unit-code
UG3 explores and reconsiders the relationship that exists between architecture, its designers and its occupants. Each year the tone of the unit is defined by the identities, desires and personalities of our students. Working across multiple scales and in the links between space and style, we consider how buildings can have a more sensuous and innovative exchange with the environmental issues that threaten to consume them, positioning the practicalities of time, crafting and construction as parallel protagonists to our personal intentions. We also consider how buildings take on a life of their own and outgrow their architect, as a child does its parent.
The unit works with a foot in the magical and a hand in the practical, creating architectural fantasies that are grounded deeply in reality. We design expressively detailed buildings which aim to excite, perceiving the creative process as a wild rumpus across the messy and the refined; the mistakes and misfires that happen along the way become profound catalysts for wonder. Our unit is a work in progress which evolves each year. We invite students to experiment with different types of media, such as hand drawing, model making, rendering or a combination of methods.
This year our starting point questioned whether architecture can be autobiographical or take the form of a diary. While an autobiography is told from a fixed moment in time, the entries of a diary are recorded daily. We considered the social history of these art forms to assess their contemporary relevance as architectural concerns and to consider how architecture, or its design process, might respond to the fluctuating desires of its designers, builders and occupants.
For our field trip this year we travelled to Florence and Rome. We visited gardens that were sculpted as love letters to lost partners, landscapes that became sculptures and architectural illusions, while learning about their designers’ idiosyncratic tendencies as both human beings and architectural practitioners. Working between the individual and the communal, we addressed the personal and the political through nuanced proposals with a story to tell, the specifics of which were informed by our students’ diverse upbringing, heritage, interests and passions.