unit 12 summer show catalogue
DESCRIPTION
A catalogue of works produced by Diploma Unit 12 for the Bartlett Summer Show at UCL. Now for sale at http://hughmcewen.bigcartel.com/TRANSCRIPT
‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’ T.S Eliot, 1920.
The Future of the Past
Unit 12 investigates contemporary and historical trends that emphasise the interrogation of historical discourses and styles as a means of design. In particular we examine how these practices sample, adapt and then hybridise pre-existing references to elicit new significance. Such a hybrid can be a means of criticism as well as production, both in terms of what is proposed and how it is communicated, so that individual architectures explore and expose understandings of site, time and history.
Modern Romanticism
The term ‘romanticism’ is often applied pejoratively, suggesting disengagement from contemporary concerns. Instead, collaborations and conversations between painters, poets and scientists characterised early romanticism, which valued intellect as well as emotion, invention as well as history, time as well as place. Unit 12 identifies the romantic origins of an architectural environmentalism that has had a profound influence on subsequent centuries. Today, anthropogenic climate change ensures the increasing relevance of this evolving tradition.
Monument and Ruin
Contemporary technologies tend to focus attention on the ephemeral. But architecture has always involved a dialogue between the material and immaterial. In Unit 12 we consider the contemporary meaning of monumentality, and to do so, we draw attention to the ruin. Contemporary society tends to consider the ruin only in terms of melancholy decay. In earlier centuries, however, the ruin was associated with imagination as well as memory, indicating the potential for reinvention as well as decay, establishing a symbiotic relationship with an ever-changing context.
The Air and Industry of London
Recognising a ‘Hellish and dismall Cloud of SEACOALE’, John Evelyn proposed a number of practical and poetic remedies in Fumifugium, 1661, the first book to consider London’s atmosphere as a whole. Coal-burning trades, butchers and burials were to be relocated east of the city so that the air and water would be unsullied. Evelyn’s proposal was only instigated centuries later, and London continued to be known as the “Big Smoke’ until the mid-twentieth century. London is now the cleaner, functionally segregated city envisaged by Evelyn. But to create a compact and sustainable city, MArch Unit 12 proposes that London’s industries - breweries, brickworks, cemeteries, power plants - are once again integrated into the city as long as they do not pollute its air and water, responding to Evelyn’s poetic intentions.
Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
2
A desire for harmony and an equitable relationship between the life-cycles of nature and the man-made is not new. For generations this attitude has shaped architecture, because of necessity or the need to maintain a habitable environment. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, attitudes towards the natural and built environments shifted with developments in science and technology and a belief in our ability to draw from nature without restraint.
The hazards of these attitudes are becoming increasingly visible; as distances between sites of production and consumption increase, the effects of climate change and the depletion of resources are experienced collectively and individually. Traditionally, science has attempted to address this issue. However, there is growing recognition that these approaches have failed to include a human aspect. The current environmental crisis is as much an ontological and ecological question as it is a scientific one.
The New London Necropolis (nLN) is an investigation into the interdependence between environments and life-cycles both natural and man-made. The nLN combines three programmes: the City of London Cemetery, Newgate Streetlight Power Station, and a walled market garden. These correspond to three separate architectural languages: Romantic, Functional, and Rational, inhabiting the same volume and the same site. Investigating a new ecology of environmental and human welfare within architecture, they present an entwined hybrid between natural and man-made elements.
Steve Baumann
NEW LONDON NECROPOLISSteve Baumann
4
Long Section for the nLN
Steve Baumann
6
Located amongst the most symbolic institutions of city, the house returns the discipline of boxing to the City. In its program, the house references traditional seventeenth century academies, which attempted to harness the ugly ‘sport’ of street pugilism for a beneficial purpose. Harking back to classical texts, boxing emerged as a respectable and national sport during this period. Aimed at creating acceptable manners of social interaction these new conventions supported both the emerging sport and new patterns of trade.
Both trading and boxing are acts of conflict, with winners and
loses. Traditionally trading was performed within loud vocal pits that retained the rawness and brutality of conflict. By the end of the 20th century, the last pits had closed, replacing this tradition with detached virtual interfaces that divest individuals of responsibility and disguise the brutal reality of trade. In opposition to the present aversion to visible conflict, the house presents a spectacle of direct conflict, teaching the necessity of purposeful brutality.
Tough routines of boxing training, the constructional language
and the arrangement of increasingly complex and finished stages, invite the user and the wider city to participate in a program of self-improvement. Constructed in timber, the house relates the conversion of a felled tree into useful material as a metaphor for the potential within a person and the possibilities discipline offers. Operating like a ship, the building requires its users to cooperate to transform and manipulate large elements of the structure, allowing the building to perform as a public spectacle and thus affirm the necessity and usefulness of brutality within society.
ThE ThREaDNEEDLE BOxINg hOuSE
James Crick
James Crick
8James Crick
10
ThE LONDON BRICkWORkS
From the early 17th century to the late 19th century brickmaking was a common activity throughout London. The devastation caused by the Great Fire of London in 1666 created huge demand for locally produced bricks with which to rebuild the city. As more and more brickworks became operational, London became a city built from the clay beneath its very foundations. In returning this industry to the city, the London Brickworks proposes to revive the vernacular traditions from which London is built and to re-establish brick as the primary construction material in the city.
Located in the City of London, on the waterfront site of Walbrook Wharf, the brickworks utilises the clay excavated from London construction sites to manufacture locally sourced building materials for use throughout the city. Combining both traditional and contemporary methods of production, the brickworks encourages interaction and experimentation with materials, providing an environment in which local construction workers and students might refine and develop their crafts. As a means of re-integrating brickmaking with the city, the London Brickworks uses new technologies to replicate many of the traditional practices of London’s early brickmakers. Biogas is generated from locally collected organic waste and is used as fuel for the brick kiln. Reclaimed heat from the kiln is then used as district heating for local housing and businesses.
The architecture plays on the duality of industry and domesticity operating in tandem. This is used to develop an architectural language hybridising the functional requirements of industrial activity with the expressive nature of industrial production itself, suggesting how this typology might integrate within a post-industrial urban context.
Christopher Cox
Christopher Cox
12Christopher Cox
14
ThE FRamE hOuSE
The Frame House functions as an allegory and critique on the continued and historical militarization of the child in Western society. The main proposal is a re-imagining of the scouts’ contribution to the Festival of Britain, in the form of a memorial park to the scouting events of 1951. In 1948, during the planning stages of the festival, the Scout Association saw an opportunity to demonstrate the benefit of its work to the country.
A letter from Chief Scout Thomas Corbett to Chief Executive Commissioner AW Hurll reveals ambitious plans to hold a series of events throughout the festival in Battersea Park. However, since the organisers decided to use the park as the Festival Pleasure Gardens, the scouts relocated to other sites. The Frame House presents a vision of what a unified site could have been, by creating structures that allegorically engage with the ideals of scouting, such as Hard Rock Café, which deals with camaraderie, and Shooting Stars which explores duty.
Situated on Queenstown Road, between Battersea Park and Battersea Power Station, the Frame House also hosts a series of events, including skills demonstrations, sports displays and performances, which recreate the original 1951 programme. The aim is thus to explore how the scouts have been framed as a symbol of hope in the effort to promote progress in post-war Britain. It re-frames the events of 1951 by returning to the original unrealised proposal, alluding to the role of architecture in constructing notions of the self, and in the way in which we inform our individual relationship to Nationhood.
Omar Ghazal
Omar Ghazal
16
Stage A: The Showerhouse, Bunkers and the Documents and Art Archives
Omar Ghazal
18
The Bathing House presents romantic speculations on an architecture that has an accentuated relationship with water, soaking in the rainfall and floods expected to result from climate change. The building is an aquifer, a body of porous stone which filters and stores water, and a public house, a single dwelling for one hundred inhabitants.
Following in the footsteps of Walter Pichler, the project starts from a large metropolitan dwelling embedded in the Earth, increasing in scale to consider a direct sensual contact of the occupant with the architectural fabric. The aim is to strengthen a corporeal relationship with space, in contrast to the abstract artifice of the City.
The programme plays with housing policy terms, pooling all living space so that minuscule private quarters, catering to different preferences, are supplemented by a wide variety of incredible shared spaces. Apartments take on the form of inhabited walls, while all circulation spaces are habitable rooms. The building is permeated by public meandering walkways, gardens and belvederes, a core of open public areas with a myriad of varying intimacy levels throughout the walls of the building, reminiscent of the Roman Public Bath House.
The architecture is soft and solid, utilising a palette of materials and forms endowed with emotional potency and metaphysical associations. It invites the inhabitant to shelter in its heavy building fabric, tempting residents to touch each surface. The Bathing House presents poetic imaginings of a highly sensual, haptic experience in a building that is both fortified and fragile.
Geraldine Holland
Geraldine Holland
BaThINg hOuSE
Paper architecture soak
weather veins in lime rendered surface
Aquifer tower with belvederes
20Geraldine Holland
Axonometric fragment: Shared drying room with private bedroom over looking:smell of fresh clean sheets
22Michael Hughes
Over the past decade, the Royal Mail has been inexorably drawn towards privatization, financially crippled as a result of the Postal Services Act, July 2000, and ever more gravely undermined by an increasingly digital age. As mail volumes have fallen and its network has been rationalised, the Post Office has all but withdrawn from the City of London, embarking on repeated modernization measures in the futile pursuit of competitive efficiency. Such action is leading the Royal Mail into logistical anonymity, towards the degradation of the universal postal service, belittling its socially democratic history.
The reformed General Post Office must seek to mediate between the digital and the physical, continuing to serve directly between communities. Within this scenario, diversification of service is proposed to include passengers and other commodities such as food, initially supplying the extensive postal workforce with seasonal produce from farms within the M25, whilst eyeing a wider role to impact on the dominance of the big four British supermarkets, who operate a food monopoly largely without civic responsibility.
Meanwhile, it is proposed that technologies – particularly revised dirigible airships and rockets, serving in supplement to a broader logistical network – should be adopted and developed to celebrate their operations in a way that the digital cannot. This study, centred latterly on a postal airport in Aldgate, investigates the potential for wider application across the urban environment. Set within a wider spectacle, a service and architecture are presented in which public and employees are both enthusiastically engaged.
ThE REFORmaTION OF ThE g.P.O.Michael Hughes
Local Pillar Rocket: an experimental outpost, the contractual responsibility of the four postmen of team B7
24Michael Hughes
Key Section through the Aldgate postal airport
Traveling Post Office - a rotationally traveling sorting platform within the Aldgate postal airport
Panorama with GPO dirigible airships, viewed from the top of the Monument
26
aN INTELLECTuaL COmmONS
Luke Jones
Fugitive departments, jettisoned by universities undergoing reductions in their funding, are the starting point for a program which seeks to propose together an alternative model of culture and education on a site symbolically close to the City of London.
The end of government funding for many university arts and humanities departments is already starting to winnow out unusual, unfashionable and unprofitable disciplines from universities forced to streamline their organisations and reduce costs. The blander, tamer future for higher education, in which strangeness and diversity have gradually been bleached away by competition and market pressure, is the result of a wider shift in our understanding of the purpose and value of education or culture: away from notions of common or public good towards an exclusively individualist appreciation of personal preference, relative benefit, and competitive advantage.
Making landfall on a former fruit and vegetable wharf next to London Bridge, a waterborne band of renegade academics initiate a ten year project to create an new ‘intellectual commons’, inspired in equal parts by a desire for a different and more radical future, and a nostalgia for an idealised image of the welfare state. Over ten years, it grows from a small floating cultural centre into an extensive, diverse, self-constructed free university which reanimates the formerly productive space of the old wharf. An all-encompassing productive landscape in which performance spaces, lecture halls, libraries, study rooms, workshops and printing presses intermingle and interact, the new wharf creates a new space in which culture, knowledge and education are truly ‘common’: free, owned by and accessible to all.
Luke Jones
28
Miniature lecture theatre and clock tower
Luke Jones
30Na Li
The Monastery of the Himalayas will consist of a Lama’s residence for both the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama and a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. It also secretly functions as a diplomatic ministry in the city of London. The project criticises the fact that religion is used as a political propaganda, corrupting and destroying its purity. The project speaks as a metaphor for the tension between the two Tibetan Buddhist chief lamas, and formalises the idea of duality.
The building is designed to follow certain Buddhist notions, including the general layout of the Mandala grid, which consists of nine units representing a hierarchy of occupations. Here, however, there are two Mandalas, while certain modules are re-orientated and re-scaled in relation to vulnerable energy spots. This distortion of the principle of the perfect Mandala represents the duality introduced by the building’s secret role as an embassy.
In accommodating both the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, the building has been designed with moments where the two meet. Nevertheless, the architecture controls their movements and perceptions so that while physically sharing spaces, they see them essentially differently.
The building will be constructed using both slow and fast techniques in parallel phases, using both Chinese contemporary construction methods and Tibetan handcraftsmanship. These correspond to two architectural languages: heavily sculpted decoration, and simple bold forms. Hybrids of the two languages happen in building segments including the gate house, Stupa of the Himalayas, the artificial Bodhi tree, the prayer wheel hall, Big Buddha statue and the stepped well.
mONaSTERy OF ThE hImaLayaSNa Li
32Na Li
34Dijan Malla
Since the inception of modern science, the dichotomy of science and religion has been a constant. Historically two distinct fields, in recent history renewed interest in the dichotomy itself has attracted considerable attention, in a conversation about the relationship between the rational and the irrational.
17th Century Romantic Science sets a precedent for a discussion of a middle ground between science and religion. The Age of Wonder encompassed a pursuit that was a combination of ideals based on both faith and reason. The formation of the Royal Society in 1660 and its precursor, the Invisible College, set a particular precedent.
The College of Faith and Reason, founded by the Russell Group and affiliated to the University of London, is located in Russell Square. The college provides residence fellowships and organises public debates in order to nurture and promote gifted artists and/or scientists. It promotes a unity- instead of a separation- between science and religion, encouraging a dialectic between art and science, practice and theory, subjective and objective, experiential and experimental, technology and epistemology. The design of the college discusses the politics of ornament by focusing specifically on the notion of the ritual, and its relationship to the craftsmanship of architecture.
COLLEgE OF FaITh aND REaSONDijan Malla
36
A divided entrance to the Debate Chamber
Dijan Malla
Hugh McEwen
THE AYLESBURY TOWN HALL
Hugh McEwen 38
Sited on one of the largest estates in Europe, one that will be demolished and completely rebuilt over the next 20 years, The Aylesbury Town Hall proposes a new civic architecture to engage the population and maintain community spirit. This sense of community is engendered in three ways - through activities, politics and architecture.
New sports pitches and meeting rooms are integrated with the town hall’s functions to provide much needed social space for the estate. At the same time, a truly local scale of government is proposed by a return to the parish system in London, allowing residents to have even greater say over the regeneration. Finally, the pop architecture of the town hall is created for our personal and eclectic society, and symbolises the multiculturalism and communality of The Aylesbury.
This pop architecture embeds itself in the long history of town halls appropriating civic elements, public functions and architectural styles. The curated eclecticism of The Aylesbury Town Hall also uses pop sensibilities to reclaim appropriated forms by creating them from novel materials and juxtaposing them with patterns and changes in scale, vernacular material patterning, and 70s architectures, which were the first to discuss pop. Through the tactics of collage and juxtaposition, the reclaiming tactics of town halls are twinned with those of pop architecture.
By preserving and increasing the engagement of the local residents, the project aims to avoid making the mistake of breaking up communities, as the original Aylesbury regeneration failed to do in the 1970’s.
Hugh McEwen 40
Pastel study of the public hall in The Aylesbury Town Hall
42
The Farmhouse project looks at forming new self-sufficient communities which integrate agriculture and housing within the city of London.
The Farmhouses and their vertical colour gardens will be open
to the public, and will rely on their colours and visitors to achieve self-sufficiency. Visitors and residents will be expected to make a donation of faeces, urine, hair or nail clippings when they visit the building. These will be used to produce water, compost and electricity for the Farmhouses. Methane gas released by the waste in biogas digesters can then be used directly or to produce electricity.
Without its public toilets, the community would not be able to survive. The more visitors the building can attract the more power, food and water will be produced. New public toilets will be erected across the borough in order to collect human waste to power Farmhouses. New communities will begin to grow around the more popular public toilets, creating new Farmhouses.
The Farmhouse project explores the use of colour to attract
people to the building and entice them into using the public toilets by employing marketing and advertising principles. Colours are therefore used less for their aesthetic and more for their functional properties.
Also of interest are the ways in which the colours of the building may be affected by the human waste deposited in the public toilets. Diets high in aluminium and other food additives will cause the colours of the flowers, and thus the architecture, to change in direct response to its residents and visitors.
COLOuR FOR a gREENER FuTuRE
Catrina Stewart
Catrina Stewart
44
Entrance of the Farmhouse through the public toilets
Catrina Stewart
46Erika Suzuki
The shocking reality of office life in the UK is that the average worker prints off 1584 sheets of paper a month, meaning that each person uses more than 50 sheets of paper per day. Walbrook Wharf is already a waste disposal site for the City of London, where waste is packaged into containers which are loaded onto barges to be towed down the Thames for disposal. The new paper factory directs its attention towards recyling this paper waste, creating a closed loop within the City in which paper is recycled and reused within the Square Mile, and there is no need to transport waste to other destinations.
This sustainable Factory will be kept continuously busy by undertaking all the work, and particularly printing, for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. The Factory focuses on the conservation of traditional techniques, such as hand-making paper, traditional bookbinding and letter-pressing, but also aims to be experimental in new ways of using paper, such as the use of waste paper as insulation or as in building materials.
Aiming to advance paper building technology, many parts of the Factory are made out of paper, using both conventional and innovative techniques. Building materials from unsuccessful experiments reenter the production loop, and are recycled again to produce other forms of paper.
hER majESTy’S PaPER FaCTORyErika Suzuki
48Erika Suzuki
Long section
50
The Pious Power Plant restores morality into the sinning City through an architecture that punishes, rewards, and absolves. Initiated by the Church of England, the project transforms Christopher Wren’s Christ Church Greyfriars into the site of the Pious Power Plant. The Plant will introduce the industry of sacramental bread- and wine-making for Holy Communion through sustainable means. It invites five penitents from the City to occupy and run the Pious Power Plant for a period of one year, starting in the autumn grape-harvesting season when the wine-making process begins.
The architecture relies on energy produced on site. This energy must be used and transferred carefully in order to minimise waste. Waste affects the performance and resources of the architecture and the comfort of its penitents.
The drawn architectural language led to the decision to realise the architecture through fabric formed concrete. Fabric formwork brings a new architectural language to the City of London and monumentalises the Pious Power Plant. Much like the drawings, the architecture is soft, delicate and, at moments, voluptuous. It embodies a marriage of surfaces, textures and the synthesis of materials, such as residual fabric from the stripped formwork embedded within the concrete, the coarseness of certain concrete finishes, and shiny steel dulled by the acidity of staining wine.
Feras El Attar
Feras El Attar
PIOuS POWER PLaNT
52Feras El Attar
54Emily Farmer
ThE mETamORPhIC LaNguagE SChOOL
The Metamorphic Language School is an architecture of impromptu meeting spaces, where students can stop, meet, and learn language through conversation. The School is arranged as a series of forms which step up and down along its site, overlapping and linking between each other to generate multiple landings, alternate staircases, corridors, balconies and terraces. It is
intentionally laid out as a building of circulatory spaces, where students are constantly moving, acquiring language through informal meetings.
The programme of the Language School is used as a vehicle to explore a shifting, changing and playful architectural language, where, as a student progresses along the building, they are able to read and navigate through the architecture of the School in different ways.
The building is situated along the southern edge of Charterhouse Square, to be used primarily by international students from the Queen Mary University of London, which shares this site. Recognising that this is a contentious historical area, the School is arranged in a narrow strip, occupying as little of the green space as possible. The long, linear form is also intended to act as a new edge condition to a busy route between the Barbican and Smithfield Market. The building touches the ground lightly, allowing views into the green Square and glimpses into the School.
The scheme is tested as a kit of parts, or a vocabulary of architectural elements: a balance between in-situ, poured concrete spaces, and refined, factory-produced components. The use of different manufacturing processes allows for the composition of different spatial atmospheres for conversation; while some are tall, echoing voids, others are very close spaces with padded walls.
Emily Farmer
Early response indicating hierarchy of learning spaces; alternate routes, doors andconnections across the Language School.
56Emily Farmer
The Translation Corridor is the spine of the building and the main meeting placefor conversational learning. In a building which is gradually revealed as the studentlearns the language, collage and distortion are used in representation to retain anelement of obscurity in the connections between spaces.
Sketch to show the nature of a split-level classroom. Language acquisition shouldbe allied with sensation and experience - “The schoolroom should have models ofthings, and failing that, pictures of them”.
58Patrick Hamdy
The Monastic Hive is a monastery which will act as the first mass-producing apiary in the City of London. Britain is losing honey bees at an alarming rate, and many beekeepers worldwide estimate that, at the current rate of bee loss, there may now be only a ten year window to find a cause and a cure.
Proposing a monastery addresses the idea of actively working and living within the same institution which also operates partially, if not fully, self-sufficiently. The monastery will act as an acropolis within Lincoln’s Inn, where it remains a place of worship for the last monastic Cistercian Order in the UK.
The bees live within the structure of the building in specially formed beehive chambers, positioned within chimney-like cavities in the two buttress walls. Their sound is amplified into the main chamber, resonating as the monks go about their daily rituals. The use of in-situ concrete must be exposed to present the building as a piece of basic infrastructure, drawing attention to the buildings desire to project values of passiveness and simplicity.
The Monastic Hive attempts to create a place of ritual and ceremony for the last surviving monastic order and honey bees while avoiding being dominated by the economic influence predominant in the City of London.
mONaSTIC hIvEPatrick Hamdy
60Patrick Hamdy
62Ben Harriman
The word promontory comes from the Latin “munctor” meaning nose.
Express Newspapers, owned by Richard Desmond, have been reporting that bankers, specifically those trading industrial expertise for raw materials, are failing the average citizen by selling off Britain’s industrial heritage.
One Day Promontory is the location of a networking event, inviting Britain’s industrial experts to meet experts from around the world and convince them to build a new home here in the UK, with the possibility of bringing industry back to The City of London.
It is designed for a festival, organised around the 8th December (Richard Desmond’s birthday) as the topping out of the building takes place. In this sense, the building is temporary. However, as with the Millennium Dome, the longevity of a supposedly temporary structure is uncertain.
One Day Promontory has an air of monstrous and miniature. It is made from miniature shiny plastic buildings nestling within a rough hemcrete ‘hill’. The hemcrete acts as a carbon store, for Desmond to offset his carbon footprint: another aesthetic-only eco build.
The building plays with the rejection of, and sycophancy to, the anonymous shiny facades of the majority of The City of London.
ONE Day PROmONTORyBen Harriman
64Ben Harriman
66YiFei Song
Taking love and death as its themes, the Death and Marriage Registry attempts to resurrect the river’s vibrancy by holding funeral and wedding services on the Thames, reasserting the importance of water to the City of London. The project is sited along the Thames Path and Watermans Walk between London Bridge and Cannon Street Rail Bridge, once the site of winter fairs and other public cultural events.
The architecture introduces a reflexive relationship between the ceremonies it hosts and the organisation of the building. Although the contrasting rituals of the funeral and marriage ceremonies are taken as opposite extremes, spaces in which the two overlap, such as the Archive of Memory, ultimately create one continuous ceremony in which the building itself is the central actor. Echoes and silhouettes of the two sets of rituals create a tension in which each responds to the other over time.
The architecture measures and records the changes in the surrounding climate, responding to the pull of tides and the accumulation of rainwater. Parts of the building are gradually eroded as a result of flooding, while washed materials are kept, reshaped and reused as an expression of the individual bonds and memories that the building embodies.
The entire project seeks not only mediate between the two ceremonies, but also to balance natural and human processes by softening the resistance of the architecture to the surrounding water. The effect of water on the building becomes integral into the ceremonies and counterbalances the respective senses of happiness and loss.
ThamES DEaTh & maRRIagE REgISTRyYiFei Song
68YiFei Song
70Amy Sullivan Bodiam
PieROTic reimagines the brewing industry, which until recently had almost vanished from London, as a new beacon for the City of London. It is an architectural promenade in three parts: an undulating river park, which spans the length of the City’s riverfront, a brewery where suspended inhabitable vessels appear to float in space, and a Lunar bar from where the City, through reflection, becomes the City beyond. Constructed from timber, glass and stainless steel, materials associated with the brewing industry of the past and present, the building is an example of Inebriated Architecture, giving rise to intoxicated and hallucinogenic experiences.
The free-flowing revolutionary spirit of the 1960s with its
liberated social landscape, communal activities and shared experiences, are captured in the form of the design. An undulating walkway has been designed to wobble in places and slide the user into the Thames in a most inelegant fashion. Light spills through perforated screens as the user ascends the timber ramp and encounters pissed glass pillars, bridges and stoppers whilst the highly polished stainless steel vessels loom above.
The interplay between materiality and light creates the
possibility of an excessive euphoric experience, during which time the building may appear to vanish for a short spell and then reappear. Before making the descent back down to earth, the user reaches the Lunar bar to experience the final magical reflection: an indirect view of the City, a flower in full bloom before it dies.
PieROTicAmy Sullivan Bodiam
72Amy Sullivan Bodiam
74Olga-Maria Valavanoglou
Due to the fact that St Paul’s Cathedral has recently completed its 10-year cleaning process, the project starts to question what restoration is and how far it can go. Instead of cleaning St Paul’s and bringing it to a ‘fake clean’ state which could naturally never be, why not reapply soot to create a symbol of the Great Smog, when buildings would be blackened even as they were erected?
The Guild of Charcoal-Makers is a small migrating village of 5 units. It houses 5 families, who together constitute the membership of the Guild. Each unit is vertically separated into spaces for timber cutting and charcoal production, common areas for the interaction of all members and private dwelling spaces.
The units will gradually move around the cathedral in an attempt to re-soot every part of the façade. This process will last 30 years, as a comment to the duration of its cleaning. The starting position will be in front of the west façade.
St Paul’s Cathedral is not the original cathedral, as Sir Christopher Wren’s design was burned in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The village will also burn 4 times, only to be reconstructed during the 30 year ‘restoration.’ This will be a symbol of the City’s strength and resilience.
After St Paul’s, the Guild will move on to re-soot 10 other sites around the City of London.
Olga-Maria Valavanoglou
guILD OF ChaRCOaL-makERS
76Olga-Maria Valavanoglou
78Gabriel Warshafsky
The Worshipful Company of Saltpetremen is proposed as a new City livery company representing manufacturers of organic fertilizer. Sited on the derelict St. Alphage Highwalk, adjacent to London Wall, their headquarters provides a venue for Company feasts while reinvigorating the raised concourse as a vital platform for public revelry.
Taking cues from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel,
consumption and in particular communal feasting are reclaimed as essentially human, bodily acts, fundamental to all forms of creativity and ingenuity. By undermining and inverting material and social hierarchies, the architecture of their Hall promotes a carnivalesque mode in Company feasts, allowing bouts of gluttony to prove just as fertile as the Saltpetremen’s wares. Well-fed and jovially drunk, Company members are ideally placed within this free and convivial atmosphere to propose productive futures for their industry.
The generative potential of Company events is celebrated
by maturing diners’ urine together with pigeon droppings and cigarette ash. The resultant saltpetre solution is allowed to wash across porcelain dining tables during the day, where evaporation leaves behind nitrate crystals. These are collected to feed the fruit vines which fill and distend the Hall’s plastic canopy.
Beneath the main bulk of the Hall, the outsize produce of
this intensively fertilized method is sold in a market alongside saltpetre-cured meats. This undercroft continues an exploration of the grotesque body, its hanging bulges sheathed in glazed ceramic tiles. Nitrate-rich salts from pigeon droppings drip from the cladding onto adjacent parks and paving, at once debasing and renewing the derelict Highwalk as a lush and inviting venue.
SaLTPETREmEN’S haLLGabriel Warshafsky
Top: Sectional perspective through axis of ceremonial saltpetre productionBottom: Internal perspective of banqueting hall
80
Perspective study of the Hall’s underbelly from Highwalk level
Gabriel Warshafsky
82
PublisherBartlett School of Architecture, UCL
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