Programme 09-10:
This year we will explore time, motion and energy. Our concern will be the immediate time of present experience and the historical time of an excavated past and an imagined future.
Architecture is not just an object, it is also an experience. Any change in the weather, the time of day or the position or mood of the viewer can influence perception, so that even an object seemingly as solid as a building may not seem the same from one moment to the next.
The most creative architects have looked to the past to imagine a future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to transform it, revealing its relevance to the present. Soane looked to ancient Greece, Mies admired Schinkel and the Smithsons absorbed the spirit of the picturesque. As a creative stimulus and narrative resource for twentieth-first century architecture, Unit 12 focuses on earlier centuries as well as those more recent. When everybody else is looking in one time and one place, it’s always good to look elsewhere as a discovery may be yours alone, and thus more surprising and personal.
Combining our concerns for immediate and historical time, we will ask you to draw your building in multiple states; under construction, as a recently discovered ruin, and with a different use in an imagined future. Throughout the year we will encourage you to explore the potential of drawing, modeling and prototyping, so that a chosen medium is a means to design and discover as well as represent.
This year, we will ask ‘what can a new city be today?’ A sustainable hybrid, the city we propose will be super-urban, super-industrial and super-rural. Each building, either small or large, will be a microcosm of the city. Together, the individual buildings will create the city, defining the principles, elements and materials from which it can develop and grow. The relationship between each building and the city will be reciprocal. Sustainable, the city will trade and exchange with its environment; one expanding and contracting, adapting and adjusting in response to the other. Self-sufficient, the city will generate its own energy; each building will produce its own energy and creates an excess that serves the general needs of the city. Discursive, the city will encourage social and political engagement, and the interaction of public and private lives. Self-aware, the city will learn from earlier centuries as well as those more recent, inventing and adapting narratives, histories and myths that define its character. Seasonal, the city will be responsive to its climate and site, creating conditions that are conducive to its survival and growth. A city that is both responsive and generative is indicative of a wider agenda: a changeable architecture for changeable conditions.
Rather than an empty site, we will build a new city on the remnants of a Ghost Town, first on the Thames, then at the entrance to the Baltic. Each student will contribute one building to each city. Our first site will be the Greenwich of scientific observation and experiment. Independent from London when the Royal Observatory was founded in 1675, it was here the Astronomer Royal mapped the skies and John Harrison devised a means to navigate the seas. The Observatory marks the Greenwich Meridian, the starting point of east and west and every time zone in the World. Visiting the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, our second site will be the narrow strait that separates Denmark and Sweden. Our project will envisage a third city linking Copenhagen to Malmo, reviving the ties that once bound the two countries as one. |
