To tour the show of the Bartlett school in London, for example, is to see a trade show of utopias, in each booth a different manifesto, each one of which carries the trappings of a movement that might have driven architecture forward for a decade or so of the 20th century. “Can we not take in our hands the history of the city and use it as a feeding ground for creating new narratives?” asks one unit. “What happened to architecture being used as a medium for resistance, if not rebellion? For challenging the status quo and the dominant power structures?” “The work this year,” says Unit 19, is “both speculative and critical, responding to fluxing densities of inhabitation in surprising and novel ways”.
Theoretical speculation is then amplified by the power of computerised design and rendering into projects such as Pneumacity, where inflatable structures unfurl over Tokyo’s freeways to create emergency shelters in the event of an earthquake, and Havana Energy Forest, a structure consisting of “ventilation pipes, cables, ethanol storage columns and dust control mesh, a mix between an energy container, a hotel and an amphitheatre”. This project “discusses materiality as a political device” in ways that space does not permit me to describe.
This image is embedded in ...
- Student architects’ annual shows: the shape of things to come? | Art and design | The Guardian, Wednesday, July 8, 2015 - 12:25