Bartlett UG0 Summer Show Booklet 2022

UG0 The Bartlett School of Architecture Summer Show 2022

Booklet design by Joe Russell, Year 3, Unit 0

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Reformulating Practice Murray Fraser, Michiko Sumi

“This year we asked the Unit 0 students to think of potential ways to reformulate how architects practice today.

In recent years our students have been exploring social/environmental sustainability in an inventive and sensuous manner, with their projects tackling issues such as energy consumption, environmental damage, everyday ecosystems, urban biodiversity, etc. While still expecting these urgent matters to be included in their design projects, we also prompted students to reflect on what they will be doing in their future careers. With the opportunity offered by the pause in all our lives caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems a good time to start speculating about other modes of working.

Architectural practice needn’t be like it is now, yet what else might it become?

Taking London as the location for their individual projects, while also studying key examples of alternative forms of practice from around the world, students were hence required to examine issues of ethics, justice, inclusivity, cultural identity and so on. We asked the question: Is it too much to redesign the architectural profession?

Our field trip was therefore to Bristol in February 2022, where we visited the collective art studios in Spike Island and elsewhere to meet with artists, architects, environmental researchers and others who are forging their own, different forms of creative practice.”

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Cover illustration from ‘The Aylesbury “Renewal” Initiative’ by Wei Lim, Y3 ‘Waterworks Baths and Studios: City Road Basin, EC1’ by Taro Bean, Y3

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Unit Tutors Murray Fraser Michiko Sumi Year 3 Students Taro Bean Vanessa Chew Maria Garrido Regalado Wei Lim Joe Russell Shannon Townsend Nathan Verrier Julie Yeung Year 2 Students Ani Begaj David Abi Ghanem Esin Gumus Rabiyya Huseynova Fahad Zafar Janjua Thu Lai Milen Purewal

Technical Tutors/Consultants Nicholas Jewell Ewa Hasla John I’Anson Matei Mitrache Tea Marta

Critics Anthony Boulanger Eva Branscome Pedro Geddes Ana Monrabal-Cook Ifi Liangi Thomas Parker Luke Pearson Stuart Piercy Neba Sere Ben Stringer Dan Wilkinson 4

(Technical Tutor) (Atelier One Engineers) (Atelier One Engineers) (Digital Tutor) (Skills Tutor)

Contents 3

Introduction Murray Fraser, Michiko Sumi

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Waterworks Baths and Studios: City Road Basin, EC1 Taro Bean, Year 3

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Proposal for an Intergenerational Amalgam: Dalston, E8 Vanessa Chew, Year 3

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The Rituals of Architecture: Lesnes Abbey, Erith Maria Garrido Regalado, Year 3

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The Aylesbury ‘Renewal’ Initiative, SE17 Wei Lim, Year 3

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Tightening the Green Belt: Oakwood Mews, Enfield Joe Russell, Year 3

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The Euston Sanatorium, NW1 Shannon Townsend, Year 3

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Deptford Green Nathan Verrier, Year 3

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Reimagining Bermondsey Through Craft, SE1 Julie Yeung, Year 3

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Nomadic Rewilding Facility: Convoy’s Wharf, Deptford, SE8 David Abi Ghanem, Year 2

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Dancer’s House, Covent Garden, WC2 Rabiyya Huseynova, Year 2

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The Green Pioneer: Reclaiming Nature in Victoria Tower Gardens, SW1 Thu Lai, Year 2

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The King’s Cross Retreat: Camlet Street Nature Park, N1 Milen Purewal, Year 2

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Waterworks Baths and Studios: City Road Basin, EC1 Taro Bean, Y3 “Following the overarching unit brief of thinking of ways to reformulate architectural practice, this project continued the explorations of the initial project which looked into the possibilities of using bathing as a crucial form of relaxation, both for the mind and the body, to reduce the level of stress caused by working in an architects’ office.

Located deliberately in an area where there is already a strong cluster of well-known architectural forms, the building provides a home for three practices each of around 1520 people, alongside a range of public and semi-public baths for the employees and the wider public to enjoy. The project is situated along the Regents Canal and makes full use of recycling water from the canal as well as having complex filtering systems to collect and use rainfall. As well as the baths, the building provides a canteen for the general public and architectural employees, thereby aiming to become a focal point where people can relax, share ideas, and retreat from the busy city around them. Wearing its woven cladding panels like the armour of a samurai, the skin of the building can breathe in summer and winter alike, with the hot water steaming into the air on chilly days.”

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View from across the canal Water collection, disinfection, and heating system Studio 3 open working space Reception of Studio 2 Working sketch plan Full building elevation Ground floor plan with context

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Proposal for an Intergenerational Amalgam: Dalston, E8 Vanessa Chew, Y3 “Today, architectural firms are widely seen as the ‘gifted few who design for the whole’, and as such employ only the adult majority. Children and elderly people are typically unheard of in the design world. This is then reflected in flaws in our most important community facilities such as schools and care homes. The English Housing Survey claims 20% of elderly people’s homes are in disrepair. School design has also fallen off the education policy agenda, with just 5% of 60,000 UK schools performing as intended.

In response, this project aims to combine the minds of children and elderly to dispel the need for ‘homogonous practices’. Located in the heart of Dalston, the building’s programme is for an ‘Intergenerational Practice’ that presents an antithesis to the mainstream projects that exclude minority age-groups, notably absent from Dalston’s recent gentrification. This flowers into a playful landscape which utilises colour theory, landscaping, and natural materials to enhance the users’ experience and encourage intergenerational interaction with the architectural practice. A series of spaces are there to tempt architects to engage with the other occupants, enabling in turn for the to create more meaningful and thought through projects for children and elderly alike.”

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1.10 The Bartlett School of Architecture UG0

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Perspective exterior view on a summer evening The garden classroom An intergenerational practice which presents itself as a playful landscape Section cut through the longest eye line to showcase visual interaction across long distances The layout showcases the lively core for intergenerational activity at the center The playroom The kitchen

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The Rituals of Architecture: Lesnes Abbey, Erith Maria Garrido Regalado, Y3 “The initial project started with a rigorous analysis of violin making and violin restoration, with the parallel being made to the architect as someone obsessively fixated with perfection. Following on from this thorough research, not least into other useful lateral precedents, a series of interpretative drawings examined the geometry of violins and other musical instruments. The design in turn became a small baldachin for a solitary architect to work and live in, with an ability for it to be relocated in any large disused structure. To shape the idea of architectural practice, this was reduced to ten key 10 rituals that need to be enacted at various points during the architect’s daily routines.

The main building project expanded this line of investigation by transforming the ritualistic behaviours of the single architect into a collective office, workshop and home for a seven-person architectural practice, to be situated in a quasi-religious building which would be built to sit upon the ruins of Lesnes monastery in Erith, in south-east London, close to Dartford. A series of atmospheric drawings and models depict the design proposals in plan and section, while also imagining this collective architectural practice living and working inside a park that is full of dogwalkers and other everyday pursuits.”

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RITUAL [02] - THE LONELY BREAK

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One of the ten rituals of architecture: the lonely break All the fragments for making the baldachin model Sketches showing the plan being built on disused Lesnes Abbey Physical model showing the baldachin for the solitary architect Sketches showing the construction process

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The Aylesbury “Renewal” Initiative Wei Lim, Y3 “In adapting Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘phantasmagoria’, this project imagines a practise of building that inverts the notion of human transcendence over the material world, thus forming a ‘higher’ bond with people and beginning to reimagine a world where discarding is seen as a sin and materials are in constant metabolic flux.

The project situates itself in the Aylesbury Estate, focusing on a slow refurbishment strategy designed to help the recovery of the Aylesbury Estate. It explores the idea of a construction process whereby the boundary of the construction site, its processes, builders and inhabitants are blurred. The design is centred on an approach of not displacing existing inhabitants while refurbishment takes place, a co-existence of inhabitants and construction. It will be built in 4 phases. Phase 1 starts by salvaging and cataloguing demolition material from ongoing demolition works on the Aylesbury Estate.

Phase 2 focuses on making of concrete to create a permanent mainframe that also temporarily holds the components of Phase 3, designed to facilitate refurbishment works for builders and tenants. Completing the transformation will be Phase 4.”

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Perspective view from road Illustration drawing of the end and its new beginnings Dining room view View down central corridor Elevation depicting all construction stages Sectional perspective of the extension and existing

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Tightening the Green Belt: Oakwood Mews, Enfield Joe Russell, Y3 “This design for new housing and associated community facilities tackles the current shortage in the UK, and particularly London, by rethinking the concept of the Green Belt.

Controversy surrounds the Green Belt, dividing opinion over its policies and protection, as discussed in the work of LSE economist, Alan Mace. The chosen site is in Enfield, opposite Oakwood underground station, designed by Charles Holden as one of several stations along the Piccadilly Line. Indeed, Oakwood is that line’s penultimate stop on its northern end.

Just 200 metres away from the site are the Cockfosters tube depots, now set to be demolished due to a newer fleet of Piccadilly Line trains. Hence, those disused materials will be reused for the project; by this means, 675 tonnes of embodied carbon can be salvaged. Whilst the depots provide an array of construction materials like bricks and steel, there are still some fundamental building components missing. The scheme thus adopts a ‘hyper-localised’ approach to harvested materials as well as salvaged materials.

Just 250 meters from the site is arable land where straw can be grown for insulation and for thatched roofs, and the adjacent woods are coniferous, so large pine trees will provide timber. This localised sourcing significantly reduces the scheme’s carbon footprint.”

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Full cut plan Aerial perspective of community centre Connection doors between hall and workspaces Axonometric cut of connection Perspective within main hall Mews housing axonometric View of extended balcony Top view of community centre

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The Euston Sanatorium, NW1 Shannon Townsend, Y3 “Sitting along Euston Road, which is one of the most polluted roads in London/Britain/ Europe, this proposal demonstrates how the future of the built environment could be re-tuned to help minimise the effects of pollution – thereby improving urban air quality and human health.

Through the adoption of a bio-reactive facade, the building provides visual reminders to the users of Euston Station and the passing public about the hyper-invasive nature of the particulates and pollutants that are so prevalent within the surrounding air causes damage, yet which are usually too subtle to even notice. Acknowledging the problem that we have post-pandemic, the structure contributes to the repair of human health and breathing in the Euston area by creating a lung sanatorium – a facility to monitor, treat, and educate people about that aspect. Given that pollutant emissions along Euston Road are so high, and a sterile environment is required internally, the design is arranged as a system of filtering walls and mechanisms which allow for a naturally cleansing flow of air through the building. As an action to tackle the climate crisis, this absorptive building improves our chances of reaching the pollution targets that currently seem out of reach.”

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Short section cut with site context Labrynth chimney detail Interior perspective View through the corridor Basement perspective Exploded axonometric and full building perspective section

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Deptford Green, SE8 Nathan Verrier, Y3 “This project uses the concepts of rewilding and reuse as the vehicles to explore how architecture can become more conscious of its ecological footprint. Situated on the derelict shipyard Convoy’s Wharf in Deptford, it proposes the seeding of a new forest to transform this post-industrial brownfield site into an ecological hub where urbanites can forge a deeper connection with their local ecology.

A new forestry commission centre will be erected amongst the trees in phases as the forest matures: it will contain an office for official forest maintenance, a community hall available to the public, and a foraging centre to conduct guided tours through the forest and to educate visitors about how to safely forage their own food from nature.

The historic dockyard building is retained, whereas several warehouses on the site are to be stripped down to their basic building materials to upcycle those for constructing the forestry centre – hence greatly reducing the overall carbon footprint. Forest maintenance will yield a lot of excess timber to be used for the façades of the new building. In this way, the project is a symbolic marriage of industrial and natural materials, while architecture becomes a threshold celebrating coexistence between humans and nature.”

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Aerial perspective of building Perspective view within courtyard Ground floor plan Section cut through community hall and courtyard Exploded axonometric drawing

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Reimagining Bermondsey Through Craft, SE1 Julie Yeung, Y3 “An art and craft community centre that builds on the fusion of two interrelated processes: the coffee brewing and the sustainable manufacture of “coffee leather” from waste coffee grounds. It narrates Bermondsey’s lost history of leather tanneries, reimagining the wet, unpleasant landscapes of traditional tanning practices and establishing a new identity for the neighbourhood where coffee leather becomes the new collective craft. The architecture as a living automaton reveals workshops, architecture studios, archives, theatre, cafe chambers, some of which are designed to have undefined uses, where walls become the canvas and instruments become the walls. It celebrates the natural decay of leather and conducts ritualistic renewal of coffee leather as temporary windows and skins. Mediating between the two worlds of the everyday and the magical, the architecture is itself an artefact of sound, colour, light, shadow, and smell.”

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The coffee making machine An architecture of instruments The coffee leather workshop Material investigation: The coffee leather window Facade as a public statement Internal coffee brewing workshop Outdoor coffee leather making landscape Ground floor and first floor plans

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Nomadic Rewilding Facility: Convoy’s Wharf, Deptford, SE8 David Abi Ghanem, Y2 “This project offers a solution for the abundant neglected post-industrial/brownfield sites in London by regenerating them into wild wetland, which have significantly decreased worldwide (35% loss from 1970–2015 globally). Following my initial project for a portable and spatially flexible architectural office, the aims of designing for disassembly and for efficient transportation were developed into a ‘nomadic’, environmentally-driven practice that can move around different post-industrial sites in order to reshape them.

To regenerate the locality in which their practice is temporarily located, the practitioners involved are environmentalist architects and researchers who experiment with wild ecologies. The 16-hectare site at Convoy’s Wharf thus represents one of many stops of the ‘nomadic’ architectural practice – the regeneration process here also consisting of renovating a listed historic building in the centre. The portable building for the architectural practice sits on an existing river pier so as not to disturb the regeneration process yet enables direct contact. An aesthetic contrast is created between the rough industrialised feel of the pier building and its altruistic aim of healing environmental damage. If the post-industrial pier served in the past to eradicate other life-form from the site, now it becomes the beating heart of its rebirth.”

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Perspective view across shore Walking down the embankment Section Cut Full plan drawing

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Dancer’s House, Covent Garden, WC2 Rabiyya Huseynova, Y2 “The initial project looked back to the model of the Vkhutemas school in Soviet Russia, with its tactic of coming up with huge abstract concepts and then working out how one might use those architecturally, as a means to conceive an imaginary ‘City of Dance’. The study of ballet and its notation systems provided a useful spatialised link, with the seven key moves in ballet then being expressed energetically and passionately through a large number of acrylic models, using coloured highlights and lighting, to give it a suitable urban aesthetic.

This same spirit is then brought to a tiny micro-building for the main project, having identified a tight but interesting triangular slot-site right next to the Coliseum Theatre on St Martin’s Lane. The proposal is to locate a centre for West End dancers from all types of dance where they can rest and recover after physical or mental health injury or fatigue.

Being located down a very narrow alleyway that is often called London smallest street, the all-glass faced rises up to the rooftops above. There, over one’s head, is a glazed bridge where the recovered dancers can start to perform again for the passing public below – thereby linking the formal experimentalism of the building to a clear social purpose.”

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Bird’s-eye perspective of the building among surrounding rooftops Ballerinas in situ Elevation perspective of front facade

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The Green Pioneer: Reclaiming Nature in Victoria Tower Gardens, SW1 Thu Lai, Y2 “This project began by asking a question: how should an architect design a space for nature if we wish to have an interpersonal relationship with it in the way we do with other humans? Located in Victoria Tower Gardens, beside the Houses of Parliament, the design is inspired by the pioneer plant level – typically consisting of fungi – in a natural forest.

Its job originally is to ‘colonise’ a piece of pre-disturbed land so that other different plants can grow there in the future, eventually turning into a forest. This research led to the arrangement of the structures as a series of mushroom-shaped roofs that take over the well-kept grass of the existing park.

The proposal is thus for an improvement of the site’s biodiversity which adds also to the recreational aspect by providing a new space for the public. The mushroom-shaped towers provide a cafe and brew house, an ecological archive, and some seasonal reading rooms in which to hold debates and to protest for environmental issues. The scheme acts as a juxtaposition to Parliament, symbolising the surpassing of the old way of thinking by a new approach that no longer treats nature and the environment as a property to own, conquer and modify to our own liking – and instead seeks to integrate ourselves within it and become part of its system.”

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Top view of cafe§ Seasonal reading rooms Walkways

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The King’s Cross Retreat: Camlet Street Nature Park, N1 Milen Purewal, Y2 “The ambition of this project to create a design for a community-based educational facility which can promote knowledge of mental health through innovative and nonstandard teaching techniques. The building is therefore designed to improve the mental health of its users whilst also improving environmental and ecological conditions in its location.

Situated in King’s Cross, next to Camley Street Natural Park, the building consists of structures and spaces which have all been carefully shaped in ways that enhance common coping techniques for anxiety. One example is the main central feature of an Aromatherapy Wellness Space. Aromatherapy is a holistic healing treatment which uses essential oils and smells for therapeutic benefit. Studies have shown that it can provide huge relief from anxiety and depression. Using natural materials such as timber and integrating my building with the surrounding landscape, what is created is a relaxing ‘retreat’ within a busy city district. Other features include temporary sleeping rooms, a sound therapy room next to the adjacent canal, three sensory rooms (one of them a lavender-infused sauna), and communal terraces that are ideal for socialising. The building aims to positively benefit all its unit with absolutely no discrimination.”

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Materialistic render Perspective view from across the street Internal atmospheric drawing

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Booklet design by Joe Russell, Year 3, Unit 0

The Bartlett School of Architecture Summer Show 2022