Postgraduate architecture unit 08

Unit brief 

This year, Unit 8 will explore the collective themes of ‘Language - Method - Care’ through the practice of economical reuse. The Unit will do so through precedent studies and model making, in collaboration with Network Models Archive and Drawing Matter. 

The concerns of Unit 8 are situated within the contemporary context of the profession and the collapse of our climate. Diminishing budgets, market volatility, and increasing labour costs put pressure on our ability to act on ecological breakdown, extreme weather, and depleted finite resources. To address this, Unit 8 will seek to establish an economical practice of architecture. Rather than one of pure efficiency, the Unit will work creatively with scarcity, developing a playful and purposeful architectural language responsible to the city and its inhabitants, human and non-human alike. 

Working with Network Models Archive and Drawing Matter, Unit 8 will develop this language through precedent studies of buildings and models made in the late 20th century. The Unit will recreate the models in paper and card, not as reproductions but as critical artefacts exploring new possibilities in how models could be made and perceived. In turn, the economising and de-carbonisation of the model making process is considered in parallel with the building’s construction, where the same language of architecture might be made in a different ‘tone of voice’. 

These investigations will be supported by a research trip to Vienna, studying the work of Adolf Loos, Josef Frank, Oskar Strnad, and Hermann Czech. 

The interest in an economical architecture is an extension of Unit 8's decade-long study into architectural reuse. The Unit will again be working with existing buildings, exploring how extant structures can be transformed with modest means and generous public programmes. Similarly, the Unit will continue to integrate landscape into its practice. These are understood as vital to the Unit’s architecture, an essential element of ‘grammar’ in the ‘language’ of our work, imagining new ecological futures for the city.

Image: 503 Studio internal elevation, t-sa