Time. Scale.
David Bass, Yasar Shah
Unit trip: Prague, Czech Republic. Project site: South Bank, London.
Unit B will work on London's South Bank. Historically, it was an area of entertainment, pleasure and disrepute. Currently, it is on the verge of significant change. Architecture's obligations to multiple time-scales come into sharp focus in this place and at this time.
A flowering of short-life projects on the South Bank respond to a range of today's demands and conditions: leisure, food, diversity and democratisation, fashion, economic hardship, and so on. An unprecedented explosion of large developments and audacious towers simultaneously declare an ambition to eclipse the North. An ecology of time-scales is at work here.
Unit B has frequently worked in places where deep context and historical continuity are put under stress by contemporary events (for example: Thessaloniki, Mahdia, Trieste, and the City of London). This year, we will investigate how various time-scales and different understandings of time influence architecture.
We are also interested in the more conventional notion of scale, and will work at different scales from and between the detail to the urban configuration. Our focus will move from detail and small ensemble in the first term to a building in the second and third terms.
The first project will explore an existing detail of your choice, investigating its characteristics, making, function and context. This detail will then be transformed into a shop, workshop or some other device in the short-life settlement of Gabriel's Wharf.
After the Unit Trip to Prague, you will select a site on the South Bank or in its hinterland, and start work on the major project, which will be based on places for people to live. (Some might call this “housing”. We won't. It will be a richer programmatic response than that word implies). Various workshops, guests, crits, talks, and periods of research into context and precedents will help you find your way into and out of the project. Design is not a simple method or process.
We are interested in the deep culture and context of architecture, and in its expert practise. We do not teach a method. We (and you) should rely on your curiosity and motivation to learn how to think and how to respond as a skilled and knowledgeable designer. These are ultimately skills to help you survive.
Unit trip: Prague, Czech Republic. Project site: South Bank, London.
We are interested in the deep culture and context of architecture, and in its expert practise. We do not teach a method. We (and you) should rely on your curiosity and motivation to learn how to think and how to respond as a skilled and knowledgeable designer. These are ultimately skills to help you survive.
