Architecture MArch | Design Studio Fifteen
Kester Rattenbury, Sean Griffiths & Ruby Ray Penny Yr1: Elise Alden, Rhiain Bower, Matt Deeming, Benjamin Ellis, Jasmine Hayden, Ciaran Linane, Max Martin, Alex Nqai, Kristel Nurmsalu, Dan Rymer Trenholme
Yr2: Tom Bower, Amelia Breadman, Mitesh Chauhan, Molly de Courcy Wheeler, Ollie Cradock, Laurence Deane, Jimi Deji-Tijani, John O’Sullivan, Rob Whalley
DS15: Here Comes Everybody (2) This year, Design Studio 15 continues its explorations of the possibilities of architectural projects driven ‘by chance’: extending the tactics the minimal composer John Cage used to compose his famous silent (and not-so-silent) compositions into the world of architectural components, designs and strategies. We went back to the musical roots of this project, with a five-day field trip to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (don’t say we never take them anywhere...) notably featuring The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble/La Monte Young where eight trumpeters play a single note for an hour and a half – a true overload of conceptual work as experience. Back home, the studio ran a workshop in Play week, exploring what we could do with the new ‘flexible’ studios, and generating a mix of lightweight protective coatings – and a new fascination for bricks, which also formed part of the design work.
Our project was set in Peckham, prompted by the Ordinary Streets/LSE Cities research project led by Suzanne Hall studying the amazing indigenous culture of its markets and nail bars, and setting a brief for a new kind of market building. Great market buildings were also on offer on the field trip, in Brutalist form in Huddersfield and in Halifax, where the astonishing Piece Hall is being renovated. But the student’s versions were also to be assembled out of the ‘chance’ components the students had made using the I Ching (the ancient book of Chinese wisdom used by John Cage), to randomise their design choices, and developing strategic and technically detailed resolutions of the random work and found situations which the project threw in their way. If they can cope with this, and still turn out amazing, and even sometimes coherent designs, we figure they can cope with anything.
Guest Critics: Rosa Appleby Aylis, James John Clifford Rogers, Amy Gaspar Slayford, Stephen Harty, Sam Kebbell, Joshua McManus, Michael Perkins, Marie Price, Matteo Sarno, Giles Smith, Doug Spencer, James Telford, Camilla Wilkinson
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Molly de Courcy Wheeler: More or Less Bricks, 1:1