unit-code
This year Unit 2 were invited to study the topic of ‘crimes of the future’ – environmental crimes that continue to have lasting detrimental impacts on a building’s future. Students unpacked the idea of buildings as sutures, meaning something that binds two edges together. In this analogy buildings have a dual function – one to hold together the tears in a city’s urban fabric and the other to explore the potential positive outcomes of an environmental crime.
Situated in the London Borough of Waltham Forest, student projects explore how a ‘torn’ environment might be repaired in order to re-establish existing, dormant connections or to create completely new ones. The urban tear is identified as part of the building, responding to the needs of the context and crimes of the present and leading towards insightful spatial solutions. The methods that the ‘suture’ deploys to rejoin the said urban fabric ranged from physical, tectonic solutions to programmatic propositions.
Third-year projects saw Orlando George-Ibitoye steal sleep in the design of a musical destination ‘grime island’; Erine Lellu dangle a birdcage over a car park as an integrated theatre of suspense; Xufeng (Styles) Li use a car wash as a pollution detector for the Waltham Forest pottery club; Malena Royo Rodic maintain calm in a landscape of therapeutic mental healing; Amane Ryomura educate children on the romance of steam and moisture control; Aya Souleimani support pioneering squatter artists; David Vincent Tornador introduce us to William Morris; and Borbála Zepkó capture and harness light in the cauldrons of the gasworks.
Fourth-year projects include Tara Abdol Hossein Zadeh stitching unorthodox energy transfers in domestic spaces with bed baths, radiator handrails and roof sinks; Eddie Jones’s chthonic architecture, made of wooden pallets that mark the community’s relation to Waltham Forest through their waste; Bihi Mohamed weaving the life of immigrants into a dynamic spatial architecture for new beginnings; and Sanara Piensuparp engineering a freshwater filtration landscape in Waltham Wetlands with wonderous fluid entanglement.