Architecture: University of Greenwich School of Design, Show 2020

Architecture

University of Greenwich

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University of Greenwich School of Design 11 Stockwell Street Greenwich London SE10 9BD Design_School@greenwich.ac.uk +44 (0)20 8331 9135 Copyright Š University of Greenwich No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

We endeavour to ensure that all information is accurate at the time of publication.

ISBN: 978-1-9996921-3-1 Design: Claire Mason + Mike Aling Production assistant: Philia Yi Sian Chua

Architecture

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Contents

Introduction to the School of Design 1 Stephen Kennedy Welcome to Architecture 3 Simon Herron — BA (Hons) ARCHITECTURE 5 Year 1 6 Susanne Isa + Jen Wan Y1 Unit 1 8 Kenzaf Chung + Stephanie Reid Y1 Unit 2 12 Louis Sullivan + Iris Argyropoulou Y1 Unit 3 16 Eric Wong + Evelina Vatzeva Y1 Unit 4 20 Jen Wan + Joanne Chen Y1 Unit 5 24 Balveer Mankia + Martyna Marciniak Y1 Unit 6 28 Ka Man Leung + Anja Kempa Unit 1 32 Benni Allan + Keiran Hawkins Unit 2 40 Seán McAlister + Pravin Ghosh Unit 3 48 George King + Irene Astrain + Yeena Yoon Unit 4 56 Susanne Isa + Nick Elias Unit 7 64 Yorgos Loizos + Ned Scott Unit 8 72 Jen Wan + Mark Hatter BA (Hons) Architecture Technology 80 Kieran Hawkins + Jonathan Walker + Shaun Murray BA (Hons) Architecture History + Theory 88 Caroline Rabourdin + Simon Withers —

Contents Continued...

MArch ARCHITECTURE 99 Unit 12 100 Rahesh Ram + Samuel Coulton Unit 13 108 Naomi Gibson + Ifigeneia Liangi + Dan Wilkinson Unit 14 116 Mike Aling Unit 16 124 Simon Herron + Jonathan Walker + Andrew Lavelle Unit 17 132 Chris Roberts + Mark Davies Unit 18 140 Pascal Bronner + Thomas Hillier Unit 19 148 John Bell + Simon Miller Unit 20 156 Jake Moulson + David Hemingway Unit 21 164 Shaun Murray + Simon Withers MArch Architecture Design Realisation 172 Rahesh Ram MArch Architecture Theories of Architectural Design + Architectural Thesis 180 Caroline Rabourdin + Mike Aling — PDAP [Postgraduate Diploma in Architectural practice] 189 Tony Clelford Research + Enterprise 191 Benz Kotzen Architecture Lecture Series 2019 — 20 192 RIBA Presidents Medal Winners 2019 204 Blueprint for the Future 2019 206 Graduates in Practice 208

Introduction Professor Stephen Kennedy

School of Design

Head of School

You will forever be the graduating year of 2020 — not the unfortunate year who missed out, but the year who rose to the challenge. The year who dealt with unprecedented pressure and stress to fulfil your potential and produce the work that you were always capable of. Myself and all my colleagues in the school are proud to have been able to support you, and even more proud to witness the fruits of your labour.

The academic year has ended, programmes are complete, and degrees awarded. Yet for many I am guessing there is a feeling of ‘unfinished business’ and incompletion. The School of Design shares those feelings with you and is committed wherever possible to make it up to you. The amazing work that is compiled in this catalogue is testament to your enduring creative talents and capacity to overcome adversity, and as soon as is practicable we look forward to displaying it in our gallery spaces. Until then it will be distributed widely across our creative community via our planned on-line show.

The range and the quality of the work on display here is outstanding.

Across all the disciplines in the School, the ability to work to find and implement solutions for the world as it is and critically re-evaluate the possibilities for the world as it can be, is demonstrated to great effect. As is the increased significance of the relationship between the virtual and the real, the remote and the present. As we retreated into the ‘safety’ of our digital cocoons your creative and critical skills were tested to their limits, and your efforts have been well rewarded. Thanks to you, the School of Design continues to go from strength to strength, and the work presented here attests to its growing reputation and standing as a creative institution of national and international standing.

Thank you for your fortitude and resilience. Good luck for the future, and we look forward to welcoming you back to celebrate with us in person very soon.

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Introduction Simon Herron

Welcome to

Architecture

Academic Portfolio Lead Architecture

In such unprecedented and challenging times, we have an ever-urgent responsibility to support and prepare the next generation of architects for the challenges that lay ahead. Architecture must continue to remain relevant to the time in which it is produced, balanced with a respect for its inheritance and a duty of care for its legacy gifted to future generations. This implicit responsibility must equally be shared by the institution that educates, informs and prepares young architects for entry into the profession.

The function of this catalogue is to articulate a cross-sectional journey through our professionally accredited Architectural programmes within the School of Design at the University of Greenwich. Traditionally this is produced as a companion guide to the annual public exhibition of student work. This year, given the global Covid-19 pandemic, the university moved online: as did the summer exhibition. This catalogue stands as a true testament to the exceptional dedication and collective achievement of our students, tutors and school community alike. The pace of adjustment was profound – simple measures such as allowing students additional time to prepare for the move online, and developing a remote render farm for image production, provided students with the framework and supportive toolkit for a truly exceptional year.

This catalogue follows the established simple structure, guiding the reader vertically through our programmes, across the interconnected modules of Design, Technology, Histories and Theories. Our architecture programmes are presented as a unified whole, collectively seen through a single pedagogical lens from Year 1, through MArch, to Postgraduate Diploma in Architectural Practice. Design practice is placed firmly at the centre of everything we do, with Technology and Histories and Theories operating as parallel strands of creative, design-focussed critical thinking. The subject of Architecture is in the first instance a discipline that gathers together these complex trajectories of thought, before putting them into practice.

Programme structures should have inherent simplicity, as they need to provide contingency and opportunity for invention and surprise. Curriculums should be invisible at the point of delivery – imbedded seamlessly into an intuitive teaching interface. A supportive studio-based culture is at the centre of the School of Design, where students are taught in the unit-based design studio system. We ask our students to be speculative, therefore we as staff have a parallel obligation to provide an environment that encourages, supports and enables this speculation to take place and evolve. Within this model, Architecture has the potential to develop powerful ideas for addressing the unknown, unlocking new uses and new meanings, new possibilities for yet-to-be-discovered futures.

“Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. “Time” has ceased, “space” has vanished. We now live in a global village. . . a simultaneous happening.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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BA (Hons) Architecture BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE is the first step in a professional career in architecture. The programme offers students a range of approaches to architectural design through studio-based tutorial groups, or ‘Units’. Each Unit explores a different aspect of architectural design, ranging from new technologies, emerging social conditions and contemporary cultural contexts, to more abstract aesthetic and theoretical concerns. Within each year of the course, design accounts for 50% of the marks with a central emphasis on developing high level design skills and the ability to create and communicate complex architectural ideas. Students explore the visual and tactile world, learning drawing and computer skills. Design projects are supported by studies in the history of architecture, sustainability, architectural practice, contemporary theory and technology.

Programme Leader: Susanne Isa

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YEAR 1

SUSANNE ISA + JEN WAN

“We all, adults and children, have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in the wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining things can be different…

We have an obligation to make things beautiful.

Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.” — Neil Gaiman This quote describes the ability of individuals with imagination to change the world for the better, using creativity. It is a powerful rallying call that we all must sign up to.

The academic year has been disrupted by a global pandemic. Covid-19 is a challenge that we can work with and overcome using these skills, and I was overwhelmed and deeply moved by the strength and ingenuity shown by students and staff alike this year. To learn reflective and empathetic thinking is important if we want to move forward.

Architecture by its very nature expresses both the known and the unknown, it has the capacity to help us understand how to live well. At its best architecture contains the past, the now and the future. I am heartened to think — and believe that — we have the individuals at Greenwich to achieve the obligations that Neil Gaiman outlines, as the work exhibited by the students attests to this uncompromising spirit.

A big thank you to all.

— Susanne Isa

→ Juno Baumgarten + Gabriel Machado + Miriam Nedelcu + Devis Tako Project 1: Building a 1:1 Fragment

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BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE YEAR 1

Y1 UNIT 1: Theatrical Experience KENZAF CHUNG + STEPHANIE REID

Students: Mariam Ahmed, Mohamad Alhfar Alhbal, Nadia Alim, Mehmet Can Bingol, Helin Demirkol, Stephanie Juilanna Durand, Berfin Gul, Lucas Lai, Saran Muthuvel Kumar, Stefania Ioana Osan, Ayesha Salam, Joshua Samuel Stares, Kacper Wojtania.

With thanks to our critics: Sean Allen, Adam Bell, Vahagn Mkrtchyan, Sharan Purewal, Emma Swarbrick, Emily Yeung.

THE FIRST purpose-built early modern playhouse was built in Shoreditch in 1576, and called The Theatre. Its existence means that the area can lay claim to being the birthplace of modern theatre. The Theatre’s success swiftly led to the construction of another theatre, The Curtain. Shoreditch was a preferable location, away from the more central city locations where theatre was often frowned upon.

Today the essence of theatre is around every corner in Shoreditch, from the procession of subversive and exuberant fashion in Brick Lane, to the experimental theatrical and musical spaces still in use within Shoreditch Town Hall.

The history of theatre in Shoreditch is being rediscovered, with archaeologists from the Museum of London recently uncovering well preserved remains of The Theatre during excavation work for the construction of a modern theatre. The timbers of the same building were dismantled in the 16th century, carried across the river Thames, and used in the construction of The Globe.

Unit 1 took an open and creative approach to exploring a range of architectural proposals that drew on the theme of theatre and Shoreditch’s past theatrical history.

Students designed a theatrical experience in Shoreditch that reflected an everyday activity in the locality. A storytelling plot was employed by each student as the starting point to drive their narrative, choosing from examples such as rebirth, rags to riches,overcoming the monster, voyage and return.

As each project evolved, the chosen plot helped to define the brief and programme for each proposal.

Selected sites in Shoreditch were chosen, carefully surveyed and interpreted as the stage for a proposal. Students documented and mapped specific site conditions, such as different speeds of movement across a site, or historical use and associated modern day traces.

Every story needs a protagonist, and students used a specific actor to evolve a building programme for their architectural proposal. Precedent studies of theatrical buildings and artistic works with a theatrical flare informed an architectural approach to the explorations.

Proposals were guided by observations of theatrical experience, such as the relationship between the viewer/viewed, the connection between actor/audience, the role of the stage, and the investigation of a theatrical moment. Movement necessarily became a key area for analysis, for example the reveal of an anticipated view, or the use of architecture to present a previously hidden process. At key moments of theatrical resonance, specific of qualities of material and structure have been utilised to express magic and illusion.

→ Lucas Lai Cowhide Theatre

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1 Mehmet Can Bingol The Pipe Brewery 2 + 3 Lucas Lai Cowhide Theatre 4 Berfin Gul The Upholstery Workshop 5 Joshua Samuel Stares Bi-cyclical Repair Workshop

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6 – 8 Joshua Samuel Stares Bi-cyclical Repair Workshop 9 Berfin Gul The Upholstery Workshop 10 Mehmet Can Bingol The Pipe Brewery

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BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE YEAR 1

Y1 UNIT 2: Transaction LOUIS SULLIVAN + IRIS ARGYROPOULOU

Students: Juno Baumgarten, Elisa Cera, Thomas Cheng, Hanna Gharres, Hasnain Iftikar, Mihai-Bogdan Ille, Muskan Khan, JohnPaul Matthews, Christel Pretorius, Anthony Toapanta Caiza, Hanna Valani Kloss, Dominic Youpa-Ryan.

With thanks to our critics: Alex Arestis, Naomi Gibson, Anastasia Glover, David Hawkins, Vasilis Ilchuk, Alastair King, Yi Lu, Timmy Yoon.

A TRANSACTION requires interaction. It implies a movement. A difference in conditions, and a passage of material. A dwelling for a transaction — a place of interaction — a moment of destination — a node in a journey.

The site for our projects was Gabriel’s Pier, along the Southbank of the River Thames, an area long associated with transaction; whether through trade along the River Thames or entertainment along the banks of the river. Our buildings addressed both the temporary and the permanent, and had ephemeral and/or transitory natures, changing over time, specific to and identifiable as the environment for the students programme. A specific and individual response, we aimed to make each project as ambitious as the student.

We explored the importance of context, how a building reacts to its surroundings, how it is specialised for its place and function. We designed responsive buildings, moments of retreat and shielding, actions of opening and embracing. We pondered and drew conflicts of spatial or atmospheric arrangement, and described what occurs when someone or something from within the context is brought to the site. We interrogated ideas of time, moments in time, how we can develop methods of recording the passage of time. We explored the personality, investigated what it is to occupy a space, and how those spaces are intended to make the occupier feel.

For everything a reason, we designed bespoke instruments and objects within our buildings specific to the need of the transaction.

→ Juno Baumgarten Ink Haven

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4 1 + 4 Juno Baumgarten Ink Haven 2 Thomas Cheng A Third Life Journey 3 Christel Pretorius Museum of Uncovered Dirt 5 Mihai-Bogdan Ille Southbank Salad Market 6 Hanna Gharres Building for a Heliophile

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BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE YEAR 1

Y1 UNIT 3: House for a Superstar ERIC WONG + EVELINA VATZEVA

Students: Zubaer Ahmed, Leila Jade Berama, Silan Esen, Bethany Evans, Mimi Scarletta Franklin, Alessandro Islam, Bianca Mihaela, Zi Hao Mo, Abel Mingana Ndombasi, Ana Barbara Quiroga Villar, Jagraj Rai, Shivaree Sookhoo, Anosha Tarar Parveen, Alexander Tesfalem.

With thanks to our critics: Marcin Chmura, Steven McCloy, Emily Yeung.

David Hockney (Artist), Karl Lagerfield (Fashion Designer and Photographer), Ada Lovelace (Mathematician and Inventor), Rene Magritte (Artist), Alexander McQueen (Fashion Designer), Steven Spielberg (Filmmaker), James Watt (Inventor), Prince Charles (Royalty and Environmental Activist), Anna Wintour (Fashion Journalist), and Stevie Wonder (Musician).

'HOUSE for a Superstar’ is a title borrowed from an architecture competition held in 1975. The competition was judged by Arata Isozaki — Ron Herron, Peter Cook and Tom Heneghen were amongst some of the many participants, with entries including a stage-set palace for the Queen and the perceived private house for rock singersongwriter Rod Steward. We often view these public figures from a tourist point of view, whilst only speculating on what their private lives might be.

“Although there is a public face that is presented… once the guy or woman enters the house, there is a certain individuality that begins to occur, the guy who collects newspapers and fills his house with newspapers… there is a lifestyle that is not reflected by the public face.” — Ron Herron Unit 3’s brief was to develop and design a re-imagined house for a superstar, speculating on aspects of work, live and play and addressing both public (openly expressed, front stage) and private (domestic, backstage) characteristics.

The ‘superstar’ provided a basis and a springboard to design a multi-functional building with diverse spatial requirements and opportunities from their extracted public competency, craft or activity.

The list of superstars included: Margaret Atwood (Poet, Novelist and Activist), John Cage (Musician), Roald Dahl (Author), Amelia Earhart (Aviation Pioneer and Author), Anthony Gormley (Sculptor), Jakob and Willhelm Grimm (Author), → Alessandro Islam The Grimm’s House

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1 Zi Hao Mo The Paper Factory 2 Bethany Evans The Pop-up House 3 Silan Esen The Paint Works

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BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE YEAR 1

Y1 UNIT 4: Sui Generis JEN WAN + JOANNE CHEN

Students: Anisa Butt, George Capstick, Ismail Cetin, Collin Churchill, Lamar Hamilton, Fahim Hossain, Antonina Kharitonova, Mook Namida Narathasajan, Punom Nath, Rebecca Proctor, Zainab Rahman, Alina Sili, Magda Szeparowicz, Karolina Szymanik.

Special thanks to our guest critics: Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami, Sam Harvey, Agata Murasko, Rebecca Nixon, James Smith.

WITH THE theme of ‘tourism’ as a departure point, Unit 4 investigated ideas of transcendental and authentic visitor experience, manifested through site specific interventions. The unit engaged in the notion of place making and the transformative power of architecture in shaping practices of everyday life, as well as the socio-cultural topography of an urban space. Our testing grounds this year were four sites in the backdrop of City Airport, Thames Barrier Park and Silver Town. The area is one of London’s oldest industrialised districts, once dominated by factories such as sugar refiners, rubber producers and animal rendering plants. We looked beyond the visible to uncover the lost chapters of history, stories and myth; rediscovering and critically reviving/reinventing the identity of the place. The projects started with each student playing the role of an allocated character who first arrives at the City Airport, in the manner of a dérive. The students designed and made maquettes for a bespoke portmanteau for their character. It was a temporary, inhabitable fragment, a pop-up structure or act as an extension to the body. These early studies, concept models and site research became central to the later speculative proposals, requirements of which were to include elements of festivity, of social interaction and collectivity, and to provide a ‘stage set’ for new modes of interaction between people and their environment. The propositions expressed the experience of journey and notion of transition with the passage of the seasons and the flow of time.

→ Mook Namida Narathasajan Total Theatre by Thames Barrier Park

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4 1 Rebecca Proctor Upcycling Fabric Workshop 2 Lamar Hamilton Beef Wellington Themed Restaurant 3 George Capstick Studio and Gardens of Piet Oudolf 4 Collin Churchill Tate Institute Silvertown 5 + 6 Magda Szeparowicz Reclaimed Glass Artisan

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Y1 UNIT 5: Use, Break, Adapt, Repeat — A Souvenir from Abbey Mills BALVEER MANKIA + MARTYNA MARCINIAK

Students: Ruth Akinfe, Bogna Bucko, Ana-Maria Cirlan, Emily Dowding, Ting Tony Guo, Valeria Hapun, Rayan Khan, Megan Lloyd, Chiara Macdonald, Gabriel Machado, Arin Mustafa, Miriam Nedelcu, Pritam Sarker, Muhammed Omer Sultan, Devis Tako, Midhuna Venukumar.

With thanks to our guest critics: Marcus Andrén, Nick Shackleton.

The Tanner, The Toolmaker, The Jeweller, The Tailor or The Printer. Students were asked to design a building that served as a home, workshop and retail space suitable for the specific requirements of their artisan’s body, personality and craft.

Students researched their artisan’s unique manufacturing process in detail, exploring themes of upcycling and adhocism to inform their architecture, as well as considering the sustainable re-use of any by-products formed during the crafting process. Students investigated how the design logic applied to the process of making the souvenir could be translated into the structural and material language of the architecture and therefore provide a reading of the craft.

WITH PHOTOGENIC appeal dictating the popularity of fast-tourism destinations, the photograph itself becomes the ultimate souvenir — not only a recording of the place but often a stand-in for the experience. The Unit 5 brief attempts to subvert the habits of fast tourism by re-defining and ‘degrowing’ the souvenir itself through a series of designed processes of upcycling craft works. The brief questions how the presence and performance of a unique souvenir-upcycling process within the day-to-day life of the local community could dictate a new architectural intervention and help to generate a sustainable tourist economy.

Projects were sited at Merton Abbey Mills, along the banks of the River Wandle where, in the 18th Century several specialist manufacturing industries flourished including calico-printing, flour-milling, copper and iron-working, brazil wood and snuffmilling, and leather-working. Once home to William Morris’ Morris & Co textile design and printing company, as well as the silk printing works of the famous Regent Street store Liberty’s, Merton Abbey soon became renowned as the major centre for textile craft in England. In 1989, after being derelict for almost 20 years, the site was re-imagined and restored as a local tourist destination with a visitor centre, craft markets and a rare working water-wheel.

Each student project was centred around an individual artisan relocating to Merton Abbey Mills; → Gabriel Machado Tracks House

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1 – 3 Gabriel Machado Tracks House 4 + 5 Ana Maria Cirlan Tree Surgery

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6 Emily Dowding Kimoga 7 Miriam Nedelcu Origami House 8 Emily Dowding Kimoga 9 Megan Lloyd Feuille Morte

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Y1 UNIT 6: Festival Now! KA MAN LEUNG + ANJA KEMPA

Students: Arish Ahmad, Levi Birde, Cicely Bryant, Wiktoria Cebulak de Matos, Halil Duzgun, Claudia Gaspar, Ziggy Johannsen, Kayhan Kaya, Ki Ying (Demi) Lai, Divora Mahari, Joseph McMorrow, Aksa Mudassir, Shirin Naveed, Nashwa Stitou Zerouali Atbar, Seher Tokman.

With thanks to our critics: Gladys Ching, Mathew Ip, Amy Kempa, Alex Sutton.

IN THE summer of 1951, six years after the devastation of WW2, the Festival of Britain attracted over 8million visitors across the country.

One century on from the Great Exhibition of 1851, it was intended as a ‘tonic for the nation’, to showcase and celebrate the achievements of British science, technology, industrial design, as well as art and architecture on a national scale. The Festival was recognised as a ‘triumphant success’ and became the ‘beacon for change’ to raise the spirits of the country, and to reshape British arts, crafts and design for a generation.

In the light of a Post-Brexit Britain, Unit 6 explored the notion of ‘Festival’ by revisiting events such as The Great Exhibition 1851, Festival of Britain 1951, Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, Peter Cook’s Instant City, Osaka expo 1970, Glastonbury, Burning Man...etc. to investigate their implications of legacy, sustainability, economic, spatial, and social aspect of urban life. Each was set to be the milestone of an era, with an optimistic and prosperous vision of the future. The unit explored Festivals as ‘testing grounds’ for future projects; an opportunity to discover, redefine and re-invent.

The proposed festivals focussed their research in the once-abandoned area of Poplar. This East London district affords a prime location that has long established it as a hub for residential communities and encouraged the development and rethinking of housing design from the redevelopment of the Landsbury estate for the Live Architecture Exhibition of Festival of Britain, to the iconic brutalism of Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower and The Robin Hood Gardens by Alison and Peter Smithson. With the recent demolition of Robin Hood Gardens and the refurbishment and privatisation of

Balfron Tower’s affordable housing, Poplar once again finds itself at a point of reinvention. The unit’s ‘Festivals’ inhabit places that are disused and overlooked, bringing vital energy to the communities of Poplar.

Through the theme of festival Unit Six focussed on lifecycle, performance, narrative and the unseen/absurd qualities through the hybrid forms of architecture. The resulting projects are celebratory and ad-hoc, temporal spaces for living and working under the students own specific subject of interest.

→ Wiktoria Cebulak de Matos House of Kintsugi: Celebrating the Broken

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1 Kayhan Kaya Jackstar Candy Shop 2 Halil Duzgun Immersive Cinema: 007 3 Nashwa Stitou Zerouali Atbar Community Natural Dye House 4 Shirin Naveed Poplar Community Garden and Kitchen: A Parasitic Extension to Chrisp Street Market 5 Ziggy Johannsen Eco-Ink: Graffiti Studio/Gallery

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BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE YEARS 2 + 3

UNIT 1: Plus Minus — Living in Crisis BENNI ALLAN + KIERAN HAWKINS

Year 3: Claudia Bode, Sarah Aisling Brooke, Pedro Jose Herrera-Gomez, Henna Kuolimo, Ana Rose Layosa Delmo, Tung Li, Iina Neittamo, Matilde Perticone, Tamanna Tahera.

Year 2: Zeki Emin, Theodoor Groothuizen-Kirk, Finley Grover, Namrata Harshad, Julie Anne Hogdon, Gustav Lindgren Rygren, Leia Monger, Preslava Pachemanova, Nikisha Patel.

Thanks: Alex Bank, Sam Casswell, Mike Critchley, Iris Hilton, David Warren.

UNIT 1 is focussed on the emotional potential of material construction and architectonic space. We are interested in buildings that derive their power from essential characteristics of human habitation and provide strong frameworks for social community together with private refuge.

Prioritising knowledge of mass, void, material character and proportion, we propose buildings that respond to their context and enclose engaging interiors with particular atmospheres. We think about how things will be made as we design them.

We learn from architectural history and precedent studies. The inspiration from this research becomes a practical tool for our own design work. Drawing and model-making are ways of thinking that are particularly useful in both the study of precedents and the making of iterative design proposals. Students develop their own design languages through thoughtful drawings and models.

This year we continued our study of buildings that can accommodate programmes of dwelling, work and civic life. These buildings constitute the vast majority of our cities and form the structure of how we live together in society.

We embedded environmental strategies in our proposals with clear, long-term, architectural thinking. How could we address the heightening climate crisis while making buildings that offer

strong contributions to the common ground of the city? What is an appropriate way for us to respond as architects to the ecological and political crisis that we are now living in?

The projects all engaged with the question of how we can transform, adapt or extend our building stock to provide ambitious new forms of housing and public space that enrich our social and ecological systems.

First, reusing the building stock of London, we added new extensions to existing buildings. The initial step was to explore the formal, material and immaterial qualities of the given site. We looked carefully at the surrounding environment to think about what can be taken away while still retaining the essential character of the building (Minus).

Alongside this we developed shared criteria for assessing the unit’s work by researching the material and spatial qualities of selected building precedents, harvesting ideas to help form new proposals (Plus).

The major design investigation was an ambitious new urban building. Environmental strategies of re-use and material intelligence were embedded in the proposals from the start of the design process.

Year 3 students designed a building that combined medium-scale housing provision with a public function to serve the immediate context. Year 2 students designed a building that combined places to live with places to work.

For our field trip we went to Zurich. We explored fantastic buildings and observed how Swiss civic space varies from what we find in the UK.

→ Sarah Aisling Brooke Hoxton Reserve Collection

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1 Henna Kuolimo New Frank’s Courtyard 2 Ana Rose Layosa Delmo Orsman Road Wet Trades Workshop 3 Tung Li Canal Boat Workshop and Housing 4 Matilde Perticone Communal Living and Gallery

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1 Finley Grover Orsman’s Basin 2 Theodoor Groothuizen-Kirk Tuscany Wharf Furniture Factory 3 + 4 Gustav Lindgren Rygren Terrazzo Workshop

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5 Claudia Bode Artists’ Housing 6 Iina Neittamo Syrian Social Housing 7 Namrata Harshad Fern Factory and Herbal Sweet Store 8 Zeki Emin Plaster Restoration Workshop

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1 Tamanna Tahera Mass Timber House 2 Julie Anne Hogdon Kingsland Bridge Nursery 3 Nikisha Patel Plant Space 4 Preslava Pachemanova The Stone Restaurant 5 Leia Monger Orsman Road Cookery School 6 Pedro Jose Herrera-Gomez Hoxton Retirement Estate and Workshop

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BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE YEARS 2 + 3

UNIT 2: Shop Shop — Value, Exchange and Worth SEÁN MCALISTER + PRAVIN GHOSH

Year 3: Eloise Blackshaw, Jamal Blair, Diana-Maria Buta, Yasmina Elshlmani, Nawres Ghachem, Nika Hodkevica, MariaAlexandra Mățăoanu, Alicja Prończuk, Belgin Sahan.

Year 2: Nicole Alves Santos, Miles Barton-Black, Gabriela Czaplińska, Joel Hilaquita Maquera, Caterina Lum, Gargee Naik, Thomas Parry, Colette Roberts Camina, Dardan Zenuni.

With thanks to: Our guest critics Benni Allan, Mark Hatter, Kieran Hawkins, Brian Murphy, Hannes Voss and past student guests Ana Rose Delmo, Mara Fletcher, Andrius Maguskin.

And you thought you were safe? Your values well founded? Think again. The inherited boundary separating WHAT YOU THINK IS WORTH A DAMN and WHAT THEY THINK IS WORTH A DAMN is decaying, pigeon-holed, catalogued, fed-back, and is being manipulated and weaponised. What is our time worth? What is the price of sweat and is it cheaper than the price of tears? We delved into architectures where objects, spaces, societies, words, values, trust, ideas and money were traded.

Kiosk [Project 1]

Buy! Value! Sell! Our shopping spree began with a trip to the local ‘Junk Shop’ + ‘Poundland’, where students were asked to buy an item for under a tenner. Following a process of re-evaluation, re-interpretation and re-fashioning, a kiosk was designed to re-house these re-defined items.

Hackney Wick/Barter Wic Exchange Village [Project 2]

“All money is a matter of belief.” — Adam Smith “Less is more.” — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe WHAT IS architecture worth? What would you trade for it? Where are our values? What do they look like? Point to them! Why is everyone telling us to do this or that, what we should or shouldn’t design, what makes people happy or sad, what works, what doesn’t? Well ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the value milieu!

Unit 2 went to the quintessential, value-setting typology, the Shop Shop. This year we explored what makes us who we are, what we desire, and what is worth it. We considered an audacious architecture where things, products, ideas, people (or nothing) are exchanged, sold and remade. We explored the world of the Hostel, the News Room, the Drug Deal, the Shop Counter, the Factory, the Football Stand, the Parliament Bench, the Confession Box, the Crematorium, the Temple, the Arms Deal, the Traffic Light, the Academy, the Repair Shop and much more… places and spaces where ideas and commodities are given worth, value and/or exchanged.

Hackney Wick was our site this year. It was considered a new place of exchange between: River & bank/public & private/old & new/buying & selling/ industry & society/inflation & deflation/foreign & sovereign/actual & virtual. Students developed proposals based on the programme of the shop/the academy/the museum, or all three through investigative research, site exploration, experimentation, speculative thought and sheer grit. Expressed through multiple modes of representation… value + worth was re-established.

The New Hackney ‘Barter’ Wic was created.

→ Thomas Parry The Hull of Hackney

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1 Dardan Zenuni Lights, Camera, Carriage!

2 + 3 Caterina Lum Junkshop Exchange 4 Alicja Prończuk Junkshop Exchange

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5 Thomas Parry Junkshop Exchange 6 Joel Hilaquita Maquera Junkshop Exchange 7 Colette Roberts Camina Mudlarker’s Lodge 8 Gabriela Czaplińska Pigment Palace 5

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1 Yasmina Elshlmani The Narrow-Boaters Community Hub 2 Dardan Zenuni Lights, Camera, Carriage!

3 Belgin Sahan Cyclists’ Tea House 4 Gabriela Czaplińska Pigment Palace

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1 + 2 Maria-Alexandra Mățăoanu Richard Serra’s Legacy Workshop → Thomas Parry The Hull of Hackney

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BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE YEARS 2 + 3

UNIT 3: Alchemy

GEORGE KING + IRENE ASTRAIN + YEENA YOON

Year 3: Dominika Banelyte, Brighitte Gonzales, Mustafa Hussein, Anna Jensen, Ridhwan Khan, Julia Lauri de Funes, Charlie Read, Rozani Rozali, Jessica E. Sharp.

Year 2: Elias Baiioud, Jekabs Barzdins, Nahim Islam, Tida Jabi, Harris Khan, Deep S. Matharu, Naomi Powell, Jennifer Weber.

With thanks to: Alex Bilton, Jonathan Holt, Emily Yeung.

THIS YEAR Unit 3 continued its fascination with the intersection of craft and technology, the real and the virtual, and the digital and the analogue by exploring the concept of alchemy.

Alchemy is the ancient process of turning base materials into precious objects. Early forms of alchemy evolved through the necessity of trade and art, leading to key advancements in numerous manufacturing processes including metal work, glass, soaps and dyes. For early alchemists the transformations taking place in front of their eyes were explained through magic with potions and incantations used to perfect their skill.

In the modern era Arthur C. Clarke’s first law tells us that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This year our unit took inspiration from the early alchemists to discover what it means to be a modern day alchemist. We developed our own concept of magic informed by our understanding of technology, physics, geometry and chemistry to discover how the practice of alchemy can play a role in a contemporary design process.

We began our projects working at the elemental scale and took inspiration from the rich history of alchemy. Beginning with the ancient Greek belief in the four basic elements of fire, earth, water and air (each with a corresponding geometric shape) we traced the history of alchemy through to contemporary examples such as Lebbeus Woods’ Cities of Air, Water, Fire and Earth.

Using experimentation, exploration and investigation, we then started developing our own theory of alchemy that allowed us to take a base material and transform it from something ordinary

into something extraordinary. Inspired by Louis Kahn, who believed materials had their own destiny, we mixed elements together, explored new geometries and let the material dictate the direction of travel, leading us to surprising and unexpected forms and functions. Our alchemic process simultaneously took place at an architectural scale in order to elevate the functions of the proposals.

Inspired by a visit to Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s Crossness Pumping Station we explored how the concept of alchemy could be used to transform a base, everyday or utilitarian function or program into something exceptional by revealing its secrets and celebrating its processes.

Project 1 was located at Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s Crossness Pumping Station. Each student chose an ancient element (air, water, fire or earth) as their starting point. Inspired by Louis Kahn’s concept of served and servant spaces students chose a ‘servant’ space (for example a staircase, ventilation system, liftshafts) and were asked how this space might change through alchemy. Processes of hidden spaces were revealed and utility was celebrated.

Physical and structural possibilities were explored in this new context.

Students then developed a forum of exchange and trade: for a guild of modern day alchemists to gather and mix their ideas, materials and processes.

The focus was on creating architectural alchemy by revealing its secrets, celebrating its processes and using the magic of science and technology to elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary. Students were also asked to explore how the concept could address the need for sustainability. How can waste materials or resources from the building be transformed into something valuable and precious?

Project 2 was based in Clerkenwell, a location known historically for its connection to the Hatton Garden jewellery industry but now known as a base for architecture and design firms, as well as for artisan suppliers to the design industries such as furniture, tiles, fabrics as well as bookbinders and art suppliers.

→ Jekabs Barzdins Headquarters for Arctic Disease Research

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4 1 Deep S. Matharu Copper Recycling Factory and Bespoke Jewellery Studio 2 Elias Baiioud Hat and Feather Theatre 3 Jennifer Weber Cyclist Community and Wellness Centre 4 Naomi Powell The Mycelium Project

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5 – 8 Rozani Razali Sleep Hotel

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1 – 4 Jessica E. Sharp Urban Crematorium and Diamand Lab

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5 – 8 Julia Lauri de Funes Sweet Taste and View

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↑ Anna Jensen Learning Through Storytelling: An EFL School for Adults

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↑ Charlie Read The Argonaut Centre for Gold

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BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE YEARS 2 + 3

UNIT 4: Species and Being SUSANNE ISA + NICK ELIAS

Year 3: Daniel Heijink, Will Jones, Joshua Kirkwood, Trendafil Krastanov, Soyun Lim, William Munroe, Andreas Petras, Jack Taylor.

Year 2: Benafsha Gafari, Irene Ilunga, Amendra Madipola, Thulasie Manoharan, Elise Serre-Simpson.

We would like to thank friends of the unit and our critics : Grimshaw Architects, Haptic Architects, Nordic Office of Architecture, Mike Aling, Will Armstrong, Ruben Felix Everett, Lauren Fresle, Jorrin ten Have, Thomas Hillier, Anne Hultzsch, Anja Kempa, Jens Kongstad, Ash Patel, Caroline Rabourdin, Joe Ridgale, Martin Sagar, Jonathan Walker, Rain Wu.

“What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you?” — Gregory Bateson STUDENTS WERE asked to explore the ‘Umwelt’ and to consider our, and others, relationship to the environment as a setting and place of meaning shared, yet separate for an architecture. Projects were sited in the hinterlands as well as in the metropolis. Research was conducted as an anthology. Ideas were evolved from the duality of thinking and feeling, a honing of the senses into a making. The projects are a testament to the individual’s responses to these questions.

The fieldtrip was to Rome, Italy.

Grazie mille.

→ Jack Taylor Re-flooding the Broads

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1 Daniel Heijink Tranquil Reflections 2 Jack Taylor Re-flooding the Broads 3 Will Jones Lure Lagoon 4 Irene Ilunga Memorial for the Lost Language 5 Trendafil Krastanov Pollution Exposition

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6 Elise Serre-Simpson Le Pain Perdu (‘The Lost Bread’) 7 Irene Ilunga Memorial for the Lost Language 8 Thulasie Manoharan Salt to Sweet 9 Soyun Lim Off-to-new-grid

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1 Thulasie Manoharan Salt to Sweet 2 Soyun Lim Off-to-new-grid 3 Joshua Kirkwood Goole’s Green Archipelago 4 Will Jones Lure Lagoon 1

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5 Soyun Lim Off-to-new-grid 6 Joshua Kirkwood Goole’s Green Archipelago 7 Will Jones Lure Lagoon 8 William Munroe The Sloth House 5

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1 + 2 Amendra Madipola The Hen of Mudchute 3 William Munroe The Sloth House

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BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE YEARS 2 + 3

UNIT 7: Inside Out YORGOS LOIZOS + NED SCOTT

Year 3: Fahdah Albusaily, Mara Fetche, Vasil Georgiev, Sam Jones, Marcello Maioli, Hessam Ranjbar, Saman Sabz’abadian, Raeesah Shah, Florence Wright.

Year 2: Saif Abbas, Simone Bezzi, Victoria Collins, Austeja Grabauskaite, Pooja Hari, Isabella Hicks, Mariah Jover, Mindaugas Kairys, Eleanor Worthington.

Thanks to: Nick Elias, Kevin Green, Simon Herron, Thomas Hillier, Larissa Johnston, Aneliya Kavrakova, Seán McAlister, Brian Murphy, Jonathan Walker, Jen Wan, Alexander Wilford, Simon Withers, Yeena Yoon.

CONVENTIONAL architectural practice is predominantly concerned with how buildings look from the outside and how they relate to the buildings around them. This ‘outside first’ approach to design begins by establishing a set of external rules and constraints which the building must obey; your window sills must match the height, materiality and projection of the window sills to the adjacent buildings. Your gutters must be half round and made from cast iron. Your building must be clad in bricks that are pre-selected in a local design guide.

Planning authorities are the guardians of the ‘outside first’ approach to design, demanding drawn plans and elevations littered with the reassuring annotation; “to match existing”.

As a result of following an ‘outside first’ approach, what happens inside often becomes a secondary consideration. The arrangement and character of the internal spaces is limited by the binding decisions that have already made on the outside. A window awkwardly appears in the corner of a room and looks straight into a blank wall. Your Louis XV settee won’t fit through the front door. You have to remove a couple of tiers from your chandelier so it fits in the dining room.

This year, we resisted the ‘outside first’ approach and instead developed experimental design methods that explored buildings from the inside out.

To do this we began with a close observation of the identity and requirements of the end users of the

building. Having first defined the unique character and materiality of the objects and spaces within the building, we then zoomed out to imagine the outside of the building as a manifestation of the individual identities and processes contained within it.

The students began the year by defining the contents, character and materiality of one of the key internal spaces contained within their building.

To inform this process, each student began by choosing a famous painting of an interesting internal space that they analysed, paying particular attention to furnishings, ornaments and lighting.

This analysis informed the production of a prototype - a free-standing physical model that deconstructed, reinterpreted and spatialised the constituent parts of their chosen painting. The first project informed students' research methods, design drivers and programme for the rest of the year as they slowly moved through the scales from the intimate world of objects to a complex building project.

Having developed an interesting prototype for an intimate internal space, the students then transferred their attention to Fish Island, Hackney, which was the site for this year’s building projects.

They explored the site in consideration of their established design drivers and found a suitable home for their prototype. The students slowly expanded their prototype and used iterative and evolutionary design methods to slowly develop a complex building project that retained the delicate qualities of their initial investigations.

→ Mara Fetche Interlocking Studios, Fish Island

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1 Raeesah Shah The Marionette Nursery 2 Sam Jones Infosphere Isolation 3 Vasil Georgiev A House for Roger Deakins 4 Mariah Jover The Lock Keeper’s Cottage 5 Austeja Grabauskaite A Studio for Three Artists, Fish Island

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6 Hessam Ranjbar A Studio for Hiroshi Sugimoto 7 Fahdah Albusaily Recycled Housing Prototype, Fish Island 8 Isabella Hicks Fish Island Laundrette 9 Eleanor Worthington Fabric Cast Concrete Hemp Farm and Textile Production Facility

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1 Victoria Collins A House for Mr. Hublot 2 Saman Sabz’abadian The Old Waterfront Waste Recycling Facility and Jewellery Shop 3 Florence Wright The Fish Island Mobile Studio: A Kit of Parts for the Nomadic Painter

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1 + 2 Marcello Maioli The Fish Island Colossus: Constructing Monumentality in the 21st Century 3 Mara Fetche Interlocking Studios, Fish Island

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BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE YEARS 2 + 3

UNIT 8: Home Truths JEN WAN + MARK HATTER

Year 3: Victoria Hajduczenia, Emilia Kepista, Maria-Antonia Ligeti, Alexandra Nell, Fabricio Aguilar Rojas, Furkan Tarhan, Tia-Angelie Vijh.

Year 2: Christopher Canada, Luke Fiorini, Ismail Khalil, Akeem Murdock, Cansu Onal, Sandra Pielech, Dorna Safari, Panagiotis Agis Valsamis, Samuel Wright.

Thanks to: Irene Astrain, Kieran Hawkins, Tom Hillier, George King, Sean McAlister, Ned Scott, Fardokht Sharifi-Yazdi, Jonathan Walker.

THE 20TH CENTURY Japanese architect and scholar Kon Wajiro accumulated a lifetime’s work of documenting day to day lives of ordinary citizens in rural Japan, later focusing on the urban context of Tokyo; of people going about their seemingly mundane routine, both in their community and beyond. Through observations in the form of sketches, photography and surveys, and other anthropological methods of collecting data, Wajiro and his dedicated team of artists and ethnographers recorded visual memories, the wear and tear of household objects, commodities, furniture, hairstyles, family units, habitual sleeping postures, clothing items, souvenirs etc. etc.

This year, unit 8 investigated the architecture of domesticity and explored its qualities, posing the question ‘what does ‘home’ mean to you, and how is it evoked?’ In a similar vein to Wajiro’s work with its meticulous recording of everyday moments, we began by mapping our observations of the ordinary. We searched for the fantastical in the prosaic, valuing ‘lived’ space as opposed to pristine uninhabited propositions. We searched for clues in the accidental, the ageing, the fleeting and the minute.

Following a series of scripted investigations, students were asked to develop a house prototype; the Show Home. The development of such a proposal requires the careful balancing of many moving parts: the clients’ desires, a functional programme, an aesthetic position, and the Architects’ ego. Alongside current residential

precedents, we looked at the iconic and experimental ‘Case Study Houses’ commissioned

by Art & Architecture Magazine in 1945–66. We asked students to consider the manifesto of their proposal, what ideas it could embody and communicate beyond its four (four?) walls? The house programme was open to interpretation or misinterpretation. It could be conventional, radical, whimsical or fantastical. The domestic can be thoughtful and modest, but also bombastic and grandiose.

This year we continued to take cues from existing disciplines, to use film, photography and the visual arts to discover different ways of seeing and representing space. We value the non-verbal narrative, and the emotional choreography of an experiential architecture.

Both year 2 and 3 developed the show home from an initial spatial intervention and design consisting of a ‘fixture’ and a ‘fitting’. Y3 had the further option to expand their proposition into ‘The Estate’, a typology that contains both Robin Hood Gardens and Blenheim Palace.

→ Tia-Angelie Vijh Creature Comforts

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1 Furkan Tarhan House for a Consulate 2 + 3 Luke Fiorini Fishing on the Water 4 Ismail Khalil Valve Control House 5 Tia-Angelie Vijh House and Micro-Tannery/ Leather Workshop 6 Sandra Pielech Highham Hill Allotment Community Restaurant

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1 Cansu Onal House of Memories 2 Luke Fiorini Fishing on the Water 3 Fabricio Aguilar Rojas Ravenswood Industrial Estate Laundrette House 4 Akeem Murdock House of Site Warden 5 Samuel Wright Home Workshop and Distillery 6 Alexandra Nell Dirigible Cephalopod Community Hub

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↑ Maria-Antonia Ligeti Institute for Swifts

→ Emilia Kepista Sunset Bingo/Sunrise Prize

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TECHNOLOGY KIERAN HAWKINS (Y3) + JONATHAN WALKER (Y2) + SHAUN MURRAY (Y1)

Thanks to: Jonathan Allwood (Barr Gazetas), Mel Allwood (Arup), Adele Brooks (University of Greenwich), Stefan Busher (Grid Architects), Larissa Johnston (Larissa Johnston Architects), Tom Jordan (Barr Gazetas), Jennifer Juritz (David Morley Architects), Andrew Lavelle (Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands), Tom Noonan (Hawkins\Brown), Luca Rendina (Hugh Broughton Architects), Hugh Strange (Hugh Strange Architects), David Warren (INGealtoir Structural Engineers), Matt Wilkinson (AL_A).

IN BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE we have a strong pedagogic ambition for the teaching of architectural technology. Behind the delivery of the modules there is a clear strategy of how the students’ knowledge of technology should evolve through their architectural education. We aim to install an ambitious attitude to technology with an eye on innovation and invention, whilst providing a solid grounding for students in the principles of environmental, material and structural design. We equip students with the relevant research methods and a critical approach to the design and making of buildings within an ever-changing trajectory of technologies. Underpinning all of the teaching of the knowledge and principles of architectural technology within the programme is an ethos of rigour, experimentation and play. Architectural design is a complex process and requires a wide range of knowledge, experience and collaboration in order to develop an initial idea or concept into a reality. By definition, architectural students at undergraduate level are just starting this process and they are encouraged to grapple with a myriad of concepts and ideas that are largely alien to their previous experience. In essence, this is a process of working in abstraction, which is a huge challenge, considering the ‘real’ world where architects typically cement their understanding of building technology in an office environment. A key aim is to make students aware of the complexities and ranges of technologies and building sciences required to produce good buildings, whilst teaching them the relevant methods and modes of how to implement technology into their designs and how best to communicate these ideas. Within the teaching of technology lies a profound learning tension between understanding and spectating.

In Year 1, students undertake an environmental audit of a selected building and critically analyze environmental and structural strategies. In term 2 students apply their understanding of structural and environmental research to their projects.

Year 2 students are taught about the architectural profession, the role of the design team and the legislation context in which architects work in term 1. In the 2nd term students carry out a comprehensive technical study of a design project fragment.

Ahead of undertaking their Technical Dissertation, Year 3 students attend a series of technology lectures given by invited speakers acknowledged as experts in their field. The Dissertation is tutored within the design units and aims to equip students with the research skills, aptitude and critical ability to assess the key technical aspects of their final design project. Alongside Dissertation tutorials, the programme is taught through a series of seminars, cross-unit reviews and technical workshops with external consultants.

→ Florence Wright Unit 7, Year 3

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1 Ana Rose Layosa Delmo Unit 1, Year 3 2 Saman Sabz’abadian Unit 7, Year 3 3 Julia Lauri de Funes Unit 3, Year 3 4 Victoria Collins Unit 7, Year 2

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↓ Luke Fiorini Unit 8, Year 2 → Marcello Maioli Unit 7, Year 3

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BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE

HISTORY + THEORY CAROLINE RABOURDIN + SIMON WITHERS

TEACHING IN history and theory of architecture is conceived as a complete journey over three years through the ideas, politics, art, buildings and landscapes of human civilisation. This journey brings students through a process of gaining skills and knowledge in research and writing, whilst building knowledge and context.

Cultural Contexts of Architecture The first term of Year 1 introduces students to London, Greenwich and the broad range of research undertaken by Greenwich staff. Site visits and workshops balance the content between research, lectures and first-hand experiences of architecture and landscape. The module examines the cultural contexts of the built environment and investigates the relationships between design and society, introducing the premise that architectural ideas are culturally constructed, allied to prevailing ideologies and value systems. It provides a general background for current issues in the built environment, from housing and education to infrastructure and incarceration.

History of Architecture and Landscape 1 + 2 A broader overview of architecture, landscape and art history follows in the second term of Year 1 and the first term of Year 2. Students develop their skills in writing and research, beginning to frame a set of interests that will inform their future studies. The modules address the history of architecture and landscape as the common human quest of designing and constructing a specific relation with nature. They offer a survey of major global architectural traditions and place special emphasis on those that contributed to the rise to modernity.

We provide tools to analyse examples and recognise patterns in design solutions, stressing the social and technological contexts that define architectures and landscapes of the past, while highlighting their relevance today.

that emerged in the 1960’s and continue to form the basis of architectural discourse today. Bringing awareness to the relationship between architecture and other disciplines such as philosophy, art, sociology and anthropology, students are introduced to postmodernist theories, deconstructivism, metabolism, phenomenology and relational ecology. These theories enable students to critically engage with architectural design and articulate clear and informed positions as they reflect on their own design practice.

Undergraduate Dissertation In the Year 3 dissertation, each student develops research interests both as individuals and in small, themed and tightly guided groups with a dedicated supervisor whose interests and research are complementary to the theme. A high level of research quality and critical evaluation is expected, and the students are encouraged to pursue themes that they are passionate about and forge connections with their design work. Many students undertake daring studies that are arresting in terms of their written and visual quality, as well as the connections made between sites, projects, and the cutting edge of architectural theory.

Abstracts from Year 3 dissertations can be found on the following pages.

Year 3 Dissertation Tutors: Miranda Critchley, Andrew Higgott, Felipe Lanuza Rilling, Laura Mark, Simon Withers.

Contemporary Theories of Architecture In the second term of Year 2, students are introduced to a range of architectural theories

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Ana Rose Layosa Delmo The Meaning of the Filipino Home: Overcoming Post-Colonial Mentality The identity of Philippine architecture stems from vernacular architecture with Austronesian roots and developed with the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s. The hybridity between these two cultures brought new building materials and technologies, improving resistance to natural disasters. Despite introducing foreign ideas, its architectural values have remained largely in keeping with its material and ecological origins. With the arrival of Americans who established US territory in the country, Filipinos and Americans, developed a stable relationship that lead to Filipinos ‘idolising' the west. One of the most concerning consequences that developed from this relationship is that Filipino architectural education is suffering from a lack of regional and cultural context. This dissertation aims to investigate the roots of this issue, which lie in political and financial intervention, the international condition of architectural education and what Filipino designers now value. Focusing on the shift of the common floorplan that embodies the identity of a Filipino household, this dissertation explores how Orientalism, as understood by Edward Said, created an impact on how the floorplan is perceived today and how designers, through the values of regionalism, can resist the eradication of the traditional Filipino home.

Yasmina Eishlmani Narratives of Brutalism: The Depiction of Brutalism in Dystopian Film With its radical aesthetic, Brutalist architecture has divided opinion since its emergence. Its history tells a story of rise and fall, of an attempt at change and of “failure” and destruction. For many years, Brutalist buildings are often seen as the setting for dystopian films, depicting run-down societies, oppressed communities and worlds where unsettling and inhumane events unfold. What has contributed to this default of Brutalism becoming the preferred background to dystopia? Has this 'inhumane’ architectural style earned its bad reputation, or has it been the victim of sabotage and stigmatisation? This dissertation attempts to answer these questions by exploring case studies from the dystopian genre and investigating Brutalism’s past in order to examine how its history has fed into its depiction.

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Mara Fetche A Fictional Tokyo: The Portrayal of the Fictional Metropolis in Ghost in the Shell This dissertation explores the visual identities of architectural and urban spaces presented in the anime film Ghost in the Shell by Mamoru Oshii (1995). It interprets Newport City in the film as a vision for a future Tokyo of 2029, a model constructed on the collective, ad-hoc characteristics of the Japanese city, alongside the Hong Kong skyline of 1995 with its dense, chaotic district, Kowloon Walled City, as neo-noir depictions of an imagined dynamic future city. The dissertation presents the spaces of the film as a shared public understanding of a 2029 future city, as expected in 1995. This dissertation argues that the visual representation of this future metropolis is portrayed as a collective outcome of constant, evolutionary motivated changes. It suggests that the films futuristic imaginary is presented by illustrating a city of spontaneous, unplanned, additive design, constructed alongside, or above the slowly-evolving architectural elements of the city’s older spaces. The dissertation unpacks the films spatial layering through its filmic sequences, its production and discusses how notions of the 1995 ‘future city’ emerged in current day Tokyo.

Daniel Heijink An Analysis of the Terms and Ideas of Peter Eisenman’s Rhetorical Architecture, from Cannaregio Town Square to La Villette Peter Eisenman's projects can be seen to operate as a rhetorical device for his theoretical writings on architecture. A rhetorical device is a means of persuading the reader of a meaning that the author is trying to convey. The Cannaregio project and La Villette are two examples of this rhetorical architecture, undertaken within a decade of each other. This dissertation analyses and categorise the main ideas of Eisenman’s work through key aspects of each of these projects and his writings surrounding them. The representation of time and palimpsests, memory and history, absence and presence, as well as rhetoric and experience are explored through graphical analysis of the drawings and models for these projects. The writings by Eisenman carried out in the decade between Cannaregio and La Villette are considered alongside the architectural output of the projects examined.

In addition, critical writings surrounding this period of Eisenman’s work are examined as a means to form a taxonomy of his key concepts. A taxonomy is defined as a scheme for classification, in this instance used to separate Eisenman’s terms for analysis. By creating this graphical and textual taxonomy, this dissertation aims to operate as a tool for architects to understand Eisenman’s particular approach to deconstruction and offer a critique of architecture as a rhetorical device.

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Anna Jensen The Future of the Home This dissertation investigates the architectural, psychological, sociological and poetic aspects of the home. Since the concept of home is an abstract one, it starts by attempting to define home and clarify some of its meanings as a physical structure as well as an idea. Notions of privacy and publicity are considered to be at the core of the way we relate to the home. The dwelling is a microcosmos that reflects our identity as much as our society: it is a reproduction of the outside world. Therefore the dissertation explores what constitutes our external reality, within the context of domestic space. Represented in the home is our relationship with work, family and leisure, our negotiations regarding gender roles, the introduction of new technologies, and our changing perceptions of privacy. In order to illustrate current attitudes, the dissertation looks back to the recent past of the twentieth century to draw comparisons to the issues mentioned, as well as discussing new concepts to have arisen contemporaneously.

Lastly, the dissertation outlines indicators of what the future might hold for the home, given its current trajectory.

Henna Kuolima Are Our New Homes Good Enough?

A Representative Case Study on the Quality of an Average London New Build As we build across London to satisfy the growing demand for more housing, public opinion on moving into a new build is showing notable signs of dissatisfaction. Post-Grenfell, society is traumatised due to the design and construction failures that have cost lives. Now the evidence of poor quality construction is emerging as a broader issue and is problematic, not just for the life quality of occupants, but also for the reputation of the construction and design industries. The use of poor quality materials or neglecting building maintenance may affect the user experience in the home and produce unnecessary repair costs. More importantly, the failure to meet standards can affect the occupant’s comfort, and even safety. It is therefore crucial to revisit building standards in order to address this issue. This dissertation critically analyses the design standards of a new build studio apartment in London.

BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE

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Julia Lauri de Funes Life and Architecture through the Eyes of Iwan Baan Architecture is often a city’s business card.

People will travel to visit architecture, but mostly to photograph it. Architecture and photography together play an essential role in documenting how a society evolves. It serves as a mean to register the 'built world’ and, at the same time, reveal certain truths about society. This dissertation explores the differences between a clean and sterile architecture photograph in contrast with an untidy and habitable one. The primary focus is on Iwan Baan, a contemporary photographer who revolutionized photography with his highly informal style. His work as a documentary photographer offers a new perspective to architectural photography by breaking the tradition of exhibiting architecture as an object rather than an inhabitable structure.

Marcello Maioli Prefabricated Micro-Living: The Future of Affordable Housing in London This dissertation provides an insight into the housing crisis that currently affects London, and the lack of government participation and policies regarding the matter. The way we inhabit space and the economic reality of many is not reflected in the approach that developers have when undertaking residential projects. London is under constant construction: however affordability and house purchases are at an all-time low. Younger demographics are unable to enter the housing market. The government sits idly by as the crisis unfurls. Pocket Living schemes of micro accommodations have become a trending solution for many in an increasingly dense city where land availability and affordable housing is on the decline.

Outdated construction methods and profit driven developers further aggravate the lack of housing.

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Maria-Alexandra Mățăoanu The Lost Voice of Spirituality: Medieval Inscriptions and Architecture This dissertation surveys and studies medieval inscriptions. It questions if these inscriptions are a destructive act, a form of medieval ‘graffiti’.

Through first hand analysis in Anglican cathedrals across the UK, this dissertation embraces the variety of subjects that were inscribed into stone, revealing the secrets behind many medieval walls and columns. This raises the question as to why graffiti has declined in social value from the medieval period to the present? Today, graffiti equates to vandalism, whereas in the medieval period it was perceived as a spiritual manifestation.

Contemporary graffiti and medieval inscriptions are very much connected: the spiritual manifestation that they represent define of the emotions and often the spatial experiences of the inscriber.

Alexandra Nell Alt-Erlaa: ‘The Best Council Estate in the World’ The UK seems to be in a continual housing crisis, ricocheting from one initiative to another. This dissertation asks why Britain does not look to our continental neighbours for potential solutions to large scale state funded housing schemes, where the creation and maintenance of vibrant and sustainable communities are central to the architectural design. The focus in Britain appears to be on providing housing stock rather than building communities. Has the time come to reverse this and use place shaping and community engagement as the prime motivation to leave a legacy for future generations? This dissertation examines Alt-Erlaa in Vienna, where the city started building social housing 100 years ago, around the same time as London. About 7,000 social houses are built in both cities every year, however as this dissertation explores, the approaches to this are very different.

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Saman Sabz’abadian Understanding the Formal and Informal Growth of Venezuela’s Communal Slums According to the UN, at least one third of the global urban population suffers from a lack of proper infrastructure, water, electricity and safety of tenure. These places go by the name of slums, shanty towns and/or favelas but are all categorised as ‘informal settlements’. With such a high percentage of the global population living in these conditions, they can hardly be ignored. There is no clear distinction between an informal and a formal development of a slum, but they are increasingly becoming formal. Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, is the focus of this dissertation, and it is argued that its slums are the by-product of diverse political, economic and social strategies. Each slum is unique to its own topographical location and habitual practices, and this dissertation explores the more elaborative roles played within the slum communities that have resulted in their evolution from informal to formal urban spaces.

Charlie Read Revealing the Palimpsest in Soane’s Pitzhanger Manor and Levete’s V&A Intervention: A Study This dissertation discusses selected redevelopment and restoration projects on buildings that involve the retaining and re-use of historical fragments or sections that have been incorporated into the design; Sir John Soane’s Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing — an example of a building extensively altered over time, and the V&A Museum courtyard and extension by Amanda Levete Architects (AL_A) — a project that focuses on three aims: revealing hidden space, reusing old space, and creating new space. This dissertation examines how each project intertwines the old with the new, and to what extent these projects are perceived to respond to the site’s context and surroundings. The two projects discussed uphold ideas of preservation, restoration, and architectural intervention. The success of these projects can be understood as how history has been preserved and retained, and how a contrast with the contemporary has been portrayed to elevate user experience.

The idea of palimpsest — in architectural terms a richly layered site that retains traces and elements of previous configurations — is utilised as an underlying concept.

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Tia-Angelie Vijh The Politics of Housing... Is Social Housing Undergoing a Renaissance?

This dissertation explores the various components playing a part in London’s Renaissance of Social Housing and its recent return to the architectural and political arena. It focuses on how new projects can be seen to emulate once highly regarded social housing schemes. The dissertation analyses examples of social housing from history in comparison with recent inspirational projects, and identify the positives and negatives to this current day ‘Renaissance’. Innovative companies are currently working alongside London councils to aid in the implementation of a much needed change in the ethos towards the design requirements for today’s social housing, whilst encouraging a much needed sense of community spirit and providing a sense of a ‘bygone age’. Is this being achieved?

If so, is it sustainable and can it be beautiful again?

Florence Wright Cinderella City. To What Extent is Lisbon’s Ruination Compelling?

The grand yet crumbling facades of Lisbon hide empty and derelict spaces. 4,600 empty buildings lay vacant in the centre of the city, with the historic centre being home to fewer than 10 residents (Chamberlain, 2011). The city has had a long history of reoccurring ruination. This dissertation discusses a range of different attitudes to ruination in Lisbon, from the eighteenth century through to the present.

It focuses on two catastrophic events — the first being the 1755 earthquake: destruction by natural cause, and the second being the demolition of the lower Mouraria by the Estado Novo: destruction by human cause. The dissertation focuses on two very different Lisbon neighbourhoods — the Baixa Pombalina and the Mouraria; one modernised, symmetrical, clean, and one old, chaotic, and dirty.

These settings are used to examine notions of progress and ruination, of cleanliness, dirtiness, calm and chaos. Ultimately, the dissertation explores the links between progress, ruination and our psychological and societal reactions, whether it be a positive feeling of intrigue, fascination, awe, or a negative feeling of anxiety, fear or trauma.

BA (HONS) ARCHITECTURE

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Stockwell Street Building, School of Design

MArch Architecture THE MArch ARCHITECTURE programme is for graduates of architecture with ARB/RIBA Part I who wish to gain exemption from ARB/RIBA Part 2. Our aim is to prepare students for the complexities of contemporary architectural practice by providing a rich mix of rigorous academic and professional teaching. All students choose a Design Unit in which to undertake their project work — each with a different specialism. Year 1 students develop advanced skills in digital representation that can be applied to the major building project in conjunction with a professionally tutored ‘Design Realisation’ technical and professional report. Additionally, students are exposed to current theoretical trends that form the basis for ambitious speculations on contemporary architecture. Year 2 takes the aspirations of the students work to a higher level of academic engagement. An integrated advanced architectural design project and specialist theoretical and/ or technological thesis are developed with respect to the student’s own interests and passions.

Programme Leader: Mike Aling

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UNIT 12: Magical Objects and Other Unlimited Dream Machines RAHESH RAM + SAMUEL COULTON

PT Year 3: Michael O'Donnell, Luisa Marie Sommerer.

Year 2: Philia Yi Sian Chua, Chun-Yin Kavika Lau, William Thorin Costain, Luigi Di Vito Francesco, Vlad Dumitru, Anna Helliar, Svetoslava Ilieva, Qiuyu Jiang, Aivis Provejs, Sikou Qiu. PT Year 2: Asalsadat Motevallian Year 1: Beatrice Cernea , Elijah Etete, Mia Fewing, Niraj Shah, Syed Aswad Al Jaffree Bin Syed Sobri.

Thank you: To our practice tutor Freddie Heath (BUJ Architects), along with our critics Martin Aberson, Mike Aling, Liam Bedwell, Rayan Elnayal, David Hemingway, Jonathan Hill, Steve Hutt, Lucian Mocanu, Jake Moulson, Alexander Mizui, Parisa Shahnooshi, Daniela Yaneva.

WE LIVE in a fictional world. There are fictional narratives everywhere; religious, political, social, historical, futuristic, urban, personal, and so on.

They are all unreal and yet they form cultures, societies and communities, and can manifest in the physical world through artefacts such as literature, art and architecture, through to the creation of entire cities. Fictions are everywhere: they create real worlds with the imagination as the driver.

Imagination is the ability to conjure up ideas, simulate novel objects, people and places in the minds eye without any immediate input of the senses. It is a cognitive process used in mental functioning and involves thinking about possibilities.

Non-real, non-physical, non-literal, non-scientific, sometimes irrational fictions can be drivers for the

creation of fantastical objects that can induce a psychological and phenomenological experience.

Objects have this magical quality, and depending on their fiction they can provide transcendental, transportive qualities that afford a multitude of connections and enable the mind to take flight. Just as in art, novels and films, objects can evoke feelings from the sentimental to the extravagant: they are agents for imaginative fantasies.

The architectural object is much more than its physical and literal manifestation; it houses many fictional phantoms that stealthily move through its physical form, lingering in spaces and whispering messages. Physical architecture can be a conduit for the release of these phantoms, although the non-real aspects of architecture are a phenomenon that is sometimes obscure. However, look closely, and a newly observed object can trigger the imagination. Architecture is a magical object: an unlimited dream machine. It is an object that can deliver a metaphysical experience. As for the city object, psychogeographers such as William Blake, Guy Debord, Daniel Defoe, Iain Sinclair and Will Self certainly understood that there is an intersection between psychology and geography that would provide an alternative experience to the everyday. It can be described as the third space, the place of the imagination and of subjective experience.

MArch is a pedagogic space where students can take risks, experiment, speculate and cultivate their imagination. Unit 12 create phantasmagorias through the conduit of architecture. This required the students to undertake a process of fictioning its architecture; fictioning being the act of choreographing a number of artefacts by imbuing them with meaning through narrative associations, mythological links, metaphoric impositions, use of sign and symbol as language, iconographic evocations and decoration flamboyance. As you will see from the following projects, the students brought their diverse backgrounds to bear on their research and proposals, producing architectures of the speculative imagination.

→ Qiuyu Jiang The Lonely Hearts Club

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1 Niraj Shah The Cyborg City 2 Chun-Yin Kavika Lau Festival of Cosmic Resurrection 3 Elijah Etete Nutopia 4 Asalsadat Motevallian The State of the Coral

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8 5 Aivis Provejs Once Upon a Time... In Latrus, An Enchanted Land 6 Beatrice Cernea The Parliament for United Species 7 Mia Fewing The House of the Pre-Raphaelites 8 Syed Aswad AI Jaffree Bin Syed Sobri Hotel California

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1 Anna Helliar The Arcadia Project 2 Svetoslava Ilieva Dark Narratives of the City 3 Vlad Dumitru Jobsville 4 William Thorin Costain All the Ghosts in the Machine 5 Luisa Marie Sommerer The Palace of the East: The Chinese Festival at Versailles 6 Luigi Di Vito Francesco Monument to an Impending Disaster

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1 Philia Yi Sian Chua The Myth of Aokigahara Jukai 2 Sikou Qiu The Sparrows → Michael O'Donnell A Masterplan for a Romantic City

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UNIT 13: The Body Exquisite — Dress, Undress, Redress NAOMI GIBSON + IFIGENEIA LIANGI + DANIEL WILKINSON

Year 2: Ayu Suriani Binti Abdul Halim, Georgia Semple.

Year 1: Olabamidele Daramola, James Fincher, Sachini Jayasena, Laura Pepple, Kwan Lam Tan, Liam Wall, Ela Yeter.

With thanks to: Our practice tutor Ana Moldavsky (Surman Weston Architects) and our critics Pascal Bronner, Simon Herron, Thomas Hillier, Andrew Lavelle, Dr. David Roberts, Martin Reynolds, Jonathan Walker, Seamus Ward.

papier-mâché structures, designed to be burnt, that worlds previously unimaginable were to be found.

The unit considered the architecture of history itself. Away from the same old references, what if Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden is taken as the true architectural masterpiece of the 20th century?

Soho provided the site for these explorations, with our projects looking to relate to its rich history of tickling the senses. The theatricality of the district, past and present, was used to embroider our proposals with the realities of urban circumstance, the weather and the holding of bodies. Through its history of fashion, dandyism, theatre, film, tableaux vivants and food, along with its more sordid pleasures, we looked to entertain Soho in the same manner that it has entertained many before us.

THIS YEAR we looked to design outwards from ourselves, our bodies being the detail around which we wove architectural proposals between the scale of the costume and the installation. Working with ceramics, textiles and other manual modes of thought, we considered architecture to be like clothing, as a second skin, that could exist anywhere between the intimate and the colossal.

We considered the houses in which we live to be enlargements of our body, with the walls being the epidermis and entire rooms, like the bedroom or the kitchen, being devoted to a single bodily function just like our organs. Ideas of dress and soft propositions have played a minor role within the history of architecture, but not so long ago it was expected for an architect to be as equally familiar with the designing of outfits, theatre sets, pyrotechnics and even snacks alongside the designing of buildings, for centuries these activities were considered as somewhat inseparable.

Alongside being a military expert, artist, theatre designer, engineer and architect, Bernardo Buontalenti also found time to invent ice cream in the 16th century. For all of the Bramantes, Borrominis and Berninis that make up the tourist trails of Rome, it was really with their ephemeral → Georgia Semple The Four Elements of Aranaputa

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1 Kwan Lam Tam Dating Age-ncy for the Elderly 2 Laura Pepple A Nigerian Craft School for Golden Square 3 – 5 Sachini Jayasena The Kathikali Theatre: An exploration of Body Language, Performance and Colour 6 Olabamidele Daramola The Musings of Isedale Wa House

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1 – 3 Ela Yeter A Coffee and Smoke House for Kurdish Soho 4 – 6 Liam Wall The Prisoner’s Cinema

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UNIT 14: The Long Project MIKE ALING

PT Year 3: Yaseen Patel Year 2: Gyuwan Choi, Xiaowen Fang, Ahad Mahmood, Hasan Sahin, Mihaela Sologon, Voon Yin Wong.

PT Year 2: Burcak Ates, Jeff Bray, Harry Parkinson.

Year 1: Hannah Gardner, Anna Goldrin, Gerannaz Gorjisefat, Charlotte Harris, Lauren Martin, James Richardson.

PT Year 1: Alex Clough With thanks to: Our practice tutor Melissa Clinch (Wilkinson Eyre), our thesis tutors Emmanuel Vercruysse and Simon Withers, and our critics: Irene Astrain, John Bell, David Hemingway, Simon Miller, Jake Moulson, Tim Norman, Andy Puncher, Caroline Rabourdin, Rahesh Ram.

AS THE slow wheels of progress turn and healthcare provisions improve, we clamber forward into what has been termed an Age of Longevity. As a species, humans are living increasingly longer lives, and the UK is no exception with its top-heavy age demographic model. Even London — the youngest region in England — is ageing, albeit at a slower rate than its neighbours. In cities across the world, for example in Tokyo or Seoul, a number of services for growing ageing populations have been introduced to keep loneliness and boredom at bay, from cheerobic workouts to rugby clubs and raves.

But longevity is not limited to those in their twilight. With a longer life comes a longer youth, a longer period for our inner puer or puella aeternus.

And consequently, it offers a longer stretch to bathe in the splendours of middle age. The constraints of being seen to ‘act your age’ are gradually being disregarded and reformed; we find septagenarian parentage on the rise, and the FIRE movement

(‘Financial Independence Retire Early’ retirees, usually in their 30’s) gaining momentum. Ideas around the desirability, or sheer horror, of living an unimaginably long life, or the dream/threat of immortality, have long permeated through culture, a history abundant with elixirs of life and fountains of youth. Sci-fi and speculative fiction has a rich canon of immortality-imaginaries, including Shelley, Wilde, Borges, Moorcock and Doctorow to name a very small but notable handful.

This year Unit 14 explored programmes for architectural proposals that were intentionally age-inappropriate, as we prepare for a future with altered attitudes towards longevity. We questioned the assumption that our social behaviours follow a linear nature in line with getting older. We challenged age specific, and age discriminate spaces, in all their forms, and for all their ages. The Unit continued its fascination with current and emerging technologies and asked how they might be utilised in relation to our ageing processes and their spaces, both psychologically and physically/bodily.

The unit continued to develop projects through the processes of modelling and the outputting of models. As increasingly advanced BIM software becomes ever more prevalent in the profession (considered to be going 10-dimensional!), we seek to explore the potentiality of the architectural model in its manifold forms. We are interested in the architectural opportunities that emerging modelling processes and technologies afford, and we aim towards proposing new model languages and methods (physical, immaterial, co-existing and otherwise). At its most ambitious, Unit 14 is interested in how modelling has the capacity for both worldbuilding and worldmaking: architectural projects as thought experiments of vast scales and complexities.

Y1 students developed their building programmes in the more mature London constituency of Bromley, whilst final year students developed long projects based on their individual themes and agendas.

→ Ahad Mahmood Of Robbers, Kites and Paper Gardens

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1 James Richardson Commuter Canopy, Bromley 2 Lauren Martin Imperium of War: Tabletop Games Expo and Cosplay Wedding Venue, Bromley 3 Hannah Gardner Men's Sheds, Beckenham 4 Alex Clough Taking the Waters: Bromley Spa Retreat

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5 Anna Goldrin Age UK Speed Dating Centre, Bromley 6 Burcak Ates Bowling in Bamberg 7 Gerannaz Gorjisefat Memory Athlete Training Weekends at Westerham Heights Hotel

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1 Jeff Bray Data Treatment Works 2 Xiaowen Fang The Egyptian Hall: Sleights of Architecture 3 Hasan Sahin Myco-Remedial Architecture 4 Mihaela Sologon Casa Harbisson

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↑ Yaseen Patel Future Fashion House

→ Voon Yin Wong The Ecotopia of Yatsu Higata

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UNIT 16: Managed Retreat…

The Edge of Empire SIMON HERRON + JONATHAN WALKER + ANDREW LAVELLE

PT Year 3: Jack Powley Year 2: Meriel Serlin, Margarita Strelyaeva.

PT Year 2: Robert Coakley, Negar Khoshooee.

Year 1: Michelle Sze Yee Leong, Eleanor Loasby, Hannah Middleton, John Pena, Deanna Seymour, Jack Smith, Will Stephens, Saskia Swan.

Thanks to: Our practice tutor Adam Bell (Foster+Partners), and our critics John Bell, Mark Davies, Naomi Gibson, Ifigeneia Liangi, Simon Miller, Chris Roberts, Richard Timmins, Daniel Wilkinson.

nation and the rise of historical models for fiscally hawkish trade posts and enclaves.

Trade Post Towns in medieval northern Europe controlled the most successful trade alliance in history. The Hanseatic League created coastal enclaves that acted as monopolies providing negotiating privileges for member towns, allowing them freedom to trade together and the reassurances that the exchange of goods would be regulated. Systems of common standards such as an agreed schedule of weights and measurements and rules of origin protected the Hansa merchants.

Those trade links are now being revived, and coastal towns across Europe are reforming links, including towns along the coast of England.

Students focused their studies at the edges of empire, coastal towns where climate change, coastal erosion and disenfranchised communities are facing uncertainty and decommission: a shifting landscape of opportunity and prospect.

UNIT SIXTEEN continued its restless exploration into the myths of the near future, reflecting again on the complex physical and immaterial boundaries of wealth and power at the centre of state in the age of the Post-Anthropocene. James Lovelock argues that the anthropocene — the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies — is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age — the Novacene — has already begun. An era when new beings will emerge from existing artificial systems.

Last year we explored the mechanisms, apparatus, and instruments central to trade. The protective ownership of ideas through Copyright, Patents and Trademarks, that attempt to traverse the modern complexities and distinctions between the material and immaterial nature of matter. We considered imports, exports, frictionless trade and tariffs, and their consequences on the economy, society and the nation.

This year we further explored the invisible forces that surround trade. The transactional arrangements and the exchanges of energy fundamental to the notion of trade. This time, we directed our gaze at the uncertainty of the edge of → Jack Powley Re-Market Town

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1 Hannah Middleton Ignis Fatuus Hide at Titchwell Marsh 2 Will Stephens Harley Cathedral and Fen Dragstrip 3 Robert Coakley Weather Fields

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1 Meriel Serlin The Wethercentre 3 Eleanor Loasby Thetford Forest Carbon Test Bed 2 – 5 Saskia Swan The End Clinical Retreat 6 Michelle Leong Sze Yee Hunstanton Archaeology Centre 1

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UNIT 17: Anthropocene Parliament CHRIS ROBERTS + MARK DAVIES

Year 2: Malaika Donkor Year 1: Mahlon Asante-Yeboah, Anna Bira, Ellen Davis, Daniel Hurst, Katherine Lunani.

PT Year 1: Declan Riordan Allison, Sean Flavin.

With thanks: To our practice tutor Richard Timmins (David Morley Architects), along with our critics Adam Bell, Simon Herron, Andrew Lavelle, Shaun Murray, Jonathan Walker, Simon Withers.

IN 2003 David Morley made a telephone call to Cedric Price to inform him of a commission to build the Kentish Town Sports Centre over the site of his Inter-Action Centre, and to ask for his blessing for it to be demolished. Of course Price said he was absolutely delighted to hear the news and that he’d been waiting for this call for years! We later discovered that he was the only architect to be a fully-qualified member of the National Institute of Demolition Contractors.

Development on The Houses of Parliament site in Westminster dates back at least 1,000 years when Danish King Cnut ordered for a palace to be built on the north bank of the River Thames. The Houses of Parliament we see today designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin were commissioned after a fire in 1834 that destroyed the old palaces. This 1,100 room redevelopment was completed by 1870 but it is reported to be suffering from subsidence and has required constant maintenance.

There have been recent reports that it could be sold off to developers and schemes have been prepared by various Architects for the 650 members of parliament to decant into temporary accommodation in order to allow the necessary repair and future proofing works to be completed over a 5–7 year period.

The timing of the 19thC collapse and reconstruction of The Houses of Parliament as we

know it today coincided with one interpretation of the dawn of the Anthropocene epoch, relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

In this age we know that the buildings we lay down leave traces, not only on their physical sites, but also from the material and energy utilised in their construction and operation.

So whilst the UK Government and its Houses of Parliament appear to be in a state of collapse and the edifices of our democracy are literally crumbling around us, we need to be planning to restore stability and be prepared to react to an unpredictable future. The unit has considered the existing building against the three measures of obsolescence (Functional, Economic and Physical) and students have adopted a propositional approach to re-imagine The Houses of Parliament for our epoch, the Anthropocene.

→ Malaika Donkor The Virtuous Parliament

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1+5 Mahlon Asante-Yeboah Mobile Parliament 2 Ellen Davis The Kitchen Cabinet 3 Katherine Lunani The Wellness Parliament 4 Declan Riordan Allison Westminster Village

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UNIT 18: Fading Stars PASCAL BRONNER + THOMAS HILLIER

PT Year 3: Tousif Islam Year 2: Gytis Bickus, Josh Dobson, Bethany Hird, Fatimah Ishmael, Arbana Izairi, Neelab Yarkhil, Zinab Zaaitar, Marine Zub. Year 1: Ana-Maria Catalina, Carina Cazacu, Ayumi Konishi, Jasmine McKenzie, Kalin Peykovski, Ana Popescu, Stephanie Steele-Boyce.

Thanks: Unit 18 would like to thank Martin Reynolds (Martin Reynolds Architecture) for his practice support, Mike Aling, John Bell, Nicholas Boyarsky, Simon Herron and Simon Withers for thesis support, along with our guest critics who so generously gave up their time, knowledge and expertise across the year; Naomi Gibson, Simon Miller, Ana Moldavsky, Daniel Wilkinson.

THIS YEAR unit 18 explored the impact of today’s celebrity and social media culture on the built environment and beyond. Ever-increasingly, architects, through decision or client recommendation, are as concerned with getting virtual likes as they are with the actual usability and longevity of a designed space. Like the superficial world of today’s celebrity or influencer, architecture is often seen as a front, a hollow façade that that can be reduced to a single image to provide the perfect backdrop for a tweet or Instagram post.

Clients write briefs with this notion in mind, and architects happily comply by ‘curating’ pastelcoloured renders, with lush trees that conveniently cover the ugly parts, whilst highlighting the Instagram moments.

Architecture and the selfie go hand in hand in today’s society. In 2017, the Museum of Ice Cream, designed purely to quench the thirst of Instagrammers, was the sixth ‘Most Instagrammed Museum in the United States.’ Artist and designer Sebastian Errazuriz calls these architectures ‘prop-art’, where a building becomes a prop or

background that is never actually experienced, like a digital Bilbao effect or a simplified 21st century version of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s ‘ducks’ versus ‘decorated sheds’ from Learning From Las Vegas. One must ask the question; with thousands of architectural selfies and tweets pinging our phones daily, do we actually need to visit buildings anymore? Will filter-free reality only disappoint?

The unit investigated the evolution of celebrity and fame as an indicator for the changing face of the built environment. From the athletes of Ancient Greece to the gladiators of Rome to the celebrities earning $800,000 from a single Instagram post.

From the Coliseum to the #Beautifulhome. Our current digital revolution has no doubt changed the culture of celebrity, with the ‘Instagram Influencer’ becoming an increasingly common aspirational career path. It would only take Kylie Jenner 40 Instagram posts to match Daniel Craig’s £31 million salary for two James bond films.

Celebrity culture is an inescapable part of our everyday lives whether we like it or not. We are bombarded with gleeful news and lavish images advertising the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

The impact this might have on the architecture that surrounds us may not be immediately evident, but there is no doubt that the young ‘grammers’ of today will become tomorrow’s clients, setting architects digitally inspired briefs for the ultimate ‘gram’. It is inevitable that the filtered world these digital platforms offer will have a huge impact on these future clients perception of beauty and success, asking the question, what kind of built environment will they want to live in?

But social media fame is often short lived, and buildings, designed with this in mind, will find it hard to stand the test of time. Will these pastelshaded, flimsy facades peel away to reveal a more macabre world around us?

→ Marine Zub Soft City

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1 Jasmine Mckenzie The Hog Hole 2 Ana Popescu Hazlitt Road Data Centre 3 Arbana Izairi The Wokens 4 Tousif Islam Phantoms of Propoganda 5 Carina Cazacu The Never-Ending Building

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1 Bethany Hird Carbon Offsetting Las Vegas 2 Gytis Bickus The Eleusinian Trail → Fatimah Ishmael The Blind Spot

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UNIT 19: Stranger Attractor — Non-Specific Urbanism 2.0 JOHN BELL + SIMON MILLER

Year 2: Christopher Harry Clarke, Denis Herberg, Mohamed Shoble.

Year 1: Edgar Alexandre Cabral de Brito, Baizhou Cai, James Ip, Ildi Mali, Kavi Michaili, Federico Minieri, Syed Shadman Salim, Ceren Sezgin, Wing Luk Wong.

PT Year 1: Erti Velaj The Unit would like to thank: Andy Puncher from PH+ Architects, our superb practice tutor, along with our delightful guest critics Mike Aling, Martin Bates, Pascal Bronner, Melissa Clinch, Ilona Hay, Simon Herron, Thomas Hillier, Andrew Lavelle, Jonathan Walker.

"No matter where you go, there you are."

— Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension CONTEXT Well, we didn’t expect to have a significant driver for the first year of the new unit undermined by some self-replicating RNA, but still…

In major cities across the world there has for many years been a growing fictional population, one that hides behind masks of seeming urban engagement, mixing more or less effortlessly into their polycultural multifarious environments. This population does not work, neither does it create meaningful communities: it does however produce considerable wealth. This para-population, present in all significant conurbations, has become indispensable to the life of metropolitan centres.

Without it, many such areas will cease to function as we currently understand them, and decay and decline will surely follow. This population appears to be made up of citizens; many look like residents, ready to defend old urban values, but they are not.

They are doppelgängers whose role, wittingly or not, is to facilitate the termination of 'old city urbanism' by deception. Their presence disguises the flight of commerce and industry, a camouflage that hides urban emptiness. Everyday city life has become co-extensive with theme park fantasy urbanism: the authentic historic city has ceased to exist, replaced by a simulacrum. Of the 42 million overseas visitors who came to Britain last year, half did not leave London. In effect the city welcomes double its native population in visitors every year, and at peak holiday times nearly half the population of the central area will consist of 'fictional' citizens from overseas.

NON-SPECIFIC URBANISM? NSU objects are not ducks, in the Tufte/Venturi sense, nor are they Architecture Parlant, they are distinct in that their primary function is to excite interest, to engender a sense of wonder, to be the opposite of ordinary. These attractor objects are seldom site-specific, they are celebrations of self, hermetic and figural. While always morphologically extravagant, this in itself is no longer sufficient, in our view. Rather than merely catering to the fictive population’s transitory interest, they must also be of worth to the real population in some regard.

THE BRIEF In contemporary urban environments we should look to localised production as well as sustainable material and energetic cycles. Architectural design then becomes explicitly linked with the ecological, or metabolic. This year we speculated on the consequences of these observations, seeing sociocommercial aggregation as tending toward the symbiotic rather than parasitic, and developed proposals that responded to both the spectacular and the quotidian. These are heuristic models of near-future dynamic urban systems, focused on opportunities for greater responsiveness, flexibility and programmatic diversity, alongside forays into the ludic, extravagant and bizarre.

→ Mohamed Shoble The Hidden Land of Frankincense and Myrrh

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1+2 Federico Minieri Versace Rejuvenation Center 3+4 Kavi Michaili Cottonopolis 5 Ildi Mali Orbit Revaluation 6 Edgar Alexandre Cabral de Brito Prison-Brewery

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UNIT 20: We Object!

JAKE MOULSON + DAVID HEMINGWAY

PT Year 3: Luis Rojas Paipilla Year 2: Saphia Al-Haboubi, Sharan Bahra, Daniela Larbalestier, Denislav Lyubenov, Lorenzo Ravaioli, Adam Wadsley, Tania Yeganeh, Zhou Yang.

PT Year 2: Alexandra Ciobanu, Myrsini Kocheila.

Year 1: Lima Babul, Amir Akeef Bin Azmir Din, Dahlia Irene Binti Jim Ilham, Azime Nazlivatan, Alana Tidd.

With thanks to: Our practice tutor Marcel Rahm (MILK Studios), along with our critics Mike Aling, John Bell, Harry Bucknall, Sanjay Ghodke, Freddie Heaf, Marilia Lezou, Shaun Murray, Nur Nadhurah, Rahesh Ram, Shamin Sahrum, Sarah Smith, Simon Withers.

With the formation of new kinds of datascapes and electrical ecosystems comes unknowable ‘abstract’ or surreal new imagery or thoughts beyond logical comprehension. As disparate and classically unassociated information and material accumulates, it builds new scapes of seemingly uncontrollable complexity that may be almost grotesque to our understanding.

It is Unit 20’s postulation that this too is a kind of tool for examination and that, by tuning into it, new kinds of exchanges are possible. The question is: how? How can we hear other languages and other voices and adopt and adapt them into new languages and propositions? What changes are required to our immediate environment — housing, communal space, distribution of resources? What would it mean for humans to renege their authority to other kinds of intelligence and ways of thinking the world? What kinds of constructions would be needed? What are the consequences for architecture and for architects?

"The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution." — Paul Cezanne AGAIN, UNIT 20 began by looking at objects, specifically tools. ‘Tool’ comes from the German ‘to prepare’. If we are entering an era that requires radical rethinking of the world around us and our relationships to it, we need to form new resources or ways of thinking about resources.

"Design presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human."

— Beatriz Columina + Mark Wigley What can we extrapolate from our tools? What can they teach us about ourselves and about our needs?

How might we invert or subvert them so that we are as much fashioned by them as they are by us?

"To think about design demands an archaeological approach. You have to dig. Digging, documenting, dissecting, discussing- digging, that is, into ourselves." — Beatriz Columina + Mark Wigley → Sharan Bahra University of Otherkin

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1 Dahlia Irene Jim Ilham The Entertainment Reality 2 Saphia Al-Haboubi Gilgamesh, The Sublime Dream 3 Myrisini Kocheila Living from Bed, A Future of Solitude 4 Amir Akeef Bin Azmir Din Memory Machine 1

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5 Alexandra Ciobanu World of Lithium 6 Azime Nazlivatan Fanuc, Vertical AI Factory 7 Alana Tidd Eurostat Hub ‘Curating the New Normal’ 8 Lima Babul The Healing Factory 5

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4 1+2 Adam Wadsley The Moore Institute of Advanced Data Diagnostics: “Look Inside� for a Better Tomorrow 3+4 Denislav Lyubenov New Olympus 5 + 6 Daniela Larbalestier Hiding in Plain Sight 7 Tania Yeganeh Carrara Miseglia Boutique Hotel

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1+2 Lorenzo Ravaioli Ianuarius Institute, ‘Blood Storage’ 3 + 4 Zhou Yang Genetic Octopus City 5 Luis Rojas Paipilla Abya Yala, The Amazonian Organism, The Maniwa Canal & The Ampó Settlement 6 Sharan Bahra University of Otherkin

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UNIT 21: Rivers of London — The Walbrook SHAUN MURRAY + SIMON WITHERS

Year 2: Dhaniah Binti Abdul Samad, Ludovico Altieri, Silvia Miah, Matthew Smith, Adam Stacey, Sharifah Nur Amirah Binti Syed Muhammad Radhi.

Year 1: Belen Abebe, Lauren Bryce, Vince Choi, Gabriel Corduneanu, Nophill Damaniya, Thuong Hiep Duong, Andreia Gomes, Lucas Johnson, Eleonora Tucci.

With thanks: To our practice tutor Harry Bucknall (Piercy& Company), along with our critics Mark Davies, David Hemingway, Jake Moulson, Marcel Rahm, Chris Roberts.

“The River Walbrook is the most mysterious, elusive and comprehensively buried of London's Lost Rivers.

Its confluence with the Thames is the place where recorded London began.” — Tom Bolton SITE Lying between the low City hills of Ludgate and Cornhill, the Walbrook can be divined speculatively from topographical and nomenclatural clues.

Flowing from Holywell under Sun Street Lane, via aqueduct through the London Wall, past Bedlam Burying Ground, Angel Court, Whalebone Alley and Token House Yard, along Lothbury, stepping quickly down into Soane's temple at Tivoli Corner thence upwards to exit from the crypt of Hawksmoor's "square within a square", “where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours/With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine”. Now Poultry and Cloak Lane, skirting the fiscally insular but fabulously louche Hanseatic Steel Yard before sluicing into the Thames at the mouth of the Dowgate Inlet.

phase. Phase One was the Registration of the River Walbrook, Phase Two the Research and Development of projects and Phase Three the Resolution of Engineered Architecture. Each Phase was conducted in a distinct timeframe. Phase One was weeks 1–6 (6 weeks) of Term 1 and was fully supported by intensive drawing and modelling sessions. Phase Two was from week 7 in Term 1 to week 3 of Term 2 (9 weeks). Phase Three was from week 4 in term 2 to week 12 in Term 2 (9 weeks).

SCHEDULE In Phase One the students undertook the registration of the Walbrook topographic catchment area by making close field observations carried out over time by using a variety of tools, including; sketching, scanning, surveying, photogrammetry, film, lux meters, microphones and GPS coordinates, in order to investigate the existing spatial, temporal, environmental and sonic contexts. This data was then utilized through drawing and modelling to fully develop the students own tool kit — a rig — that became the foundation of their Phase Two and Phase Three projects.

LABORATORY Downriver from Dowgate Inlet, here at Greenwich, are the great baroque architectures and landscapes of the Old Royal Naval College, Queen's House and the Royal Park. As a laboratory for our explorations at Walbrook, Unit 21 utilised the Painted Hall, King William Court and the Vista Land to test our rigs and our tool kit technologies such as scanning and photogrammetry. We worked closely with the ORNC who were our guides through the histories, politics and hidden interstitial spaces of Wren's, Hawksmoor's, Vanbrugh's and Jones' masterpieces.

BRIEF The Walbrook and the City were the provocations for the students investigations. These investigations were conducted in three phases and at the three scales of the tool, the occupant and the vessel.

Each phase became the foundation of the following → Matthew Smith The Art of What Lays Beneath

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MArch ARCHITECTURE YEAR 1

DESIGN REALISATION RAHESH RAM

We would like to thank the following architects, practices and consultants that provided their expertise and hard work with enthusiasm: Practice Tutors: Adam Bell (Foster+Partners), Harry Bucknall (Piercy& Company), Melissa Clinch (Wilkinson Eyre), Freddie Heath (BUJ Architects), Ana Moldavsky (Surman Weston Architects), Andy Puncher (PHP architects), Marcel Rahm (MILK Studios), Martin Reynolds (Martin Reynolds Architecture), Richard Timmins (David Morley Architects).

Consultants: Archanna Arunathevan (Arup), Simon Bateman (Arup), Hannah ChalmersStevens (Barr Gazetas), Larissa Johnston (Larissa Johnston Architects), Tom Jorden (Barr Gazetas), Hugh Pidduck (Arup), Deni Siampou (Arup), Lauren Walter (Arup), Simon Welbirg (Arup), Hasan Yousaf (Arup).

AS THE DISCUSSIONS on the relationship between the architectural profession and architectural education heighten, schools that have promoted the idea of experimental and speculative design have on occasions been accused of ignoring the ‘real’ world in favour of the abstract.

Design Realisation (DR) in Year 1 of MArch Architecture is a gateway between these two worlds. As a school, we encourage and enjoy the speculative and the experimental, but we use the DR module to juxtapose these ideas up against ‘real’ world constraints and opportunities. The result is the surfacing and resurfacing of tensions that ask questions of the status quo and provide a conduit for learning.

It could be said that architectural technology education begins when ‘real’ world experience and the speculative world of architectural education collide. The friction between the two is where the excitement is. At worst the DR can be a tick box exercise, and at its best it can be a provocation.

With this in mind, the module engages with the profession in earnest, employing architects from

established practices to support the teaching. This year they brought a wealth of experience and provided one-to-one tutorials on every aspect of the delivery of an architectural project.

In a pedagogic strategy of mimicking ‘real’ world experience, students were given the opportunity to consult with structural engineers and M & E consultants about their projects. The highly respected practices of Arup and Max Fordham Engineers provided this support with workshops, one-to-one tutorials and lectures.

Students are expected to bring the practical experience that they gained from their experience in architectural practices and apply it at masters level.

We are aware that one or two years in an office is not sufficient to gain the knowledge that is required to be experimental and to be speculative. Therefore we reinforce, in depth, their knowledge of architectural technology and the profession before we encourage students to think outside of the box.

After discussions with students and design tutors, we made some fundamental changes to the module to enable the DR to run concurrently with the evolution of the design process; site context, followed by the professional component, followed by studies into materials, structures, construction and performance.

We hope that we have provided firm ground for our students to start a learning trajectory that will continue well beyond their university lives.

→ Ayumi Konishi Unit 18

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↓ Alana Tidd Unit 20

↑ Eleanor Loasby Unit 16 → Beatrice Cernea Unit 12

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THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN + ARCHITECTURAL THESIS CAROLINE RABOURDIN + MIKE ALING

Thesis Supervisors: Mike Aling, John Bell, Nicholas Boyarsky, Simon Herron, Rahesh Ram, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Simon Withers.

With thanks to our Thesis critics: Murray Fraser, Anne Hultzsch, Stephen Kennedy, Maria Korolkova, Caroline Rabourdin, Ed Wall, Tim Waterman.

THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN Theories of Architectural Design is a module that offers Year 1 students the opportunity to independently define and critically appraise ideas in relation to their own design projects and to the work of others. The module supports a deeper understanding of the design projects undertaken in the studio through critical reflection and argumentation. Students focus on topical themes from architectural discourse and produce an essay on an individually agreed topic that is developed through an intensive series of lectures and seminars running from the start of the academic year to the end of the first term. The module encourages students to make critical reflections on their own practice in relation to the wider context of contemporary architectural design, theory, the fine arts, technology and the human sciences. Students enhance their skills in research and writing, whilst further refining their critical awareness of the role of architectural theory in the field of architecture.

ARCHITECTURAL THESIS The Architectural Thesis module allows every Year 2 full-time, and Year 3 part-time, student in MArch Architecture to develop a highly tailored piece of research to support the intellectual and/or technical ambitions of their final design project. The thesis can take many forms, be it an individually written historical, theoretical, technological or futurological essay, evidence based experimental and/or

empirical technical research, work developed through specialist programming and scripting, experimental writing practices, interactive media, full size installations and constructions, and performance-based research, amongst other forms of research practice relevant to the particular interests of the individual student. Each student works with an individual Thesis supervisor to develop the exact content and structure of the final output.

Concurrent to the Thesis, students also develop a Research Methods Statement (RMS), a 1000-word submission that demonstrates a systematic understanding of different relevant research methods and knowledge of the correct implementation of different research methodologies in the production of the Thesis. The RMS is initiated through an intensive series of lectures that run at the start of the academic year.

Students identify, investigate and communicate in detail a specific topic of architectural research, demonstrating skills in evidence-based research and writing. The Thesis offers students the opportunity to develop a rigorous intellectual position that informs, and symbiotically synthesizes with, the major Design Project undertaken in the studio. The Thesis supports design practice with a highly informed knowledge base and critical engagement with the relevant technical, historical and/or theoretical issues at the forefront of the architectural discipline. The Thesis encourages highly creative, critical, inventive and innovative forms of research.

Abstracts from a range of our highest achieving theses in 2019-20 can be found on the following pages.

→ Qiuyu Jiang How to Design a Home that Loves you Back?

A Study of Relationships Between Objects, Homes, Technologies and Humans Supervisor: Rahesh Ram

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Anna Helliar Is ‘Pataphysics Useful?

Narratives and Wicked Problems Supervisor: John Bell

An academic of sound mind would laugh at the prospect of attempting to harness ‘pataphysics in any form. To define it is to make a mistake.

‘Pataphysics conception is primarily linked to Alfred Jarry, a French poet who developed a contrasting science to metaphysics by exploring anomalies not yet explained. Referred to as an avant-garde pseudoscience, the language of ‘pataphysics does not rely on the stark contrast of right and wrong, real and unreal. Instead, it focuses on narrative, described by Jarry as “the science of imaginary solutions.” Within our society, we have lost a primal connection to our natural surroundings, and we are ignoring the multitude of warning signs that our planet is giving us. As a species we look for new ontological narratives that can aid us in reconnecting with nature. Questioning the agency that ‘pataphysics holds, the thesis is constructed as an exhibition that explores a multitude of effects.

Through an engagement with abstract thinking encouraged by ‘pataphysics, the thesis restructures the ‘wicked problem’ of the climate crisis through the use of the five core ‘pataphysical elements; clinamen, syzygy, anomaly, opposite and antinomy.

Bethany Hird Carbon Offsetting Las Vegas: A Study on Remedial Design Supervisor: Simon Herron

In 2015 the United Nations Framework Conservation on Climate Change negotiated an agreement for dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, mitigation, adaptation and finance (Sutter, 2015). This agreement outlined the goal to keep the increase in global average temperature to under 2⁰c in relation to pre-industrial temperatures, and pursue the goal to limit temperature increase to 1.5⁰c. This figure is said to sustainably reduce the risks and impact of climate change on the environment. By November 2019, all 188 UNFCCC members had signed the agreement, requiring each country to determine a plan and regulatory report on the contribution they undertake to mitigate global warming. In the press, carbon emissions are a popular topic, and new methods of carbon offsetting are often discussed, however the viability and legitimacy of said offsets remain unclear. In the beginning, phoney ‘carbon offset schemes’ were more common than not (Azlen, 2019), and whilst standards and regulations have improved, the way that carbon emissions are calculated and declared, and the legislation behind this, is as unclear as ever. This begs the question of accuracy, legitimacy and credibility regarding emission and offset data, suggesting that the problem may be worse than it appears, and carbon offsetting may be a mechanism of greenwashing.

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← Anna Helliar 'Phylum & Swords' and 'Balaena 2519' from a series of exhibits across London ↓ Bethany Hird Carbon offsetting the total emissions produced in the making of the thesis

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Luis Rojas Paipilla Ayawashka: Nature, Being and Entheogenic Architecture Supervisor: Mike Aling

This thesis explores the indigenous epistemologies of tribes in the Amazon rainforest, discussed through an engagement with the contemporary discourses of posthumanism and panpsychism. The thesis aims to expand on the current redefinition of the notion of the human, and the need for architecture to be designed towards a praxis of coexistence with nature and other earthly beings.

Ayawáskha is a hallucinogenic ‘brew’ consumed in a ritual by the Tukanos and Shipibo people in the Amazon, ingested to expand an understanding of their ecology and their role within it. Guided by a Taita (shaman), the ceremony takes the participant through stages of self-recognition, repentance, determination to change, purging and ecstasy, whilst both physically and psychologically ‘cleaning’ the participant in order to trigger visions that fully enmesh the participant with their surrounding natural environment. The thesis reconstructs the space of the Maloka, the indigenous hut, as a virtual reality experience, and critically examines the ‘psychotropic practicing’ of its architecture. The study redefines the stages of the ritual as a set of parameters that speculates on how architecture more generally can enhance its relationship with natural contexts.

Meriel Serlin J.D. Wetherspoons: The Public House as Civic Architecture Supervisor: Simon Withers

This thesis is an evidence-based enquiry into adapting architecture for civic roles, through the lens of the pub chain JD Wetherspoon. It seeks to identify how Wetherspoons have successfully created their own architectural typology of pub that becomes civic in its function, through a critical analysis of the history and evolution of the public house. The thesis discusses what constitutes the ‘public house’, with ideas on who forms the ‘public’, public space and its changing nature to ‘quasi’ public space, and the extent to which Wetherspoons responds as a civic space. This thesis concentrates on the ‘traditional’ pub in England and Wales, since Scottish and Irish pubs have a different history through their independent laws and licensing. An analysis of Wetherspoons’ position is made through first hand visits to specific branches of the chain. It focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on the urban Wetherspoons as loneliness, isolation, anxiety and deprivation are highest in cities. The focus is not the community value of the rural pub, but rather how Wetherspoons’ have created and promoted an adaptable prototype that can be viewed as a civic pillar nationwide.

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← Luis Rojas Paipilla Realtime journey through the Maloka in VR ↙ ↓ Meriel Serlin Thesis form as Wetherspoon News

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Philia Yi Sian Chua Gaia Stories and Speculative Fabulations for a Multispecies Flourishing Future Supervisor: Rahesh Ram

This thesis seeks to critically evaluate our broken relationship with nature and uncover the power of storytelling to reconfigure this relationship. Gaia stories and speculative fabulations — called forth

by Donna Haraway and other leading figures in the field — embody the ability to initiate different modes of thinking and relating to our natural world.

Upon establishing our current anthropocentric context to reveal the urgent need for us to change our story, a study on the effects, impacts and limitations of storytelling are discussed. This is followed by case studies and analyses on various storytelling mediums and techniques as well as investigating provocative design practices that enable these stories to permeate into architecture.

Architecture — as an integral mediator between humans and nature — needs new storytelling practices to transform the way that we position ourselves in this world, disclosing the message that we are a part of Gaia, to live-with and become-with Gaia for a multispecies flourishing future.

Luisa-Marie Sommerer The Constructed Illusion of a European Town in Yuanming Yuan: Western-Chinese Fantastical Imaginings Supervisor: Nicholas Boyarsky

This thesis establishes how, through a rare example of eighteenth century cross-cultural collaboration between the multidisciplinary team of Italian Jesuit painter Guiseppe Castiglione and the Chinese Yangshi Lei architecture family, a Western-Chinese drawing perspective was developed. This was utilised in the open-air theatre scenography in the Gardens of Yuanming Yuan, depicting a fantastical Européenerie town. The thesis analyses the epistemological inaccuracies between the Western manual on perspective and scenography, Perspective et Pictorum et Architectorum by Andrea Pozzo, and its Chinese part-translation, the Shi Xue. Extensive scholarship

by Art Historian Kristina Kleughten establishes discrepancies between the Western and Chinese manuals and draws connections between the Shi Xue and the illusion of a European town. Through 3d reconstructions, experiments, comparison studies and testing the findings against Italian Renaissance theatre principles, this thesis interrogates how the inaccuracies of the Shi Xue layout would have impacted the usability of the stage. Edward Said’s discourse on unilateral Orientalism is consequently critiqued, and through virtual reconstructions the thesis argues that these architectural inaccuracies were not a form of epistemological mistranslation, but a creative trigger for cross-cultural drawing techniques forged by a trans-cultural design team.

← Philia Yi Sian Chua The Beach House, from the Gaia Stories series ↓ Luisa-Marie Sommerer Emperor Qianlong's view overlooking the European Town in Yuanming Yuan

PDAP [Postgraduate Diploma in Architectural Practice] THE PDAP (Postgraduate Diploma in Architectural Practice, Greenwich’s ARB/RIBA Part 3) programme is designed to be enjoyable, engaging and interactive. Small group teaching encourages students to share experience and critically appraise their own professional practice. The ensuing debate is always fresh, contemporary, relevant, and fascinating. We want architects to thrive in uncertain times, creating new models of professional practice and client service when the old norms are changing fast. This one year programme can be easily extended at no additional cost. Each year there are two joining points and two exit points, the result being a programme that can easily accommodate personal, professional and project circumstances. There are no formal examinations, but continuous assessment of coursework will keep you busy.

PDAP’s pass rate is one of the best in the country. PDAP students (already based in full time architectural practice) translate and transfer their design skills into the world of business, money, and professional practice. So their work is more about the realities of buildings and construction, and less about marks on paper; more about other people (clients, users) and less about themselves; and going beyond the promise of talent to delivering buildings, using business plans, compressed and complex programmes, and legally binding contracts.

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School of Design Dr Benz Kotzen

Research + Enterprise

Research and Enterprise Lead

The creation of the School of Design in August 2018 has created opportunities for intradisciplinary as well inter and multi-disciplinary research and other collaborations across the School, the University and the wider world. Building on the multitude of disciplines that the enthusiastic and talented staff bring to research, we are providing opportunities to grow research and enterprise, creating our mark, fashioning centres of excellence in a variety of fields encompassing the theoretical, technological, scientific and the creative. We are developing our research culture in the School, with groups including: DARE (Digital Arts Research and Enterprise), Captivate: Spatial Modelling Research Group, INTENT RG (Integrated Nature and Technology Research Group), the Advanced Urban research group, and Diversity and Inclusivity by Design.

Whilst preparing for the School of Design’s submission to the Research Excellent Framework 2021 (REF 2021) it is abundantly clear that our research has the significance, originality and rigour desired and the social, environmental and economic impacts that will make the world and the lives of people better, healthier, more sustainable and even more enjoyable and happier. Our REF submission brings together an abundance of high quality 3* and 4*outputs that illustrates the rich, broad vein of research activities within the School ranging from practice-based research, to experimental scientific and theoretical studies.

Our research carries us across European and continental boundaries, where we are involved in, for example, the INTERREG ‘EYES — Empowering Youth through Entrepreneurial Skills’ project. With institutions in Switzerland, Slovenia and Spain we are preparing the first undergraduate course in aquaponics (Aqua@teach). In response to the Grenfell tragedy, we are working with the University’s Fire Safety Engineering Group on living walls and how these can remain an asset to the built environment whilst most importantly to minimise the risk of fire. Other long term and important research areas include ‘Diversity and Inclusivity by Design’, the ‘Internet of Bodies ‘specialising in the future human, body responsive technologies and immersive experiences’ and the series of ‘Smashfest’ festivals focusing on innovative methods in providing ‘equality, diversity and Inclusion in STEM and Arts education and careers’. Our research also has significant penetration in sound, music and cutting edge technologies with annual conferences in exploring the moving image and sound and in the ‘Loudspeaker Orchestra’ sessions exploring immersive multichannel sound design and sonic art.

This year the School of Design launched an annual PhD Colloquium to encourage the dissemination of research by postgraduate students. The Advanced Urban research seminars and PhD reading group have further supported students focused on interdisciplinary urban research that intersects new materiality, media and space. We are delighted with the success of our PhD students over the last year (Dr. Chris Nunn, Dr. Mohammad Sakikhalis, Dr. Melissa Sterry, Dr. Julie Watkins and Dr. Russel Duke and the growth in our postgraduate MPhil and PhD research.

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↓ Unit 16 Field Trip 2019 Banger Racing in North Norfolk → Unit 4 Field Trip 2019 Pantheon, Rome, Italy

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Unit 12 online tutorials during lockdown

→ Remote render farm at the School of Design during lockdown

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Paula Pocol Somers Town Community for Women

Paula Pocol University of Greenwich RIBA Presidents Medals 2019 Part 1 Commendation 204

Samiur Rahman GramLiving

Samiur Rahman University of Greenwich RIBA Presidents Medals 2019 Part 2 Commendation RIBA PRESIDENTS MEDAL WINNERS 2019

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MArch Architecture University of Greenwich @ Blueprint for the Future Knauf Clerkenwell, 07/2019

→ Work by MArch Architecture graduates Alicea Chia, Rebecca Tudehope and Katie Stares, amongst others, exhibited at Knauf in July 2019

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"Tutors at Greenwich supported me when developing my interests into architectural projects — that support helped me to gain confidence to continue exploring my ideas post-graduation, which is so rewarding."

— RAYAN ELNAYAL, MArch ARCHITECTURE 2019

↑ David Morley Architects Primary School, Barking, London

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"Studying Architecture at Greenwich provided me with a diverse set of skills and knowledge in preparation for life in practice, encouraging me to explore unique and innovative architectural research and design. " — LIAM BEDWELL, MArch ARCHITECTURE 2018

GRADUATES IN PRACTICE

↑ Hawkins Brown Architects Network Rail Footbridges of the Future

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"Exploring my personal interests and developing unique projects in the field of digital technologies at the University of Greenwich enabled me to continue progressing my enthusiasm for innovation in my work in practice."

— ALEXANDER MIZUI, MArch ARCHITECTURE 2018

↑ Arup The Gfinity Esports Campus

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"At Greenwich I was encouraged to explore aspects of architecture that truly excite me. This gave me the confidence to develop and express my architectural identity and gain an understanding of a wider context. " — LUCY SANDERS, MArch ARCHITECTURE 2019

GRADUATES IN PRACTICE

↑ Piercy&Company Sumner Street, London

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