unit-code
(dis)Continuity:
In recent times, through pandemics and economic and social change, we have depended on systems of measurement and feedback to maintain a sense of continuity – keeping economies and society operating in the face of instability. Architecture both adapts to and resists these dynamic forces. Architects find themselves operating within one current system while always imagining and creating future alternatives.
This year UG21 considered continuity and discontinuity. How do we design with multiple systems that overlay, combine or break? Can architecture sustain and also rebel?
Throughout the year students were asked to develop their own
design process using analogue or digital techniques, physical making, drawing and digital methods. Through their personal research, students identified combinations of continuous and discontinuous systems. These included explorations of time, materiality, data and perception. Areas of research were wide and diverse. We encouraged students to draw on personal interests, obsessions or topical subjects to narrow their focus. We celebrate the juxtaposition of a personal approach which might be intuitive and/or highly subjective against data or science that is objective or shared knowledge.
‘Florence is like a town that has survived itself.’
William Hazlitt, 1826
Our field trip this year took place in Florence, Italy, the iconic city of the Renaissance and home to scientific, financial and artistic revolutions. Historically Florence created a great discontinuity in thinking and ideas, but is now a city that is highly preserved and resistant to change. From the 13th century to the early 16th century, one bold experiment in the arts and sciences succeeded another: artists were thinkers and painters were mathematicians. Leonardo da Vinci had a plan for diverting the River Arno and Michelangelo imagined how a mountain could be turned into a piece of sculpture (Eve Borsook, 1981). After the dramatic flooding of Florence in 1966, the city incubated a series of radical design groups including the 9999, UFO, Archizoom Associati and Superstudio. They designed discos, guerrilla inflatables, jumpsuits and cities with continuous flows of information such as the No-Stop City and The Continuous Monument.