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At the centre of PG14’s academic exploration lies Buckminster Fuller’s ideal of the ‘comprehensive designer’, a master builder who follows Renaissance principles and a holistic approach. Fuller referred to this ideal of the designer as someone capable of comprehending the ‘integrateable significance’ of specialised findings and able to coordinate and realise the commonwealth potentials of these discoveries without disappearing into a career of expertise. Like Fuller, we are opportunists in search of new ideas and their benefits via architectural synthesis. We are seeking the new, leveraging technologies, workflows and modes of production seen in disciplines outside our own. Our propositions are ultimately made through the design of buildings and in-depth consideration of structural formation and tectonic. This, coupled with a strong research ethos, generates new, unprecedented and spectacular proposals.
The focus of this year’s work evolved around the concept of ‘constructed futures’. The term aims to describe architecture and, as such, a fundamentally human future as the result of the architect’s highest degree of synthesis of underlying principles. Constructional logic, spatial innovation, typological organisation and environmental and structural performance are all negotiated in a highly iterative process driven by intense architectural investigation. Inspiration for inherent principles of organisational intelligence can be observed in both biotic and abiotic systems, and in all spatial arrangements where it is critical for the overall performance of the developed order. Through a deep understanding of constructional principles, students generated highly developed architectural systems in which spatial organisation arose as a result of sets of mutual interactions.
PG14’s methodology employs both bottom-up and top-down strategies to build sophisticated architectural systems tailored to individual problems. Pivotal to this process is the concept of practical experimentation: in this case, intense exploration through both digital and physical models that aim to assess system performance and its direct application to architectural space. In order to deliver multi-objective architectural propositions, we moved through the year in a precise trajectory, following a design process sequenced with defined milestones that gradually increased in complexity.