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This Sceptered Isle

Part 2 Project 2003
Nicola Koller
Chloe van Grieken
 Royal College of Art | UK
‘Pessimism is the new fashion’

By 2020, the World Health Organisation predicts depression to be the number one health problem.

The suburban bourgeois Neanderthal slowly consumes its narcissistic undergrowth. As physical and mental malaise infiltrates and contaminates the countryside, farming has reached a condition of survival. The Ministry Of Agriculture has forged a partnership with Barratt Homes to create a harmonious British Landscape, fuelled by its consumers and cultivated by financial benefactors. It aims to sustain farming both economically and to preserve it status as a cultural, psychological myth, in harmony with the monoculture madness that once bred in the suburbs

Nicola Koller
Chloe van Grieken

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This year the unit investigated truth. Our media saturated environment bombards us with information and opinion. Projects negotiate between reputable data sources and the ad hoc and hearsay tapping into unofficial and unrecognised versions of reality. Emerging social trends sit at the heart of the design brief.

Everything must be questioned and examined. Nicola investigates the countryside and aesthetic farms, in particular, the impact consumerism and suburban psychology could have on its future expression. She backs up her hypothesis with statistical analysis and concrete evidence, but equally a playfulness is evident, a light humour that invites the irrational and contradictory. She develops a creative landscape which allows both the real and the imaginary to coexist in the same space. A space for speculation where the ‘suspension of disbelief’ is carefully crafted and judged, and where the viewer is lead through the different scales of architectural proposition, from master plan to the intimate detail of an inhabited space.

Her work presents hypothetical ‘What If’ scenarios as critical instruments for discussion and debate. Their open-ended speculation engages the imagination and causes reflection on the decisions and values shaping our future cities and environments.


Tutor(s)
Mr Michael Angus
2003
Madness in suburbia… to the consternation of his stereotypical family.
Image looking at agriculture and scale. ‘Depth’ and ‘perspective’, terms used in both mental health and architecture.
Section_ rear view mirror architecture choreographing the suburban 4 point turn.
Detail of the new urban planning densification. Leisure time gets pushed into the green belt to allow for back to back housing. Cows and rendered images of Switzerland construct myth and needed perspective.
Model_ Bovine Utopia.
Site analysis of Stanmore suburbia V agriculture.
1:100 plan. Network of bypass heaven. (William Morris (1834-1896) was a poet, artist, designer, Romantic, socialist, advocate of a return to traditional craft styles and materials - and a peddler of poisonous wallpaper, according to a new study.)
A4311 Gorse Hill roundabout, Swindon meets M4 junction 29. In a perfect world, surrounded by safety and bliss… madness is the only freedom.
Network diagram showing the mechanisms sustaining the bypasses. Lawn Chief 2000’s, Flymos, 4 x4's and genetic beautiful cows weave through the turn circles, bypassing neighbours. Ice cream vans clear the bovine annihilation sector.
Rural rage. Bovine annihilation. Finding loopholes in the animal consultation bill. What can trigger such irrational behaviour? Or is such behaviour all too rational when you look at the psychological landscape of a subject's surroundings?
A glossy view though a GPS navigated life. Stephen and Beryl fashion ‘his and hers’ matching 4x4, variable valve, ABS, EBD, twin turbo, pleasure vehicles
A car, a Home and a Billboard farm factory that ‘you can believe in’.
1:100 plan of final design at location Stanmore.
Detail.
Detail.
Model of the leisure bypasses.
Vettriano Avenue_ section of site describing the hierarchy of the new agriculture community. 40% mini Lilliput, affordable housing sits in the greenbelt, housing the caretakers who tender this landscape of llyandis, lawns, Tupperware and concrete.
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