Diploma 11. Outline and brief timeline 2010/11. Radical  Remodelling  As  we  stand  at  the  brink  of  the  economical  abyss,  transport  development  and  speculative  commercial  housing  continue  to  drive  urban  regeneration.  While  property  values  stumble,  construction  generally  proceeds  at  a  rapid  pace,  in  an  effort  to  complete  images  of  cities  based  on  masterplans  that  are  far  removed  from  reality.  But  when  the  construction  process  stumbles,  empty  volumes  of  buildings  emerge,  revealing  textural  details  beneath  the  urban  fabric.  These  show  us  the  city  as  a  history  of  architectural  erasure  rather  than  growth.  It  seems  that  this  incompleteness,  often  accidentally,  creates  the  most  successful  public  spaces  and  architecture  of  our  city  today.  Could  we  take  this  phenomenon  further  and  improve  the  city  by  making  it  even  more  beautifully  incomplete?  Could  we  remodel  the  city  by  taking  apart  its  rigid  structure  and  colliding  different  objects  and  programmes,  old  and  new,  small  and  large,  temporary  and  permanent,  until  the  city  functions  as  a  collective  expression  of  life?    Diploma  11  continues  to  be  fascinated  by  the  pattern  of  urban  change  at  the  peripheries  of  London.  For  us  these  areas  are  post-­‐infrastructural  cities  emerging  within  a  city  –  micro-­‐cities.  Our  approach  is  empirical.  Our  fieldwork  is  based  on  direct  observation  and  sampling  as  we  reread  and  redraw  taxonomies  of  the  urban  field.  Our  experimentation  consists  of  making  and  un-­‐making  physical  models  of  the  city,  randomly  combining  them  to  speculate  on  new  forms  of  urban  architecture  beyond  the  given  context.  Our  design  objective  is  to  make  familiar  objects  unfamiliar.  At  the  southeast  corner  of  Royal  Albert  Dock  lies  a  small  community  trapped  between  City  Airport  and  the  Thames  Gateway.  Cross  Rail  and  commercial  development  are  leaping  in  from  the  west.  The  DLR  extension  across  the  Thames  is  underway  from  the  south.  On  the  east  side  the  former  Beckton  Gas  Works,  the  site  for  the  Thames  Gateway  Bridge,  has  now  been  abandoned.  Silvertown  East  was  bombed  in  1940  during  the  Second  World  War  and  was  further  demolished  in  1987  by  Stanley  Kubrick  during  the  shooting  of  Full  Metal  Jacket.  A  ferry  terminal  and  its  forgotten  foot  tunnel,  the  Thames  Barrier,  a  sugar  refinery,  a  rubber  factory,  a  forest  of  BT  satellites,  rows  of  terrace  housing,  pubs,  churches,  schools  and  North  Woolwich  Station  all  have  uncertain  futures.  The  design  brief  this  year  explores  the  remodelling  of  Silvertown  utilizing  the  area’s  voids  through  the  recycling  of  its  architecture.  We  will  speculate  on  alternative  service  facilities  for  this  small  piece  of  the  city  that  appears  to  be  trapped  between  trains,  ships,  lorries  and  airplanes.A city strip bare.   Unit 11 has been preoccupied with developing architectural design strategies for the post-infrastructural landscape learning from the ‘inner-periphery’ of London. The unit will continue to learn from the current city topology. We will explore the city’s potentiality of generating responsive urban components and urban environmental unit that responds to the notion of social sustainability. Our tectonic explorations will speculate new composite structures and material organizations that challenge the notion of permanent and temporality, dynamic and static, transformative and accumulative components. Borrowing the notion of reversal urban engineering we will un-make the architecture of the city. Material studies will be made in non-scale, 1:5 and 1:20 detail components, developing a new vocabulary of forming structures as well as textural expressions, mixing digital analysis and usage of inherent material qualities with combined methods of fabrication.

Supplementary investigations this year including: Tokyo workshop on Void Metabolism with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Professor Shigeru Aoki, material experiments at Hooke Park, Revisiting Collage City, Shrinking city with Prof. Grahame Shane and Revisiting Modernism ; The Sainte Marie de La Tourette with Seminars on Fragmentation with Peter Carl. That which we wish to design may represent a spatial anthology of exceptions inherent within the city. Term 1 Sampling textual details and Re-modelling the city. Objective of this initial phase is to analyze and represent London’s periphery by identifying the complexity of existing service infrastructures. We use composite scale and time base methods to uncover textural details of its sedimentary landscape. We will experiment by combining various excess material production, sub-systems, and gap space and other unresolved details of the city to speculate various unit of urban environment. The field works will begin by sampling of the city details seeing from the point of view of post-industrial / infrastructural context, with layers of existing patterns of material circulation inside the transitory urban condition, There are two types of studies one; field study (urban periphery seen from 3 different scales). Later part of the project intends to experiment by translating these studies into various forms of models in four scales (1:1000, 1:20, 1:1 and Non-scale). Week 1 Project introduction Short exercise: Dismantling Machines in Silvertown. We will survey a series of chose buildings from Silvertown. Making models and drawings and speculate creative forms of Dismantling them. Week 2,3 Contextual field works. City as Taxonomy, read from its details. Sampling textual details from chosen context in three different scales. 1:1000, 1:10 and 1:1 scale. Urban Resource Catalogues of Silvertown . Week 4 Drawing workshop on composite drawings, details and configurations, time sequences and patterns: architectural scale. : city scale. Non-scale models. Week 5 Seminar 1; Silvertown Study Seminar with Hugo Hinsley/ Housing an Urbanism. Seminar 2: Joint session with Design For London, Silvertown Project Team. Week 6 Seminar 3; Shrinking City and Post Collage City with Prof. Grahame Shane. Pin-up: Silver Town Samplings and individual collage proposal (Remodelling Silvertown). Week 7 Revisiting modernist projects and their urban topologies.

Topological analysis of their building types and related fabrication industries. Exemplary buildings visits The Sainte Marie de La Tourette (week 7) Week 8. Seminar 4; On Fragmentation with Peter Carl.(week 8) Pin-up session. Week 9. Weekend Fabrication workshop at the Hooke Park. Non-scale architectural models. Week 9 Models of urban appliance in multiple scales. Followed by Collage workshop. Week 10 Tutorials. Week 11 End of Term Jury. Week 12 Unit Field Trip during the winter break (date will be informed). Urban Sampling Workshops in the central Tokyo. Workshop 1; Void Metabolism with Yoshiharu Tsumakoto (Tokyo Institute of Technology). Workshop 2: On f2 site. Recycling Concrete Buildings with Professor Shigeru Aoki. Term 2 Design research by making. material experiments at the Hooke Park and the AA workshop. The project at this stage, require individual agenda for conducting research and analysis, experiments working with chosen materials and fabrication principles informed by the model proposals for detail components, Project should propose to modulate operational and spatial variations; analysis and experiments will require documentations not only of its fabrication procedures but also wider technical context in response to the reality of the urban dynamics in the wider notion of the sustainability as means to maintain cultural tolerance. Week 1 Submissions Hand in. Technical Study thesis Pin-up session. Week 2 Design thesis of material study proposals: articulate individual objectives on material experimentations in relationship to design synopsis. Week 3-4 Hooke park session 2. Material research by fabrication.

Week 5 Contextualization of models of urban components in to multiple scales. Speculative scenarios and constructed situations along the existing timeline of Silvertown site. Week 6 Interim jury. Seminars: pin-up presentations of individual design thesis project agendas. Tutorials. Week 7-8 Hooke park session 2 (detail fabrication). Silvertown Remodelling design thesis research. Week 9. TS. Intrum Jury. Week 10. 4th Year Review. Week 11. 5th Year Review. Term 3 Final proposals should attempt to demonstrate creative interpretations of complex forces predominant on the working landscape of chosen area in Silvertown and speculate architectural artefacts responsive to the transitional aspect of post-infrastructural urban spaces. Week 1 TS. Hand in. Portfolio jury session to discuss structures of individual portfolios. Week 2 Tutorials. Week 3 Tutorials. Week 5 Final jury. Tutorials. Week 6 Tutorials. Week 7. 4th Year End of Year Review. Week 8 Diploma Committee. Week 9 External Examiners.