unit-code
This year UG7 has attempted to mobilise the tectonic as a connection between architectural design and the wider global project of environmental transformation.
Tectonics are the expression of construction: the connection between what a building literally is – its innate reality as an assembly of things, elements and products – and what it seeks to say about itself. Today the environmental damage caused by the construction industry is generally spatially distanced from buildings themselves. Only through an articulation of its materials and their global manufacture and dependencies can the connection between one and the other be firmly established. The question is not simply how architecture can contribute to necessary shifts in consumption, but also how larger processes of climate mitigation may shape its room for manoeuvre and its scope of possibility.
In term one students worked outwards from an existing built condition; they used the examination of current construction as a jumping-off point for the creation of a new materiality. By understanding how the urban fabric has arisen from global industries and supply chains, students began to propose how such systems might best be recomposed or reformed.
Our field trip was to Munich – a global nexus for contemporary building technology, the host of the world’s largest building fair and a site of emerging techniques and industrial and architectural experimentation. The trip included visits to Frei Otto’s Olympic Park, Hans Döllgast’s Alte Pinakothek and a lecture from Professor Florian Nagler on the work of the Einfach Bauen ‘Simple Building’ research centre at the Technical University of Munich.
After the trip, the unit’s focus shifted to the reintegration of this materiality into the fabric of a changing city. Working in sites around Old Oak Common, a new West London development zone at the intersection of Crossrail and HS2, students developed their material proposals into an exploration of new architectural expression or language.
What should a civic building in an age of ecological transition be like? How can it form a sustainable and humane urban environment? How can an understanding of time and future uncertainty be internalised as a creative and productive force? Using a timeline that stretches between the present day and 2050, the unit has attempted to address these questions from the simplest and most fundamental starting point – the materials at hand.