unit-code
UG8 welcomes curious students interested in prototyping. We work between the drawn, the made and the moving image to develop innovative architectural strategies that address the environmental challenges of our time.
This year the unit explored the architecture of sightseeing and sight making, reimagining the experiences of tomorrow’s tourist. We asked ourselves how much travel was ever really needed, and considered the different experiences we might construct now we are able to travel again. In doing so we addressed questions of architectural identity, authenticity, permanence and mobility, the provenance of materials and the skills and people that build.
Three ideas framed our thinking. Are we destined for surrogate tourism, simulated travels to another place (or time)? Or might we creatively rethink destination tourism, conjuring sustainable experiences capable of drawing footfall away from ravaged historical sites and sublime landscapes? Or are consumerist models of travel inappropriate in an age of climate catastrophe; should we instead embrace slow tourism?
The first design project of the year provided an immersion in craft and experimentation, training tactile and digital dexterity. Personal research agendas were established in response to the brief, using the concepts of surrogate, destination and slow tourism as a springboard. These methodologies informed and evolved into the building projects that followed.
Travelling from Rome to Venice, via Florence and Verona, our field trip was a journey between lesser-known experimental architectures and major cultural landmarks, finding sites for the building projects along the way. We visited Michelucci’s prototypical Autostrada, the churches of Borromini and the vast marble quarries of Carrara. Immersing ourselves in the work of Scarpa, we travelled across the north of Italy to explore Castelvecchio, Brion Cemetery, the Canova Museum, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia and the Olivetti Showroom.
The building projects are located in constrained urban sites in central Rome. Projects include a ‘dead letter’ postal museum that takes visitors on journeys to faraway places, derived from the contents of lost post; a gravitationally disobedient performing arts centre, counterbalanced by the old Aurelian city wall; and a reinterpretation of the Roman columbarium, an experiment in cyclopean stone construction and ‘impossible casting’ techniques that considers the journey from one life to the next. In our work we learned the value of moving between the analogue and the digital, the spatial and the psychological, and the remote and the real, both up close and at a distance.