Open Studio
The studio draws readily on a wide range of references and thinkers in its pursuit of design processes relevant to to-day’s urban conditions and its social and cultural landscapes. It does not believe that designers alone are able to understand, apprehend and formulate propositions that will offer appropriate and lasting additions to the urban landscape nor that architecture is but a measure of its physical substance. We ask for a more nuanced and contemporary understandings of spatial navigation, consumption and use. To help students build up a critical and informed approach to design we have assembled a multidisciplinary panel of experts to be our guides, critics and companions. Details of panel members are given at the end of this text.
To explore the interaction of the social, the cultural and the spatial the studio will begin the year by pursuing a live project in London. This will allow us to develop and test participatory processes and physical designs for a unique playscape for teenagers on a site at Timber Wharves on the Isle of Dogs. The challenge will be to establish an extraordinary environment that will accommodate the needs of the young people while permitting a continued reading and use of the space as ‘public realm’.
The first project - Building a public - will explore ways in which various users and stakeholders can shape a dynamic that can properly inform the process of design and act as a generator of civic, social and spatial values associated with public space. This will entail working directly with the young people throughout the project, as well as with a number of key stakeholders including the local primary school, the Cedar Community Centre, Docklands Youth Outreach and ‘Space’, a small indoor theatre and cafe/bar in a converted Victorian chapel that abuts the site
Among other things we will explore narrative-based approaches to readings of place and social interaction, the interplay between public (place) and publicity (communication), the use of the university as a public asset by inviting clients, stakeholders and user groups to crits and juries, the role of journeys in marking and memorising urban fragments and the nature of play in defining spatial and social relations. We will work directly with Bold Creative, an innovative partnership who use the value systems and graphics of contemporary advertising, consumer culture and media in consultative projects. A journalist from the Landscape Institute will shadow and report on the participatory design process and its outcome.
The second project - Building in public - will be approached through three or four competitive groups of students, each elaborating a project through participatory processes and the design values defined in the first project. The clients, users and stakeholders will select what they consider to be the best design scheme in mid November, and this will subsequently be developed, detailed and built by all unit members working together with Southern’s own building contractor. The project will require the submission of a full planning application, a design & access statement, a method statement on risk reduction through design, and all building regulation and production drawings. 4th year unit members will develop particular prototypes for the structure, cladding and surfacing using the project as a critical point of reference for the ATA prototyping module.
During the design process the unit will be assisted by Mark Gillingham, an Associate at landscape architects Gustafson Porter, Wolf Mangelsdorf, a structural engineer who is a group leader at Buro Happold and fronts up the Architectural Association’s technical studies programme, and Afolabi Spence, a senior architect and associate director at Fluid.
During the first two projects we will build up an understanding of environments of and for play through field research and by studying the projects of Nils Norman, Aldo van Eyck, Constant and General Public Agency (GPA), a multidisciplinary practice run by Lucy Musgrave and Clare Cumberlidge. We will also compare and contrast unplanned, multilayered ‘creative city’ spaces with rationally designed urban environments, probing their value in social and cultural terms with reference to the writings of Jane Jacobs, Doreen Massey, Karen Franck and Richard Florida. Reuse and sustainability will be considered and informed by the writings of Cedric Price, Marta Rojals del Alamo and others.
Key references:
‘Projects Vol 1 & 2’ - Cedric Price
‘An architecture of play: a survey of London's adventure playgrounds’ - Nils Norman
‘Design and Landscape for People’ - Lucy Musgrave and Clare Cumberlidge
‘Loose Space - possibility and diversity in urban life’ - Eds. Karen Franck and Quentin Stevens
‘Design for fun’ - Marta Rojals del Alamo
‘The Situationist City’ - Simon Sadler
‘The Power of Place’ - Dolores Hayden
‘The Fall of Public Man’ (etc) - Richard Senett
‘The Death and Life of the Great American City’ - Jane Jacobs (1961)
‘The Economy of Cities’ - Jane Jacobs (1969)
‘The Rise of the Creative Class’ - Richard Florida
‘The playgrounds and the city’ - Aldo Van Eyk, (Constant)
The ‘Play Ethic’ - Pat Kane
‘Did Someone Say Participate’ - Eds. Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar
‘Architecture and Participation’ - Eds. Jeremy Till, Doina Petrescu, Peter Blundell-Jones
‘Critical Architecture’ - Eds. Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Mark Dorrian and Murray Fraser
‘The Reflective Practitioner’ - Donald Schon
Secondary reading:
‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ - Michel de Certeau
‘Of Other Spaces’ - Michel Foucault
‘The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change’ - David Harvey
‘London, the next ten years’ - Doreen Massey
The third project - A public building - will go on to explore the interaction of social structures, cultural conditions and spatial tactics in the definition of a public building that will be located on and will act as a protagonist for one of the London Mayor’s ‘100 Public Square’ sites in Woolwich in the Thames Gateway. The project will draw on lessons learned in the live project and will provide a vehicle for the production of designs that synthesise built form and urban landscape at a relatively large scale. Unit members will be encouraged to develop their own programme for the public building and their own definitions of what should constitute a contemporary public space.
Open Studio (Person/Discipline/Position)
David Barrie TV Producer / Regen C4 / Freelance
Dr. Paul Brickell Social, physical regen Director of Leaside Regeneration
Jamie Dean Landscape Strategies Design for London Unit
Prof Colin Fournier Urban Design MSC Urban Design course leader, Bartlett
Mark Gillingham Landscape Architecture Associate at Gustafson Porter
Paul Lincoln Communications Communications Head at Landscape Institute
Wolf Mangelsdorf Structural engineer Group leader at Buro Happold & AA tutor
Dr. Doreen Massey Author / Social scientist Senior Researcher, Open University
Martin Orton Media and participation Director, Bold Creative
Greg Villalobos Media and participation Director, Bold Creative
Stephen Thake Architecture / Policy Reader in Social Policy at London Met
Prof Jeremy Till Architecture / Author Head of Architecture, Sheffield University
The unit will be taught by Steve McAdam and Christina Norton, assisted by Angelika Lienhart (a member of Fluid, a journalist and a graduate of Central St Martin’s Narrative Practices MA) and Natalia Alonso (a member of Fluid and a graduate of architecture at LMU)
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