“To change is to lose identity; yet to change is to be alive.”
Stewart Brand, ‘How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built’
This year we explored architecture as an experimental practice to aim designing buildings and environments that can be adaptable through change. Time and duration are often overlooked in design due to the difficulty of predicting the future of the lifetime of buildings. This creates the interesting challenge of trying to predict patterns of inhabitation and how a building might respond to environmental conditions in the future, to be able to stay relevant and future-proof – and these predictions may be wrong to some extent. We challenged the notion of buildings as fixed and finished constructions and instead we imagined architectures that are in flux and explored how these can not only be built but also be maintained, repaired, adapted, weathered, decayed, reused or demolished after they are built. The sites were in Bow Creek where we studied the transformations of the area over the years as well as the current ecologies of the creek and tidal river.
The projects were developed in three phases:
• Phase 1: An introductory project to define the research methods and an initial design language.
• Phase 2: The lessons from the introductory project were translated into a site-specific experimental building fragment.
• Phase 3: The experimental building fragment was grown into a larger architectural proposal with a specific timeframe exploring and developing further research themes, narrative and design drivers from the earlier work.
Yorgos Loizos
Jenna de Leon, Samiur Rahman, Matthew Stewart, Pascal Bronner, Ned Scott, Ifi Liangi, Dejan Mrdja,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.
