Image: Citizen Kane Closing Sequence
Time goes, you say? Ah no, alas, time stays, we go
UG7_Pascal Bronner & Thomas Hillier_ 2015/16
“The drawers, he knew, were full of beetles. Hundreds of thousands of beetles. He was free, now, to do nothing with
his time but study them, sketch them, annotate them, classify them: specimen by specimen, species by species,
decade after decade. The prospect was so blissful that he almost keeled over with joy.”
- Greg Egan, Permutation City During the Age of Enlightenment, French philosopher Denis Diderot co-founded, edited, contributed and compiled
the first volume of his Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, cataloguing the cutting edge of contemporary
technologies and ‘mechanical arts’ of the time. In his wildest dreams he could not have foreseen that, 250 years
later, mankind would be living out a large part of its collective life inside virtual machines and electronic devices.
These devices, plagued by virtual viruses, turn our nimble and agile bodies, ergonomic miracles created to tackle
the challenges of our existence, into mere vessels that need to be fed in order to keep pressing buttons and swiping
screens.
As we enter the third generation of the Digital Revolution we must ask ourselves if we are losing our affinity with the
analogue, the physical, the crafted and the tangible? Are we becoming slaves to computational technologies that
many of us do not truly understand? UG7 will challenge students to question, dissect, experiment and speculate on
the relationships between old and new technologies and their cause-and-effect on the built environment. Is it always
best to choose the most advanced and up-to-date method or is there a value, perhaps even a moral responsibility to
practice former crafts and techniques in order to both preserve and push them to the limit within the design process.
We will explore these possibilities through the typology of the ‘archive’, which by dictionary definition is ‘a collection of
historical artefacts, documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people’, in order
to examine the value of our physical existence in an increasingly digital world. The notion of the archive is incredibly
diverse and ever-evolving, be it the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, often called the ‘Doomsday Vault’, which
preserves 720,000 individual seed samples or the mass art re-production factories of Dafen Village in Shenzhen,
China, where thousands of classic western paintings are reproduced on a daily basis. The artist Joseph Cornell, who
rarely ventured beyond his home in New York State, created an archive in his basement made up of thousands of
objects he called his dossiers of paper ephemera ‘explorations’, which took him, his imagination and his work around
the world, a route to armchair travelling.
Title: ‘The paradox of time’ by Henry Austin Dobson
Image: Timber Churches of Karelia
To scrutinize these notions, the unit will be travelling to and through Russia, a country famed for its cultural history,
notably in literature, classical music, ballet, animation and architecture, alongside its deep tradition in technological
innovation. We will begin in Moscow where we will visit remarkable cathedrals, churches and palaces alongside
experimental social housing and micro-districts located on the fringes of the city. From Moscow we will travel over 400
miles by train through Russia’s winter landscape to St Petersburg, a city almost entirely built on a series of islands
across the delta of the Neva River. Commonly referred to as the cultural capital of Russia, we will visit museums,
factories and the opulent summer and winter palaces of the Tsars.
We will analyse both cities through movements such as Constructivism and explore the ideas of the ‘Paper Architects’
who produced elaborate, impossible designs as an oblique form of architectural criticism of the austere utilitarianism
of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. We will end our Russian adventure by travelling, via Petrozavodsk, to
the remote island of Kizhi on Lake Onega to visit the unique 17th century timber churches of Karelia, built completely
without nails, the island itself acts as a historical archive of a particular architectural typology.
Disassemble
Before this journey, and in preparation for it, students will be asked to research, discover and disassemble a historical
object from Russia’s past, present or (hypothesised) future and archive it in an inventive way. Taking inspiration
from Diderot’s Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, you will need to classify, catalogue, draw and otherwise describe
everything about this artefact. This new architectural assemblage will be used as a research tool to help you discover
your programme, site and brief for the rest of the year. You will use this object to explore and question why and
how you should construct your drawings or models, and with what tools, analogue, digital, both or neither? This
speculative exploration is as much about the methods and modes of representation as it is the result.
Assemble
Post Russia, we will focus on the main building project that will be informed by both your disassembled archivearchitectures and field trip investigations. Your proposed buildings should question the meaning of the archive in the
digital age and challenge the conventions of drawn architecture whilst utilising Russia’s dialogue between historical
traditions and thirst for technological advancement. As always your work should be experimental, speculative and
inventive, with the only limit being your imagination.
“I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know
any names for and then has to close its eyes again”
- Marilynne Robinson, Gilead -