BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE Architecture Undergraduate
CONTENTS 09 06 11 17 19
Zone 137
New Build Project | 2025
The Contemporary Situationist Computationally driven design | 2024
Verdant Refuge
Retrofit + Rebuild Project | 2024
Junctions Architectural Investigation | 2023
Fungi Origins
Retrofit + Rebuild Project | 2023
ZONE 137
A SITUATIONIST TECHNO PARK
LOCATION - MITTE, BERLIN
Architecture BSc Year 3
UG21 | Abigail Ashton + Andrew Porter + Tom Holberton
New Build Project (Rhinoceros 3D | V-Ray | Blender | Python)
January 2025 - Ongoing
ZONE 137 is a Situationist Techno Park that proposes an assembly of listening and archival spaces that both celebrate and perform techno on a post-industrial plot adjacent to Köpi 137 in Berlin. Drawing from Situationist theory and techno subculture, the project blurs boundaries between structure, performance, and activation. Architecture becomes not a fixed composition but a programmable field of possibilities: spaces flicker and reform based on sensory input, energy availability, and user interaction. At its core is a system of extrusions - timber and steel based elements animated by a colour-coded taxonomy (via RGB values) which inform their position, size, and transformation logic. These extrusions break out from an original modular grid, forming fuzzy spatial conditions and expressive assemblies through a blend of craft intuition and computational rule sets. The acoustic performance of spaces, particularly the listening rooms, is influenced by the presence and movement of people, activating sound-dispersing surfaces and dynamic light shifts.
90s Berlin Techno Gallery
Listening Room III
Listening Room III Floorplan
Listening Room III Section
BREAKING OUT OF THE MODULE?
Each block or module represents a condensed 3×3×3 metre spatial unit, initially generated through a systematic dérive across Berlin’s city grid, specifically geolocated using the what3words mapping notation. These units are not arbitrary but stem from a combination of GPS mapping, sensory observation, and colour-coded classification. Each what3words location corresponds to a moment in the dérive where specific environmental data - such as photos, sound levels, visual qualities, spatial tension, or material textures - was recorded and translated into a RGB value based off a set of defined situationist rules.
These RGB values form the taxonomic base from which each module’s extrusion logic is derived. The red channel governs spatial permanence, the green channel controls scale or mass, and the blue channel relates to transformability or flexibility. Initially, all data is embodied in compact, cubic blocks - dense and modular, like urban fragments waiting to be unpacked ands here, a core challenge emerges: how to maintain the legibility and coherence of a modular grid while simultaneously allowing individual architectural elements to express variation, movement, and identity. There is a careful tension to be navigated between each extrusion being clearly traceable back to a rational point on the 3×3m grid - giving a sense of address and navigational clarity - versus allowing each piece to grow beyond the constraints of its original module. Without such variation, the system risks becoming overly rigid. Through the RGB transformation process, these blocks then burst into dynamic architectural assemblies, with extrusions stretching, scaling, and shifting position to create spatial variation and expressive affordances. In essence, each block is a situational archive, spatialising moments of experience through rule-based transformations, resulting in a building that is both data-driven and affective, structured yet performative.
THE CONTEMPORARY SITUATIONIST
YEAR 3 - PROJECT 1 2024
LOCATION - FARRINGDON, LONDON
Architecture BSc Year 3
UG21 | Abigail Ashton + Andrew Porter + Tom Holberton
New Build Project (Rhinoceros 3D | V-Ray | Blender | Python) September 2024 - December 2024
This project disrupts conventional urban design by exploring how computational creativity can evoke new ways of experiencing and representing the city. Combining psychogeographic mapping, situationist methodologies, AI, and computational tools, it transforms urban sensory data - images, text, and audio - into generative outputs that reinterpret the cityscape. Central to this is the creation of metaphorical “situationist walks” derived initially from the situationist device of the dérive (the act of drifting through the city) (Fig.1), guided by semantic associations between text prompts and multimedia data.
A fine-tuned CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pretraining) model translates textual inputs into meaningful matches from a dynamic dataset of urban photos, observations, and sound recordings. Advanced transition logic ensures the generated walks incorporate spatial, temporal, and contextual diversity while avoiding repetition. An initial system was developed where users could input any word or phrase, generating a semantically matched image. Using OpenCV, these images were abstracted into 3D masses, with extrusion lengths based on colour intensity and hues derived from the original image. Simultaneously, a spatial interpretation code categorised the image into one of four views - Plan, Elevation, Section, or Isometric - based on geometric lines, colour analysis, and spatial complexity, using weighted rules to determine the final view (Fig.2).
Without defined scale, the system (Fig.2) was applied to the What3Words mapping platform, translating each 3×3m block of a chosen site into a 3D mass, envisioned either as situationist sculpture or a kit of building parts. (Fig.3) Applied to a site in Farringdon, London, this produced a smallscale situationist pocket park (Fig.4), where each extrusion is tied to a specific, legible address on the grid, as well as its colour data still traceable to a photo taken at an exact location in London.
FIG.2 - SEMANTIC TRANSLATION
Fig.1 - Derive Visualisation
Fig.3 - What3words Squares on site
Fig.4 Application on site
VERDANT REFUGE
A MENTAL HEALTH + GARDENING CENTRE
LOCATION - WATERLOO, LONDON
Architecture BSc Year 2
UG04 | Katerina Dionysopoulou + Billy Mavropoulos
Retrofit + Rebuild Project (Rhinoceros 3D | V-Ray)
January 2024 - June 2024
The project is based in Waterloo and is retrofit proposal aiming to redevelop the Union Jack Club which currently serves as a military membership club and accommodation exclusive to both serving and veteran enlisted members of the UK Armed Forces. Research revealed that Covid saw significant increases in anxiety, loneliness and depression amongst veterans. In 2022, 60% of veterans found it difficult to ask for help regarding mental health issues. Through exploring the existing pathways into mental health services for UK armed forces personnel and the complex process can take up to over a month for a patient to seek specialist advice, underlining the need for veterans to be able to seek immediate attention for mental health issues.
Thus the proposal is for a mental health care and gardening centre where both currently serving and veteran personnel of the armed forces can get quicker and more direct access to mental health care, whilst being able to do some gardening which overall creates this therapeutic journey of healing.
Section BB
Renovated Library
OUTDOOR THERAPY SPACES:
This journey the veteran has in the building is fixated on the idea of healing through exposure to nature, so it ought to have therapy spaces that would be outdoors. A timber joinery component was modelled (top middle) and then revolved (left) to create five unique circular spaces. Timber was chosen due to the warmth it creates, and then after further studies of precedents like Zumthor’s pavilion that employ this idea of an opening in the roof and using water instead of greenery. 5 unique designs were designed for these 5 therapy spaces. After researching into cognitive behavioural therapy and social prescribing, each character aims to cater for specific mental health problems.
Glass Brick Facade: Section + Details
JUNCTIONS
A MODULAR COLUMN SYSTEM
LOCATION - WATERLOO, LONDON
Architecture BSc Year 2
UG04 | Katerina Dionysopoulou + Billy Mavropoulos
Architectural Investigation (Rhinoceros 3D | V-Ray)
September 2023 - December 2023
The brief involved looking at a building in London that had previously been demolished and replaced with something new. The site chosen is the formerly Red Lion Brewery and today’s Royal Festival Hall. After material studies of the two buildings, the project specifically begins to focus on the geometries, forms and structures of the junctions in each building. Synthesising the structural and the ornamental, the design process leads to the design of a timber column system: Its modular nature allows it to repeat as part of a larger structural framework that could hypothetically sit in its original context in the Red Lion Brewery.
FUNGI ORIGINS
A SELF SUSTAINING MUSHROOM FARM LOCATION - WHITECHAPEL, LONDON
Architecture BSc Year 1
Alastair Browning
January 2023 - June 2023
Fungi Origins is a self-sustaining mushroom farm in Whitechapel that uses food waste to supply energy to the building and coffee waste as a growing medium for the mushrooms which are then sold back into Whitechapel Market, fostering a constant cycle of growth and re-use.
Food waste is initially picked up off the floor around Whitechapel market by a farmer, market worker or member of the public. This person then walks into the small scale anaerobic digestion plant on the ground floor to the blending station. They blend their food waste depending on what kind of food it is. They then pour their blended food waste into the anaerobic digester. The anaerobic digester turns this food waste into renewable energy in the form of biogas. This process happens due to thousands of microscopic bugs who break down the food. The biogas produced is connected to a biogas processor which is then linked to a generator. This generator can then produce electrical energy or thermal energy to supply the building, particularly, the cantilevering growing pods that are thermally controlled to ensure consistent mushroom harvests. The harvested mushrooms are sold back into the market and this process repeats.
