2012 - 2013

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John Pendelbury

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Introduction

When we embarked on restructuring our Part II offerings into an MArch course, our goal was to provide students a supportive environment to pursue their own self-initiated research and design agendas by combining a broad latitude for explo-ration with opportunities for frequent and personal-ized feedback. To this end, we consolidated the coverage of almost all RIBA criteria within design studios where matters such as arts, history, urban context, cultural heritage, technology, materials and construction, sustainability would be seen as integral parts of the design process rather than streamed in parallel modules. We structured the first two semesters as two mini-thesis projects where the students propose their own briefs within a well-defined thematic framework. Throughout the year, a range of lectures, study visits, readings, specially designed exercises, presentations, ex-hibitions, and symposia complement the learning process. The first of these thematic projects em-phasizes the urban fabric and students investigate the socio-spatial dynamics of cities, the relation-ships between buildings and the spaces between them, and urban transformation processes (such as gentrification, ghettoization, regeneration etc). The second semester zooms down to the scale of the individual building, with a sharp focus on the significance of detail design, appreciation of technology and understanding of the spatial narra-tives embedded in every structure. These projects also offer students the chance to think about the design process as a method of developing critical responses to the pressing issues they have identi-fied—that is, a thesis—from the outset.

This year our Master of Architecture Programme (Part II) will see its first students graduate. We could not have asked for better partners in the process—our first cohort of students have thrown themselves into the challenges with passion, worked with us as we dealt with the kinks of a new system, engaged us in discussions and made the school a buzzing hub of activity. Their work has been varied and engaging, they have, in addition to a range of interesting design projects, partici-pated in linked research projects and produced dissertations that have enriched the school’s

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Graham Farmer

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One of the most unfortunate additions to the vocabulary of architectural education in recent years has been the term; unique selling point or USP. A recent RIBA visiting board to the school insisted that we establish and articulate (in a lim-ited number of words) what the school stands for and what differentiates it from the growing number of architecture courses in the UK. This necessity to have a distinctive ‘offer’ also mirrors a wider concern within Higher Education for the market-ing and marketability of courses and connects to an institutional context in which even the slightest annual fluctuations in application numbers, survey ratings or league table position can either verify or bring into question the value of your ‘product’. Fortunately, when viewed through these particular lenses the architecture programmes at Newcastle continue to go from strength to strength. We have seen significant increases in student satisfaction ratings and our application numbers have risen again this year - bucking the national trend. Re-cently published league tables cement our place within the top 5 of Architecture Schools and we are now the highest ranked school for graduate employment in the UK. Add to that the impressive and continued success of our students in local, national and international design competitions and we have much to celebrate.

However, it is also important to acknowledge that such recognition can be fleeting and if you focus too much on it you risk neglecting the deeper character and attributes that really do make the school unique and which provide the strong foun-dation for our continued success. These enduring qualities cannot be captured in a sentence or two and to understand them you certainly have to delve further into the background and culture of the school. Over the course of the past two years I have become much more conscious of the history of the school and in particular the important role it has played in the trajectory of modern archi-tecture in the UK, both regionally and nationally. Architectural education at Newcastle dates back almost 100 years and developed out of Fine Art in the 1920s and expanding rapidly through the 1930s to establish itself as an academic discipline

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by its lack of a single identity or through its ability to resist being defined in any singular way. Pas-more once famously described the pavilion as a ‘free and anony-mous’ monument, and by this he meant that it belonged to every-one and anyone who used it and they would in turn bring their own particular function, use or mean-ing. It could be argued that the very generosity of this gesture - of not wishing to narrowly define or impose a predefined meaning onto the structure is the aspect of the work that will both continue to provoke, but that will also sustain it into the future. Perhaps this is a lesson for every school of architecture.

in its own right. From its earliest foundations the pedagogical outlook of the School has always extended beyond a narrow focus on design and formal concerns to encompass an ethical outlook and a wider social concern for the conditions in which people live.

The city and region with its particular social, industrial and landscape context has always been fundamental to the work of the school and this remains the case to this day.

I recently had the opportunity to work on several research and teaching projects connected with Victor Pasmore’s Apollo pavilion, an iconic piece of brutalist public art located in the new town of Peterlee. In many ways the his-tory of the pavilion mirrors that of the school and it encompasses a rich and fascinating story that includes (amongst many others), Peterlee’s first master planner; Berthold Lubetkin and numerous graduates of the school includ-ing Gordon Ryder, who went on to work with Lubetkin and later founded the practice Ryder and Yates. Ryder himself lodged with Peter Smithson as a student at the university and went on to teach Alison Gill, who later be-came Smithson’s wife. Together they coined the term brutalism in 1953, and set in motion an im-portant but often misunderstood contribution to architecture that is still recognised internationally. A year later in 1954, Victor Pasmore joined the university as Master of Painting and together with Rich-ard Hamilton contributed to fun-damentally reshaping arts-based education in the UK through the establishment of Basic Design training that itself was rooted in the philosophy of the Bauhaus. During this period Newcastle

University was at the very centre of pedagogical innovation in the Arts and Architecture, a legacy that still remains.

The pavilion itself is an innova-tive structure that blurs the boundaries between art and architecture and was the result of Pasmore’s involvement as a landscape consultant at Peterlee during the 1960s. Completed in 1970 the concrete pavilion has always been controversial, and has been under threat of demolition for much of its life. For a period it was vandalised, poorly maintained and became the setting for serious anti-social behaviour. However, it is recently restored and in December 2011 it was granted Grade II* listing, effectively securing its longterm future. The impetus for creating a positive future for the pavilion was generated locally and can be largely attributed to the suc-cessful campaign work carried out by local groups including the Apollo Pavilion Community Association who had the vision to recognise and celebrate the wider importance of the pavilion beyond the immediate and all too visible problems of its dirty and spalling concrete forms. Crucially, they understood the intangible values embodied in the pavilion both as a culmina-tion of an ambitious collabora-tion between artist and architect and as a monument embodying progressive values, as part of the post-war period in which architects strove to create better living environments for all.

In a contemporary world fasci-nated by product and branding, perhaps the pavilion has much to teach those who seek to market Higher Education. It could be argued that the positive future of the pavilion has been secured

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Matthew Margetts

charrettes

The charrettes will be run by variety of tutors including successful design practitioners from all over the U.K.

Each charrette will be made up of students from the BA, MArch, MAUD and DigiArch. Most charrettes will have approx. 40 students.

Students will be assigned groups automatically The week will end with an exhibition and celebratory drinks. All work will be collated for a published book and form a chapter in the year book

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A democratic and collaborative exploration into why people matter to architecture.

We will investigate the interstitial, examine the undergarment of the city and listen to the walls and doorways. Places reek with the living in them and the traces of spent lives. We will find a tool or device for listening to the stories that soak the air like a history mist.

Once the device has been established the team, like early Victorian detectives, will hunt out and retell these stories; unfold a network, a lattice, a pattern, a connected and collective understanding of the city. The job then will be to establish a game, a route or a telling, a performance, a construct or a poetry.

Product It might be an Almanac, a collection, a mapping or a bibliography. It will be rich and enduring as an oral legacy and an invitation to enjoy seeing and listening to the city today.

Key themes:

collaboration, the interstitial, narrative.

The History of Space

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Tim Bailey (xsite architecture)

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The Charrette team will be given a large empty space to create a mixed media machine/installation that triggers a series of inventive chain reactions to perform a simple outcome or task.This charrette aims to encourage all the aspects of the design process that are crucial to a successful project in a fun, stimulating, and inclusive way.

The Charrette team would be split into 10 groups and each group given an allocated area within a studio in which to create chain reactions which would then form part of the large ‘machine’ installation. Careful consideration will have to be given to the connecting elements between each group.

This will be an intensive, stimulating and rewarding project (if the machine works!) Social is also to be included within the programme.

Product: Machine/ installation

Key themes: machines, problem solving, mixed media

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Daniel Kerr (MawsonKerr Architects)

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The university has a world class reputation has a place of learning and research. Visiting the university campus, it is difficult to see, appreciate or even believe the wealth of amazing discoveries, inventions and learned academic activity.

You are asked to conceive and develop a piece of full scale work that will be viewed and experienced as a monument/ folly to one or more of the discoveries, inventions or significant developments made at the university during it’s history.

It will be a temporary addition to the built environment, it may be usable, havemore than one function, encourage certain activities or be intended to be merelyviewed.

Product: Full scale interventions

Key themes: uncelebrated, forgotten, lost….ideas, discoveries and inventions.

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Colin Ross

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The Charrette will commence a year-long programme of activity in which the school will be working with Kielder Art & Architecture on a design and construction project that will aim to increase public engagement, participation, and understanding of contemporary architectural practice.

‘Testing Ground’ will allow a wide range of mutually beneficial opportunities to be explored, including connections between education and research, thinking and making, and public outreach and engagement. These interconnected aspects of the project have the potential to lead to significant and influential architectural outcomes that will be demonstrated through the ‘live’ construction of a pavilion and related programme of events at Kielder during 2013.

The design challenge of the Testing Ground Charette is to generate a range of initial ideas that will respond to the existing built structures of Kielder as well as its landscape qualities and ecological context. Students will work in mixed-stage groups to propose an appropriate architectural, tectonic and material response to the Kielder context and to generate a resource base of design, construction and material ideas that can be taken forward to subsequent phases of the project.

Product: Design proposals

Key themes: education, engagement, construction

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Graham Farmer (Director of Architecture)

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The city lives and works in the eyes of cameras. It sleeps under the watchful gaze of closed-circuit television. You live in a city of surveillance. It’s time to turn the cameras back on themselves and turn eyes back to you. You live in the city. You live here.

How does twenty-four hours pass in this urban environment? What stories, what acts, what loves and hates, what crimes, fears, excitements and boredoms are played out around one rotation of the earth on its axis? You’ll find out. You’ll record: a series of stories composed of life in the city. An opera of opportunities, disappointments, meetings, chance encounters.

Eat.Shop.Drink.Dance.Drive.Write.Think.Draw.Sleep.Love.Smile.Cry.Laugh.Walk.Run.Record.

We’ll take precedent from the ground-breaking 24hrs Berlin, produced for German television channel Arte, and we’ll grow the idea from there. You’ll live your lives, and you’ll record the events of your twenty-four hours in this city new, city old, city lived and city yet to be experienced.

Product:Recordings

Key themes: time, record, film

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Ed Wainwright (Publish Architecture)

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As we chart the relatively un-known waters of the new (or at least different) higher educational world in which we find ourselves, the good ship BA Architecture appears to have enjoyed a year of stability - the number of new students joining the programme has increased slightly, the per-formance of students throughout the programme remains high, our students have enjoyed suc-cess in a number of high-profile awards and competitions, and the number of graduates gaining placements in both work and educational contexts has been encouraging.

It would be tempting to sug-gest that the continuity of our “outputs” simply reflects the continuity and stability of the “inputs”; of staff, tutors, project themes, module content and the like. Whilst this is undoubtedly true to an extent - and this is the ideal point to express my thanks to everyone involved in making

the BA so successful - there are many areas and avenues within Architecture and within our programme where risk and un-certainty, far from simply existing, must always be encouraged.

Regardless of the extent of the change that the on-going BA Review ultimately brings about, I hope that the BA Architecture Programme will keep one eye firmly fixed on the prize of stabil-ity and continuity, but in doing so, never shrink back from testing, innovating, and from a healthy dose of risk-taking and uncer-tainty – all of which, I trust, are in evidence on the following pages.

Simon HackerDegree Programme Director

BA degree

Looking up Dog Leap Stairs - Photograph by Chris Perriman

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Martin Beattie

stage 1

Stage one is a varied introduc-tion to architecture, characterised by numerous workshops, visits and hands-on activities and students respond to it with great energy. In the first week of term students begin by taking part in a number of intense design charettes with all students from across the School. Their first designs were for small spaces of refuge and shelter in rural settings, where scale, function, materiality and the construction of space were explored primarily through modelmaking. Addition-al hands-on projects developed structural understanding and measured drawing skills and made use of buildings – historic and contemporary - in Newcastle and its surroundings, with visits to Holy Island, Escomb and to Durham. Theory, history and technology are taught through lectures, seminars and group work and are also integrated into

the design teaching.In semester two students move to the city to embark upon a longer design project that demands more complex three dimensional manipulation and emphasises the experience and qualities of space. Artist-led workshops allow the testing of al-ternative ways of exploring form, drawing and space - and intro-duce a process-driven approach to design. A final semester two project for a piece of set design primes students in the use of digital tools, before students bring together the great range of work they have undertaken for the portfolio.

Drawing on the Dog Leap Steps

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Kati Blom

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As part of induction week new students accom-panied by artists and design tutors visit parts of the city with their sketchbooks to experiment with the use of various drawing media including pen-cils, pastels, charcoal and graphite. After wandering and drawing in different loca-tions, students finally find a destination in town -churches, markets, galleries, old city walls- and start to draw using A1 paper and a drawing board. The idea is to get a taste of the way ar-chitects look at the environment, but also to get students to do something they have never done before; use A1 paper on a drawing board and sketch with charcoal or graphite. It is meant to be a pleasant and memorable occasion and gives them opportunity to familiarise themselves with the city and each other, as well as the way the first year is run in collaboration with artists. This city sketching exercise is part of a profes-sional studies module, which introduces them to different visual media. Later on during the autumn semester students visited Lindisfarne island and castle making a presentation using analogical media.

Ruta Bertaunskyte

Yee Ching Chew

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The first project is a simple one roomed single-storey beach hut. This is a place to make day vis-its to the beach, a room of one’s own with a view of the sea. Students were asked to pose creative and conceptual ways of living, which were re-flected in their beach hut designs. The beach hut is a place for daydreams and this project hope-fully captures some of the dreams that first year students may have had about architecture.

The site is on the North East coast of England, next to a long strip of golden sand which runs north-south. The hut’s internal dimensions are 2.5 x 3 metres, and it forms part of a row. Natural-ly, it will have a floor, walls, and roof to give shel-ter from the elements, a door to get into the hut, and openings in the walls and/or roof, to let light in and see out. Students were asked to develop their schemes largely in model form. The final re-view was student led, with students choosing the best schemes for a final selected exhibition.

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Martin Beattie

project 01

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Robert Douglas

Philippa Skingsley

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The second project is a small summer cabin plus artists’ studio of 40 m². It is a place for one person to stay for short intervals throughout the year. Basic provision is made for sleeping, cook-ing, relaxing, studying, and creating art. There is no electricity and vehicular access to the building is not possible. The experience is one of living simply in nature and in isolation and it might be a chance to question conventional modes of living.

The site is located on the southern edge of a promontory of land, forested with Scots Pine, called the Belling, in Kielder Forest. It is a site where the sound of wind in the trees and water lapping on the beach are prominent. Sunlight, wind, proximity to shelter, trees, ground condi-tions, topography, paths, aspect, outlook and surveillance were crucial aspects which students were asked to consider. However we were also looking for a more conceptual and poetic re-sponse to both site and programme. Students were asked to develop their schemes through sketchbooks, models and weekly theory read-ings.

Martin Beattie

project 02

Matthew WreglesworthBryony Simcox

Matthew Wreglesworth

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Armelle Tarvideau

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Urban Delights is about Drawing, Cooking, Cast-ing, Eating, Mapping, Film screening, Modelling, Photographing (01_Photography workshop) and Drawing again.

The Urban Delights project aims to engage stu-dents with 1:1 scale by first designing and deliv-ering a feast in which both food and cast dishes (02_Curry group cast), vessels or food stand are staged for palatal and visual enjoyment and where the spatial and lighting environment re-lated to each food group is carefully considered. The food groups included Tapas, Wrap, Cous-cous, Noodles, Bakery, Pastry, Sushi and Curry (03_Noodles group feast).

The second part of the project focused on the urban fabric of the Quay Side area of Newcas-tle. Students mapped food related spaces and venues (from pubs to fashionable cafés/ restau-rants and temporary food kitchens) and recorded unexpected (04_Unexpected urban space) and potential urban spaces for the now well estab-lished EAT Festival of Newcastle Gateshead to take place at the end of summer. They also drew inspiration from various films where food was at the core of the plot (05_Film scene).

The final part of the project is dedicated to the design of a cookery school located on a topo-graphically challenging site adjacent to Black Gate. Particularly emphasis is drawn to the se-quences of spaces, the cooking and eating spaces are often drawn from the feast experi-ence, whether nesting, stacking or spreading across the site (06_ Model).

Guest lecturers: Tim Townshend, Jane Midgley, Simon Hacker, Simon Preston and Carol Bell (Eat Festival). Artists supporting drawing, casting and photography: Andrea Toth, Charlotte Powell, Keri Townsend, Tracey Tofield, Damien Wootten and Tara Stewart. Design tutors: Katie Lloyd Thomas, Di Leitch, Bill Tavernor, Tony Watson, Sophia Banou, Ed Wainright, Montse Ferres and Louise Squires, James Longfield Stage 6 students sup-port: John Beattie, Janice Chen, Suzanne Croft, Nikoletta Karastathi, Imogen Lees, Matt Lippiatt, April Murray, Stuart Taylor and Annabel Ward. project 03

Noodles Group Feast

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Preena Mistry John Harvey

Sarah Topley

Photography workshop

Curry Group

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As part of induction week new students accompanied by artists and design tutors visit parts of the city with their sketchbooks to experiment with the use of various drawing media including pencils, pastels, charcoal and graphite.

After wandering and drawing in different locations, students finally find a destination in town -churches, markets, galleries, old city walls- and start to draw using A1 paper and a drawing board. The idea is to get a taste of the way architects look at the environment, but also to get students to do something they have never done before; use A1 paper on a drawing board and sketch with charcoal or graphite. It is meant to be a pleasant and memorable occasion and gives them opportunity to familiarise themselves with the city and each other, as well as the way the first year is run in collaboration with artists.

This city sketching exercise is part of a professional studies module, which introduces them to different visual media.

Martyn Dade-Robertson

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Alexander Minney

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Richard Dunn

Ole Petter Steen

Bernita Tao Wan Zhen

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Simon HackerStage 2 Coordinator

stage 2

Teaching in Stage 2 is something of a treat.

It’s analogous to watching trees come into leaf – admittedly for much of the time you don’t notice anything that spectacular, but then there are rare days when, if you look closely enough, you can witness individual students and their designs growing in front of your eyes.

Of course, some students become frustrated with what they consider to be a lack of architec-tural growth and development, but at this time of year, when they revisit their entire year’s work and curate it for their portfolios, for most, the cumulative change and development that has taken place across the year is undeni-able.

Of course (hopefully) the analogy falls down when we consider the role of those who lecture and teach. A tree will tend to leaf

regardless of the care and at-tention lavished on it, and whilst some students will inevitably progress with relatively little di-rect input from the staff, for some the right lecture or tutorial can certainly contribute to the tree coming into leaf a little quicker. Perhaps, ultimately, even to it growing a little stronger.

So, thanks to all the teaching staff (keep tending), and thanks to all the trees (keep growing). I hope you enjoy the follow-ing, very edited, collection of leaves…

Darren Harmon

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project 01

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The project, envisaged as a primer for the subsequent ‘Simplicity, Economy, Home’ project later in the Semester, focuses on the spatial and volumetric planning and design of small row house. Students are asked to generate, test and declare a range of possible alterna-tives within a given, fixed volume. The very tight physical parameters of the project brief prevents students from resorting to the lazy solution of simply making the design a little bigger – rather, in order to ‘place’ one requirement of the brief, it necessitates ‘displacing’ another.

The primary focus of the project is on the understanding of the principles of ergonom-ics, although the project also asks students to consider the varying degrees of privacy required in a home and the thresholds that might define these, together with an appreciation of natural daylight and sunlight within small scale spaces.

The overall aim of the project is to familiarise students with the creation of good, liveable homes within relatively modest means.

Project Tutors: James Craig, Simon Hacker, Dan Kerr, Di Leitch, Astrid Lund, Tony Watson, Jenny Webb, Kate Wilson

Simon Hacker Ningxin Ye

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William Whiteaway

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Richard Morrison

Annabel MacLeod Katie-Rose Hay

Shaobo Wu

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Bill Tavernor

project 02

Building on the previous project, ‘Simplicity, Economy, Home’ asks students to expand the realm of the private beyond the single cellular home to include aspects of shared and col-lective living. A small Foyer scheme, to house eight vulnerable youngsters forms the core of the brief, with a workshop and training provision alongside.

Besides immediately requiring the students to translate themselves into the particular and often ‘different’ needs of others, of their clients, the project necessitates them analysing and choos-ing between two very different sites. Throughout the project the boundaries between what is rightfully private and the public realm are exam-ined, determined and re-assessed. This takes place within two over-arching requirements of the brief; one highly pragmatic – to employ a simple, affordable constructional solution; and the second almost impossibly idealistic – to provide something that many of the clients will never have had, a home.

Project Tutors: James Craig, Simon Hacker, Dan Kerr, Di Leitch, Astrid Lund, Bill Tavernor, Tony Watson, Jenny Webb

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Gabriel Niculcea

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Emilia Kalyvides

Mariya Lapteva

Gabriel Niculcea

Mariya Lapteva

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The settlement of Tynemouth, characterised by its wide and largely intact medieval Front Street, provides the location for the major Semester 2 project. Students choose one of three medium-scale public building typologies – a Moot (small Town) Hall, an Outward Bound Centre or a Literary Co-op – and mix and match these with four suggested sites. Whilst the emphasis inevi-tably changes from that of the private and the personal, to that of the public and the collective, students encounter many of the same themes introduced in the earlier projects.

Associated lectures and tutorials concentrate initially on what makes public space ‘public’, and what the implications for architects and designers are in this regard. They go on develop thoughts around urban movement and routes - how buildings and spaces announce them-selves and the role they play in the townscape - and then develop this to consider the way in which individual buildings can be structured in similar ways. In addition, there is a conversa-tion throughout the project concerning various environmental and technological issues – with a view to integrating elements of the on-going technology lecture module and assessment with the project. Project Tutors: Simon Hacker, Dan Kerr, Di Leitch, Astrid Lund, Bill Tavernor, Tony Watson, Jenny Webb, Kate Wilson

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project 03

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Mariya Lapteva

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Cynthia Wong

Dominic Bareham

Joseph Dent

Sebastian Bowler

Ningxin Ye

Deimante Bazyte

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Simon Hacker

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yThe Section-Alley project was formulated in an attempt to challenge the dominance of plan drawing and thinking amongst architectural scholars and practitioners. The blunt but highly effective teaching approach is to simply ban plan drawings for the duration of the project.

Newcastle’s medieval quayside Chares, or alleys, provide the physical context for the project. Each has it’s own qualities and unique characteristics, but all share the same essential quality – that of being interesting and complex sectionally – their form borne out of the essen-tial function of linking the low-level quayside to the high-level city centre.

Working in groups, students choose and then survey a Chare and produce drawn, modelled and video-based presentations. Employing lightweight and demountable timber construc-tion techniques, they are then asked to design one or more performance-based interventions within their chosen Chare, to help facilitate “Musical Chares” - a hypothetical annual busk-ing festival. Finally, each group was tasked with publicising and promoting their Chares and interventions prior to a final exhibition of the project work.

The project combines collaborative working methods with an insistence on the production of exhibition-standard material throughout its duration. Project Tutors: Dan Kerr, Di Leitch, Astrid Lund, Tony Watson, Jenny Webb, Kate Wilson

project 04

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Daniel Malo

Following the fast paced, high-energy, design charette across all stages and design programs at APL, students first engaged in a short competition project focusing on the relationships be-tween architecture and ecology.

The design of a small structure, located in one of Newcastle’s wildlife corridors, was intended to provide a haven for biodiversity. The project was carried out in collaboration with the Natural History Society of Northumbria with the support of TRADA and the winning schemes will be built for the 2013 British Science Festival hosted in Newcastle.

The second part of the first semester concentrated on the strategic master plan of an abandoned textile estate in Barcelona and the addition of a programmatic provision to one of the buildings addressing reuse and refurbishment at the micro scale. The module culminated

with a choice of five studios offer-ing a wide variety of graduation projects.

Win-win ecologies project, a haven for biodiversity in Heaton Park, by Emma Irene Hall, Wing Laam Sze and Fatima Tayyeb Afzal

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At the end of October 2012, stage 3 took part to a three day-field trip to Barcelona. Described as the City of Marvels by Catalan writer Eduardo Mendoza, Barcelona has reinvented itself over the years. Mendoza’s highly atmospheric novel takes us through the development of the city be-tween the World Fairs hosted in 1888 and 1929, two key moments in history that generated large scale urban transformations. This ambition of constant improvement of the built environment has never ceased and has intensified over the years. From the design of public spaces in the 1980s, to the metropolitan plans for the Olympic development in the 1990s through to the re-gional scale strategic plans of the 2000s, Barce-lona’s history of urban renewal demonstrates an exemplary determination to become one of the best European cities in terms of quality of public space and urban life.

The project was supported by James Craig, Montse Ferrés, David McKenna, Tim Mosedale, Matt Ozga-Lawn and Michael Simpson.

Acknowledgements:This field trip would not have been possible without the invaluable input and effort of Montse Ferrés who identified the site and provided links with the local authorities and professionals. Our thanks go to Marc Aureli Santos (architect in charge of ‘fabriques de creacio’) and Rosina Vinyes (architect and urban designer).

Daniel Mallo and Colin Ross

Turo-de-la-Rovira

Santa-Caterina-Market

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Group photo

talks and the environment of the ‘Hangar’ set the tone and the context for the project.

On the last day of our visit, we embarked on a wider perspec-tive of the city. A coach drove us to the edges of the city, marked by the mountain, the Besós and Llobregat rivers and the sea. The abandoned military bunker at the top of the Turó de la Rovira Park provided a memorable view across the city and the geographic context in which it is located. The coach allowed us to hop from the works of wHerzog & de Meuron (Forum building), Josep Lluis Sert (Miró Founda-tion) to the unavoidable Mies van der Rohe’s pavilion for the 1929 World Fair, the ideal setting for a farewell to the City of Marvels.

Our field trip started with a day walk through the historic core of Barcelona crossing from the Raval and Gothic districts to the newly revived and creative Born area. This short walk enabled a journey through history rang-ing from the medieval times (Pi square) to the period of growth and prosperity of the 12th- 14th century (church of Santa Maria del Mar), which was followed by a slow process of decadence and densification that can still be perceived through the labyrinth of narrow streets. It was only in the 19th century when the city walls were eventually demolished that Barcelona radically changed its image thanks to the city extension designed by Ildefonso Cerdà in 1859.

We were taken through squares, markets, museums and religious landmarks. Two distinct markets punctuated our walk: la ‘Bo-queria’, the holy place for both locals and world known chefs, awakened all the senses needed to enjoy the city while ‘Santa Ca-terina’ provided a breath taking architectural experience with its levitating wavy roof designed by the late Catalan architect Enric Miralles. After a long day and little energy left, we walked down the streets of the Born area to reach the beach and the incred-ibly calm Mediterranean sea. For some, it was hard to resist its

magnetic attraction. Even though the early autumn evening was not particularly hot; it was simply impossible not to take shoes and shirts off.

The following day unfolded under the auspices of heavy rain and public transport strike, which set a challenge for the visit to the project site in the neighbourhood of Poblenou. Nonetheless all the students made it and, in contrast to the first day, we discovered a part of the city without tourists or historic landmarks, but a built environment of abandoned industrial factories intertwined with residential areas and newly built regeneration schemes. The site, known as ‘Can Ricart’, has a long history dating back to the heydays of the textile industry in the 19th century and has been abandoned in recent years. This derelict environment has attract-ed meanwhile uses, in particular artists’ initiatives that flourished thanks to the low-rents associ-ated with the dilapidated condi-tion of ex-industrial buildings. The ‘Hangar’ studio, adjacent to our site, is one of such initiatives, which is now supported by the city council. The ‘Hangar’ was our base for the day where Marc Aureli Santos talked to us about the reuse of industry heritage in Barcelona and Rosina Vinyes on the wide master plan vision for the neighbourhood. Both the

La Oliva abandoned factory

Can Ricart site visit

Mies van der Rohe Barcelona pavilion

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‘Can Ricart’ is a 19th century industrial estate of textile factories located in a large urban site of the Poblenou neighbourhood, Barcelona. The site offers the opportunity to rethink abandoned industrial buildings and to create synergies with the emerging productive, cultural industry of Poblenou. Following a field trip to Barcelona, students focused first on site strategies and landscape design; the project then zoomed into the micro scale with a detailed proposal for the refurbishment or extension of one of the buildings developed in conjunction with the Architectural Technology module.

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Daniel Mallo

Rania Francis

Agata Murasko

Agata Murasko

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Nedelina Atanasova

Michael Pybus

Nedelina Atanasova

Oleg Sevelkov

Portia Malik

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Portia MalikRuta Austrina

Alexander Hart

Stavri Rousounidou

Stavri Rousounidou

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The “Play Me” studio takes its inspiration from the ‘Play me, I’m Yours’ festival. This artistic pro-ject by British artist Luke Jerram started in 2008 and has been touring across 30 cities in the world. A series of pianos located in the city are available for any member of the public to play and enjoy (see http://www.streetpianos.com). The studio echoes the vision and values behind this city festival with the activation of urban spaces through improvisation and participation.

The project was set with the assumption that the “Play me, I’m yours” festival would come to Grainger Town, the historic core of Newcastle upon Tyne, whose dense urban morphology and vibrant city life offers a wealth of urban spaces that can provide venues for both public and intimate performances. Three main themes have driven the narrative of the studio: interstices, atmosphere and envelope.

In Phase 1, the project explored the realm of Grainger Town: students were asked to produce a ‘townscript’, a descriptive and interpretative drawing that mapped perceptions, geometrical patterns as well as traces of every day life. As well as including 5 locations for the pianos, this drawing became a palimpsest of interstitial spaces including the quietest, the most intimate and unexpected urban spaces and revealed the hidden and the historical layers of Grainger Town. The 5 chosen locations informed the de-sign of a prototype for a stool to accompany the pianos, both enabling the festival and activating the spaces identified.

Learning from Phase 1, Phase 2 of the project invited students to embrace the design of a music hub, drawing from the atmospheres recorded on their ‘townscript’. This facility encompasses a series of rehearsal rooms, all of different size, volume, character, atmosphere and acoustic quality intended as a community resource as well as cater for local musicians and bands in need of rehearsal space. The hub also acts as a base for the festival and future, similar initiatives and is complemented with a music library and a provision to financially support it, such as café, music lessons, second hand instruments shop, repair workshop, etc.

Phase 3 of the project engaged with a material study focusing on the concept of structure-envelope providing an opportunity for the

structure to define column-less volumes. Students were asked to investigate and celebrate the space in-between these volumes and to consider these interstices in terms of their programmatic potential, for instance, the ‘Play me’ pianos could be safely stored until the next call for an improvised tune…

Daniel Mallo and Michael Simpson Seray Sutcuoglu

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Adam Hampton-Matthews

Nedelina Atanasova Ian Campbell

Ewan Thomson

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Anna Cumberland Alanah Honey

David Tam

Fatima Afzal

Muyan Liu

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esIf the morphology of the city of Newcastle is characterized by anything, it is surely that of the remarkable density of extraordinary bridges that span the Tyne. Normally bridges are singular “pinch points” in a city, but something else seems to be at work in Newcastle – an almost irrational compulsion to span the river and to make a “city of bridges”. The aim of this studio is to develop and push this logic to an extreme condition by designing 12 new inhabited bridges to be situated in the zone between the Swing Bridge (to the west) and the new Millen-nium bridge (to the east). The studio was set up in such a way that, although each student could work independently, all the bridges could be brought together at the end to form a collec-tive urban project, a “city of bridges”. Through studies of the existing context of the river and its architectural relations with the city, and of cinematic media, we developed proposals for a new architecture that connects the two sides of the river but that also introduces new program-matic elements to it. Each student was asked to elaborate a design for an inhabited bridge that contains a variety of functional elements. However, these were to be anchored around a key programmatic condition: a cinematic screening facility together with adjunct func-tions. The cinematic focus of the project was not arbitrarily given, for there is something uncan-nily filmic about bridges. Internally they are to do with passage, movement and framing, and as massive infrastructural elements they give rhythm to the cityscape, partitioning it in mobile and contingent ways.

Taken together, the work of the studio produced a “city of bridges” that was at the same time a “cine-città”. In the initial stage of the project, students were asked to use video to construct short films of a visual and acoustic architec-tural passage, using montage and other filmic techniques. The films were then transformed into notational drawings as a way of opening an architectural speculation regarding the constitu-tion of the bridge itself. The aim of the notational drawing was to graphically spatialise, in a single drawing, the film, and as such to work as a kind of architectural translation of it. The cinematic construct and notational drawing then led on directly on to the major project.

Aikaterini Antonopoulou & Mark Dorrian

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Tahmineh Emami

Tahmineh Emami

Tahmineh Emami

Shuo Yang

Shuo Yang

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Alexander Hart

Erandi Helamini Amarasinghe

Alexander Hart

Caspar Thorp

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Rosalia Kateryna Samus

Rosalia Kateryna Samus

Malcolm Greer PritchardMalcolm Greer Pritchard

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Gergana Popova

Gergana Popova

Gergana Popova

Charles Lambert

Emily Clay

Thomas Day

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Kati Blom and David McKenna

This project is based on a hypothetical move of The Finnish Institute in London to Newcastle. The mission of the Institute is to act as a catalyst to promote collaboration between cultural agents in Finland and their counterparts in UK or Ireland. Students were initially asked to familiarise themselves with a local practitioner who could work with the Institute to inform what a permanent base for the organisation might be.

The Incubator

The starting point was a period of research into the local cultural climate. Each developed a small scale proposal for a possible local col-laborator who might give some insight into the activities of the Institute. Interview techniques were used in the early stage of project to gain information and get inspired.

This phase, the “Incubator”, could be thought of as a stage set that locates a specific activity of the agent at a site somewhere in the city centre. There were no environmental constrains and ideally the Incubator would augment the existing fabric of a found site with a strategically placed intervention without the need for any major construction.

The incubator became a prototype from which would develop, firstly, a more detailed brief in response to the particular interests of the col-laborator and secondly, a focus for the design by establishing the spatial and tectonic strate-gies that would be explored in the architectural proposal for the institute.

The Institute

In the second phase, each student chose a site according to their emerging brief. The choice was between three possible city centre loca-tions.

The most popular was Broadchare which re-placed a missing tooth in the urban fabric of the quayside, connecting the river and street front ne

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with the back courts and historic chares. The Black Gate site tested the students ability to resolve the programme within a small footprint and to understand the complex sectional relation-ship between the steeply sloping road, the castle and viaduct. The third site was in Gateshead; the former Brett Oils Ltd Refinery at Pipewell Gate which required negotiation between the height of the adjacent High Level Bridge and the horizontal expanse of the disused refinery and the Tyne.

The educational emphasis was partly on brief making as a meth-od to promote abstract cultural or social aims and in parallel to develop and refine an architec-tural language. Most revisited the incubator to establish clearly defined areas exploration in the design of the Institute. During the tutorials, specific emphasis was afforded to the translation of the individual briefs into a coher-ent spatial and diagrammatic strategy with a focus on model making and refinement of an architectural proposal.

Generic fields of interest varied between sustainability, research fields like synthetic biology, visual arts like photography, textile design, and glass design, and performance arts like poetry, dance, and theatre. Collabora-tive organisations included the Textile Hub, Institute of Aging and Health, Northern Stage, Home-lessness and Arts, Newton’s Lad-der, Institute of Social Renewal, and Sentient Cities.

Richard Glover

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Styliani Michael

Stella Michael

Stavri Rousounidou

Stavri RousounidouStella Michael

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Ruta Austrina

Ruta Austrina

Daniel Celaya Miranda

Daniel Celaya Miranda

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Mohammad Abdul Bari

Mohammad Abdul Bari

Rebecca Miller

Rebecca Miller

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Joe Wilson

Joe Wilson

Matheus Simon dos Santos

Stephen Ringrose

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Ella Cain

Jack Scaffardi

Katie Rowe

Matt Jackson

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Matthew Wilcox

Matthew Wilcox

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Rumen Dimov

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Graham Farmer, Adam Sharr

Concrete is, simultaneously, the most solid and the most elusive of materials. A liquid which be-comes solid, concrete is usually given its shape by the formwork into which it’s poured, regularly displaying the impress of the shuttering material. Yet it also has its own material properties which determine how it flows, sets and how it acts when dry. Seemingly self-reliant, it is really only liberated in association with other materials. This studio explores concrete; its material properties, its cultural consequences and its contemporary meanings. Students are expected to evolve a design position through a combination of direct experience, inquisitive intuition, critical imagina-tion and material experimentation.

The studio worked with the former site of the Bank of England building in Newcastle. Designed by Fitzroy Robinson and built in concrete in 1971 (although faced in Portland Stone) it was partly demolished in 2012, although the vaults, constructed of thick concrete walls remain as a buried remnant of the site’s former use. The site addresses Newcastle’s most heroic modernist space – the roundabout at the foot of Pilgrim Street – oversailed by a footbridge and by Swan House (now known as 55 Degrees North) and undercut by the Central Motorway. It sits directly on the north-south axis of the Tyne Bridge and forms a gateway to the city for those travelling by car or rail, who view it at speed. The site is also a key point on the proposed urban link between city and Quayside (The ‘Geordie Ramblas’) which could potentially solve the current disconnection between them.

The project encouraged students to adopt a position on the threatened ‘Brutalist’ heritage of the city. The Bank is the latest in a sequence of demolitions of concrete buildings of that period. This part of the city was developed as part of T. Dan Smith’s ambitious vision of Newcastle as the ‘Brasilia of the North’. It was a vision of slab and point blocks, representing a new future after the privations of the wartime past and symbolizing a new Newcastle imagined for the computer age. This placed cars below and people above on new high-level ‘pedways’. A truncated ‘pedway’ adjoins the site, as do various subways and the tunnel housing the Central Motorway. Students were asked to find their own programme around that could promote and support social innovation. The wide diversity of projects produced each propose interesting ideas for an urban, program-matic and material focal point for social change within the city.

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James Houston

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Anna Holsgrove

Sarah Rozelaar

Matthew Pratt

Matthew Pratt

Matthew Pratt

Jess Riddell

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Claire Peerless

Claire Peerless

Myrto Barbaris

Sophie Mclean

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Andrea Sze

Nur Zaminudin

Luke Lupton

Luke Lupton

Andrea Sze

Nur Zaminudin

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Greta Varpucianskyte

Greta Varpucianskyte

Greta Varpucianskyte

Nguyen Xuan Man

Richard Spilsbury

Nguyen Xuan Man

Richard Spilsbury

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Tarek Abida

Pheobe Burnett

Kristina Kupstaite

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Richard Everett

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Richard Everett

Anastasia Ananyeva

Anna Melson

Anna Melson

Anastasia Ananyeva

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Matt Ozga-Lawn, James Craig

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This is a project about testing.

Testing is central to the scientific method. Its role, in the form of experiments of near-limitless variety, is to demonstrate the relationship be-tween two events: a cause, and an effect. This project invited students to produce a design for a new building that was derived through this process, from initial tests of the body and its relationship to its surroundings, to the iterative development of test institutes and their cor-responding test sites.

The institute was to be situated on the site of the former Steetley Magnesite Works in Hartlepool. The works was among the largest of its kind in the world, and together with other, massive-scale industrial landscapes in the region, con-stituted a significant part of the late 20th century industrial history of the North East. This legacy is now largely erased or in ruins as factories close their doors and jobs and expertise disappear, and we are left to interpret their remains. Often, we read the post-industrial landscapes they leave behind alongside representations that hold them in perpetuity, such as the famous opening scene of Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner, in which nearby Wilton industrial works is merged with Los Angeles to create a dense, nightmarish urban environment. Films such as this immortalise the industrial structures of the 20th century through their reinterpretation as something else, taking their characteristics and utilizing them to generate something new, and this was the ambition of the studio.

The project challenged students to find a new use for the unique terrain in Hartlepool that lives up to its generative qualities. To do this, students were encouraged to act as both testers and explorers. The first site of exploration was the body, and altering its relationship with the world. Through these tests, students arrived at starting points for specific and individual treatments of the site, onto which their tests and apparatuses were translated at a large scale and programmed accordingly.

Through studies of the body, its surroundings, and the appara-tuses, drawings and techniques arrived at through the develop-ment of the project, proposals were arrived at for a series of unique testing grounds and institutes in Hartlepool. These included a cloud generat-ing and colouring institute, an institute for the experience of falling, and a nightclub utilising resonant sounds generated by the landscape, to name a few of the diverse and extraordinary projects depicted here.

Rebecca Dillon-Robinson

James Morton James Morton

Rania Francis

Natasha Carfrae

Natasha Carfrae

Natasha Carfrae

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Clare Thomas

Edward WatkissOleg Sevelkov

Marta Zembinskyte

Marta Zembinskyte

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Robert Evans

Emma Hall

Hazem Halasa

Hazem HalasaAgata Murasko

Agata Murasko

Agata Murasko

Alex Blanchard

David Boyd

Ibrahim Muasher

James Humber

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James Humber

James Humber

Theodora Kyrtata

Josh Smith Theodora Kyrtata

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Lam Nguyen

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It was a great honour to receive the Hadrian Award. The award represents a recognition of achievement that has been built up over two years of my education at Newcastle. I’d like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the many contributions others have made to my success. First of all is my greatest appreciation to my parents’ support for my study in the UK. Having the chance to study in the UK has opened up a lot of opportunities that have brought me closer to a deep and personal understanding of de-signing and making. Among those, the chance to meet and work under the advice and tuition of Matt Ozga-Lawn and Aikaterini Antonopolou in my graduation project was a great opportu-nity for me, and their inspiration opened up a new horizon in the way I approach design that I have continued to develop through my Masters studies, which began with another collaboration with Matt. Finally I’d like to show my apprecia-tion to the department’s support staff and the facilities they operate – the 24h access and the workshop in particular – with special thanks to Sean Mallen and Bill Softley for their help with many models. All these figures and their support play a very important part in my achievement of winning the Hadrian Award and it wouldn’t have been possible without them.

I was really honoured to be selected as the student to bring the Hadrian Award 2012 to the School. It was the third award granted to the Architecture Department since 2010 and it is proof of the high standard in quality in architec-tural education that Newcastle staff have been providing.

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time it was altered it was more exciting, something new revealed itself, and looking back I can see that every step was connected coherently from beginning to end.

I used different patterns where different urban grids met, overlaying them, rotating them, aligning them, finding the geometrical similarity between them, connecting them and rotating and aligning them again… little bit by little bit, the fragmented details of the layered urban condition, the layered car park and layer of structure exposed when the excavator demolished the building became involved in my sequences of transformation. What came up in the end was exciting for both my tutors and me. My proposal was in some ways a more imposing structure than even the previous Brutalist structure. But unlike the car park, my building is a living, breathing, growing vertical neighbourhood. The scheme divided opinion and sparked discussion at the Hadrian jury panel – is it too brutal, impersonal, even cold? ‘Either way, it does what all good projects should – it asks questions, challenges and engages you…’ – the panellists.

The Hadrian Award 2012 was an achievement in my study and its impact will echo into my future career, but more than that, what I have learned through this exceptional experience really opens up a new horizon on the way I see design, the way I approach it and process it. I want to express my sincere thankfulness to my tutors and Matt Ozga-Lawn in particular, for this priceless experience at the School.

My project, named ‘Afterimage’, addresses the recently demolished iconic Trinity Square car park in Gateshead, commonly known as the ‘Get Carter Car Park’. The studio was also named Afterimage, led by Matt and Katerina, with a brief written by Professor Mark Dorrian, who writes in the studio brief: ‘Through studies of the volumetrics and morphology of the previous building, and its architectural relations with the city, we will develop proposals for a new architecture that works through a kind of oscillation or reflection between past and present’. The term Afterimage, in science, refers to the phenomena of a visual image that persists after the visual stimulus causing it has ceased to act. In the first stage of the project, we were asked to express our personal remembrance of the car park; this expression would be presented through a range of visual media as a kind of ghost image. The result among the studio was full of fun and sparkling imagination. I expressed my fascination in the layering structural relationship between the concrete, monumental car park and the surrounding industrial collaged cityscape of Gateshead. Sited within 500m from the river bank, near the top of a deep slope, the building is surrounded by infrastructural connections where railway bridges overlap road bridges, where one urban grid meets another, and historical buildings, church sites and low rise council housing come together. These layers of infrastructure and architecture set up the particular urban character of Gateshead which fascinated me. It seemed that the car park held everything together, and I wanted to provide something to the urban condition to recreate this purpose. I produced an

analytic model of the city where information was separated into different layers piled up on top of each other, geography, transport and infrastructure, building facilities, and so on. This layering proved very influential to my final design.

In the second phase of the project we were encouraged to use the ‘afterimage of the car park’ that we had produced and transform it into a new form of architecture that carries a significant relationship to the original building. This way of designing was really new and challenging for me, and so it raised questions for the way I operated in my design process. The aim moved from being about designing something ‘new’ after doing research to gain understanding about a subject and applying it to the site, to transforming the initial subject, the initial forms and ideas, literally, right from the beginning of the design process through many iterative developments, many times over so that an understanding of the subject is gained gradually and incrementally, and these steps are repeated until we reach a point of satisfaction.

This design method created a lot of challenges, confusions, uncertainty and sometimes lack of confidence in me at the time. I remember asking Matt about this way of design later on in my Masters studies: ‘are you not scared of designing without knowing where it leads to?’ and he answered, ‘that’s the exciting thing about design’. Although a new methodology for me, transforming my analytic ‘afterimage’ model into a new structure was in some ways a straightforward task. The transformation wasn’t done once but many times, and every

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Richard Breen

A Cyclotel Created from Perspectives

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The RIBA President’s Medal Student Award is a truly iconic and highly respected award and cel-ebration of student work, recognised throughout the world. Taking entrants from around the Com-monwealth, the award is highly accredited and receives a hugely diverse range of work.It was a great honour for my project to be nominated by the school as one of two projects chosen to represent the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the awards. The process quickly spiralled far beyond my expec-tations; from being nominated to short-listed from 110 entries to 14 to it being announced that I was to collect a Bronze Medal Commen-dation from 66 Portland Place on 5th December 2012.

A truly overwhelming achievement, not only for myself but for the School, my tutors: Matt-Ozga-Lawn, Aikaterini Antonopoulou and James Craig, and my fellow Afterimage studio participants. Receiving the award at the RIBA Headquarters in London was an indelible hon-our. Discussing my work with and collecting my award from the RIBA President Angela Brady, while my project was presented and critiqued to a room of 300 people was a truly special experi-ence. The evening provided a great opportunity to discuss the nominated projects with their authors, bringing together students from New-castle, Sheffield, Leeds Met, University College London and the Architectural Association. It was a wonderful evening of conversation, celebration and the promise of a bright architectural future! As an award winner my work will be exhibited around the world in the Awards Tour, from Aus-tralia to Chile to Bulgaria – a testament to the universal communicative qualities of architecture

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development of a building at this stage; the focus was purely on process, on finding a methodol-ogy on which to base our archi-tectural intervention in the vast Gateshead site. It was amazing to see the array of widely differ-ent approaches to the project discussed an early Crit. It was so exciting to be involved in such a uniquedesign pedagogy but it presented us with a shock when seeing our early work alongside the work of other studios as the approach I was taking was so different to many of my contem-poraries in the School.

I personally became interested in how the car park’s existence survives in the subjective memories of people, and more tangibly in photography and film. I was interested in exploring how photography and its qualities of framing, composition, lighting, focus and colour, can attribute to people’s continuing memory of the car park. The photography

as well as great exposure for the School. The project I chose, entitled Afterimage, run by Matt and Kat and based on a brief by Professor Mark Dorrian, provided a far too intriguing and interest-ing challenge to ignore when it was presented to the year. Their presentation stood out for many reasons, chiefly in its experimen-tal nature and its dedication to challenge the boundaries of the design process, architectural output and idea generation. The choice, though very daunting at the time, was an obvious one – this was the project for me.

Afterimage presented a very different challenge to the other offered projects as well as all the previous projects I had engaged with during my time at the School. The idea of taking on a project in which the rules of architectural design were to be tested to the limits as the last project of my Part I degree was

very exciting.

The project tasked us with exploring the physical, emotional and psychological void left in Gateshead by the demolition of the brutalist and monumental ‘Get Carter’ Car Park designed by Owen Luder, with the aim of developing a new architecture that acted as an afterimage or ghost of the old structure. The brief for a Cyclotel (a hotel for cy-clists), became the architectural and contextual vehicle to explore our independent interpretation of the car park and its impact, morphology, construction, destruction and function. While it provided a loose guide as to what the Cyclotel should accom-modate, the brief was thoroughly open to interpretation.

The beginning of the project was dedicated to idea generation, theoretical exploration and physi-cal experimentation. Little, if any time was afforded to the actual

The architecture I was creating was almost at the mercy of my process and the experimenta-tion I had embarked upon. The Cyclotel brief was accommo-dated and the design developed, but the result was one that I could not have foreseen at the beginning of the project. I believe therefore, that the quality and merit of the project existed in the results being honest to my thorough and sometimes uncom-promising design process.

Gaining recognition at the RIBA President’s Medal Awards provided a massive boost to my confidence and was a wonderful acknowledgement of my hard work and dedication during mt time at the School as well as a brilliant signifier of my devel-opment from an uncertain art stu-

of Sally Ann Norman presented a locally uncharacteristic ap-preciation of the architecture. By focusing on her capturing of the car park’s dramatic forms, lines, verticality and shadows I selected four appropriate images to digitally manipulate under a set of fairly arbitrary rules, to test and distil the qualities of the car park, in an attempt to forge a new perception. Each manipulation was then produced as an acetate layer, allowing -with the use of an old-fashioned overhead projec-tor - the physical creation and manipulation of new imagery on a large and dynamic scale. Through assigning architectural qualities to each layer, a potential formal, spatial and architectural language began to emerge when projected back onto site.

dent to a devoted architectural designer. As well as boosting my CV, my Commendation provides a great talking point with prospective employers and a presentation of my project be-came my first ever professional CPD, given at xsite Architecture LLP in January 2013.

I firmly believe that the project brief, my tutors and my peer group provided the perfect platform and atmosphere for me pursue a design process and ex-ploration that ultimately resulted in mine and the School’s suc-cess during the Bronze Medal Awards. Therefore I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to everyone involved.

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Nick Bastow, Ewan Thomson, Sophie McLean

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Set up by Northern Architecture and plus 3 Architects, the six week summer school was hosted by FaulknerBrowns Architects in Killingworth, Newcastle. The summer school team included Nick Bastow (who is currently on placement at FaulknerBrowns), Ewan Thomson and Sophie McLean, who are both graduating their part 1 this year.

Our project was to propose design ideas to regenerate a Grade II brick neo-gothic church in Blyth, for our Client, Headway Arts. Headway arts which is a charity, offers unique resources, specialising in participatory arts across multiple art forms. They offer people that may tradition-ally be regarded as “hard to reach” the chance to take part in highly inclusive projects.

We were given our own work space in Faulkner-Browns’ office as well as access to their print room and model workshop. In addition to this, we were mentored twice weekly by a Partner Architect. This provided us with valuable experi-ence in areas we hadn’t encountered at uni-versity, such as working with a real client, legal issues and liaising with a conservation officer.

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Comments from the public con-sultation session included:

“Wonderful ideas for this lovely church, so pleased it is being used so well.”

“Great to see the building regener-ated with such a bold and exciting vision”

“Congratulations - local craft group would like to use the space to display”

“The extension is very fitting”

“Fantastic potential - feels like there’s a very positive vibe already”

“Welcoming, a place people can come to, a hub, beautiful”

Finally we would like to thank FaulknerBrowns and ArchiGRAD for their time and support during this six week programme. We learnt many new skills during this time and it was a fantastic opportunity.

point. From this, a new sensory connection and theatrical format between the performers and the audience would be established.Our proposal and feasibility work was then displayed and discussed at a public exhibition inside the church. We gave a verbal presentation to accom-pany the 1:50 model, plans, visualisations and a 1:1 partial model of our theatrical curtain, which we projected onto. This enabled members of the local community and the Conservation Officers we had been working with, the chance to view our work and leave their feedback. We were left very positive comments, praising the sensitive, rational and creative way we had dealt with the church. Frances Castle, Chief Executive of Headway Arts commented: “It has been an excellent project for Headway Arts to be involved in and the ideas and designs produced will be a valuable resource for the company.”

From our site analysis we discov-ered that Blyth was undergoing a major regeneration and that we had an opportunity to make the church an integral part of this, returning the building to its historical position as a social hub for the town. Access by visitors was a key concern due to the nature of the clients’ work. To address this, we proposed a new, accessible entrance and a clearer circulation route to make the building instantly understand-able. We incorporated sustain-able ideas, using a vertical louvre system that not only regulated the heat gain but visually com-plemented and connected linear elements of the church, such as the tower and spire, back into the new atrium space. We also spent time designing a digital theatre and production space that offered the client a permeable 360° cinematic projection screen. This screen would act as an ever changeable scenery set, offering the ability to pass through at any

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Annabel Ward & Matt Lippiatt

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The Wider Mbarara Project is a student led construction initiative working in south west Uganda. Founded in 2004, the project relies on 12 volunteers raising £12000, designing a building and travelling to Uganda to assist local labourers with the construction.

2009 – 2013: House of Love Orphanage, Uganda. The House of Love provides a home for the most deprived orphans in the Kich-wamba area. On land donated by a local family, WMP has created a central living building, eat-ing area, learning centre and dormitory block as part of a 5 year plan to expand the capacity of the orphanage. This year sees the construction of a second dormitory and completion of this master plan.

As a celebration of completing this project we are holding an exhibition to show the achieve-ments of our current students, and to involve new students in 2014 and beyond. Join us on:

Tuesday 15th October at 6pm, in crit 2 of the Architecture Building.

The project is organised annually by students in APL and CEG. The students undertake design work, through a dialogue with local people. The money students raise through fund-raising pays for materials and local labour. This is an excellent opportunity for students to gain hands on construction skills, while living within the local community.

Students have the opportunity to travel within East Africa, and experience a variety of cultures, people and places while making a positive contribution.

To find out more visit:

w: http://www.widermbararaproject.btck.co.uke: wmp.annabel@hotmail.co.uk

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Students coming into the MArch Programme at Newcastle take the ARC8053 Studio, a yearlong module. As a graduate design studio, ARC 8053 integrates research, seminars, and workshops. The goal is to get students to think critically about the wider context within which they will be practicing architecture, to develop their own critical responses in relation to the social, cultural, political and economic factors that shape the built environment, and to hone their craft at different spatial scales. With two projects that focus on the urban and individual building scale over the course of two semesters, the students prepare for the demands of the individual thesis project in their last year.

stage 5

Zeynep Kezer

New York at Buffalo), who also served as a panelist during a day of presentations by the four groups. In addition, Dr Thomas organized a series of movie nights over several weeks with films shot in Berlin revealing facets of experiences and memories pertaining to the variegated populations that inhabit the city. The selection, which included, among others Goodbye Lenin, Run Lola Run, Lola and Bilidikit, and Wings of Desire, also opened up opportunities for extended conversations, since, in many cases, the project sites were featured in the films shown.Students proposed an astounding variety of interventions in response to the issues they identified in each site, which made for very interesting discussions. Guest reviewers at the final review (December 13-14) included Graham Farmer, Adam Sharr, James Craig, and Tim Bailey (Excite Architects).

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project 01

Zeynep Kezer

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The first semester design studio in the New-castle MArch programme is about the urban fabric. This year, we visited Berlin again, but with a larger group and had four sites and four projects to choose from:

Crossings : Nord/Süd (tutor: Dr Ed Wainwright)North and South Berlin are now connected directly by tunnels and over ground rail lines. They have been separated by politics, culture and economics, and continue to have dra-matically differing, yet interrelated conditions. Today, the patched and repaired infrastructure of the city is subject to significant economic challenges and political pressures, and Berlin is still considered a near-bankrupt city-state in Germany. Physical divisions between the west and east have been largely repaired, but social, cultural and economic divides still prevail across the German capital and these crossing points have significant challenges facing their spatial situation. In this studio, students were sked to analyse and determine what these chal-lenges are, through a close contextual reading of the sites, and to propose a method of urban-infrastructural change to address a question they determined in their investigations. The goal was to produce an emergent spatial-led strategy to address a range of issues ranging from a proposal to address unemployment, to a method to encourage re-housing, presented through a variety of means from manifestoes to drawings to models.

Fields of Flight : Tempelhof (tutor: Dr Sam Austin)This project used the now abandoned site of Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport—once regarded as a symbol of the city’s modernity and Nazi Germany’s technological achievements—to explore what happens to the sites left behind and ‘liberated’ by the processes of modernization and the expansion of global capitalism, what happens to their outdated infrastructures and to the places, activities and networks that have formed around them, and what issues are raised by their sudden ‘return’ to the locality? Students were asked to consider Tempelhof in context: as part of ever-changing interrelations, systems and flows that constitute the city and extend beyond it, relations that are infrastructural, political, socio-cultural, environmental, historical and economic.

After critically investigating the questions posed by the site’s past separation and its proposed reintegration into the urban fabric, the students were asked to develop develop urban strategies and interventions that respond to the issues, rhythms,relations and distinctions you identify.

Cultural Encounters / Spatial Fluidities: Kreuzberg (tutor: Dr Zeynep Kezer)This project focused on Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, which was marginalized during the Cold War due to its physical proximity to the and became a predominantly immigrant district with low rents that was also favored by young artists, activists and squatters. With the removal of the wall Kreuzberg is once again near the city’s centre, and has become a desirable residential area that is undergoing gentrification. The social and physical transformation of the area and the tensions between its diverse inhabitants set the scene for student proposed interventions this semester. This year, the site selected within Kreuzberg was larger and included areas adjacent to the wall to the North and the banks of the canal to the South. This allowed students to pursue a broader range of projects from waterfront development to memorials.

Curating Museum Island (tutor: Matt Ozga-Lawn)Berlin’s Museumsinsel has become, since the Reunification, the site of a contentious construction and ‘reconstruction’ projects through the city authorities have sought to replicate the city’s pre-1939 urban structure and rebuild neo-classical landmarks. The process has progressively erased traces

of GDR modernism in order to restore a sense of continuity with the pre-war city, editing the recent past out, in favour of a selective image of an older past, thereby unapologetically promoting one distinctive set of values over others. In this project, the students were asked to re-imagine the Museumsinsel, making new proposals about its future, interpreting its past and considering its unusual and symbolic role as an epicentre of what might be described as the ‘museumification’ of the European historic city centre. Although very different in scale and character, all four project choices required students to consider very carefully questions of memory/history, urban transformation (especially ghettoization and gentrification), urban infrastructure, rights to the city, public good and public space, land use and rents. These issues were continually discussed frequently, throughout the semester, during both the stages of investigation and of proposal development After a week of intensive preparatory readings and lectures by Prof Sharr, Patrick Devlin (Pollard Thomas Edwards Architects, London), Professor Peter Blundell Jones (Sheffield University) and Dr Katie Lloyd Thomas, we embarked on our trip to Berlin (October 15-19). The first half of the semester was dedicated to intense research on each one of the sites, followed, on November 8, by a symposium in which students focusing on the three sites made multi-media presentations featuring their findings and outlining their proposals for intervention. The symposium also featured a guest lecture by Professor Despina Stratigakos (State University of

tempelhof 1.JPGMuseumsinsel

Museumsinsel

Kreuzberg

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Tempelhof

Crossings

Kreuzberg

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Create an Artefact from the Assimilation

SEA FORTS / SEALMAY, 7 2013 21

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Daniel Dyer

Katie Burgess

Irina Korneychuk

Olga Gogoleva

Vitalija Salygina

Dana Mudawi

[PROMONADE]

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Ugnius Katinas

MA 1.jpg

Peter Drysdale

Joseph Charman

Hugh Craft

site entries movementsite entries movement

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Matthew Ruddy

Paul Hegarty

Paul Hegarty

Adam Smith

Annie Hart

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Sam Austin

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Design begins with a concept and ends in details, or so conventional wisdom and contract documents might have us believe. This studio challenges the tendency to see architectural ideas as separate from the materials, processes and technologies of construction. Inspired by Marco Frascari’s notion of the ‘tell-the-tale detail’, the project explores how details can embody the story of the whole.

Studio participants chose an existing build-ing – of any style, age, location or use – and proposed an addition to it. First, they drew and modelled their building in detail as a way to encapsulate their interpretation of it. Then, focussing on the ‘tell-the-tale detail’ where new meets old, they developed a programme, de-vised strategies and designed the addition. An accompanying series of lectures and seminars, including contributions from Rob Thomas (Car-diff University), Ade Scholefield (Architype) and Claudia Dutson (RCA), encouraged exploration of technical and environmental issues as inte-gral to the emerging narrative of the project.

The resulting proposals are thought-provoking, playful and diverse: Sunderland Civic Centre is transformed into Culinary Institute, Shivering Sands sea fort becomes an outpost for isolation training, a mill boiler house near Darlington is recast as Industrial Ideas Store, a Cambridge block is refigured to open the University to the city…

project 02

Joseph Charman

Lam Nguyen

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roving travensed back to spinning room

carded wool drawn across to extension to be gilled drawn and turned into roving

lift

spinning room

roving dropoff

staff kitchen

polycarbonate  panel35mm  marlon  st  sevenwall  polycarbonate  panel

polycarbonate panel

polycarbonate encloses cuts made through existing building

existing windowsoriginals have already been scrapped therefore replace with double glased, timber frame windows

shower room

shower room

design studio

electrical access point

mechanical services

24mm birch ply flooring

existing stonework540mm masonry wall with 110mm stone facing

clipping frame

steel frame: 200mm circular hollow section clips out existing wrought iron frame to create atrium opening

bracing10mm steel cables prevent steel frame twisting

steel frame

steel frame: 200mm circular hollow section

PLAN DETAIL PERSPECTIVE 1:50

Tell the Tale Details

Sarah Harrison

Daniel Dyer

Katie Burgess

Matthew Ruddy

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Ronald Allen

Olga Gogoleva

Joseph WorralAnnie Hart

Adam Smith

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Gavin Welch

Omer Alp

Dana Mudawi

Hugh Craft

Will Whiter

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HUNTER STREET

NORTHGATE STREET

MALE TOILET

FEMALE TOILET

STORE ROOM

CAFE

BAR

BAR

KITCHEN

PRODUCTION ROOM

RESTAURANT

RESTAURANT

OUTDOOR SEATING AREA

Scale 1:100 at A1

Ground Floor Plan

NORTH

site model

massing model massing model massing model

Vitalija Salygina

Paul Hegarty

Marina Osmjana

Ugnius Katinas

Peter Drysdale

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John Beattle

Competition 2012 Second Prize

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During 2012 the RIBA ran a design competition called ‘Forgotten Spaces’. Open to entrants from across the country, the competition asked students, architects, planners, artists, engineers and landscape designers to nominate an existing site in the North East area and propose an idea for its improvement. A ‘forgotten space’ could be small or large a grassy verge, a wasteland, an unused car park, a derelict building, an empty unit, an underpass or a flyover. The proposal could be simple or complex, a commercial or public facility, a piece of public art or a new build-ing. The main requirement is that it responds to the surrounding area and serves a function for the local community.

The North East is a sprawling region full of poten-tial for development. Despite successive waves of economic booms, there still remain pockets of obscure left over land and neglected plots that could with imagination and new thinking accom-modate a host of functions and respond to local needs.

The competition placed an emphasis on local engagement and active participation in the de-velopment of our urban realm under the assump-tion that in the coming years we are likely to see an expanded role for neighbourhood and com-munity groups in what gets built and where. For-gotten Spaces 2012 was an opportunity for test-ing ideas and is a chance to put locally inspired proposals ‘out there’.

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have met local needs, the redun-dant steel frame can become another opportunity for the occu-pation of a more sustainable, risk free development.

Proposal

The scheme proposes a new adaptable architectural system that can inhabit a redundant steel frame. In doing so it aims to question the type of generic masterplanning present in ar-eas of potential regeneration. The design therefore seeks a way of thinking about development that will only respond to current mar-ket demand and the needs of the local area. A new type of architec-tural system will emerge allowing adaptability, less restrictions, ef-ficient extensions and no vacant spaces. The system will inhabit the redundant frame and will con-stantly change to meet market

New City Industries: Sunderland

Context

Back in 2006 council plans were in place for the regeneration of the Sunniside area of Sunderland. Developers were attracted to in-vest and work began in 2007 on the first of many intended sites. The site in question was acquired by an Irish developer where work was underway to construct a 6 storey development, compris-ing of 62 apartments and retail units at ground floor level. During the construction phase financial problems caused by the reces-sion brought work on site to a stand still. To this day the site has remained a forgotten space where a redundant steel frame still stands as a monument to the boom and bust culture of pre-

recession development.

In recent years steps have been made to progress the origi-nal masterplan resulting in the completion of a small number of new developments. On the whole these schemes have car-ried big risks for developers and now many remain vacant. The real issue for this area is the as-sumption that generic mixed-use buildings are the answer to suc-cessful regeneration. It is exactly this kind of real estate develop-ment practice that I want to ques-tion through my forgotten space.

Some of the more neglected buildings originally marked for demolition have seen a gradual increase in the occupation of cre-ative industries. This type of sus-tainable development has meant the area is slowly showing signs of life without the need for generic masterplanning. In a similar way to how these neglected buildings

demand and satisfy multiple uses for both buying and renting. The system is based around the con-cept of flexible individual units constructed cost-effectively off-site. It has been designed to al-low units to cater for any use type. Also various options will be avail-able to suit the client’s require-ments chosen from a standard kit of parts. If the client requires additional floor space in the fu-ture, new units can be connected vertically or horizontally across the frame. This is all made pos-sible through an interchangeable panelling system that tackles the problem of adaptability that is in-herent in other modular construc-tion. Also, if the client decides to move out of the frame the unit can be recycled and used elsewhere independently or as an extension.

Once units start to occupy the frame the collective community will start to make decisions on how the future of the scheme will develop. This co-operative ap-proach will take away decisions from developers and allow the community to develop inclusively. This method of development chal-lenges the original masterplan of the area and seeks to nurture a more sustained growth inline with the needs of the local area.

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Materiality (Armelle Tardiveau) Studio 2 – ArchAid (Martyn Dade Robertson)Studio 3 – Quotidian Contraptions (Matthew Margetts and Jo McCafferty)Studio 4 – Under the Skin (Colin Ross)Studio 5 – Strange Places (Adam Sharr)

The studios were designed to offer the students a wide range of themes to consider – from Studios centred around strange or historic contexts, through people and process to advanced technology and experimental materiality. In all cases the studios explored issues that also had a wider contemporary social, economic and cultural relevance.

As a thesis, students were still expected to identify and develop their own particular individual line of architectural enquiry. In many cases this evolved gradually throughout the year, but always with a continuous narrative. The line of enquiry was

encouraged to be specific, but linked to the collective themes identified by the studio. Prevalent themes explored this year have been liminal thresholds, post-industrial employment, economic insecurity, temporary materiality and uncertain futures.

Also new to 2012 / 2013 was the introduction of the ‘Technical Specialism’ as an integral part of the thesis project, and the ‘Academic Portfolio’. Students were encouraged to explore from the outset a specific line of technical enquiry that could inform the architectural development of their project. Supported by leading regional and national engineers the technical development of the project was recorded in the ‘Technical Report’. The Academic Portfolio is a separate critically reflective document which collects all the design output from the two March years into one edited portfolio, carefully mapped by the student against the RIBA / ARB criteria.

Matthew Margetts

stage 6

Stage 6 this year has been taught through 5 themed studios. Students still undertook a year long thesis with a self generated brief, however this brief was informed by, and related to, a thematic framework established by the studio. There were a series of collective reviews programmed through the year, but between these shared points the studios were encouraged to function autonomously, organising their own field trips, technical support and guest reviewers / tutors. All studios participated in a 5 week long ‘primer’ exercise at the start of semester 1 which was used to develop and test wider themes on smaller scale projects. The primer output was not expected to be a ‘building’ but in all cases had an architectural relevance. Many students’ thesis project briefs emerged directly from the primer project, though this was by no means an expectation.

The five studios were:Studio 1 – Atlas – Exploring

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The Thinking Through Making Week (TTMW) was a new initiative for this academic year. The intensive week was designed to provide Stage 6 students with an introduction to a range of ‘making’ techniques which could be used to develop new ways of thinking about their thesis projects.

A series of interactive workshops were developed with practicing artists and makers throughout the week to explore notions of space through a variety of media and working at a variety of scales. Each day was themed around a particular process – assemblage, film, casting, rubbing and stitching.

Tim Morrison (http://www.yorkopenstudios.co.uk/artist/Timothy-Morrison) launched the week with his ‘Assemblage’ workshop – challenging the students to create miniature worlds from brown cardboard.

These worlds were then used as the basis for stop motion animations in a workshop run by Newcastle graduate Matt Lawes –(http://www.matthewlawes.co.uk).

Christian Spencer-Davies from London based A-Models (http://www.amodels.co.uk) ran a workshop introducing the students to advanced model making techniques.

Wednesday centred around a workshop run by Newcastle based artist Effie Burns - http://www.effieburnsglass.co.uk, exploring small scale casting techniques.

Thursdays ‘rubbing’ theme involved block printing workshops from current Stage 5 student Kevin Liu and life drawing classes from Charlotte Powell.

The week culminated in a day long workshop run jointly by Lesley Campbell – Course Leader Fashion Design at Sheffield Hallam and Rachel Currie (Plus 3 Architecture) which introduced the students to dress pattern making techniques and explored how these might be spatialised.The History of Space

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There are famous examples of architecture schools where the ethos of the school has worked closely with the building that the school occupies, where the building has somehow been a testing ground for the curriculum. The most famous examples are, perhaps, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, Walter Gropius’ building for the Bauhaus in Weimar, Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall at IIT in Chicago and Josep Lluís Sert’s Gund Hall at Harvard. But these buildings were imagined somehow as complete representations of cur-ricula that were also understood as complete. Now, in a changed world, they stand as histori-cal artefacts as much as living places of work. There are other architecture schools where their buildings remain a work-in-progress, where architectural ideas are tested, changed and adapted over time. The Architectural Associa-tion’s Hooke Park campus springs to mind, or Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architec-ture Center, both of which are in a constant state of experimental building and rebuilding. In Newcastle, our listed building at the heart of a dense city centre campus allows us neither the space of Hooke Park nor the free reign over our spaces that is available to Virginia Tech. But a lively group of ‘linked research’ projects un-dertaken by seven MArch students has sought to re-imagine the building in creative ways to further its creative culture. The proposals emerged from a participation exercise organ-ised by the group – complete with tasks, games and ‘Corb specs’ for everyone – to gather ideas and opinions from students and staff. Each of the projects are small in themselves but their cumulative impact is much greater than the sum of their parts.

In her project, Cassie Burgess-Rose promoted a tactile appreciation of architecture, adorn-ing the doors of the Architecture Building. She conducted a thorough survey of the building’s doors, preparing a phenomenological door schedule. Noting marks and observing people’s use of the doors, she added pads (in leather, PVC, suede, for example) where they’re barged-open with shoulders and bums, push plates where they’re kicked open and door knockers made from pencils. Students and vistors will be surprised and amused by these details, she hopes, promoting a heightened awareness of how buildings and people touch.Adam Sharr and James Longfield

practices. He proposed to create a series of ‘Making’ manuals and indexes that document the workshop and its tools which was supplemented by a series of fabricating exercises. These would engage students in developing knowledge by introducing tools, methods and practices in the workshop as they carried out the exercises. The created objects would then serve a secondary purpose in satisfying needs around the school such as storage and availability of tools.

These projects, together, propose a view of architecture as design research: a creative synthesis born out of methodical investigations of live problems. Cumulatively, the group’s projects help to integrate the student’s values into the building itself, seeing it as a live experiment in architecture and architectural education.

Rachel Bennett recognized that the school lacks a material library. Cajoling and persuading material suppliers to send samples, she constructed a series of typical details for display near the studios which students can to refer to. Rachel herself practiced a series of trades to construct these details including bricklaying and joinery, her learning process serving as a powerful example to others. It is, she hopes, the beginning of a continuing development of a material library.

Alice Gunter developed her project in Old Library Lane between the rear of the Architecture and Building Science buildings, a backland space whose legitimate uses are supplemented by others, many of which are out-of-sight and – theoretically at least – forbidden by the University. She conducted a meticulous analysis of the marks and traces left behind in order to discern how the space is really used and appropriated. Proposing an entrepreneurial kind of practice growing out of the place and its uses, she devised a series of recycled interventions to enhance them, including a ‘guerilla garden’ planted in old car tyres, tables for smokers and for late-night conversations, and furniture for spraying paint and glue.

The school’s ‘multi-purpose’ crit and coffee space, known as ‘Crit 1’, was addressed by Laura Harrison. She noticed that its sliding-folding screens provide only a few of the configurations that the inhabitants want. Out of these observations, she designed and built two mobile cabinets that double as seats and pin-up boards – also containing a collection of

architectural journals donated to the school by Roger Stonehouse – which can be deployed to subdivide the space in different ways.

Imogen Lees began with a series of material experiments, testing the possibilities offered by ‘papercrete’; a mix of paper and cement. Observing the amount of scrap paper generated by school’s ArchPrint plotter suite, she sought to promote its reuse in making a new material. A series of artefacts constructed around the school – a seat, a light-fitting, pin-up boards – are supplemented with QR-codes. Read by digital devices, these provide links to movies and tutorials which describe how to make models and a variety of other things in papercrete, offering step-by-step guides for others to follow.

Jane Usher is a critic of contemporary architectural education. She argues that too much emphasis is placed on design and not enough emphasis on the practical knowledge needed to be an architect in practice. Interested in different learning styles, she recognised that many architects are visual learners and proposed that the school building could help teach the UK Building Regulations. She installed a series of vinyls on floors and walls outlining key maximum and minimum dimensions, highlighting instances where the building meets and does not meet Regulation standards, in order to teach those standards. Myles Walker proposed a solution to the issue of developing thinking through making as a skill in first year students and basic workshop

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Research Event Cassie Burgess-Rose

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Rachel Bennett Laura Harrison

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Alice Gunter Imogen Lees

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Jane Usher Myles Walker

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Armelle Tardiveau

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Learning Environments was a participatory action research project headed by MArch students and lecturers Armelle Tardiveau and Daniel Mallo from the School of Architecture Planning and Landscape in collaboration with Longbenton Community College and the Natural History Society of Northumbria (NHSN). The Society are working to encourage young people to explore and learn about the natural world in the North East and also manages Gosforth Park Nature Reserve where they are looking to develop facilities that will encourage and enable school groups to visit and study. The aim of this Linked Research project was to determine the potential for a ‘Learning Environment’ in Gosforth Park Nature Reserve to support future outdoor teaching.

The research team designed, developed and deliv-ered a programme of workshops with fifteen eleven-to-twelve year olds, which encouraged an active participation and interaction with the spaces around them and the environment offered by the Gosforth Nature Reserve. The methodology involved a cyclic process of plan-ning, action, feedback then reflection in which each cycle of engagement with the children informed the next with view to:

- Develop, together with education specialists, new approaches to outdoor teaching and learn-ing aiming at instilling a sense of familiarity with the Reserve and a sense of pride and care for nature amongst students.

- Allow children and young people to become familiar with Gosforth Park Nature Reserve and to support some of the activities required by the curriculum.

- Generate an informed spatial / architectural brief for a new education and research facility in this unique natural resource in Newcastle.

director of The Natural History Society of Northumbria commented that the work that the students and staff carried out has been invaluable to them: ‘it has enabled the project to move forwards and we hope it will also enable us to secure funding for future capital works’.

Following the completion of the active engagement with the children, the students continued to research individual but interconnected lines of inquiry which derived from our first hand research in the field. This research then informed the 3 essays: Biophilic design in learning environments by Adam Hewgill investigates the design of learning environments and how to enhance the biophilic characteristics of space and inherently educate children in ecological concerns. Learning by action by Michelle Martin interrogates if evidence based instruction is a beneficial tool to guide an approach in developing a framework for an engagement project. Finally, Taking the

class out of the room, by Alexandra McClellan questions the great outdoors as a better learning environment and explores the agency of space in influencing children’s awareness and sensitivity to outdoor environments.

The output from the project was a book which details the methods and findings adopted by the research team, how this field research informed specific lines of inquiry into children’s engagement with space, guidance for developing a spatial engagement project with children and finally, recommendations for the design of a new educational facility in Gosforth Park Nature Reserve. James Littlewood,

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engaging children in interpreting a map

Engaging children in interpreting a map

Engaging children in creating space in the nature reserve

Engaging children in their natural environment

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Flooding In Informal Settlements Bangkok

A group of four MArch students (Victoria Brown, Suzanne Croft, April Murray and Annabel Ward) carried out intensive fieldwork-based research in a development context to explore the complex interrelationships between people and their envi-ronment in vulnerable low income communities.

The project was co-ordinated by Dr Peter Kellett who for many years has been running Linked Re-search options focusing on housing and interna-tional development. These projects are related to ongoing research work in GURU (Global Urban Research Unit) much of which is done collabora-tively with academics overseas, in this case with Dr. Rittirong Chutapruttikorn of Bangkok Univer-sity who supervised the fieldwork. The students were responsible for designing the research and making funding applications to support the 8 week field visit to Bangkok, Thailand.

Peter Kellett

improve participation between researchers and participants. The students presented their work at Bangkok University and prepared posters and booklets for each community. On return to the UK they presented their study at a conference at Leeds University on the topic of communication and language barriers in fieldwork research. In addition the students held a photographic exhibition in APL to make their research accessible to a wider audience.

The project explored the risks and vulnerabilities facing canal-side informal settlements in relation to the severe flooding in 2011. With the support of students from Bangkok University the four students conducted qualitative research in two case study communities using a range of methods including mapping, interviews, focus groups and detailed analytical drawings of the dwellings. An overarching aim of the project was to explore and test the potential for architectural and visual skills to be employed in qualitative research.

The main outcome is a book documenting, describing and evaluating the research and the

process of qualitative research itself. The study offers a series of insights into how residents responded and adapted to the 2011 flooding, and how the community worked collectively to improve their situation and levels of resilience. The analysis informs and broadens our understanding of how a community’s informal status exacerbates their vulnerability to both environmental and human factors.

The study also evaluated the relative success of the methods adopted as communicative tools. The methods combined architectural and social science research techniques to bridge the language barrier and

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Dr Katie Lloyd Thomas

dis

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nsThe 10,000 word MArch dissertation runs across semester 2 in Stage 5 and semester 1 in Stage 6. It offers students the opportunity to undertake a sustained enquiry into a topic of particular interest to them and to develop their own modes of writing and presentation. It may or may not lead into their thesis project. This year saw a marked increase in the number of students taking this option, perhaps due to a new module Tools for Thinking about Architec-ture that introduced Stage 5 to a wide range of approaches to their discipline from anthropology to philosophy, and to the research interests of staff in the school.

We were delighted with the quality and diversity of the work produced,from enquiries into the complex material and lived conditions of cities torn by division (Belfast, Nicosia)to studies of new phenomena and their spatial implications (agoraphobia in conditions of surveillance, the rise of the ubiquitous coffee shop). There were explorations of the techniques of architecture (measure in all its dimensions at Greenwich, the grid in Carlisle and in Lisbon) and experi-ments with form of the dissertation (the use of fabrication within the text and in producing new stories of wonder for Sunderland, and the use of the horizon as a structuring device for a study of Orfordness). We have included an overview or sample of each dissertation here.

Thanks to Hentie Louw who ran the first semes-ter of the module, and to the tutoring team: Dr Zeynep Kezer, Professor Mark Dorrian, Profes-sor Adam Sharr and Dr Martin Beattie.

provisions, or indeed for him. It is perhaps due to this realisation that he ultimately makes the decision to leave his house in order to seek out a pizza delivery girl that he has fallen in love with.

It seems at this point he realises that his lifestyle was generated by his own bunker-mentality; the apparently voluntary restriction of his own movements enabled by his emotional relationship with the house. This relationship is constantly in tension, as it is both his shelter from the outside world and everyone in it, and the generator of the boundary preventing him from stepping outside.

Hazel Cowie

Agorophobia and Surveillance:

Is the proliferation of technologies related to sight – both seeing and being seen – generating a new form of distributed agoraphobia that translates and re-frames formerly spatial characteristics?

Shaking Tokyo, a short film by Bong Joon-Ho as part of the trilogy of short films comprising ‘Tokyo!’ tells the story of a young man who lives alone and will not leave his house. We are unaware if this is because he is afraid of the outside, or of society in general. Describing himself as a hikikomori, he mentions that he cannot stand contact with other people or with sunlight, and so he lives alone in darkness. Not only can he not leave the house, he cannot make eye contact with the people who deliver his food to him, nor enter a room in his house ‘because of his father’. His house has become a means of maintaining this lifestyle, with great stores of provisions such as toilet rolls beautifully and exactly arranged; serving as a record of the length of time he has spent in his self-imposed solitude. He has read each of the books and magazines in his living room, and stores each of his Saturday-night pizza boxes as neatly as he does his provisions. There is finality to this, as by maintaining these systems by which he is able to quantify the length of time spent inside he is also placing a limit on the amount of time he can continue to live in this way. At some point the perfectly arranged detritus—pizza boxes and toilet roll tubes—will take over and there will be no space for new

Hazel Cowie

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ferent areas within the council’s framework of on-going regenera-tion - areas it might seem, on the surface, are in desperate need of meaning and wonder. The focus of each study was a sign situated within each site - a textual spatial intervention that defines the lin-guistic landscape of the city. It is hoped that all is not lost for these sites and that these signs and site-writings may have revealed the wonder and the wonderful that is in fact already there, lying beneath the surface.

1 Carroll, L., Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, (London; Vintage, 2007), p.254

Ashley Mason

Alice in Wonder[less]land (or Fabricating Stories)

“When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

from Through the Looking Glass1

The non-sense of Lewis Carroll has captured the imagination of many readers since the first publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Some might even wonder where he may be referring to with his wonderful wordplay. Carroll’s manipula-tion of language in order to allow for a multiplicity of different meanings illuminates the crea-tive potential that exists within the gap between a text and its

interpretation. His fabricated stories may also prompt the reader to critically question their surroundings.

After the closures of the ship-yards and the coal mines, the city of Sunderland experienced a period of post-industrial decline. Whilst efforts have since been made to regenerate the region, it has still suffered from derelic-tion and demolition, generating sites that might be described as ‘wonder-less’. Yet, if wonder may be seen to exist in the search for meaning – in the lacunae in the fabric of the story – might it be possible to suggest that the perception of these sites as ‘wonder-less’ – the lacunae in the fabric of the city – is inaccurate and that wonder may exist there after all?

In a series of case studies, five such sites were selected in Sunderland, each specifically chosen in order to represent dif-

Ashley Mason

ties’ or coffee houses of the 17th Century which were places for the disemination of information, debate and informal learning.

reinforcing our consumption patterns, thereby elevating the commodity to create concepts of lifestyle and experience with which we identify.2 The commu-nity found in these new construc-tions of such ‘third-space’ is fabricated in the imaginations of its patrons, through accepted codes of conduct, dictated by notions of popular culture. This is the articulation of an otherwise disparate, pseudo-community. It is a community created by a pattern of consumption in contrast to the ‘penny universi-

Edward Walker

[a new] British Coffee Shop Culture: Consuming Public Life

Over the ten year period [1994 to 2004] that Friends was aired in Britain, the number of coffee shops on UK high streets also grew rapidly, facilitated by the expansion of branded coffee house chains, a trend that the US experienced concurrently as Starbucks grew exponentially.1 The arrival of the US behemoth, Starbucks, in the UK marked this late nineties trend. It opened its first store on the King’s Road, Chelsea in September 1998. Since then, the growth of both Costa and Starbucks has been rapid, between 1999 and 2012 the number of branded coffee outlets in the UK grew from 700 to 5,000. This may be coinci-dental but this high growth is indicative of a growing social importance placed upon them, becoming a place to be seen.

The pseudo-public spaces of coffee houses simulate sociabil-ity, socially constructed by our imagination and influenced by the media. It is a space that operates by inferring a sugges-tion that it is public space, but it exists in private buildings not under the management of the state but of private businesses. This hybrid space between home and what is public, is designed for people to meet in and is a setting for conversations, mirror-ing scenes depicted in television soaps. Costa’s familiar aesthetic references the home, and in Friends, the coffee house is used as if it were a living room. With coffee woven into the fabric of our daily lives corporate coffee brands have exploited this,

1 Mintel, January 2003. Coffee Shops - UK, [http://oxygen.mintel.com/display/125/. Accessed August 2012] 2 Klein, N., 2009. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. Picador. p. 21.

Edward Walker

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Christopher DayKieran Connolly

line represented the complex data, the numeric and quantita-tive measures that facilitated its being. “In this sense the line is also the wandering of the num-bers, the elements, or geometric solids to their places.”2 Its simple form, easily readable and identifiable, helped accurately plot the edges of the known land, the coastlines. This had obvious benefits in terms of safe maritime navigation but equally such lines show the traces of particular sections of time, which depict the motives and socio-political ambitions of the nations which in-duced them. The sole regulating line running through Greenwich and around the circumference of the earth produced other lines that mapped new territo-ries. These lines, marks and boundaries become the fossils of such colonially driven forces. “…The subsequent fossilisation of these marks of intellectual movement, as well as histori-cal movement in space, into an authoritative style of earth writing in which the world’s surface is reduced to a pattern of conti-nuities…”3 Ultimately however these fictive lines, induced by scientific intellect, constructed an abstract reality depicted in a two-dimensional form, that helped significantly improve the comprehension of the known world and at the same time “an immense reduction of the world’s complexity.”4

Kieran Connolly

Measuring Greenwich: A Topography in Many Dimensions

For the purposes of finding lon-gitude at sea, accurate time was essential and thus the clocks at Greenwich kept incredibly precise time. Such precision not only impacted on maritime navi-gation but also induced an early form of universal standardisation, as the time at Greenwich (GMT) became the accepted time for the whole of the British Isles. In 1884, atthe International Merid-ian Conference in Washington D.C., GMT gained international

acceptance as a uniform global standard, defeating its “time” rival, Paris, in the process.This standardisation of both time and space was the culmination of the quest for global longitude. The line which extended from what was the initial reference point to chart the seas and then the land, and thus ultimately set a world regulated by time impacted on how we inhabited our spatial environments. “[The] Protocols of the proceedings [of the Meridian Conference] are a uniquely detailed record of the attempt to thrash out a universal standard that would impact civil life as well as scientific, military, commercial and other interests.”1 The orthogonal rationality of the

1 Dolan, Graham; Higgitt, Rebekah; Greenwich, time and ‘the line’; Endeavour Vol.34; p.392 Carter, Paul; Drawing the Line – Putting Spatial Practice into History; Dark Writing – Performance, Geography, Design; p.983 Carter, Paul; Dark with Excess of Bright: Mapping the Coastlines of Knowledge; Dark Writing – Performance Geography, Design; p.524 Ibid; p.53

surveyors and complex schemes of compensation.3 The grid here becomes a tool for organisa-tion, almost as though the literal listing of landowners had been translated directly into plan form, as a table of names represented in built form, much like the way that Upton, as spoken about earlier, charts how graveyards can be organised both literally on site and through grids drawn on paper which organise the literal implementation in the built form.

Christopher Day

The Application of the Grid: The Grid Form. The Non-Grid location. Where might the edge exist?

The new gridded zone of the Baixa, situated in the downtown area of Lisbon, seems as though it was an attempt to rational-ise the area, and also to try to restore urbanity as a meaningful terrain for socialisation, culture and community,”1 where the rational layout of the area could be seen to be an attempt to clarify the use for the place, after a period of the unknown. The use of the term ‘rational’ here can link back to earlier iterations of the grid, for both Ching and Elam, the organizing power of the grid results from the regularity and continuity of its pattern.2

The downtown plan is orientated towards the riverside, with the typical layout of avenues and cross streets which is very typi-cally associated with American cities such as New York City and Washington DC. The tight knit streets with high buildings to either side offer the most cost effective and simple method of building. The catastrophic earthquake of 1755 meant the destruc-tion of existing buildings and land boundaries which then preordained the problem of the re-distribution of Public and Private land as an inescapable issue of the re-building process. As a result, the orthogonal grid formation which was integrated, seems, in present day, to have been the most ordered and simple way to re-distribute this land to those who had owned it before. Barreiros explains that the exchange of public and private land would require skilled

1Bookchin, Murray. The Limits of the City (New York: Harper and Row 1974) p. 161.2Ching, Francis. D. K. Architecture Form, Space, and Order (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons 2007) p.230.3Barrieros, Maria, H. “Urban Landscapes: Houses, Streets and Squares of 18th Century Lisbon” in Laitinen, Riitta. Cohen, Thomas V. Cultural History of Early Modern European Streets (Boston: Leiden 2009) p. 24.

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Luke Rigg

of Nicosia and the Ledra Street border. What will come to light is that Ledra Street Border is a heterotopic juncture.

Ledra Street border is a paradox-ical and uncertain space, a site of total freedom and at the same time of total control.1 Once the symbols are decoded the visitor finds himself surrounded by conflicting spatial practices. Here, the border is turned into an ambiguous space revealing the ongoing conflict between and within the two communities, as well as the fact that people are split over the idea of reunification and harbour opposing views.

Charoula Lambrou

Ambiguous Land: Divisive Spatial Practices Reveal Conflict on the Island of Cyprus

The dissertation focuses on the Ledra Street border, as an embodiment of the spatial dimension of Cyprus’ continued division by the Buffer Zone. The Turkish invasion in 1974, officially divided the island into south Cyprus (Greek Cypriots / the Republic of Cyprus) and north Cyprus (Turkish Cypriots / the “Turkish Republic of North Cyprus”). Since then, countless negotiations between both sides, as well as international efforts, sought to provide a solution to the Cyprus problem and reunite the island. These efforts have failed and the island remains divided. The aim of this dis-sertation is to understand and identify how people act through

spatial concepts, practices and experiences and whether space helps reconcile sparring parties or mediates, produces and reinforces division. The Ledra Street border is located within the Walled City. It is a site with multiple meanings and memories of deep rooted and unaddressed grievances that date back more than a century.

The Buffer Zone and Ledra Street border with its visual bombard-ment of conflicting practices (see image), created by the different parties of the Cyprus problem (Cypriots, Greeks, Turks and international players) is used as a site to explore key themes: the disconnected spatial imagina-tions of the urban morphology in relation to physical reality, the existence of a far reaching culture of denial, as well as the cognitive dissonance and conflict characterising the border. These themes will be explored in three layers: the Walled City, the city

1 Hetherington, Dr Kevin. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. Routledge, 1997 pp 8, 42.

Charoula Lambrou

The removal of the Union flag in 2012 at the behest of national-ist councillors was an attack on what had become a normalized presence at City Hall since its erection in 1906 and sparked a more physically violent re-sponse from loyalist protestors. Conversely Stephanie Barcze-wski recounts that the grand Edwardian building was once a symbol of Protestant Unionist pride, built in response to the rising Catholic population at the turn of the 20th century. Writing in 2006, she goes on to say that the Belfast City Hall remains a potent symbol of the Ulster Protestant ascendancy and that a little over a decade ago the dome was adorned with a banner reading “Belfast Says No” in response to Anglo-Irish Peace Talks.4 Thus Victoria Square’s dome, by archi-tectural association, unwittingly draws attention to the past and present ethno-national-religious tensions that have played out at City Hall.

article observes that the dome on Victoria Square is an architectural reference to City Hall, an asser-tion that is further demonstrated by the stylized dome of Victoria Square’s logo, which bears more resemblance to the Baroque City Hall.1 The relationship between the two domes hints at a growing competition between private and civic power in Belfast. On this competition, Peck and Tickell state, “no city can afford principled non-involvement in the game,”2 thus Belfast’s two domes draw attention to pre-cisely this increasing submission to private sector investment.

By associating Victoria Square with City Hall attention is drawn to the ethno-national-religious tensions that the Council are trying to gloss over. This is because City Hall has, accord-ing to loyalist claims, become a battleground for a new “theatre of war” played out in symbols.3

Luke Rigg

Seams of Tension

Contradictions in the Concept of Neutrality in Spaces of Post Troubles Belfast

The glass dome atop Victoria Square shopping centre has been adopted by the government of Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council as a symbol of post-Troubles Belfast, however it also reveals the competition between private investment and the state. Although it has been replaced on the covers of Belfast’s tourist guides by Titanic Belfast, the city’s latest icon, the dome adorns the council’s investment prospectuses. In one docu-ment, pictured, the respective domes of Victoria Square and City Hall are juxtaposed with one another prompting comparisons between the two. A BBC news

1 “The iconic dome was intended to mirror that of the Belfast City Hall” in “In Pictures: Belfast’s New Centre,” BBC News, 5th March 2008, accessed 16th January 2013, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/7279568.stm2 Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, “Neoliberalizing Space” in Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe, ed. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, (Wiley, 2003), 463 Peter Shirlow “Northern Ireland is not at a crossroads it’s stuck on a roundabout,” The Guardian, 11th December 2012, accessed 12th December 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/11/northern-ireland-crossroads-stuck-roundabout4 Stephanie Barczewski, Titanic: A Night Remembered (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 208-209

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Matthew Margetts & Jo McCafferty

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nsThis year Studio 3 has explored the quotid-ian. Students were asked to slow down, listen carefully and analyse the specifics of un-noticed aspects of everyday life and places. Start-ing with the drawings of Heath Robinson and Perec’s ‘Species of Spaces’, the primer asked the students to add joy to a routine everyday task through the making of a ‘contraption’. These contraptions ranged from story anima-tors, through bespoke ticket machines and interactive combination locks to decision mak-ing machines and devices for measuring and wasting time. Other machines and mechanisms were dismantled, analysed and (not always suc-cessfully) reassembled.

From Rotterdam to Rotherham everyday places in Yorkshire (and Lancashire) were explored, with the students eventually choosing sites in Halifax, Blackpool, Bolton and Rotherham. Briefs developed that blended the functional with the humanistic, extracting joy from the utilitarian whilst exploring honesty through ma-teriality. Words such as input, output, carcass, interdependency, context, narrative, pivot, balance and precision were heard frequently. Many of the projects combine infrastructure and urban circulation with mechanised processes, exploring themes such as recycling, spectacle, employment and the post-industrial.

Rachel Bennett’s ‘Tough Nut to Crack’, located in Toffee Town (Halifax) seeks to unwrap the secretive Nestle Quality Street factory, whilst simultaneously providing a new pedestrian link-age from the station. Three interlinked projects in Rotherham propose a new Iron / Green lung through the post industrial heart of the town. At the end of the green ‘lung’ Victoria Brown’s ‘Royal Space of Waste’ considers how junk mail could be made more sustainable through a combined post depot waste paper recycling centre.Christopher Day’s ‘Potentially Anything’ sits at the pivot of the green to iron lung, and proposes a research and testing centre for low head hydro electric power.

And Myles Walker’s ‘Institute of Urban Industry’ completes the triptych with new education and manufacturing centre at the heart of the iron lung. ‘In Blackpool’, Nick Peters’ new arrival point explores the idea of transport interchange as urban valve, facilitating Blackpool’s seasonal changes. Jane Usher’s ‘Overdue’ is a new library for Halifax which combines a bus station and multi-storey car park with a new civic arrival. Ashley Mason’s ‘Coincidence Club’ emerged from readings around the Mass Observation Movement and investigates how the Council might better spend the £6m proposed for the existing Town Hall refurbishment on a new ‘public’ facility. And finally Stuart Taylor’s ‘The Stalls’ sees us return to Rotherham with a project that explores the uncertain future for the town’s market by sharing the existing market hall with a new theatre.

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Rachel Bennett

Ashley Mason

Stuart Taylor Myles Walker

Nick Peters

Victoria Brown

Christopher Day

A Tough Nut To Crack

This thesis is a commentary on the secrecy of the Nestle factory in Halifax, strategically breaking into the impenetrable wall of the factory to reveal the hidden process carried out behind. The building provides a new public destination to expose the secrecy of the confectionary process and showcase the part Halifax played in the chocolate wars of the 1900’s. A nut processing pedestrian route reconnects the broken link from the train station to Eureka children’s museum through a series of lenses across the site, creating a new improved public face of Nestle.

The Stalls

The flagging regeneration of Rotherham has bi-passed cultural value in the town centre. By cross programming a theatre into the 1960s market hall at the heart of the town, a reinvigoration of both the market and its relationship with Rotherham is possible. The building seeks to use dynamic lighting and simple moveable features to create an area for the stage and the market to coexist. These new elements are wrapped in a symbolic red curtain that presents the everyday workings of the building as a performance for street life to investigate.

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Rachel Bennett Stuart Taylor

The Coincidence Club

Sparked by two coincidental events, Mass-Observation was an unprecedented documentation of everyday life. Influenced by Surrealism, the movement sought to dispell the myths of political propaganda and the disillusion with those making the decisions. Following the primer Decision-Making Device, this thesis returned to Worktown where Bolton Council are currently refurbishing the existing Town Hall. This alternative proposal is for both a workplace for the council and a ‘public house’ for local clubs to occupy, seeking to question the transparency of politics as well as of materials. It is all about the coincidences - the two halves and the space between.

Overdue

Extracting elements from my Primer Contraption my Thesis aimed to investigate how animating a currently static environment can encourage a community to overcome its dated misconceptions and promote everyday use. Asking, can taking a building typology that is declining in popularity and adapting its archetypal form, function & location reignite interest? Introducing a Library as part of a community’s quotidian routine aims to remove old fashioned connotations and stigmas, about this institution and demonstrate to users it’s potential. With the use of cross fertilisation of civic functions/spaces and a ‘Snakes & Ladders’ approach to circulation the building becomes integral to a communities journey and no longer only a destination.

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Ashley Mason Jane Usher

‘Potentially Anything’

The project is sited in Rotherham and is based on the re development of an industrial centre to a post industrial town. The location of the site next to a weir, means the shift in the river height allows for the use of hydroelectric turbines, and for the testing and development of new technologies in an otherwise underutilised field. The building also acts to re-establish an industrial presence within the town, with a water tower acting as a mechanism for the testing procedure, but also as a replacement for the lost industrial chimneys of old.

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Christopher Day Victoria Brown

INBlackpool -

This thesis looked at the arrival experience in Blackpool. Currently, arriving in Blackpool is a disorientating and fractured. The thesis looks at consolidating ‘arrival’ into a transport interchange. In analysing arrival, four sets of clientele were established: Residents and workers, Stag and Hen Parties, ‘Holidayers’, and Business and Investment. These groups throughout a yearly cycle take precedence, exerting dramatic shifts in pressure on the transport system. The interchange looked at a way to deal with shifts in usage without building for maximum capacity.

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Nick Peters Myles Walker

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Martyn Dade Robertson

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Vitruvius suggested in his texts On Architecture that ‘architecture is an imitation of nature’ (Vitru-vius, 2009) but what happens when architecture becomes nature and we begin, through the design of biological systems, to become archi-tects of nature?

The studio, this year, focused on Synthetic Biology and architecture through a series of experiments involving collaborations with a molecular biologist (Dr Meng Zhang at North-umbria University) into ‘bottom up’ processes and emergence and an engineering approach which focuses on how we can control and design biological systems to with design specifications and tolerances. The experiments involved controlling and analyzing the results of bacterial biomineralsation. In other words we were attempting to grow limestone. The primer project was project is split into 3 parts: In Silico (1:100), In Vitro (1:1) and In Vivo (1000:1). Each part deals with a different set of techniques and relates to both a linear and fractal scale. Linear scale – in the sense that we will deal with the Macroscopic through to the microscopic. Fractal, in the sense that we expected to see forms and structures, which repeat at these different scales. The parts are also divided by media. In Silico suggested using computation as a modeling tool, In Vitro involves used physi-cal models and In Vivo involved the use real biological systems (in this case bacteria cells). The work has since been published (1).The thesis responses to this topic were wider and diverse and include Markus Ryden who examined an ecological approach to retrofit-ting a disused oil rig for new research purpose using the minimal interventions possible. Alex Lyon who studied the process of entropy in Orford Ness as the a way of generating a built response. Malcolm Welford looked at reclaim-ing and ‘lithifying’ Brighton West pier through an innovative material system, composed of the ceramic firing of knitted fabric structures. John Beattie created a prototype architecture based on an evolutionary reading of Gothic ornament and form based on a modem program and delivered through a combination of parametric design and 3D printing.

(1) Dade-Robertson M, Zhang M, Figueroa C, Hernan L, Beattie J, Lyon A, Ryden M, Welford M. Proto-materials: Material Prac-tices in Architecture at Molecular and Cellular Scales. In: Michael Stacey, ed. Prototyping Architecture. London: Building Centre Trust, 2013, pp.211-223.

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Entropy Collective

This thesis is an investigation into the design of responsive structures that derive from and allow the ongoing study of the natural processes and ‘managed decay’ on Orford Ness. The Ness, a shingle spit on the Suffolk coast, was a military base during most of the 20th century and is now owned by the National Trust. The new building forms and materials chosen are an interpretation of those currently on-site, however inverted to be more temporal interruptions of the flat horizon. The users would include scientists, artists and theologians forming a collective focused on the study of entropy.

Alex Lyon Markus Ryden

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Fabricating evolution

Can the emergent technology of 3d printing bring the bespoke back into a standardised architecture?The research thesis developed from studies into coded design at work within natural systems. In particular, the way these systems evolve and mutate from their DNA code. The study of a codified gothic became the platform to test these ideas of evolution within an architectural paradigm. The discourse between bespoke meets standardisation is researched through a non-linear design process that takes into account site code, a heavily standardised programmatic code and environmental influence resulting in an evolved architecture fabricated from new material possibilities afforded through 3d printing.

John Beattie

This thesis addresses the design challenge of re-capturing, lithifying and rejuvenating Brighton West Pier by providing a new venue, for a communal program for adults based on contemporary crafts.

It questions the relationship between construction and inhabitation and between function and fabrication.• How can we re-capture, lithify (turn to stone) and rejuvenate Brighton West Pier.• How can we use an innovative construction process to provide a communalprogram for adults (i.e. which is distinct from the youth centered offering of other similar structures).• How can contemporary crafts (specifically weaving and ceramics) be used as a way of questioning and reconfiguring the relationship between construction and inhabitation and between function and fabrication.

The premise behind my technical investigations was to capture the complex, fluid and highly desirable undulating forms developed in weaving and knitting, then translating such complex meshes into permanent lithified architectural ceramic components.

Malcolm Welford

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Armelle Tardiveau

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Methodology for a deep understanding of materiality. ‘Since the beginning of the 1960s, Gerhard Richter collected simple amateur photos, everyday icons, snapshots from family albums as well as photos from average reporters from newspapers and magazines in which the world was reflected. This kaleidoscope of images forms the original core of the Atlas’. (Gehard Richter’s Atlas, 2006, Thames&Hudson).Similar to Gerhard Richter, over the summer students have created an Atlas, of photographs focusing on materiality. Unexpected, surprising and recurring themes occurred such as the life cycle and of materials’ arrested developments (Suzanne Croft); materials to saw, grind, drill, split, polish or carve (Annabel Ward); up-scaling: small hand bound, woven, stacked, tied, pinned and stitched items to create a larger than life elements (April Murray); living materials and uncertain grounds: bogs and marshes (Janice Chen); the preconceptions and illusion of material properties: deceitful materials (Imogen Lees); filling gaps and marrying two materials, action, reaction, rejection how to engage now with materials of the existing (Nikoletta Karastathi).

These ideas were set against a one-day field trip to London where we inspected, scrutinized, admired and dreamed with re-invented materials, materials used in an unexpected way or simply repeated over and over again. From the Caravanserai site run by Cany Ash, to 10 Stock Orchard Street by Sarah Wigglesworth, via the Peabody housing buildings by Níall McLaughlin and Ash Sakula in Silvertown, to conclude with the FOA Ravensbourne College and the unforgettable small city contained in the Herzog de Meuron Laban Centre. These very ideas were unfolded, discussed and debated with Robert Sakula who has inspired us once more. An assemblage of ideas emerged out of these sometimes converging, sometime diverging approaches, to create pragmatic and poetic interpretations of materials; A process of reflection, of understanding the small scale, of becoming familiar with a material and transform it, displace its meaning and use, push it, reveal it for the pure joy of exhibiting it and ultimately working with it.

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Imogen Lees

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April Murray

Suzanne Croft

Nikoletta KarastathiAnnabel Ward

Recycling Perceptions of Waste

A critical reflection on how designers should consider the lifespan of a building when considering its siting, designing its structural system, specifying materials and its environmental strategy. The lifespan of the specified materials has been the main focus due to the current global issue of the overuse of finite raw materials. The potential for specifying materials with a recycled raw material content has been highlighted through their use in the cardboard structural system for the building façade and the landscape strategy. This focus has lead me to design a multi functional building, which manufactures structural cardboard as well as being the largest permanent example of structural cardboard in the UK.

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Imogen Lees

ASSEMBLAGE

My thesis aimed to design from small-scale handcrafted objects to an intervention at an urban scale. I have proposed a mixed-use repair centre, which aims to tackle some of Walthamstow’s issues. The themes of repair Richard Sennett discusses in his book Together have heavily influenced all aspects of my thesis. The proposal aims are to: ‘repair’ Walthamstow physically and socially, ‘restore’ the areas image and, use the ideas of ‘reconfiguration’ to transform and encourage social engagement. The animated façade design reflects the dynamic market leading up to the site.

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CAFE | GALLERY EXHIBITING REPAIRS

SITE AXO NOMETRICPROPOSAL IN CONTEXT 1:500

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Ouseburn community joint

Steurer My thesis explores the relationship between timber and people. Based on a sloping site in the Ouseburn valley and sited next to the dramatic brick arches of Byker bridge, the building is a timber construction ‘hub’ which seeks to join together communities in and around the valley. The thesis explores the timber joint both as a physical form, and as a metaphor, defining the building in 5 aspects: materially, socially, spatially, programmatically and technically. Through the exploration of timber construction techniques the building aims to showcase the varying potential of timber whilst providing training, education and workshop spaces for users alongside a public realm of café and gallery space.

Suzanne Croft

Bridging the Divide: Music for Dewsbury

Dewsbury is a town with divides. This project aims to knit the town back together physically and socially with a new cultural music venue and learning centre. The building becomes a piece of the urban fabric which forms new links and new urban destinations activated with music - ‘the promenade’ ring road park, a new internal piazza, a street through the building and a new groundscape at roof level. The building allows varying levels of engagement- from listening to music, learning about music, having a drink or just walking through, and encourages impromptu performances and a mixing of people and culture.

Annabel Ward

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Janice Chen-Haddon Nikoletta Karastathi

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Colin Ross

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inThe unit will immerse itself in aspects of de-sign that are embedded in my own practice. Students will navigate a path through the year guided by a lightly framed programme and sup-ported by a series of overlapping themes:

International Outlook

Visual communication

Cross disciplinary practice

Taking the fantastic setting of Girona as a start-ing point we will look beyond the historic charms and obvious surface qualities in this medieval Catalunyan city. There may be social, cultural, political discoveries- real issues that can form the basis of a design thesis.The unit will aim to harness the potential of architecture to support and enrich peoples’ lives. Proposals may respond to uncomfortable subjects but will hopefully result in architecture with some meaning, spaces and places that are needed and propositions suitably resolved to be believable.

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Under the skin: civic encounters

The thesis investigates how two culturally disconnected yet neighbouring cities can be brought together through a civic campus in Spain. Girona - a traditional Catalan city, and Salt - housing a migrant population of mainly North African descent. This campus forms a city-to-city transitional zone, and provides a mix of academic and community programmes. These are connected together through a series of walkways, aimed at creating a mixing space for encounters between different types of people. The site massing creates a sheltered environment to escape to, which cools both visitors and the surrounding breathable blocks - empathising with typical North African public spaces.

Thesis Statement

My thesis tries to marry the ever modern and international culture of Catalonia with the traditions it has had

for hundreds of years through looking closely at one section of life. Death.

The building will make up part of the engine that keeps the city growing, it will be complex in its technology

and will coincide with the growth of secularisation of society. All these are very new ideas, whereas death is

very old.

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Matt Lippiatt

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Laura Harrison

Under The Skin: The Liminal...Portals Of Transition

Manifesto: exploring the points of transition through liminalality.

The project strives to inhabit the underutilised water diminished river bed by providing a place for people suffering with cancer to find the balance of interaction between the public realm and their private introversion, by integrating a therapeutic environment into an existing vibrant city context. The project creates a new portal and gate way to the city of girona, enabling the city to be seen from a different perspective.

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Existing gutter to be lowered, cased and controlled. Connecting existing run off points to new integrated boxed culverts within the river bed

Concrete lift shaft providing a structural base for the connecting 750mm beams supporting the r

Adaptable screens used within the proposed market area.

Gabion basket used as additional retaining natural drainage with planting and seating troughout the landscape

Gravel for natural drainage leading to land drain

750mm x 350mm reinforced concrete beams supporting:parquet floor finish on 50mm screed.DPC.100mm insulation.200mm reinforced concrete slab.

Green roof construction:Vegetation layer onNature mat + lightweight substrate.Filter fleece.Drainage + water retention layer consisting of drain tray partly filled with aggregate.DPMPlywood250mm Insulation between 175mm x 350mm joists.

Small insulation strip for cold bridging

Existing bank been cut in to, reinforced and stabilized for structure.

750mm x 350mm reinforced concrete beams spanning from the two load bearing points; the bank and the lift shaft. Beams set on both 5000mm x 5000mm structural grid and diagonals giving the structural capacity for cantilevered areas

Frame constructionLaminated timber frame. Set on a 5000mm x 5000mmstructural grid. 175mm x 350mm timbers @ 1000mm ctcGlazing between mullions with coated alluminium frame.Throughout the building some windows fixed and others able to open for ventillation and allowing the users of the building to have control over the privacy and appearance of the building.

Facade Angled 100mm horizontal slats weather protected and white coated @ 170mm ctc on barrier board and weather protected stainless steel angle fixings. In areas throughout the building that facade being fixed in an openable frame in which the window can also be opened.

Integrated seating areas within frame throughout the building

Sliding panels with flower in print on fabric + some areas glass attached to frame throughout the building for the use of privacy control and space making

Concrete pile foundations with reinforcement. 800mm x 1650mm pile cap.

Michelle Martin

The Value of Somnolism: Hotel Academy of Dreaming

Located in the noisy city of Girona, popular with tourists, who provide 90% of the city economy, and business users in search of siesta, the site sits on the confluence of two rivers, overlooking a Natura 2000 island. The hotel and it’s constructed wetland park provide visitors and residents with spectacular views, offering connections of experience to the natural world, one which psychology has shown to be an essential part of human wellbeing. Meanwhile, the landscape relives some of the local fear of city flooding through the volumetric flood relief created and future proofs the sensitive local habitat with the help of the community planting scheme.

Cassie Burgess-Rose

Hiding in Plane Site; Perspective and Production in Parc de la Devesa, Giriona

Set in the heart of the underused Parc de la Devesa, this project reactivates the park, returning it to its former glory as a venue for walking, wandering and watching. Timber from a program of tree felling produces a series of follies, furniture, and elevated walkways culminating in a building which provides the opportunity for education through observation of the story of the trees. The building is at once juxtaposed against its context of tall, imposing plane trees and disguised by their reflections on a glimmering glass façade which transforms at night into a beacon of light in the dark forest.

Thesis Statement

My thesis tries to marry the ever

modern and international culture

of Catalonia with the traditions

it has had for hundreds of years

through looking closely at one

section of life. Death.

The building will make up part

of the engine that keeps the city

growing, it will be complex in its

technology and will coincide with

the growth of secularisation of

society. All these are very new

ideas, whereas death is very old.

The Working Section 1:100Although the building is a place for emotional experiences, it is also a working place.

Routes Using the Yokohama Project, No Return Diagram idea to create routes through the building that allow for the user to never travel back on the same path. The exception to this is when exiting the ceremony spaces.

The Body

The Stone Walk | Silk

Staff

Cemetery | Cafe

Visitors

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Alice Gunter

Internet facility

Car hire

Cash machine

Bureau de change

Babycare

Information

Lift

Restaurant/Café

Telephone

Toilet men

Toilet women

Wireless hotspot

Accessible toilet

Public areas

BOH

Retail

GRO-BCN &Spain’s ‘White Elephants’

This thesis reassesses the relationship between infrastructure and place by exploring the potential for change by the superimposition of a connectivity to Girona that places this regional city within a supra-national context.

The procurement of public works in Spain is a very contemporary problem and Spain’s 17 regional governments have a large part to play in the country’s financial problems. The attitude was such that ‘Bilbao was getting its own Guggenheim museum, why couldn’t every region cash in on this regeneration effect?’ So every region had a grand project, to set itself apart and attract investment. Are these projects monuments to the vanity of a region’s decision makers?

The proposal is based on the hypothesis that the ‘experience’ of Girona will change beyond recognition through the combined impact of a high-speed rail network connecting it to Barcelona, together with connections to the Spanish and wider European HSR networks, and as such propinquity is no longer pertinent.

This project speculates on how a modern architectural response can stand side by side with the cultural and historical significance of Girona’s medieval quarter, offering a measure of respect without losing a sense of contemporaneity. A programme combining a series of public flower gardens, a perfumery which feeds from them and a shop and boutique hotel which sustains it commercially, re-activate a disused and unaccessible portion of the city. The result is scheme that exudes a minimalist luxury from within, and yet subtly blends into its surroundings when viewed from afar.

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Kieran Connolly

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Adam Sharr

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This studio is about strange places: places which are so particular that architecture made there cannot be like architecture made anywhere else. Students were asked to choose strange places which are not only spatially distinctive but which also have cultural resonances – literature, history, film, art, photography – and/or political resonances – palpable inequalities or strange relationships – which could be investigated through design. While the places explored by the studio were diverse, certain methods were shared: how to depict the strange qualities of a strange place, how to measure its particularities, and how to pursue that unique and particular architecture which could only happen there.

The particular strange places chosen by the studio have been varied. Hazel Cowie worked with Spurn Point on the Humber Estuary, a shift-ing shingle spit which has been eroding rapidly for hundreds of years, abandoning houses and whole villages to the sea. Adam Hewgill identi-fied the strangeness of the City of London, a city within a city which has few residents but its own political system, where high capitalism meets high surveillance. Charoula Lambrou chose Nic-osia Airport in Cyprus, abandoned following the 1974 conflict on that island and now stranded, empty, in the so-called ‘green line’ policed by the United Nations. Davoud Moradpour travelled to Portland, the island off Dorset famous for its white limestone which has been quarried for famous buildings worldwide, and whose striking acoustic properties are little known. Luke Rigg – inspired by John Betjeman’s Metroland – be-came fascinated with Ebbsfleet, the first British new town of the twentieth-century, described by Stuart Lipton as ‘a new Rome’.

We’d like to thank our guest critics for their con-tributions: Sarah Wigglesworth, Robert Sakula, Andrew Carr and Marc Horn.

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The Retreat at Spurn Point

This project explores the design of a retreat for people who want to seek out an alternative to the permanently connected, networked lifestyle that has become the new normal for so any of us. Located on Spurn Point, a sand bar projecting into the Humber Estuary, the building is conceived as a series of concrete pontoons that are able to lift and float with the tide and retreat westwards with the land that is receding underneath it. Intended to be fully autonomous, the building has no electricity to put the emphasis of the retreat on relearning about natural rhythms and cycles as an antidote to the instancy and immediate reward that modern lifestyles give us.

254

The Ideal Rome Show

The Ideal Rome Show places the Ideal Home Show on a site linking Ebbsfleet International and the new town of Ebbsfleet. The new location offers residents and commuters travelling to and from the station an idealized vision of the home. In a paranoid critical response to Ebbsfleet’s reality shortage, and Stuart Lipton’s assertion that the “Thames Gateway could be [the] new Rome,” various elements of Rome are grafted onto the site to form the exposition park. The superimposition of classical Rome is a reference to the nostalgic classicism in the housing developments of Ebbsfleet and Britain as represented in the Ideal Home Show.

Luke Rigg Hazel Cowie

256 257

Imogen Lees

Portland soundings

This project is based in the Isle of Portland and it mainly concerns designing a monumental building for the island, keeping the identity of the island, which are in fact its great limestone and the sound of Portland stone. It may be surprising to say that Portland stone sounds productively, but it really does. This has been explored through this project and as a result variant aural effects in different spaces within the proposed building could be explored. By using different parabolic surfaces and acoustical ducts sound is amended and transmitted from underground spaces to the top floor spaces of the proposed tower (made fully of Portland stone) vertically and horizontally.

Davoud Moradpour Hafshejani April MurrayAdam Hewgill

Aircraft Recycling Station: Nicosia International Airport

The abandoned Nicosia International Airport located within the UN Buffer Zone will be transformed into a major bi-communal project, as part of the process of reconciliation. The airport will be used as a final resting place for ‘end of life’ aircrafts and at the same time a place to reconstruct / reinvent the city, using recyclable aircraft partitions. Through the process of recycling, aircrafts will turn into housing units and Greek and Turkish-Cypriots will build up on a common identity as an alternative community. This creative and evolutionary process will not only create highly skilled jobs for the divided communities but it will also help the airport regain its identity in the world of aviation.

Charoula Lambrou

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Jennie Webb

Had

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Aw

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IMy thesis project emerged following research into three areas of personal interest: the pedagogyand social status of vocational education; the role that photography plays in helping to furtherunderstand the built environment and embody a sense of ownership in space; and the alternativeoccupation of everyday urban spaces. Vocational education in Britain suffers from a poor reputation and is generally valued less than academic qualifications. However, as we observe a steady decline in skilled labour and manu-facturing knowledge in Britain and a unhealthy economic reliance on service industries, it is be-coming apparent that breadth across a multitude of education pedagogies could benefit both the UK economy and society as a whole.

Young people who choose to work in skilled jobs find that there are very few job opportunitiesavailable to those without adequate work experi-ence, and the gap between academic education and the skills needed in the workplace is often too large for businesses to manage and support. By providing both vocational and foundation level academic education in real life urban contexts, direct links could be formed into skilled employ-ment and the gap between school life and work life coulddiminish.

Perspective

Archives

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NE6 VOICE project, along with a long history of both professional and amateur photography in North East, led me to consider locating my intervention centrally within the Newcastle upon Tyne. Through a series of photographic mapping exercises, I began to unearth a string of concealed openings within the urban grain. One of these explorations led me to a site in Graingertown, which is bordered on all sides by four to five storey buildings and is only accessed via three under croft alleyways. Behind the Bigg Market and adjacent to BALTIC 39, which houses a series of art-ists’ studios, galleries and teach-ing spaces, the site offered a central yet hidden location which could build upon Graingertown’s vibrant artistic scene.

Much like the development of photographic film, the design of the NE VOICE Photographic Institute evolved through a process of iterative 3D modelling and renderings, which allowed for accurate simulations of light within the building and its exhibi-tion spaces. Decisions, such as arranging the building around a central core and suspending the floors from a steel exostructure, were informed by the renderings and a desire to provide uniform, diffuse daylight throughout.The institute’s facilities hinge around one continuous spiral gallery, which is the main circula-tion route. Momentary views across the city are afforded by selective ‘Lenses’, which focus viewers’ eyes across the rooftops and towards key areas of Newcastle and the Quayside. Alongside teachingspaces, the institute contains processing facilities, studios and extensive archives.

The universal nature of photog-raphy and its presence within everyday life has the potential to bridge this gap, by encouraging a detailed exploration of the built environment, thus strengthen-ing a sense of ownership of the city fabric and building self confidence. Projects such as PhotoVoice, who aim “tobuild skills within disadvantaged and marginalised communities using innovative participatoryphotography and digital sto-rytelling methods... to achieve positive social change” have successfully shared the skills, enthusiasm and confidence of professional photographers to those who are not so active within their communities. By us-ing photography in this way, the skills and confidence learntcould benefit a large proportion of the youth population; instilling a greater understanding of thelocal built environment and helping to positively change the urban fabric.

To further this research I col-laborated with Teresa Strachan, a senior teacher within SAPL, and Lauren Wedderburn, a fellow Stage 6 student, on a project called NE6 VOICE which was exhibited at the Great North Museum in Spring 2012. We worked with a group of students from Benfield Secondary School in Wallsend, teaching them the fundamental principles of pho-tography to enable them torecord, interact with and under-stand their local urban environ-ment.

Inspired by the work of Artist George Shaw, the students were each given a disposable analogue camera and asked to photograph places in their local area and in the city, focusing specifically on areas that they

liked or disliked. The photo-graphs produced were then discussed as a group to revealthe narratives behind each image and to explain which specific photographic techniques had been employed to convey their thoughts and feelings.

The photographs they produced gave an insight into their views on the city, and along with both the group discussions and feed-back from members of public who attended the exhibition, the students evoked clear impres-sions of their local environment and suggested their thoughts for the future. The students’ work mirrored that of a prominent North East collective called Amber, who formed in 1968 and subsequently set up the Side Gallery in Newcastle in 1977. Their analogue photography andcinematic films were primarily concerned with social documen-tary in the North East, in particu-lar working class communities. The archived collections have helped to record and understandsignificant changes to the North East’s built environment and societal structure over the last 50years.This strong photographic herit-age is seldom celebrated and much of the archive material is kept out of easy access within the Newcastle Library stores. Gerry Badger explains how “every photograph is amemory trace” and “it is frequently the information that ‘drops off’ a photograph, more or less by chance, which proves the most pertinent.” My design invention, therefore, looks to pre-serve Newcastle’s social history by providing archival, exhibition and teaching spaces for photog-raphy in the North East.

Research gained through the

Square

Reception

265264

Amy Linford

ShortlistedA Thesis in Process

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Is a thesis project the pursuit of a beautifully designed object? A validation of architectural education? A rigorous examination of a research subject? Or is it a period of experimentation, a series of thought exercises, a realisation and re-imagining of architectural practice? As a profession architecture is founded on its depar-ture from the construction site. At present the architectural drawing is assumed to be the tool of communication between the designer and builder. As the architectural researcher Pablo Miranda Carranza suggests, the ‘craft’ of the architect is not building but drawing1. The domi-nance of the drawing emphasises the priority of the spatial product, leaving tectonic processes out of the equation.

Is an architect simply a curator of materials or is their role that of a craftsman? Rooted firmly within architectural culture is the distinction between form and matter; the hylomorphic schema. In this framework, originally proposed by Aristotle, substance is separated into form, “hyle”, and matter, “morphe” 2. In the creation of a binary relationship there becomes an inevita-ble hierarchy, of form over matter. In Material Matters Katie Lloyd Thomas suggests that materials are understood as a subset of matter leading to an architectural tendency to treat materials as interchangeable, superfluous, simply supplementary decorative finishes3.

Flex

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Low

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Uterus

Shift

in C

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Gra

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Diaphragm & Stomach in Compression

Spine As Fixed Frame

Expa

nsio

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Mak

e Room

The Pregnant BodySympathetic Change

A Tectonic in TransitionFinding material order

Emergency Medical Vehicle Clearance

Median Height of Domestic and Institu-tional Context

Birthing Vehicle Arrival Vehicle Clearance

Hospital Ward Tower Block Height

Existing Roof Line

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Stepped Section of Construction Sequence1:200

Building frame acts as “Jig” to construct the rest of the building Flexible green oak timber lattice gradually settles and seasons Furniture and structure take on the role of “Jig” After pouring the concrete fabricators make adjustments intuitively Although the process is repeated the product results in variation

266 267

1 Miranda Carranza, Pablo (2007) ‘Out Of Control: The Media of Architecture, Cybernetics and Design’ in Material Matters (London: Routledge).2 From a lecture on concrete formwork by Katie Lloyd Thomas, December 2011.3 Lloyd Thomas, Katie (2007) Material Matters. (London: Routledge).4 Simondon (1964) 48 as cited by Lloyd Thomas, Katie. (2007) ‘Jigging with Concrete’ in Fabric Formwork (London: RIBA Publishing)5 Pye, David, 2007, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (London: A&C Black).6 Frascari, Michael (1996) cited by Jeremy Till & Sarah Wigglesworth ‘The Future is Hairy’ (2001) in Architecture: The Subject is Matter (London: Routledge).7 Brodsky, Joseph (1995) as cited by Pallasmaa, Juhani, (2007) The Thinking Hand (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons) 79.

dictate form, the forces meet an equilibrium. During the casting process tools, labour, and decision-making, leave their traces on the solidified mass. When casting with fabric formwork the outcome depends largely on the maker’s care, dex-terity, and judgment, shifting to a ‘workmanship of risk’. The result is both a product of the mind and the hand, as Marco Frascari de-scribes the detailing of a joint as “the place of the meeting of the mental construing and the actual construction”6. The generous tolerances in the casting process leave room for intuitive decision making, between the designer and the fabricator the result is a shared endeavor.

What if the Maison de Verre be-came pregnant? What happens when the condition of contingent ordering is placed inside a regu-larized structural organization? In order to test the fabric casting process a scenario had to be proposed. It felt relevant to chal-lenge the controlled and institu-tional environment of healthcare architecture: in particular an area of healthcare - the maternity ward - where although the users are not unwell, they share the same environment with ‘unwell’ patients. Allowances are made by the pregnant body to shift the centre of gravity, allow the expansion of tissue, and make space for the growing child. Par-allels can be drawn between the structure of the pregnant body’s changes and adaptations, and the changes and adaptations that the fabric formwork under-goes in the casting process: a fluid order placed within the rigid limits of healthcare architecture.

So how can you represent a process? In casting it is more appropriate to record the ex-

Interchangeability becomes apparent in the use of material specifications in construction projects, where standards and numerical values are given to materials on the basis of an objective performance, reduced to quantitative and measurable criteria.When materials are assumed to be inert the construction process itself becomes a mystified pro-cess. In casting concrete a large amount of effort is expended in the fabrication of timber shutter-ing, serving to resist the force of the liquid concrete which refuses to become a wall, insisting it becomes a floor. The resist-ances of matter in its form taking are erased. In the architectural product the energy of the liquid concrete becomes invisible. Even in projects that appear to express the construction process the result is edited to meet an aesthetic ideal.

Gilbert Simondon criticizes the hylomorphic schema in that it assumes a fixed form and a ho-

mogeneous matter, and refers to it as “...essentially the procedure commanded by the free man and carried out by the slave”4. The architect becomes the form giver through drawings and specifica-tions, with matter assumed inert; he also instructs the builder who carries out his commands, as if he is also passive. In this sense the architect is believed to be in control of the material process and of matter itself. Thinking and designing within the hylomorphic schema disenfranchises the fab-ricator and assumes a predeter-mined process: a ‘workmanship of certainty’5

What would happen if concrete shuttering were made not from timber but from cotton, hessian, or spandex? The hierarchical roles of formwork and mat-ter are thrown into a dynamic relationship when the formwork is no longer rigid shuttering, but flexible fabric, held in place by a simple frame or ‘jig’ on site. When concrete is cast in fabric neither formwork nor material

“The process takes precedent over the result, if only because the latter is impossible without the former”

7 Joseph Brodsky

the project and their relationship to each other is crucial to under-standing and explaining this way of working.

Is the thesis both product and process? The thesis both produces and is product of the processes of design, making and representation that can appear to be the ‘final’ body of work – this is to say that the way of making the drawings, casts, models etc. is as important as the final prod-uct (in fact, is the final product?). Thinking of the thesis as process, rather than end product, enables a way of working, thinking and designing that act as an influ-ence on rethinking ways of future practice. Such exercises and experiments can help to shape the way that architecture can be approached; it is not the concluding thought that is of greatest value, but how thought processes can be changed.

periment than to solely represent the outcome. As a three part process, this involved determin-ing the quantitative constraints on site as measured drawing, the experimental modeling informed by these constraints physically, and the overlaying of these draw-ings and model photographs to enable the mediation between the two through the creativity of the designer. The drawings are a result of this layering. In this way the process could be described as a form of analogue paramet-rics: the non-digital analysis of parameters and the intuitive de-sign response to these. Trial and error was intrinsic to this method with the results of each experi-ment fed back to the next itera-tion. In this process, failures have as much validity as successes and form an essential part of the thesis – demonstrating this cycle of testing and tweaking by displaying the totality of works in Analogue Parametrics on Site

1:1000

Evening sun

Garden Enclosure

Pedestrian Route to Newcastle City Centre

Emergency Ambulance Route

Georgian Terrace Row

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Line of Georgian Terraces

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Emergency Route

Constraints & Opportunities MaterialiseSetting up Site as Jig

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The MA in Urban Design is a well-established 12-month course bridging across the built environment disciplines, with a particular social focus. The course equips students who come from all over the globe, with skills in thinking holistically about place-making, bringing together the socioeconomic context of a place with social science theory and best practice in design.

The curriculum has a strong design base consistently under-pinned by lectures and theoreti-cal seminars. Students benefit strongly from the studio culture and multidisciplinary of the co-hort and tutors as well as strong links to practice, local organisa-tions and communities. The later gives the course at Newcastle its distinct character and appeal. There are a number of field trips and participatory activities across the year, includ-ing a study-trip to a European

City. Overall the course offers an intensive and varied experien-tial immersion into this exciting discipline.

MA of Urban DesignGeorgia Giannopoulou

270

Gateshead Gateway and Creative QuarterThe project enquires into the vision for the future of a complex transitional post-industrial area in Gateshead, locked between a declining town centre, and a booming but disconnected cultural and leisure based waterfront and fragmented by large-scale road infrastructure. The students working in teams, are called to contextually synthesise and reconcile compet-ing forces of bottom up artistic activity and top-down retail-led regeneration initiatives as well as the conflicts in movement between the various actors using or going through the area. The aim is to produce an imaginative, coherent and flexible strategy for rediscovering and deploy-ing abandoned land, reusing historic stock and threading it altogether in a sensitively phased delivery approach.

Project 1: Amy Priestley, Ning Cui, Dexter Lee, Peter Horak

Project 2: Davoud Moradpour Hafshejani, Mat-thew Lippiatt, Stuart Taylor

Georgia Giannopoulou

Gateshead Gateway and Creative Quarter

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Project 1 Project 2

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This project explores concepts of Housing Al-ternatives with a strong focus on cohousing as a product and a co-creative process. The site is in Hexham; a historic market town in Northum-berland, at the edge of the town centre abutting post-war suburban social housing.

The aim of the project is to understand the links between the demands of contemporary living and the specifics of living in community and bring it together with issues of affordability and place making in a site with a strong local narrative and existing historic buildings. As part of this project, we visited and shared with a developed cohousing community in Lancaster and also designed and facilitated a vision-ing workshop with a local forming cohousing community. Students are called to experiment with principles of design coding to structure this large site in providing housing and other amenities that respond to the needs and make the most of the assets of the place and the community.

Project 1: Shreya Shetty

Project 2: Sarah Cawrse

Carlos Calderon

project 02

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A695

HOSPITAL

A6079

private housing

private housing

allotmentsworkshop &craft centre

cafe, shop &pub

common house[existing bldg.]

bbq

bbq

bike parking

turf fieldbasketball court

social housing

social housing

cohousing

cohousingcohousing

social housing

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social housing

orchard

gazebo

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terraced botanical gardens

compostwork shed

rain garden &retention pond

orchard

Image 5.jpg

Project 2

Project 1 Project 1

Project 2

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Armelle Tardiveau

AlternativesChristiania Outside-In Housing

citie

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Last years’ experience of Christiania encour-aged us for a second edition in order to learn more from this self-organised neighbourhood of Copenhagen and envisage a perspective that, this time, is outwards looking. This urban design project is intended to create relation-ships and synergies between the Freetown and its surrounding urban environment, as well as provide new arenas for exchange. The students’ projects emerged from the Christiania culture deeply embedded in recycled materials, identifi-able aesthetics, self-governance and ecological lifestyle yet inclusive and capable of blurring the boundaries of the area.

Group 1:Joseph Charman, Yichen Cao, Sarah Cawrse

Group 2: Peter Drysdale, Ruibio Fan, Ning Cui

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Group 2 Group 1

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Digital technologies are at the forefront of architecture and are shaping the way architects design and buildings are being built.

The MSC in Digital Architecture offers our students the oppor-tunity to explore the meaning of these technologies in their own local contexts and reflect on their own praxis as designers.Digital architecture projects are founded on thoughtful practi-cal “hands-on” experimentation which is guided and supported by experience researchers and practicioners.

MSc digital Carlos Calderon

architecture

John Beattie

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Nikoletta Karastathi John Beattie

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Sheng Jin Seyed AyatollahChao Xie

288 289

Michael Chapman Richard Hodgkinson

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title of article or essayauthor and surname

How to design in the context of changing urban conditions forms the central focus of the one year Masters of Arts in Architecture, Planning and Landscape - De-sign (MAAPL-D) course. With an international cohort of students, MAAPL-D takes a critical perspec-tive on investigating, analysing and operating in contemporary cities, asking students to develop a rich and people-centred ap-proach to urbanism. Semester one sought to investi-gate the community of Chinatown in Newcastle, proposing to con-tribute a Chinese Cultural Centre for the North East. Semester two was again focused in Newcastle, and involved developing a brief in three parts - An Incubator of Sorts - for the city centre section of the Great North Road, Pilgrim Street, proposing to provide an environ-ment on the street for the propa-gation of an activity that needs social, financial and spatial sup-port, over three varying scales. Semester three, running over

the summer, seeks to develop a researched design thesis of the students choosing, producing a design response to the complexi-ties of their chosen urban environ-ment.Through close readings of urban form, critically informed analy-sis and design decision making processes, and a modular based course that enables a wide variety of design areas to be explored, MAAPL-D builds on students existing architectural and urban knowledge to form a deeper un-derstanding of how cities oper-ate, and the architects role in working in them

293292

Ian Thompson and Matt Ozga-Lawn

The first year of our innovative new MA in Future Landscape Imaginaries is well underway with a small cohort producing interesting and provoca-tive work. The course focusses on the relation-ship between landscape, culture and society, and on the various ways that landscape is prac-tised, represented and imagined. It is not tied to any particular discipline, and us such the work produced and media utilised by the students is varied, open and ambitious. The creative prac-tice project focussed on World’s Fairs as large scale social imaginaries that also constitute unique and engrossing landscape conditions – the students utilised research into these places as starting points for their own critical imaginar-ies.

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MA in architecture planning and designSam Austin, Nathaniel Coleman, Edward Wainwright

How to design in the context of changing urban conditions forms the central focus of the one year Masters of Arts in Architecture, Planning and Landscape - Design (MAAPL-D) course. With an international cohort of students, MAAPL-D takes a critical perspective on investigating, analysing and operating in contemporary cities, asking students to develop a rich and people-centred approach to urbanism.

Semester one sought to investigate the community of Chinatown in Newcastle, proposing to contribute a Chinese Cultural Centre for the North East. Semester two was again focused in Newcastle, and involved developing a brief in three parts - An Incubator of Sorts - for the city centre section of the Great North Road, Pilgrim Street, proposing to provide an environment on the street for the propagation of an activity

that needs social, financial and spatial support, over three varying scales. Semester three, running over the summer, seeks to develop a researched design thesis of the students choosing, producing a design response to the complexities of their chosen urban environment.

Through close readings of urban form, critically informed analysis and design decision making processes, and a modular based course that enables a wide variety of design areas to be explored, MAAPL-D builds on students existing architectural and urban knowledge to form a deeper understanding of how cities operate, and the architects role in working in them

298 299

Huang Po-ChienHuang Po-Chien

Yiwei Peng

Jing Zeyu

Jingrong Zhang

Jiachen Song

300 301

Yiwie Peng

Ruibiao Fan Huang Po Chen

Sha Miao

303302

Ian Thompson and Matt Ozga-Lawn

The first year of our innovative new MA in Future Landscape Imaginaries is well underway with a small cohort producing interesting and provocative work. The course focusses on the relationship between landscape, culture and society, and on the various ways that landscape is practised, represented and imagined. It is not tied to any particular discipline, and us such the work produced and media utilised by the students is varied, open and ambitious. The creative practice project focussed on World’s Fairs as large scale social imaginaries that also constitute unique and engrossing landscape conditions – the students utilised research into these places as starting points for their own criti-cal imaginaries.

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Andy Slater

Jiwen Li Jian Jiao

Boyang Ma

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Mark Dorrian, Aikaterini Antonopoulou

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Salvaging / Scavanging Athens

In September 2012 our MA in Architectural Design Research was launched. This is a new design-based international masters programme that focuses on the relations between architecture and today’s complex urban conditions.

It seeks to foster projects that are the out-come of a sustained and rigorous process of study; that are investigative, poetic, and theoretically informed; and that deal in a criti-cal way with issues and questions of press-ing contemporary relevance for the city.

During this first year the students have worked under the theme of ‘Salvaging / Scavanging Athens’, developing projects that address the current crisis in the Greek capital in various ways. We are extremely grateful to Maria Theodorou and to her not-for-profit School of Architecture for All (SARCHA), who worked closely with us dur-ing our field trip to the city.

Before travelling to Athens, the students did an initial project set in the landscape of Holy Island on the Northumberland coast, exam-ples of which are also shown here.

Maria Yoanita Gunawan

Fig. 1: Lindisfarne pavilionFig. 2: Site recoding of the empty tower of Piraeus, the port of AthensFig. 3: Sectional programmatic distributionFig. 4: Tower massing: the slid-ing blocks contain pockets of functionsFig. 5: View from Kastella Hill

Yousef Khatib

Fig. 6: Lindisfarne pavilionFig. 7: Scattered house, ExarchiaFig. 8: Programmatic charactersFig. 9: Strefi Hill balconyFig.10: Exploded axonometric of school

Anh Dung Ta

Fig.11: Sectional model: veg-etable market and housing for immigrant workers, GeraniFig.12: Sectional model: veg-etable market and housing for immigrant workers, GeraniFig.13: Section showing connec-tion between marketsFig.14: Relation to urban blocks and existing meat marketFig.15: Project in the city

Zhang Yizhe

Fig.16: Section: Omonia square remodellingFig.17: Sectional isometric: Omonia square remodelling and stair buildingFig.18: View of entrance to metro

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Mark Dorrian

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eAPL’s PhD by Creative Practice has developed into a vibrant route for doctoral study, in which students formulate and pursue an intensive programme of design-led research. A student’s work typically encompasses various modalities of creative practice and critical reflection upon it, and culminates in a major submission – involving an exhibition and well as a substantial written thesis documenting the study – at the end of their research. In the pages that follow we celebrate and showcase the ongoing work of students currently enrolled on the programme.

Sophia – Konstantina BanouThe Kinematography of a City(Supervisors: Mark Dorrian and Wolfgang Weileder)

The Kinematography of a City deals with ques-tions of representation that emerge from the understanding of space as a temporal and ephemeral condition, by means of experimenta-tion with the conventions of architectural draw-ing and notation. The installation “Weaving Lines - Looming Narratives” was presented in January 2013 as part this process.

The installation constituted the tracing of an urban site in Edinburgh onto a room in Newcas-tle, documenting the actions and interactions of a set of characters. Focusing on the kinetic rather than the static, this collection of traces at-tempted a representation of the usually illegible negotiations between the humans and non-humans that inhabit and form space, across both graphic and temporal registers. Through the intertwining of these paths, the space of the site and the space of the drawing coincided as a weave of traces that derive from both the real world and the graphic conventions. The project seeks to study the discrepancies that occur be-tween the two, as well as the interchanging roles of the various agencies that emerge through the transition from site to drawing and back to space again.

James LongfieldThe Situated Practices of the Citizen Architect(Supervisors: Adam Sharr and Katie Lloyd Thomas)

Upon his appointment in 1968 to design the Byker redevelopment, architect Ralph Erskine

took the unprecedented step of opening an on-site office, in collaboration with local architect Vernon Gracie, in a former undertaker’s shop. During the project Vernon Gracie and his wife also lived on-site in the flat above the office.

In 2011 I moved into the Byker estate in order to learn from this situated, and socially-engaged approach and explore further the practice of the citizen architect, which is bounded and influenced by their location of residence.My PhD seeks to explore the theoretical definition and practical manifestation of the practice of the citizen architect, a method of architectural practice that operates in the overlap between the architect’s social position as a citizen and their professional identity as a practitioner. The images presented here are of a situated drawing I am working on, a ‘Nolli plan’ of the estate drawn onto my dining room table. In the images we see the personal and professional overlap: the life of the architect and the drawing become interwoven, the experience of living and relating socially inform and influence the professional response of drawing, writing and building.

Yasser MegahedQuestions of Quality in Architecture(Supervisors: Adam Sharr and Graham Farmer)

The research investigates the breadth and variation of views of quality within the multiplicity of architectural practice, explored and defined through the development of the Map of Practice and its spatial representation, the City of Practice or ‘Practiceopolis’.

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Sophia – Konstantina Banou Yasser Megahed James LongfieldYasser Megahed

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Andrew Ballantyne

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Howard Baker, an architect, is the protagonist of Michael Frayn’s novel Sweet Dreams (1973). On the second page of the narrative he is accidentally killed while driving, and the rest of the events unfold in Heaven, which is terrific. In Heaven he leads a charmed life, where everything falls into place in the most agreeable way. Life is not without its problems, but they are resolved and their resolution is satisfying. Howard feels at home there. His wife is there, and he falls in with old friends. During the course of one particularly intense and creative day at the office, he produces the design for the Matterhorn. 1 Frayn’s description of the design process mixes two different methods of finding form. One of them is the imposition of form from outside--a method that we have learnt to call ‘hylomorphic’--form is seen as separate from matter (hyle). In this mode as Howard is thinking about the possible form of the mountain he associates it with the pyramids, and imagines a mountain as if it were designed by the ancient Egyptians--a pyramid shape, subtly twisted out of alignment.2 However he is also working with the technical constraints of mountain-building, the sense of working against limitations, of seeing what kind of mountain shape can be devel-oped given certain unalterable geological and meteorological data. And then the sudden lurch-ing shift of perspective, the falling through the bottom of things, when you discover that these constants have been or could be altered after all.3

In this second way of work-ing the mountain’s form is not imposed from outside, but is generated from within, through the interaction of forces that are

properties in the matter itself and its environment. This is closer to the kind of description that would be given by a geologist, where questions of aesthetic intentions or of expressivity would be ruled out of the question for the techni-cal discussion, no matter how beautiful or moving the geologist might find the mountain in other circumstances. The whimsy in Frayn’s account lies in his willing-ness to entertain in this emotion-ally light fictional context the idea that the mountain’s power to move us might have been part of a designer’s intention. By framing it in this way, the mountain is tamed and reduced to the scale of a human achievement, albeit a brilliant achievement. The mood is far removed from that of the sublime, which is more often as-sociated with mountains--for ex-ample in the elevated language of Shelley’s Mont Blanc:

Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on theeI seem as in a trance sublime and strangeTo muse on my own separate fantasy,My own, my human mind, which pas-sivelyNow renders and receives fast influenc-ings,Holding an unremitting interchangeWith the clear universe of things around;4

Here Shelley (1792-1822) is describing his own response to the mountain, but he was aware of the mountain as a thing that had been formed. In 1816, when he was writing, geology was still a very speculative subject, influenced predominantly by the work of Scottish Enlightenment figure James Hutton (1726-97) whose Theory of the Earth was published in 1788, presenting the world-as-we-know-it as having been formed over aeons of time, through upheavals, erosions and sedimenations.5 The projected time-scale for these speculations was so vastly at odds with the

Biblical account of creation that Hutton was accused of atheism (as were some of his friends, such as David Hume). That would have been no obstacle to Shelley’s acceptance of Hutton’s ideas. As a student at Oxford in 1811, Shelley had published The Necessity of Atheism, and had to leave the university.6 Hutton seems to have been the main source for Shelley’s geological allusions in Mont Blanc.

-- Is this the sceneWhere the old Earthquake-demon taught her youngRuin? Were these their toys? or did a seaOf fire envelop once this silent snow?None can reply - all seems eternal now.7

John Ruskin published the fourth volume of Modern Painters in 1856--On Mountain Beauty. It is about geology more than it is about painting, and one would expect that Ruskin would see a study of geology as being as important for the modern landscape artist as the study of anatomy had been for academic figure-painters. Ruskin saw the analogy, but he had reservations about both fields of study:

I observed that all our young figure-painters were rendered, to all intents and purposes, blind by their knowledge of anatomy. They saw only certain muscles and bones, of which they had learned the positions by rote, but could not, on account of the very prominence in their minds of these bits of fragmentary knowledge, see the real movement, col-our, rounding, or any other subtle quality of the human form. And I was quite sure that if I examined the mountain anatomy scientifically, I should go wrong, in like manner, touching the external aspects. Therefore in beginning the inquiries of which the results are given in the preced-ing pages, I closed all geological books, and set myself, as far as I could, to see the Alps in a simple, thoughtless, and untheorizing manner; but to see them, if it might be, thoroughly.8

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1 This is an extract from a paper that was published in the Nordic Journal of Architecture, No. 3, vol. 2, Winter 2012, where it was entitled “Remaking the Matterhorn”. Michael Frayn, Sweet Dreams (London: Collins, 1973) p. 69.2 ibid., p. 68.3 ibid., p. 66.4 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc (1818) lines 34-40.5 James Hutton, Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe and appeared in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: 1788).6 Percy Bysshe Shelley,The Necessity of Atheism (Worthing, 1811). The author’s name did not appear on the title page, and copies were distributed to the heads of all the Oxford colleges.7 Shelley, Mont Blanc, lines 71-5.8 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 4, first published 1856 (London: George Allen, 1906) p. 414 (Appendix 2: Rock Cleavage).

Matterhorn in Disneyland under construction in 1959

Ruskin was returning to one of his characteristic themes: being blinded by rather than informed by theory. Rather than being guided by theory, he would rather we just looked intently and scru-tinizingly at things--with the aid of a sketchbook and a camera (he was a fine draughtsman, and a pioneer photographer). His ‘method’ was to start with the carefully observed detail, and to more from there to think about the bigger picture. If we start with the big idea and then start looking, we tend only to see what we expect to find; and if we start to design a moun-tain then we would begin with a pyramid and modify it, rather than looking at how mountains are actually made and shaped, then trying to empathize with the forces at work so as to produce unanticipated marvels.

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Catalina Mejia MorenoPhD Candidate Architectural Theory and Criticism

The Berliner Bild-Bericht prints

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sMy research examines the conditions of criticism in architecture and their relation to the con-cept of ‘experience’. By concentrating on two different periods, 1920’s – 1930’s and 1980’s – 1990’s; by focusing on the German and British contexts; and by considering the critical litera-ture around two buildings – Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 German Pavilion and the late 19th-century Buffalo Grain elevators – I question if there is a difference between architectural criticism derived from direct encounters with the building and that derived from encounters with texts, im-ages and other architectural representations.

Supervisors: Mark Dorrian and Katie Lloyd Thomas

Images:Iteration of some of the Berliner Bild-Bericht viewpoints in the ‘reconstructed’ pavilion. Photographs by Gabriela Garcia de Cortazar. Barcelona, 2012

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widely-known case, Mies’ alterations come from a different background. His knowledge and interest of image retouching and alteration must necessarily be understood within the ideological battles that were taking place in Germany after WWI, which reached their most provocative extremes in 1920s and early 1930s. Through new kinds of image juxtaposition (as in the practices of Paul Schultze-Naum-burg, Sigfried Giedion and Adolf Behne) and through the use of photo-collages to reinforce their architectural ideals (as is the case of Mies), architects and critics aimed to promote their visions of Modern Architecture as part of their wider attempt to redefine German culture.

Bringing into architecture photographic techniques that were initially and mainly used for portraiture from the late 19th century on, the edited Berliner Bild-Bericht images are the result of two different processes of retouching: manual or ‘visible’, and airbrush or ‘invisible’.

‘Invisible’ retouching or airbrush-ing techniques can be divided into two: one of corrective nature, the other of creative. The ‘crea-tive’ or additive allows erasing or altering contexts, to obliterate disturbing and distracting ele-ments and to remove or blur hu-man figures while maintaining the photograph’s seamless surface, processes not only manifest in Mies’s case but also in others such as Walter Müller-Wulckow’s Blaue Bücher, 1929.

The results of this process are evident in the Berliner Bild-Ber-icht’s ‘invisible’ alterations, usu-ally referred to by Mies scholars when highlighting, for instance, the erasure of the Casamarona

Interested in the ‘experience’ derived from the photographs as agents in their own right and detached from the media of publication in which they are largely uncritically disseminated, I travelled to five of the archives where the photographs of Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion for the Barcelona International Exhibition in 1929 are held.

Named after the interwar Berlin photographic agency that dis-seminated them, the Berliner Bild-Bericht photographs are not new to anyone who knows about the German Pavilion. Intentionally altered and corrected, they are the most significant and immuta-ble documents of Mies’ German Pavilion, those upon which the majority of architectural histori-ans have based their interpreta-tions and which have given this building its emblematic status.

My original contribution to the way in which these photographs have been studied is based on

the interrogation of their ideologi-cal standpoint, through making conscious or ‘visible’ their ‘invisible’ condition: namely, the intermediate process of retouch-ing the photographs prior to pub-lication, adjustments undetect-able in the printed version. I call the alterations whose process we are not able to see ‘invisible alterations’, in contrast to ‘visible alterations’, which are the ones I could see and experience in the Berlinische Galerie and to which I will refer later on.

Numerous scholars have investi-gated the use of photography at the service of modern archi-tecture. Regarding processes of retouching or alteration as means to fulfil the ideals of the architecture they depict, their focus lies on the before and after conditions of these processes, as for instance in Beatriz Colo-mina’s reading of Le Corbusier’s photographs of La Villa Schwob as ‘fake’.But while Le Corbusier is a

textile factory from the building’s background. But is there visible evidence of this in-between con-dition of the two photographs – the one before and the one after the retouching – and if so, how is it evidenced and experienced in the photographs?

My encounter with the ‘visibly’ retouched images at the Berli-nische Galerie was destabiliz-ing. In contrast to the ‘invisibly’ retouched, all that was meant to be altered could be seen: edges had been redrawn; a fine red line retraced the perimeter of the shiny window frames; white painted lines rendered the shiny columns, while thick brushes made them slim. What had once been a photograph had become a drawing. In a process of addition and superimposition, as in Mies’ collages, the seams between the photograph and its alterations were made manifest and visible.

It was this closeness prompted by the image, as well as the dif-ferent type of vision it triggered, that made me recognize the process of becoming-uncon-scious through the ideologically-constructed discourse of the Berliner Bild-Bericht photographs and their ever-repeated iteration. It is here that the notions of the ‘photographic unconscious’ and the ‘optical unconscious’ are relevant.

In 1931 Walter Benjamin coined the term ‘optical unconscious’ with reference to psychoanaly-sis, designating a new realm of experience that had been made accessible by photography. Later, in his Artwork essay, Ben-jamin makes reference to it as the stretching of time and space through the camera eye that allows the seeing of new modes

of movement. It is this ‘spacing’ or ‘distancing’ that brings into consciousness the in-between condition of the before and after photographs. As in the ‘visible’ retouched, by disrupting this superficial appearance it draws attention to our seeing and makes us conscious of it.

This different kind of vision that manifests itself addresses the consciousness of the viewing subject, who in it discovers an optical pleasure – the pleasure of viewing the image’s retouching and the photographs as drawing, a process that has been, so far, a blind process or an ‘invisible’ intervention.

My proposition lies in the pos-sibility of thinking about a ‘photo-graphic unconscious’ that deals with the image’s ideological con-struction, and at the same time entails the question of subjectiv-ity in the two ways it has been manifest: that contained in the photograph (the making of the image) and that comprised by my own experience of encounter (seeing the image). Accordingly, this ‘photographic unconscious’ works alongside Benjamin’s and Rosalind Krauss’s ‘optical un-conscious’. For while Benjamin’s work points to the possibility of critiquing the images and their alterations as ideology, Krauss’ gives room for reflection on the specific conditions of my own en-counters with the photographs.

This is a work of situated criti-cism that revisits master narra-tives of history. I aim to uncover new forms of evidence and to construct alternative modes of interpretation derived from the personal experience that emerg-es in the interplay between the inner world of the critic and the one contained in the photograph.

Image caption: Iteration of some of the Berliner Bild-Bericht viewpoints in the ‘reconstructed’ pavilion. Photographs by Gabri-ela Garcia de Cortazar. Barce-lona, 2012

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than

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than

k yo

usRobert Sakula

Pierre D’Avoine

Ed Bennett

Sarah Wrigglesworth

Marc Horn (SHED)

Phil Oliver (KYOOB)

Mark Johnston (Buro Happold)

Colin Riches (Buro Happold)

Montse Ferres

Tim Mosedale (Mosedale Gillatt)

Tim Bailey (X-SITE)

Stephen Richardson (+3

Architecture)

Ed Wainright

Andy Thomas (Grimshaw)

Alex Gordon (Jestico and Whiles)

Mike Goodall (OOBE)

Andrew Perez [Grimshaw

Architects]

Josep Fuses [Fuses Viader

Arquitectes]

Bet Capdeferro [Bosch

Capdeferro Arquitectes]

Ramon Bosch [Bosch

Capdeferro Arquitectes]

Lee Leston-Jones [Ramboll]

Stuart Hallett [Arup]

Sarah-Jane Stewart [Arup]

Kevan Shaw

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Editor

Graham Farmer

Design Coordinator

Myles Walker

Design Technician

Olga GogolevaLam Nguyen

Additional Photos

Graham Farmer, Lam Nguyen , Matt Lippiat, Matthew Margetts, Myles Walker

Our heartfelt thanks to all the students and staff contributing to the material of this yearbook. This yearbook was published by Newcastle University School of Architecture Planning and Landscape on the occasion of their degree show during the summer of 2012.

Copyright the editors, students, authors, photographers and The School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the written permission of the copyright owners and of the publishers.

The QuadrangleNewcastle UniversityNewcastle-upon-TyneNE1 7RU

www.apl.ncl.ac.ukwww.nclarchitecture.org.uk

ISBN - 978-0-7017-0244-1

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