Unit 19
The Laboratory of Mereology Mollie Claypool, Manuel Jimenez Garcia, Gilles Retsin
Year 4 Tzoulia Baltsavia, Jaspal Channa, Zuzana Sojkova, Gintare Stonkute, Ivo Tedbury, Joshua Toh, Kuba Tomaszczyk, Oscar Walheim, Xin Zhan Year 5 Elliot Mayer, Sukriye Robinson, Julian Sivaro
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Many thanks to our supporting tutors: Vidal Fernandez (Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners), Design Realisation Tutor Christian Dercks (Arup), Structural Consultant And many thanks to our invaluable critics: Isaïe Bloch, Brendon Carlin, Tomasso Franzoloni, Evan Greenberg, Kostas Grigoriadis, Sofia Krimizi, Hseng Linter, Javier Ruiz, Harald Trapp, Tomas Tvarijonas, Manijeh Verghese Thanks to our sponsor ABC Printing
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Set in Argentina, particularly in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, this year, Unit 19 proposed novel housing models based on a new understanding of serialisation and discreteness, enabling an increased automation of architecture while exploring new territories for design. The unit work questioned the prevailing paradigm for computation in the past two decades, one that understood architecture as a continuously evolving organic body, growing and adapting under external forces. Rather than borrowing models from nature, the students investigated an architectural ontology based on sharpening the tension between architecture and its parts. This year’s research explored fabrication techniques that are fundamentally digital, rather than analog, discrete rather than continuous, and increasingly fast and assemblage-based. Discrete, or ‘digital’ fabrication processes are based on a small number of different parts connecting with only a limited number of connection possibilities. The design possibilities (spatial, typological, tectonic, material) – or the way elements can combine and aggregate – is defined by the geometry of the element itself. Given the framework of discrete fabrication, where the geometry and definition of a part generates the whole, mereology (the theory of parthood relations, of the relations of part to whole and the relations of part to part within a whole) became an important concept for the work. We looked into establishing novel types of methods for design and fabrication based on low-cost, simple, quick and reversible methods of assembly into highly-detailed, heterogeneous and structurally sound architectures. Increased computational capabilities are able to push the initially modernist understanding of architecture as an assemblage of prefabricated, discrete elements into an unexpected new domain of previously unachievable detail, materiality, structure and aesthetics. By questioning and designing the system of production behind their building block, students developed provocative social and political scenarios intrinsic to their design projects. These scenarios range from exploring a fully automated society without work (Julian Sivaro, Year 5), to collectively-owned self-assembling robotic exoskeletons which enabled continuously adapting buildings (Ivo Tedbury, Year 4). Other projects question the impact of the digital on the way we handle data, create instruction and think about authorship and originality (Elliot Mayer, Year 5 and Oscar Walheim, Year 4). Projects also took on board questions of analogue craft and digital materiality in mass production, designing prototypical systems for manufacturing (Sukriye Robinson, Year 5 and Jaspal Channa, Year 4), amongst others.