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Buildings are typically made upon land and crucially (though we may sometimes forget) from land. Creating buildings involves the formation of new land in various ways. In the context of the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis, what kinds of architecture emerge when we investigate the most effective use of land?
Working towards a decarbonised future means using less resources and less space. If we adhere to this agenda while trying to preserve human resilience and enjoyable qualities of life, we must make every square inch we build work ten times harder. How can we lose the slack and maintain generosity? How can we make space and lose carbon?
This year UG1 have been investigating the design of effective, hardworking, mixed-use thresholds, rooms and buildings as the keys to unlocking radical arrangements for an urban block in London. Continuing our interest in designing for change over time, we have studied and imagined new kinds of layered and shared space in the particular context of Walworth Road, paying attention to shifts of use and microclimate according to daily and seasonal rhythms. While studying the area’s rich history and present, and engaging with current socially-oriented projects on the ground, we have worked across the scales of neighbourhood, room and body.
With each student developing an individual brief and architectural response, proposals imagine a future in which locally sourced and spatially intelligent architectural interventions radically contribute to our global future communities and ecosystems alike. Through experimentation with timber and clay, we have taken time to understand and engage with material properties and investigated how the sourcing, processing, assembly and finishing of materials can generate an architectural language that embodies ideas of effectiveness, coexistence and care.
Our field trip this year in southern England focused on Flimwell Park and the Woodland Enterprise Centre. Here we worked with expert foresters, makers and architects to understand how to design with local timber. We engaged too with ceramics by visiting the incredible factory of Darwen Terracotta in Blackburn and the studios of Rochester Square in London. We also participated in workshops facilitated by B-made which focused on the interplay between manual and digital methods and tools.