Unit Brief 2015-2016_SOFT CITY

Unit theme: The theme for this year is that of the ‘soft city’. Students are asked to investigate ways of looking differently at a major global city like London, seeing it not as a harsh or alienating environment, or as existing only in the realm of economics and systems, but rather as an open and fluid entity that allows for many readings of ‘softness’. This term can be understood literally, in terms of the relative density/hardness of the materials which are used to create buildings and urban spaces -- or more metaphorically in terms of the flows and interactions of human bodies, energies, weather patterns, trees and plants, animal species within the city -- or else poetically through the expression of feelings such as love, warmth, openness, communality, etc. How can designing the spatial practices and physical qualities of softness contribute to our urban experience, including the enhancement of sensations such as health and well-being? How might softness and hardness be designed together, whether in opposition or symbiosis, or indeed as some complex hybrid form?

Initial project: To start the year, you will be asked to investigate your personal understanding of London through an artifact or perhaps a series of artifacts that explore ideas of softness in relation to a specific area of the city which we will suggest. Your artifact(s) should aim to introduce you to a different set of sensibilities and ideas which will provide you with a new understanding of London as the ‘soft city’. Your approach in Project 1 can be openly experimental, addressing for instance the notion of digital craft through the making of large-scale, physical working models, layered spatialised drawings, material explorations, or various hybrid processes. To help in this task, we will be organising workshops to teach relevant computer skills and digital fabrication and photographic techniques. Your large-scale investigations/prototypes should combine fixed methods of representation (models, photos, sketches, paintings) along with more ephemeral time-based media (video, film). Importantly, the ideas that you begin to develop in the first project should act as the test-bed for your main design proposal for the year.

Main project: The site for your main project will be somewhere of your own choosing in London, selected on the basis that it offers intriguing possibilities for exploring concepts of softness within the city. How might your building design on your chosen site add to the properties of softness, and thus mediate in some way the prevailing urban mood of hardness, indeed coldness? How can rethinking softness help to create a new identity not only for your chosen site but also for surrounding areas and other parts of London? Students’ projects are therefore required above all to test out notions of softness so as to come up with innovative kinds of building uses that will enhance urban and cultural interaction. Throughout the year there is going to be an emphasis on research as a vital aspect of architectural design, and this will encompass many fields: anthropology, history, ecology, climate, economics, sociology, technology, studies of everyday life, etc.

Field trip: Our unit field trip in late-November to early-December will be to northern India, and specifically to visit Delhi/New Delhi, Chandigarh and Jaipur. There we will discover very different cultural attitudes and traditions towards issues such as softness/hardness, openness/closure, official/unofficial urbanism. We will link up with leading local universities and architectural practices to find out what is happening there now architecturally, as well as visiting a range of striking cultural phenomena, many of them historical in nature, which touch upon intriguing aspects of softness, hardness, density, social inclusivity, etc.