MArch Architecture, Year 2
2013-2014 @ The Bartlett, University College London
TUTORS://
Jonathan Hill,
Elizabeth Dow,
Matthew Butcher
PROGRAM:// THE SHOCK OF THE OLD AND THE SHOCK OF THE NEW
A Twenty-First Century Grand Tour
Eighteenth-century architects, painters and patrons spent at least three years in Italy, collecting ideas, principles, experiences and artefacts to transfer home, from south to north. The Grand Tour was an invaluable education but its pleasures were not all refined, as Alexander Pope waspishly remarked: ‘Led by my hand, he sauntered Europe round, / And gather’d ev’ry Vice on Christian ground’. The Tourists’ purpose was not to copy what they had seen but to translate it to a new context and climate, and thus invent a new architecture and a new landscape.
The Grand Tour continued into the twentieth century. Commissioned to design a house when he was 20 years old, Mies’ first client paid for his tour of Italy, while Roma Interrotta (Rome Interrupted) defined postmodernism in 1978. Today, 50 US architecture schools have a base in Italy, and digital computation’s mathematical concerns echo those of the Platonic Academy in Renaissance Florence.
This year, we will travel to Vicenza, Florence, Rome and Naples on a twenty-first century Grand Tour, questioning and expanding this tradition from east to west and north to south. The most creative architects have always looked to the past to imagine a future, studying an earlier architecture not to replicate it but to understand and transform it, revealing its relevance to the present. Twenty-first century architects must appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new.
Designs on History
Vincent Scully concluded that the architect will ‘always be dealing with historical problems—with the past and, a function of the past, with the future. So the architect should be regarded as a kind of physical historian … the architect builds visible history’. Objective as well as subjective, a design is a reinterpretation of the past that is meaningful to the present, transforming both, like a history. Equally, a design is equivalent to a novel, convincing the user to suspend disbelief. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The architect is a ‘physical historian’ and a ‘physical novelist’.
What is a New City Today?
In recent decades, the cultural and economic dominance of London over the rest of the UK has grown exponentially, becoming particularly prevalent during the recent recession as the capital city has seen continuing growth while other areas of the country have declined. To try to reverse this trend, successive governments since the 1960s have proposed or implemented social, cultural and infrastructural projects, including urban regeneration programmes, economic subsidies and high-speed rail links, each with the purpose of invigorating urban and rural areas across the UK. As a polemical response to government-led rhetoric, our project this year is propose a new city, asking ‘what is a city today?’
Architects, planners, artists and politicians have always sought to utilise the potential in starting anew, generating both imaginary and practical solutions. From the utopian propositions of Ledoux’s neo-classical Saline Royale to Le Corbusier’s modernist Ville Radieuse; from Constant’s playful megacity New Babylon to Tange’s metabolist Tokyo Bay; from the rhetoric of health and happiness in England’s garden city movement to Milton Keynes’s grid of vehicular boulevards. Each of them suggests the opportunities inherent in learning from local conditions as well as in translating urban inspirations from one place to another.
Unlike earlier new towns, our new city will be urban, industrial and even rural. But not suburban. Although its relationship to London and other British cities will be important, the new city will be self-confident and productive, not just a commuter dormitory town. Each student will design a complete urban condition—a hybrid of architecture, infrastructure and landscape—as a microcosm of the city and a catalyst to its growth. Establishing a symbiotic relationship with its ever-changing immediate and wider contexts, the new city will recognise the creative influence of natural as well as cultural forces. Discursive, it will encourage social and political engagement, and the interaction of public and private lives. Inventing and adapting histories, narratives and myths, each student will name his/her new city to reflect its forms, values and character.
Our site is focused on Stewartby, a 1920s model town created by the London Brick Company to serve the world’s largest brickworks and brick kiln. The brick company commissioned neo-classical public buildings and housing by Sir Albert Richardson, Bartlett Professor of Architecture, who lived nearby in an eighteenth-century house without electricity because he wanted to authentically appreciate Georgian architecture. In the 1950s the London Brick Company recruited a significant number of their workforce from a southern Italian town due to their brickmaking skills. This influx of a particular society not only benefited the operation of the brickworks but also more intriguingly acted as a significant catalyst for change in the surrounding area, affecting its culture, customs and politics. Organised or accidental population influxes are not unique, and have the potential for a rich set of cross fertilisations. In a sylvan equivalent to this human allegory, in 1947 Brenda Colvin associated landscape with liberalism, emphasising that just 23 out of 60 ‘native’ trees originated in Britain.
Today, the brickworks is closed and the four remaining chimneys dominate the site, its dramatic topography carved by disused quarries and littered with discarded brick mounds. Built to construct airships and house visiting Zeppelins, the two vast, 250m sheds of the Royal Airship Works are on the horizon, a memorial to the past that may become the future.