This year, Unit 4 will examine the idea of the ‘new’. We will look at how ‘newness’ is being embraced culturally as an opportunity for re-invention, and ‘context’ as something that is beyond the immediate built environment.
Operating in London and Beijing , we will explore the Market as a collective space; where the pragmatic exchange of goods leads to a transient network of operations, territories and opportunities; a place of social gathering, exchange of ideas, news and gossip. We are interested in how these social functions might enable the re-territorialisation of the public realm; a type of collective urbanism.
The project for the year is to design two market buildings, one in East London and another in Beijing . We will continue our interest in complex geometries and the relationship between these and the constructions of situations that bear an accommodating potential for its user. A research into network structures will support the unit program and deliver technical and organisational prototypes.
The students should developed an understanding of working within a multifaceted urban situation and also learn how to articulate an architectural project dealing with the complex inter-relationship between spatial, material, and programmatic organization. Design is understood as a non-linear, bottom-up process intersected with strategic thinking. The students should also learn how to critically evaluate their own work in relationship to its social consequences.
London
The year will begin with the design of a new timber roof structure for Chrisp Street Market, located on Lansbury estate in Poplar. This will form the prototype from which we will test against our final project in Beijing .
We will focus on the failed public realm of the market square and examine how we can re-territorialise the market place to enhance its social function. We will examine how the market operates and how territories and boundaries are negotiated. During this term, students will operate as collaborative groups. We will also make a short trip to Barcelona to visit the Santa Caterina Market Building by EMBT.
Beijing
“If it is true that globalization is accompanied by global standardization of urban space, then China ’s overall experience of urbanisation is the most persuasive instance of this phenomenon. In other words, urbanisation increasingly tends towards homogenization.” Huang Du, 2006
“Chinese always believe in a brilliant future, that defines our tradition: Destroying and forgetting the old in order to make room for ever new Utopias.”
Yinsin Ho, 2005
Beijing
Old Beijing are being erased at an alarming rate; ‘old’ is definitely not a good quality in China , especially for a culture that values ‘newness’. Yet it is this cultural tendency towards the new that is currently shaping New China; in between a sense of lost for the past and the anticipation of the future.
New China is currently experiencing the longest and most sustained urban growth the world had witness. With a huge effort to renew and expand all its major cities, Beijing with its 600 years of history is no exception; fed by constant demolition and reconstruction of its city quarter. The city has adopted the strategy of tabula rasa up until 2004 where part of its city quarter was listed as World Heritage Site. The increasing privatisation of land use has led to ever fewer public spaces for its inhabitants. In fact, the idea of public space is a relatively new concept in China as such spaces had never existing in traditional Chinese urban morphology up until the fall of imperialism at the start of the 20th Century.
Our final project is to design a new market building for an existing wet market and the famous night market. S tudents are to include other additional programs on this site. The site lies just outside the Eastern gate of the Forbidden City, on the fringe of the Heritage zone; currently occupied by poorly build hotel blocks which bear poor relationship with the street and most of them over the planning height limit – the first phase of tabula rasa that took place during the 1990’s which erase large part of the old city quarter in an attempt to renew its city centre.
Believing in the new, we will instigate a second phase of tabula rasa, demolishing the existing hotel blocks and insert a finer grain of public programs which aim to enhance the social function of the city quarter. In a context where the past is being erased, tabula rasa confronted us with a new opportunity for re-invention; programmatically, spatially and in material organisation.
During our visit to Beijing , we will collaborate with students and staffs from Tsinghua University, Beijing.
