2012 - 2013: COLLISIONS

Simon Kennedy, Michael Chadwick

“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
—Jean Baudrillard

Unit 24 employs film, video and animation techniques to generate architectural propositions. Unit 24 seeks to operate consciously and conscientiously within the globalized, decentralized, desensitized territories of media.

Unit 24 recognizes the current absence of a dominant politico-social architectural and design regime. We propose to celebrate this freedom and draw from popular art forms: cinema, television, photography, literature and computer games can be analysed and utilized to form hybrid and synthetic spatial propositions.

Unit 24 has strong connections with a broad network of professionals, working in sectors ranging from architecture to film, animation and sound design, who will provide inspiration and guidance, and potential pathways to employment via internships. Students develop an advanced and exceptional set of skills, enabling them to compete effectively in the current, competitive job market.

COLLISIONS:

We inhabit unique times of tumultuous transition. Encroaching digital technologies collide with analogue and chemical technologies (nowhere more strikingly than in the construction industry.) Cyberspace collides with and infiltrates built fabric. Iconic images collide with their own dissemination. Globalization collides with everything.

The unit will consider the collision to be a force of positive change, and seek to investigate its potential use as an instrument of architectural investigation.

The unit will travel to the original source of the spread of globalization, armed with iconic images and film, with the intention of testing the power of such iconography against its origins.

The unit will travel to California, visiting the Dreamworks Studio, the Case Study Houses, and Hollywood.

The unit will begin the year with four, short, moving image-based projects:

Project 1 -  Image: a constructed representation;
Project 2 -  Montage: a time-based collision;
Project 3 - Collage: an image-based collision and
Project 4 - Bricolage: a three-dimensional collision.

While completing these projects, tuition will be provided in key filmic techniques.

The projects will enable students to begin to outline a conceptual position, while developing and refining the skills required to examine their own architectural collisions.

4th year students have an opportunity to the resolve these speculations into a dynamic, cinematic, building proposition.

5th year students are able to define a personal spatial and artistic practice, while constructing a speculative thesis proposition.

The unit’s work will be screened regularly in London and internationally.