Villa Aldobrandini is not set to one side of its garden, it is at its centre; the villa is treated as an optical instrument for the viewing of the garden. The view to the water theatre is composed by the framing of the loggia and doorway, a trompe l'oeil outer door and a reflective glazed inner door. Although it is intended to view onto and frame an external Arcadian vision of landscape, the garden is as synthetic as the painted door.

There are many example of this synthetic nature, whether it be the romantic English rural landscape, such as Stourhead in Wiltshire or the ever-shifting Jones Beach in Long Island, New York. We would ask you not just to develop a world of the purely synthetic but to investigate the collage of the more subtle layers between the various readings of the real, the physical and the mimetic. Furthermore we would ask you not to think of this as a landscape or in an extra-urban setting; your context should be overtly urban. The city should be your playground. In so doing it is also important that you consider and respond to the following criteria:

Illusion
Ecology, co-operation and symbiosis
Narrative, lyricism and metaphor
Digital Craftsmanship

4th Year
Term 1. Project 1. You will be given a district in Greater London in which you will establish your site. You will either identify a system of interaction and respond to it, perhaps by calibration and re-reading or by establishing a new system which responds to the context. In either case you should consider how your system works as an ecology and in particular how it behaves in term of co-operation and symbiosis. By the end of the first term you will have a fully developed building project. This will form the basis of your design realisation project in Term 2. This will not be deferred and is fundamental to the progress of the year and your architecture.
Term 2. Field Trip – China- cities to be confirmed. Design realisation report. Project 1A. You will develop either a focused aspect of first term’s work or you will progress a new small adjunct that encapsulates and re-investigates your initial ideas. This will act as a precursor and a catalyst for your 5th year thesis work.
Term 3. Project 1A continued.

5th Year
Term 1. Project 1. You will continue with and extend your investigations that you have initiated in your 4th year. The first term should be defined by the creation of a system, object or mechanism that is capable of reading, calibrating and responding to its environment. This will be a manifestation of your ideas, however it should clearly be a designed piece.
Term 2. Field Trip – China- cities to be confirmed. Project 2. You will site your project in Hong Kong.
Term 3. Project 2 continued.

Although the unit is defined by the year’s theme we are also happy to embrace a diversity of approaches and we encourage students with their own specific agendas - new 5th years are also welcome.

Image credit: Villa Aldobrandini, nr Rome, c1598 designed by Giacomo della Porta. View to the water theatre from the house.

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