unit-code
This year UG6 explored the notion of calibration and pursued our interest in the latent qualities of London’s intermediate space, between rural and urban landscapes. We considered our architectures as ‘tuning instruments’ – responsive constructs that ask questions of our environment rather than seek to impose answers upon them. As such, our approaches were necessarily experimental, constructing the means to provoke and listen, suggest and adjust, posit and mutate, as we perpetually rediscovered the questions we asked. We also considered their relationship to the broader ecology of our site of Rainham and Wennington Marshes, just off the Thames Estuary. This held us throughout the year in the captivity and productivity of the uncertain as we created worlds that calibrated from, and towards, multiple origins.
We began the year by dissecting the site. To do so we built digital and physical instruments that aimed to reveal, accentuate and measure a site phenomenon. As we delved through layers of history, geology and environmental change, we repeatedly tested and refined both instruments and methods. Our instruments developed a specificity and precision that stored and produced knowledge through speculative interjection, experimenting with local materials and sensitive recording.
In the building project, our term one instruments were translated and developed into building proposals that adopted equally innovative, local and experimental construction methods and material choices for a range of diverse communities. While each project addresses its own specific context, they share a common ground in acknowledging the open-ended nature of something in the act of calibrating. Such a state is receptive and responsive to change and imaginative opportunities, pointing towards a more diverse and pluralistic built environment.
Our field trip this year was to Copenhagen and Aarhus. In these cities we shared, discussed and learned about the intersections of our research with the Aarhus School of Architecture, the Royal Danish Academy (CITA and Architecture and Extreme Environments) and the Danish architecture practice Vandkunsten.