Unit brief
Unit 12 will continue with its interest in language, and this year will focus on the invigorating potential of colour and abstraction in architecture. The Unit is always searching for an appropriate and optimistic expression for this time. We will study modern and contemporary examples of abstract and immersive environments by architects and artists, as a way of leading to our own formal experiments. Architecture can be abstract, it does not have to make reference to known building types or familiar things.
For example, the Brion Tomb of 1978 by Carlo Scarpa is a contemplative artificial landscape of abstract architectural figures and water channels, in which the architect’s connection to Venice can be interpreted from its fragmentary forms and reflective surfaces without resembling Venice or its buildings. Quite differently, the chaotic immersive environments of the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschorn are made with people, events, signs, corrugated cardboard and masking tape. His temporary constructions seem like an abstraction of a 21st century city in collapse, that reminds us of our fragile democracy in an unequal world. We will start with abstract sketches of such examples.
In the first semester, we will design more freely a house for artists and a garden at Hospitalfield in Arbroath. We will stay at the remote location of Hospitalfield for a few days in late October, to start the design of a garden with accommodation and studio spaces for artists, making small buildings within a designed landscape using the material of local geology and available materials, along with the local needs of Arbroath.
In the second semester we will work individually, and more rationally, on a plan for a small city block on the Hackney Road in East London. Students will be given a detailed brief for a complex building that occupies the whole block, maintaining the current workplace areas, together with sheltered housing and a mix of semi-public uses. Our idea is that the previous Scottish, and rural, experiments in abstraction and colour will provide a basis for a harmonious and communal arrangement of uses on the urban site.
The focus of the work will be the architectural language of your design, composition, addition, renovation, facades and interiors.
Image: Josef Albers Adobe Variant Luminous Day 1947
Details
| Course | |
|---|---|
| Tutors | Peter St John and Amy Young |
| Where | Goulston Street |
| When | Monday and Thursday |
