Design Studio Vol. 3: Designs on History

The Architect as Physical Historian

Jonathan Hill, Jonathan Hill

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000481624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Historia de la arquitectura

Each architectural design is a new history. To identify what is novel or innovative, we need to consider the present, past and future. We expect historical narratives to be written in words, but they can also be delineated in drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The aim of this volume is to understand each design as a visible and physical history. Historical understanding is investigated as a stimulus to the creative process, highlighting how architects learn from each other and other disciplines. This encourages us to consider the stories about history that architects fabricate. An eminent set of international contributors reflect on the relevance of historical insight for contemporary design, drawing on the rich visual output of innovative studios worldwide in practice and education. Wide ranging and thought-provoking articles encompass fact, fiction, memory, time, etymology, civilisation, racial segregation and more. Features: Elizabeth Dow, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Terunobu Fujimori, Perry Kulper, Lesley Lokko, Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Niall McLaughlin, Aisling O'Carroll, Arinjoy Sen, Amin Taha and Sumayya Vally.

Architects of Fact and Fiction

Elizabeth Dow and Jonathan Hill

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231288-1

Tom Noonan, John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Science, 2010. River panorama.

As dialogical tutors, our aim is to create a coherent position that is also questioning and incomplete, and thus a stimulus to each person’s creative development, facilitating a generous design community of individuals. We encourage each student to develop their ‘own creative myth’,¹ an evolving collection of ideas, values and techniques that spurs design, and to foster friendships and associations that will sustain future careers.

At the start of the academic year, we galvanise Unit 12 students at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, to trust intuition as a form of intelligence based on knowledge and experience, identifying a catalyst to the imagination that can then develop in conjunction with critical reflection. A creative dialogue should also exist between design intention and working medium. Often, the most fruitful innovations develop between distinct but related media, such as analogue and digital drawing, encouraging the designer to conceptualise their place within this process. Design is a form of critical and creative play, tricking and surprising us to understand and question presumptions and prejudices.

Our concern is the relevance of the past – recent or distant – to the present and future, speculating on the question: how and why might this happen now? As well as history, we are interested in personal history. When everybody else is looking at one time and place, it’s always good to look elsewhere as a discovery may be yours alone, and thus more surprising for everyone. Exceptional architects are exceptional storytellers. Such tales have special significance when they resonate back-and-forth between private inspiration and public narrative.

Architecture is about bricks and mortar and concrete does follow formwork, but these seemingly quite pragmatic statements can and often do mask the complex set of research questions that each student and architect must ask themselves to determine the when, why, how, from what and for whom a building might be constructed. Whilst we see speculation and an ability to conflate fact and fiction as a vital part of our approach to the study of architecture,² this does not mean that Unit 12 students do not have equal determination and genuine passion to understand how architecture is built, from inception to completion, appreciating the joy of the small detail that informs the big picture. To suggest that architectural practice is the ‘real world’, and education is somehow less real, misses the point. It fails to recognise that building the skills of speculation, the ability to ask ‘what if?’, and the rigour of constructing a research-based position, allow each student, and subsequently each architect, to be much more able to hold their ground and convince others.

To create architecture you need imagination, passion, empathy, originality, a knowing respect for the past and a positive anticipation of the future. You need to be able to tell a story and to solve problems, you need to be able to convince others of your ideas but also to listen. An original idea is very rare, but to posit an original approach that builds upon existing research and experience is an invaluable skill.

Architecture does not exist in a vacuum; it has always been informed by multiple disciplines – history, politics, art, craft, philosophy, gardening – and communicated through a range of media that complement and even validate each other. Students must understand that it is not merely the skills within these disciplines that should be appropriated, but also the ability to look at a question and then answer it from a number of perspectives. By allowing the resulting architecture to encompass the bigger picture one can more easily enter into and contribute to contemporary debates such as sustainability and climate change. To bring the nuanced knowledge of other observations, languages and means of communication to the production of architecture broadens the debate beyond the short term and obvious – the regulatory and reactionary – to see change as positive, as welcoming as it is inevitable, and as life-affirming.

Acknowledging that differing conceptions of change exist in conjunction today, Unit 12 understands a monument and a ruin as creative, interdependent themes within a single building, which may fall into decay, rise into built form or oscillate between the two, further intensifying the already blurred relations between the constructed, ruined and unfinished. As its etymology derives from monere, meaning to remind, warn and advise, the monument’s purpose is complex and questioning and not merely commemorative, while the ruin is a temporal metaphor representing potential as well as loss and an environmental model combining nature and culture.

The inevitability of change – whether of climate, ethics, governance or use – requires us to consider the future as well as the present, notably as a design may take years to complete. How should a building react when, for example, it is predicted that London will have the climate of Barcelona or Melbourne by 2050?³ How long should a building last? 100 years? 1,000 years?

In response to anthropogenic climate change and in support of sustainable and regenerative development, we propose that buildings should be designed to endure and adapt, emphasising longevity not obsolescence. Conceiving construction, maintenance and ruination as simultaneous and ongoing processes, our designs are drawn in varied times and states. Appreciating the interaction of public and private lives, we emphasise that architecture is political, and use is transformative.

Acknowledging the creative influence of multiple authors – human, non-human and atmospheric – the following projects developed in Unit 12 conceive architectures that work in symbiotic interdependence with the hybrid conditions of their immediate and wider environments. Sometimes competing, sometimes affirming, each author may inform the other, as in a feisty dialogue of distinct voices and unexpected conclusions in which authorship is temporal and shared.

John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Science (previous page)

Advocating the poetic and practical implications of Evelyn’s seventeenth-century environmental research as a model for contemporary architecture and landscape, the John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Science is built close to the site of his demolished house in east London, where the royal dockyard was once located.⁴ The new dock is an ever-changing stage animated by the Institute’s activities, developing renewable energy systems and sustainable building practices. Extensive reforestation of the Thames Estuary reduces global warming and reinvigorates the timber construction industry. London is rebuilt in a renewable building material and the Thames is once again a working river. Combining old and new technologies, Tom Noonan’s hybridisation of analogue and digital drawing techniques encapsulates the Institute’s ethos.

London City Farmhouse

Asking how far we should take recycling and reuse, the London City Farmhouse is a riverside prototype for a self-sufficient community that integrates agriculture, housing and vertical public gardens. Noting that advocates of sustainability sometimes adopt moralistic religious metaphors in which environmental catastrophe is the punishment for human failing, space is the reward for those who contribute and a diminished lifestyle is the outcome for others who do not cooperate. Colour theory informs the choice of materials with specific hues selected for their laxative properties; all types of waste are potential energy sources.

Catrina Stewart, London City Farmhouse, 2011. River elevation.

Christine Bjerke, FX Beauties Club, 2013. Exterior.

FX Beauties Club

An association of Japanese housewives, the FX Beauties, challenges stereotypes of gendered domesticity through successful careers as currency speculators. Designed, explored and expressed through a large-scale model of lacquered, polished, veneered and mirrored materials, the FX Beauties Club sits in critical dialogue with the male-only clubs of London’s Pall Mall, and in stark contrast to the solid Portland stone of the adjacent Reform Club.

Left: Ifigeneia Liangi, A Primary School for Athens, 2012. The lovers’ tree house.

Right: Ifigeneia Liangi, A Primary School for Athens, 2012. The giant.

A Primary School for Athens

Ifigeneia Liangi characterises the contemporary Greek crisis as an economic, political and social catastrophe rooted in the nation’s recent history. Located in central Athens, the primary school’s purpose is to re-educate a nation in civic responsibility and thus re-envision democracy. Critically transformed for their new scale and setting, buildings and spaces mimic the principal state institutions, allowing children to play out scenes, operate their own parliaments, courts and libraries and learn how to address the inequities of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Drawing on fairy tales and collective memories, the magic realist architecture is playful, scenographic and at times sinister, offering a socio-political, poetic and allegorical critique of the present, and suggesting possible but improbable futures.

The Living Dam

In response to the UK’s water shortage and inadequate hydrological infrastructure, Louis Sullivan conceives a new typology for a reservoir that incorporates a small town in the curved, outer slope of a dam. Sequential terraces incorporate housing and public facilities among ponds, reedbeds, watercress fields and fruit gardens, which are maintained by the inhabitants to develop the symbiotic interdependence of town and reservoir, generating pure water, productive ecologies and communal responsibility.

Louis Sullivan, The Living Dam, 2014. Sectional perspective.

Benjamin Ferns, Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2015. Apostolic library.

Benjamin Ferns, Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2015. Long elevation.

Pontifical Academy of Sciences

The Pontifical Academy has its roots in the first academy dedicated exclusively to the sciences, which was founded in Rome in 1603 and now has a membership of 80 eminent scientists. Soon after the election of a new Pope named after St Francis of Assisi, Benjamin Ferns relocates the Academy to the City of London, which is synonymous with financial greed. In contrast to the banal, burly modernism of banking, the Academy learns from the Baroque. The densely articulated spatial networ...