Unit 23
Constructing Pleasures Nat Chard, Colin Herperger
Year 4 Dean Hedman, Jiatong (Karen) Hu, Andrea Matta, Kirsty McMullan, Ian Ng, Thomas Parker, Daniel van der Poll, Peter West Year 5 Michael Arnett, Amy Begg, Joshua Broomer, Rania Francis, Muhammad Hussan Jubri, Flavie Caroukis, Wynne Leung, Luke Lupton The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Design Realisation tutor: Ralph Gunson Parker Thanks to consultants and critics James Craig, Bastian Glaessner, Tamsin Hanke, Perry Kulper, Shaun Murray, Jerry Tate, Emmanuel Vercruysse, and Simon Withers Thanks to our sponsors RIAA Barker Gilette Solicitors
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A background concern in the unit is the relationship between ideas and techniques; both in the way ideas can be embodied in materials and processes and in how thinking through materials and processes (in making and drawing) can tease out ideas. To help find some precision in such methods, we looked at the work of a number of anthropologists who instead of locating artefacts within established epistemologies have been constructing epistemologies directly from the artefact. The question we have been looking at is how to construct architecture in such a way that those who come across or occupy it might be seduced to have the same relationship with the building that these anthropologists have with the artefacts they study. Is it possible to construct an architecture where those who engage with it construct cosmologies that emanate from the architecture’s apparent logic? To support our studies into these questions we ran two parallel projects; an invented object and a piece of architecture. The aim was to set up an ongoing dialogue between the research object, through which ideas within the architecture could be tried out as a (small) reality, and the architecture. In a number of cases this led to objects that in some way predicted the architecture, often as practical and conceptual tools to draw – and draw out – the ideas. We wished to avoid prescribing objects or architecture primarily through practicalities and instead wanted to look at broader senses of purpose, hence the title 'Constructing Pleasures'. We were looking for motivations that might in modest ways infect a larger cultural realm than the piece being designed. We started the year with visits to the Pitt Rivers Museum to imagine our own realities out of its artefacts and Rousham Park to study how the internal program infects the surrounding world. We also visited a range of intensely personal buildings in northern Italy where immense care had been invested in building their ideas as fulsomely as possible.