It's been a crazy week in studio, not so much a week of settling in but of hitting the ground running! Specialisations have kicked off with lectures, and we've had a taste of what to expect from supporting modules. In studio, design studios and units have been busy setting their intent, and on field trips.
DS2 London Visit / Kerry Fox
In the next 2 weeks, DS2 are taking part in a live build project, to create a pavilion (really, a housing for a compostable loo) for Hogsmill Garden in Surbiton. We visited the garden on Tuesday, a busy community space bursting with life. The location alongside the Hogsmill river and the needs of the garden users drove design tutorials at the RIBA, where we split into groups for a fast-paced design charrette. Watch this space: we'll be constructing the building next weekend at Grymsdyke Farm, in Missenden.
Afterwards, we visited the Bartlett's B-Pro show opening night. It was particularly interesting for our studio as the architectural design students had been investigating how modular pieces can come together to form a structure, similarly to the current Serpentine Pavilion - something that sparked our interest in terms of creating our own design. One of the areas of the exhibition also focuses on craft and design, which our studio will investigate for the remainder of the year.
Stay tuned here for a review of our evening visit to Heatherwick Studios! While there, we saw plenty of work that has yet to be viewed even by the clients, so a full account is currently awaiting approval to ensure that we don't break our non-disclosure agreement.
Zone 5 London Visit / Matt Jordan and Matt Purslow
On the 25th September, Zone 5 MArchD ventured into London for our first field trip of the year! Our day started early on a sunny Tuesday morning with meeting outside the Tate Modern, on London’s South Bank after an unsuccessful venture to the SkyGarden at the top of the Walkie Talkie building. If you’re new to the UK, we can recommend going up there! It’s free and un-ticketed before 10am and provides amazing views over London! On our visit to the Tate we began to formulate ideas of where our final year projects might lead. After exploring Herzog & de Meuron’s Blatvanik Extension we found ourselves drawn to Jenny Holzer’s exhibition that experimented with the use of light to convey social messages.
Having finished at the Tate we travelled to the Victoria & Albert Museums, where as a group, we visited both the Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt and The Future Starts Here exhibitions. The Videogames Exhibition showcased the most innovative games released in recent years, as well as a series of older retro games. It portrayed videogames and game design in a new light, highlighting the process required to bring a game from concept through to final development. Although not strictly architecture, we found the exhibition challenged our way of perceiving architecture space. It also noted a worthy emphasis on the power of storytelling, atmosphere and mood within graphic design, which we believe architecture would benefit from in lieu of traditional photorealistic rendering techniques.
The Future Starts Here revealed many futuristic endeavours that have yet to be released within the public realm. It provided a physical connection to the futuristic process, giving the public a glimpse into their near future. There were a series of architectural models on display, ranging from Foster’s Apple campus, to near future developments in Dubai. Accompanying this were a wide range of revolutionary architectural materials.
After this, we visited Frida Escobedo’s 2018 Serpentine Pavillion, composed of a semi-permeable shell, formed by stacked concrete roof tile structure. The design embodies a hybrid of Mexican Vernacular and Northern European materiality. Escobedo’s design allowed for a playful manipulation of light, which was filtered through the outer shell, forming a chequerwork pattern of light and shadow on the pavilion’s polished concrete floor.
A walk from Hyde Park to the Bartlett followed allowing us to get lost amidst Oxford Street's unique atmosphere on our journey there. The B-Pro Show 2018 featured an array of work from throughout the Master's programmes - as detailed in the DS2 trip review.
What's On
You might be feeling inspired by Zone 5's gallery visits - so here are this week's highlights of where to visit.
Serpentine Galleries, London - Serpentine Pavilion
Modern Art Oxford - Future Knowledge
Ashmolean, Oxford - Tricks of Trade: Money and Magic in Context
Student of the Week
Our Student of the Week is Valentina Ioannou, whose hand drawn macro of spider silk is gorgeous! The image was created as an investigation into architectural details.
