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Lost Space, Forgotten knowledge. Urban writers club / Architecture Foundation

Part 1 Project 2003
Gordon Sung
Emma Sinha
 Kingston University Kingston | UK

I interpreted the context of Bloomsbury a field of conflicting tension between, on the one hand, imposed universal knowledge / visions (UCL and the Square), and disestablished physical activities. This reading developed into a brief for a building that re-represented the architectural process from an interdisciplinary perspective, with added local participation. In this sense my design attempts to deconstruct the existing institutional setting, contrasting it with dialectical activities (making - representing, events - history, architecture - landscape, public-professional etc). I prefer slowly fermented ideas rather than fast formal concepts. I aim to construct plausible space charged with ‘the possibility of otherness’.





“Professional over-specialisation in the field of architecture” was the studio agenda under which this competition entry was realised. Broadly speaking students were asked to develop a brief for a “building about buildings”, which in this particular case resulted in the design of an Architecture Foundation. We encouraged working methods that concentrated initially on mundane aspects of site and their translation into architectural ideas. Conceptual aspects derived from a questioning of the role of a public building. Specific activities focussed on ideas about reading the city, material technologies, and the programmatic (mis)representation of architectural procedures.

Tutor(s)
Prof Mohsen Aboutorabi
2003
Project_1344
Readings: Measuring local and global site programmatics, linkages, (stoppages and urban anchors), and cultural thematics: (between thinking and action)
Readings: Unfinished city: Critical relativism of heterotopic, particular spaces (carpenter’s workshop) transposed into normative urban block structure of UCL.
Reading: Experiencing the site: Habitual (sensual pleasure of the park and St George’s cemetery) and Narrative space (practice of academic work); beginnings of strategy to connect and create hybrid.
Urban / Programmatic Strategy: Useless Space Accommodates ‘Useless’ Knowledge: Downtown Writer’s Club inserted into forgotten voids; writing as the reactivation of extreme human experiences
Building Proposition 1: Downtown Writers Club Spatial structure: Introverted compressed room (world compressed into book-format) undergoes process of concealment and exposure
Material Proposition: Fabric of Outer skin continues and modifies extreme domesticity of neighbourhood fencing and birdhouses (elevation of standard Wickes DIY products)
Situation of new insertion
Renegotiating pubic space: Excavated ground offers new public space, critically contrasting the instrumental totalitarian structure of the Brunswick Centre.
Proposition 2: Stretching the interstitial ground plane into the open setting of Brunswick Square; transposing occult knowledge into the urban arena suggests that apocryphal (secret) knowledge of the writer underlies all institutional methodologies.
Reading: Collage depicts the complexity of the architectural imagination - intuitive, physical historical, contextual, speculative, visionary, bookish, technical – the world in a single process. Building programme of the Foundation depicts this range
1:1study Continuing the language of the DIY products, the fragment questions the limits of architecture in a nation amateur builders. Standard material become particularised in the domestic home; the foundation adopts that logic in a system of screens
Assembly of Screen: Housing 2D&3D products, the spectators interaction with the screen embodies the characteristics of the architect’s perception of surface and depth. Constructional aspects are also revealed, mimic the section seen in the drawings
Spatial structuring: Like the French Ecole, a lower level infrastructural fragment = a pit displaying 1:1 experiments; located at roof level a drawings collection looms over the city, an archive of visionary abstraction.
Abstraction: The amorphic scale of the pit becomes contracted to the viewing frame of the drawn map. In the distant, Patrick Hodgkinson’s Brunswick ‘system’ provides the visual correlation of the 20th century confusion between the ideal and the real
Introverted City: Material embodiment showing characteristics of drawing room and internalised projected realities.
Resolution of Screen into map reading room: Transformed scale of timber sections towards corner reflects the detailed acts of looking undertaken by the viewer
Overall resolution
Semi-public space of inner courtyard
Presence of foundation along edge of Brunswick Square: Relationship between articulated ground and floating mass of the drawing collection expresses the gradual specialisation of the architectural design process.
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