individual thinking and critical expression.