Architecture dedicated to people affected by Alzheimer’s disease features alongside and a conceptual home for “Disney’s unloved” in this VDF school show by the Bartlett School of Architecture.
A total of 10 student projects are included in the digital exhibition, completed by both undergraduate and postgraduate students at the school that forms a part of UCL.
It provides an insight into the diversity of teaching units at the Bartlett, ahead of its summer show in September 2020.
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
School: Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
Courses: Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1), Architecture MArch(ARB/RIBA Part 2)
School statement:
“The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL offers a comprehensive range of architecture programmes, including but not limited to the professional qualifications needed to practice as an architect in the UK. We are world-leading teachers of architecture, passionate about exploring what architecture is and what it could be.
“The annual Bartlett Summer Show is one of the largest student architecture shows in the world. This year, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the school is launching a new and innovative online environment for all of our shows. The Bartlett Summer Show 2020 will open on Thursday 10 September and will be accompanied by a range of exciting online events.”
Metamorphosis by Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1), Year 1
“The Year 1 installation is a pivotal moment in the life and tradition of Year 1 Architecture. Entitled Metamorphosis, the installation took nine characters from Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses and translated them into nine installations that were translocated into Walmer Yard – four bespoke tailor-made houses – in West London.
“The one-day event consisted of nine spatial proposals that explored the relationship between myth, transformation, and identity, which were set against a series of musical performances. The event was developed in collaboration with Jane Gilbert from UCL’s School of European Languages, Culture and Society; Laura Mark, the Keeper of Walmer Yard, Baylight Foundation; and the Topos String Quartet, a group of classical musicians from the UK and Europe.”
Photography is by Jason Brooks.
A System of Urban Flow by Hazel Balogun
“With the agenda of improving urban mobility in Amman, this Senior Citizens’ Day Centre provides an accessible route across one of the city’s hillside topographies.
“Influenced by modern and vernacular collection systems, the landscape captures stormwater to reduce the intensity of seasonal flash floods. This precious resource is circulated through a network of activity spaces, such that water acts as both a spectacle and a coolant to suit Amman’s summer climate.
“Curved stone surfaces wind and fold with one another, just like the natural caves polished by water for hundreds of years, and the tactile handrail becomes a signifier of beauty, bringing a seamless urban flow to the city.”
Name: Hazel Balogun
Project: A System of Urban Flow
Course: Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1), Year 3
Unit: UG2
Tutors: Maria Knutsson-Hall and Barry Wark
Email: [email protected]
The Sanctuary of Disney’s Unloved by Xinze (Sean) Seah
“Once upon a time, on an abandoned island, located at the heart of Disneyworld, sits a new magical kingdom created by those unloved by the outside world. Inspired by Cinderella’s dress, this new soft architecture is now home to an industrious community, who, like Cinderella’s furry companions, continually build a new home from the unwanted materials that surround them.
“The smell of homegrown pumpkin soup drifts into the grand central atrium where soft sleeping pockets surround a giant ball of yarn that is endlessly knitting their new home. This home will live forever in the shadow of Disney but will outshine it always.”
Name: Xinze (Sean) Seah
Project: The Sanctuary of Disney’s Unloved
Course: Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1), Year 3
Unit: UG7
Tutors: Pascal Bronner and Thomas Hillier
Email: [email protected]
An Ode to Apollo by Matthew Semiao Carmo Simpson
“This film presents An Ode to Apollo, a centre for research in acoustics and musical production, platforming both creative and scientific studies of sound.
“In defiance of the unrelenting roar of the neighbouring elevated railway line, the facility is a prototype for how we might occupy such acoustically-challenged pockets of the built environment. Contained within this architecture of attenuation, a series of inhabitable music chambers celebrate and amplify the weird and wonderful dynamics of sound and space.”
Name: Matthew Semiao Carmo Simpson
Project: An Ode to Apollo
Course: Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1), Year 3
Unit: UG8
Tutors: Farlie Reynolds and Greg Storrar
Email: [email protected]
An Architecture between Cultures by Isaac Simpson
“Dominant history has always been the British gaze mapped onto the African landscape. We find ourselves always looking at the radical politics elsewhere, instead of the national politics here.
“This project will be reverse to that construction, imagining the African gaze mapped onto the British landscape, to describe a radical idea in response to the question: who should own the land of the Scottish Highlands?
“The project’s ambition is to challenge existing land-ownership boundaries by constructing a radical vessel that roams across the highlands, rehabilitating the land and cultivating conversations in a way that requires communities’ cultural diversity and appreciation.”
Name: Isaac Simpson
Project: An Architecture between Cultures: The Highland Council, Scottish Highlands
Course: Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2), Year 5
Unit: PG12
Tutors: Elizabeth Dow and Jonathan Hill
Email: [email protected]
Apartment #5 by Clement Luk Laurencio
“The project is located in Apartment #5, Prince Regent Mews, London, in the current context of the isolation of lockdown due to the global pandemic, where travel has become restricted. It imagines a future where travel is no longer possible – where all we are left with our memories of places visited, and our photographs to recall them.
“The project redraws the apartment of confinement merging it with fragments from places that were visited on a recent trip to India. By manipulating scale, forced perspective, and atmospheric phenomena, the spaces become embellished, corrupted, and re-imagined; a labyrinth of memories.”
Name: Clement Luk Laurencio
Project: Apartment #5: A Labyrinth and Repository of Spatial Memories
Course: Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2), Year 5
Unit: PG15
Tutors: Max Dewdney and Susanne Isa
Email: [email protected]
Sweat, Pant, Blush by Samuel Davies
“In contrast to the professional drive towards technological efficiency to reduce domestic emissions, this project instead examines the social and architectural stigmas that surround the notion of comfort. It questions our reliance on controlled internal environments.
“A cul-de-sac of three experimental houses is proposed between Palm Springs and the surrounding desert. Within each house, everyday domestic conventions are dismantled to suit a different attitude to comfort. This exposes the power of these conventions in determining our understandings of what is considered homely, and holds the architect responsible, not for the development of new technologies, but for new ideas of what it means to be at home.”
Name: Samuel Davies
Project: Sweat, Pant, Blush: Three Houses of Three Tomorrows
Course: Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2), Year 5
Unit: PG16
Tutors: Matthew Butcher and Ana Monrabal-Cook
Email: [email protected]
Carlisle Alzheimer’s Foundation by Philip Springall
“This project investigates the role that architecture and the built environment can play in improving the lives of those with Alzheimer’s disease.
“Carlisle Alzheimer’s foundation is a network which connects individuals in creative practice with individuals at various stages of Alzheimer’s disease. By developing creative partnerships, pairs can engage in meaningful activities to respond to the challenges of personal identity, occupation, responsibility and inclusion faced by those with Alzheimer’s.
“Situated at the Citadel, in the centre of Carlisle, the proposed scheme is designed through spaces to house creative activities of making, constructing, performing, eating, cooking, wandering, conversing and socialising.”
Name: Philip Springall
Project: Carlisle Alzheimer’s Foundation – Living alongside Creative Practice
Course: Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2), Year 5
Unit: PG17
Tutors: Yeoryia Manolopoulou and Thomas Parker
Email: [email protected]
A.T.L.A.S. by Theodoros Tamvakis
“This 22nd-century vision investigates the human condition in a future where independent space colonies are established on both Mars and the Moon. The project suggests a deep space habitat in lunar orbit that has, embedded in its formal DNA, a multiplicity of artificial gravities.
“A gravitational field generates a structure that becomes a mediator and a political common ground for future space colonies. Using the embryonic state of an astronaut inside an Extravehicular Activity suit as an analogy, the project suggests a closed-loop ecosystem, creating a living and ever-changing architecture to nurture and protect the inhabitants by creating a symbiotic relationship between architecture and humans.”
Name: Theodoros Tamvakis
Project: A.T.L.A.S.
Course: Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2), Year 5
Unit: PG20
Tutors: Marjan Colletti and Javier Ruiz
Email: [email protected]
The Third Space by Krina Christopoulou
“The Third Space investigates how the domestic realm will be affected by the evolution of 2D computer interfaces into 3D inhabitable digital environments. In light of the recent Covid-19 pandemic, the project explores the role of architecture in learning, working, meeting up and living communally online, eliminating spatial distance through technology.
“Over the past half-century, the emergence of immersive technologies allowed us to move from the two dimensions of computer screens to the three dimensions of spatially experienced information, making our interaction with computers an increasingly-architectural concern.
“The project speculates a future where houses do not have computers in them but are computers themselves. In the home of the future, domesticity is simply the programmatic starting point of a home.”
Name: Krina Christopoulou
Project: The Third Space
Course: Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2), Year 5
Unit: PG24
Tutors: Penelope Haralambidou and Michael Tite
Email: [email protected]
Virtual Design Festival’s student and schools initiative offers a simple and affordable platform for student and graduate groups to present their work during the coronavirus pandemic. Click here for more details.
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