Cultured landscape

Civility, production and leisure in the urban landscape

This year Studio 1 will continue to investigate the density of the city and how nature, and wilderness, can live within it; the productive and civil qualities of buildings and the landscape in the city will be explored on sites in London and Berlin.

A room with no ceiling

The year will begin with the design of a city room on a site in Aldgate, focusing on the spatial and material qualities of place making and how this room can become part of a wider network of urban rooms, investigating the walled garden and other external room typologies. This short design project will introduce the spatial, tectonic and programmatic themes of the studio year; civility, the picturesque and the wild, the natural and the man made, material decorum, the temporal and the permanent, character through structure, philanthropy and commerce, density and the 'urban loose fit’ as well as productive landscapes and buildings and the generation of food, energy and knowledge.

Cultured landscape

In the main design project we will shift focus to Berlin, a city with a looser fit allowing a wide range of typologies and densities. In the former railway landscape of the Gleisdreieck area, around Yorckstrasse, we will explore both dense urban developments and buildings that dwell in the landscape, whilst continuing the interest in a productive and cultured landscape. The main building and landscape project will begin with a suite of shorter non-linear exercises to propose the architectural components of the project; a shared room, a landscape narrative, a building ensemble, and a structure, lining and envelope concept, which will finally be brought together in the last phase of the project. We won't immediately define programme; ideas on place, civility, decorum and character will guide the programmatic investigations, but civic gestures to the city and the landscape, spaces for assembly and manufacture all seem relevant to the place.

Methodology

The specifically non-linear structure of the year aims to allow for an informal way to explore architectural character and programme- different scales of design will be investigated simultaneously and allowed to influence organically. The studio will continue the work with large scale interior and exterior models and perspective hand drawing. We put great emphasis on learning through design research; by working through, testing, reviewing and re-working the design in sketches and models. Through careful cataloguing and representation this design process will form an important body of work. The IDA and DMR diary will be developed as an atlas; as much representing a process as proposing a body of source material. Students will also from the very beginning develop a personal or collaborative Wunderkammer; a collection of site samples, material samples, models and booklets; found things and made things. Individual research enthusiasms into historic and urban precedents will be encouraged, and this research will be collected as a studio resource.

Fieldtrip

The studio trip to Berlin will take in recent and historic examples of civic buildings and atmospheric rooms that have a specific relationship with the surrounding landscape. Additional walks and study visits to parks and landscapes in London and UK will be organised with the studio throughout the year.

In addition to regular crits and pin-ups, at specific points in the year we will be joined by our collaborator; Jamie Scott-Baxter, who will help in particular with urban strategies and landscape construction detailing.

Preliminary Reading list
Rob Aben & Saskia de Wit - The Enclosed Garden
Adam Caruso - Gardens of Experience
Robin Evans - Figures, Doors, Passages
Rainer Haubrich - Berlin: The Architecture Guide
William Mann - Bastard Countryside
Nadine Olonetzky - Sensations: a time travel through garden history
Mark Pimlott - Without and Within
Mason White & Maya Przybylski - Bracket 1: On FarmingImage; Richard Long, A line made by walking, 1967