Cultivation and Culture

Unit 1 will work with the idea of Farm City: City Comes to the Farm; Public Realm in the Farm City; Weak Urbanisms; City Landscape. It could perhaps be called Urban Agriculture, Agrarian Urbanism, or
Metropolitan Village. Last year we began thinking about agricultural space in our translated archaeologies interwoven with orchards and aquaducts. In this years work we want to embrace the coexistence of Agriculture and City more closely and go into more depth with this idea. This is an important question today. There is uncontrolled urbanisation of agricultural space in many parts of the world. It is called sprawl. Often this space has very little character. It is unmemorable. It is unspecific and it is not linked very much to the cultural history of the place.

Seoul and London
This year a group of 5 final year students from Dip Unit 1 are being hosted by the Korean National University of the Arts (KNUA) in Seoul from September to mid November. Similar to the programme in Dip 1 last year, there will be an introductory design project in October, and the main design project will start when the Seoul students return to London in mid November. The year will begin with a one week intensive sketching project, to be followed by the introductory design project. Students in London will be given a site in England, and students in Seoul will be given a site in Korea. The sites chosen will be situations where there is an agricultural cultivation order and a built idea of urbanity either contemporary or historic.

Architectural Precedents
Following the introductory design project, we will work in parallel in Seoul and London on a number of precedent studies, to be published as a book, as Dip 1 has done Students in Seoul will study places in Korea, and students in London will study places in the UK and Europe. Both historical and contemporary examples will be selected to offer spatial concepts that could be translated and applied in the final design projects. In Korea we will study a 16th Century garden called Soswaewon in the Southern Province of Jeollam-Do. This is a unique example of a poetic marriage of the artificial and the natural. Another study will be the 17th Century Confucian Academy called Pyongsan sowon in the Eastern Province of Kyung Sang Buk-Do. Here, a series of timber framed buildings make open courtyards between them on a steep slope that faces a stunningly beautiful cliff side on the opposite side of a narrow river valley. The architectural ensemble brings this setting into visibility and offers an acutely beautiful spatial experience as the seasons change. Here in England we will be studying several examples of late 17th and early 18th Century picturesque gardens where intensive transformations of the land make a very specific relationship between the artificial and the natural. Also a number of contemporary building ensembles will be studied such as Jorn Utzon’s design of a community of houses in Fredensburg, Denmark, (1963), and Aurelio Galfetti’s design of a public swimming pool in Belinzona, Switzerland (1967-71).

Final Design Projects
For the final design project we have several beautiful sites in France, Holland and South-East England to choose from. In both the introductory design project and the final design projects, students will look carefully at the archaeology of the site. We want you to find your own special ways of drawing and modelling the existing landscape infrastructures that have been embedded in the place over time - the physical and cultural history of the place. You will use these existing orders as a basis to propose new infrastructural spaces (say a terraced hill with walls forming a new topography) with a few new building additions that inhabit the infrastructural space. We would like students to come up with a conception for the large shared infrastructural spaces as well as the local more intimate inhabitational architectural spaces. This is not a landscape design project. We are looking for an architecture with a sense of time and culture.

Florian Beigel and Philip Christou are working on design as research projects in the Architecture Research Unit, at London Met University.
http://aru.londonmet.ac.uk
photo:
Petworth House and Park, P. Christou, Sept. 2011