Thoughts on I6 2015
past and
present
The unit has made
a shift towards a more reflective, socially and politically driven generative
design process.
This year, we
have placed less emphasis on material fabrication experiments as a departure
point for the architectural project, and more emphasis on the mapping of social
behavior in relation to the architectural characteristics (material-spatial arrangement)
of interstitial spaces within the
city.
Correlations which
are exposed through the mapping and documentation exercises are made operative for
the design of a one-to-one structure as an intervention
intended to alter or shift the recognized patterns of behavior with respect to a
social agenda.
The social agenda
is driven through historically relevant and critical readings, writing and
debate amongst the group of students, unit tutors, and invited critics.
The second term
propels students into a collision course with intrinsic urban enigmas; identity,
interconnectivity and autonomy within the impending reality of a new kind of London
high-density. This year the chosen site at South Bank forces them to extend their
consideration beyond the individual and collective, to the idea of cultural and
civic institutions.
The concurrence of
the concepts publicness, entitlements and the cultural institution is essential
to the ethos of London. This tenet appears eternal, yet high-rise shadows grow hourly,
casting further into darkness the concrete shells and platforms of Southbank’s
cultural institutions.
The students have
been challenged to adopt the square meter floor area requirements of the new development
plans for the area as a brief for their design of new buildings. In the case of
students whom are more convinced of the impending death of the high-brow
institution and/or archaic (as they
see it) civic space, we have challenged them to insert a higher density of
consumerist programme and in rare cases re-appropriate or mutilate and architecturally cannibalise the
existing institutions. These projects serve to amplify and therefor expose the affects of and question the architectural future of dominant political and economic ideologies.
This year we also
made obligatory the direct formal reference and re-use of past/existing
architectures as a departure point for theory and a physical proposal. It is a
problem that we do not stick more strictly to the schedule and planning,
because now we see that in term 2 several students still struggle to find a
formal system though this is not necessarily as relevant as what they do with any formal system.
future
We will continue
to explore the affect of city and architectural form on civic space and to interrogate
the role of the cultural institution within society and its spatial-material characteristics.
We will make physical,
generative architectural instruments as organisational
and testing tools for material mediations that seek to challenge
suppositions about the relationship between space and culture.
on open-endedness
On one hand
leaving architecture open ended to be appropriated by the user forces the architect
to address some essential questions of architecture; flexibility, time, user appropriation
and negotiation. On the other hand it may relinquish responsibility for and
therefor awareness of the interfacing surfaces of the enclosure for programme
on digital fabrication and formal system
explored in the
past as a means of giving material drivers and constraints to the project, the
fabrications now serve as a medium to explore issues of inhabitation and
sheltering in relation to the unit brief. The choice about which spatial material,
structural and formal system might be further interrogated critically with consciousness
towards the implications not only of performance in relation to measurable
function but also affect of formal language.
