Common Ground: Architecture, Topography and Sculpture

Unit 2 aims to develop design approaches that consider both the Topos and Mythos of the modern city. We believe that the topographical aspects of architecture can be as generators for tectonic and programmatic proposals. The status of ‘Ground’ is often confused and complex in the modern city. In order to uncover the grounds for a renewal of public life the economic and material geology  - the infrastructure that ‘underpin’ building design - needs to be considered. Tucked-away in clefts and crevices, nature and its analogues flourish despite road engineering and the inhospitable climate of the modern city. The revelation of ‘hidden nature’, buried beneath technology and modern transport systems, opens up spaces of imagination, places for potential inhabitation and appropriation. The representational and mythical aspects of culture, including the complex relationships between program and type, and between festive and permanent uses of spaces, suggest a deeper ground of meaning than the simple functionalist or formalist paradigms that typify most architectural rhetoric today. Both festivals and ornament have their origins in representations of nature understood as regenerative. Any ecological thinking needs to acknowledge Decorum and poetics as the characteristics that make places worth caring for. Traditionally, urban rooms were adorned with sculptures and architecture incorporated artworks into interiors and facades. We want to investigate how contemporary sculpture offers alternative ways of thinking about territory and time, materials and perception.

The studio will be working with sites along the course of the River Fleet, from Hampstead to the Thames at Blackfriars. The fleet is now mostly buried, but it has deep historical resonances with the city and subtle traces of it remain along its course. This ‘non-site’ reveals much about the development of the city, its rituals, institutions and trade; and opens many possibilities of connecting past, future and present. Visits to Cass Sculpture Park in West Sussex and to Yorkshire Sculpture Park will be followed by detailed study of a sculpture in terms of its material presence and its spatial ambitions and effects. Development of a programme as well as the development of site strategies will be made in response to both the material imagination and the spatial and formal imaginations inspired by these studies.  We imagine that students may choose to work on adjacent sites and are open to suggestions for collaborative visions.