What makes a city resilient? After the Great Fire (1666), London saw rapid rebuilding using more durable materials and improved urban planning with much of the city restored within a decade. Japan’s resilience stems from its deep-seated disaster preparedness culture, advanced infrastructure, effective early warning systems, and community-level engagement in disaster risk reduction. If we look to more speculative examples, Archigram’s Plug-In City (1963-1966) embraced the rapidly changing urban environments in the post-war decade, while Buckminster Fuller and Soji Sadao’s Dome Over Manhattan (1960) questioned issues of energy consumption and resource allocation. Kiyonaru Kikutake’s Marine City (1958) challenged Japan’s limited land concerns, while Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway (1967-1972) hoped that transportation routes could bind rather than divide communities. Architectural speculations have often been provocations and optimistic visions to large scale urban challenges, and as Professor CJ Lim notes, “the resilience movement has important roles to play… in developing revolutionary new spatial programs and systems fit for the challenges of the 21st century.” This year, unit 10 revisits, rediscovers, and redefines resilience through poetic, predictive, and spatial speculations:
The work aims to embody wonder, intrigue and delight, whilst being equally as brave, speculative and ambitious as the resilient starting points used to inspire each individual’s proposals. Be daring, be delirious, welcome to the poetics of a resilient city.
Eric Wong
The MArch Architecture is a two-year full-time or three-year part-time programme offering exemption from ARB/RIBA Part 2. It combines rigorous professional training with creative and speculative design exploration. In the first year, students join a themed design unit to undertake a creative building design project combined with a technical and professional report. In the second year, students pursue a comprehensive speculative architectural design project, and an in-depth theoretical thesis tailored to their personal interest. The programme fosters independent thinking, innovation, theoretical and technical excellence, preparing graduates for advanced architectural practice and ongoing professional development in a dynamic global context. See further details on our prospectus page.
