Urban Rituals

 

Unit theme:     The theme for this year’s design investigation is that of ‘urban rituals’. Ever since humans first organised themselves into communities, the importance of ritual has been paramount. We are no different today in our highly technologized capitalist society. It is just that the rituals have changed. This leads to a number of intriguing questions. How do people inhabit contemporary cities through the performance of rituals? What are their differing beliefs and practices? What is the role of ritual within the processes of everyday life, or as part of exceptional spectacular events? How can architecture and urbanism either help or hinder such activities? There is a need to consider other occupants of the city from the animal world, as well as the climate and presence of natural resources, to devise ecologically informed strategies that can help to reduce energy consumption and also improve urban biodiversity. Standard definitions of ritual usually refer to factors such as time, rhythm, routine, pattern, habit, location, beliefs, value systems, behaviour, observance, custom, tradition, celebration, ceremony, performance, acting, and so on. Rituals can thus be ultra-low-key in the sense of those carried out repeatedly and consistently as part of daily life, or else the term can equally apply to the psychological desire for events and spectacles which on the surface might claim to be unique and unrepeatable and deviant, but yet are in themselves an acknowledgment of the need for an agreed temporary respite from normal practices. Or indeed there can be seen to be an overlap between the needs for repetition and exception, and in that sense we can conceive of performance as being part of the theatre of everyday life, with the streets and urban spaces of our cities forming the open space for this theatrical performance.

Main project:     Your site for the main project will be somewhere of your own choosing in London, in the areas where there are powerful forms of urban ritual. How might your building design on your chosen site add to the importance and enactment of these rituals? How can rethinking urban ritual help to create a new identity for your site as well as for the surrounding areas in London? Students’ projects will therefore need to explore the notion of urban ritual to come up with innovative kinds of building uses that will enhance urban and cultural interaction.

Initial project:    To start the year, students will be asked to examine the idea of urban rituals by designing and making a prototypical object/space/installation that encapsulates, in some way, the concept of ritual. It is essential that the design for the initial proposal has a spatial element, and some sense of enclosure and containment, so as to you endure that your investigations are being pursued in an architectural sense. To help you in this task, we will be organising a number of workshops to teach computer skills and digital fabrication techniques. Your large-scale prototypes should combine fixed methods of representation (models, photos, sketches, paintings) along with more ephemeral time-based media (video, film). Throughout the year there will 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, everyday life, etc.

Field trip:     Our unit field trip in late-November will be to Shanghai in China to examine a fascinating and economically booming city in which the pressures of development are creating new kinds of urban rituals, while also often coming into conflict with older patterns of everyday life. While we are over there we will link up with leading local universities and architectural practices to find out what is happening architecturally in the city, as well as examining striking cultural phenomena around rituals of eating, leisure, performance and such like.

We are very pleased to announce that Sara Shafiei will be joining Professor Murray Fraser and Justin C. K. Lau to run Unit Zero in the next coming academic year 2014-2015

Sara Shafiei

Co founding Partner: saraben-academia, saraben-studio

Teaching Fellow Bartlett School of Architecture

Associate Lecturer Oxford Brookes University

www.saraben-academia.com

 Sara Shafiei graduated from the Bartlett school of Architecture (UCL) under the tuition of Dr Marcos Cruz and Dr. Marjan Colletti. She was the Bartlett recipient of the Sir Banister Fletcher Bronze Medal, 3D REID prize, Hamilton Associates prize, and  RIBA Silver Medal nominee. In 2008 she was awarded the KPF/ Architecture Foundation Public Space Travel Award, The International Bamboo runner-up prize, and the International TECU Architecture Award.
 

Her work has been exhibited internationally including exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Art Summer show 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012 where she was awarded the Royal Academy of Arts drawing prize, The Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York, Mathaf Museum of Modern Art, and 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale.

 

Sara has also been published in Bartlett Design: Speculating with Architecture, Slash: Paper Under the Knife, AD-Protoarchitecture, Visionary Bamboo Designs for Ecological Living, Innovation in Bamboo, Wallpaper Magazine, The Financial Times, Icon Magazine, London Interiors Magazine, BD and The Architects Journal. She is one of the authors at Deletedscenes magazine and in 2009 co-authored Digital architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands- a book celebrating provocative projects from a young generation of digitally enabled designers.

 

Sara formed ‘saraben studio’ with Ben Cowd in 2007.  The design practice balances teaching with experimental architectural design research. The studio was awarded the Royal Academy of Art Grand Architecture Award in 2012, Sara has lectured extensively about her research and teaching methodology and in 2012 2012 was Keynote speaker at the international conference ‘Conversations on Architecture’ Cape Town, South Africa. In 2013 the studio exhibited and lectured at the Qatar Biannalle, and the Mathaf Museum of Modern Art, Doha. Sara has also been an invited lecturer at VCUQatar, and Cork University, Ireland.

 

Saraben-Academia was formed in 2009 to promote academic activities and share knowledge and ideas from across academic institutions. Saraben-academia students have received over 45 national and international awards since their launch in 2009, including the 2011 RIBA Silver Medal commendation, The RIBA Serjeant Award, MAKE Architects Award for Part I and Part II, Alderman Windley Scholarship, Ibstock Award, RIBA LRSA Award, 2012 Creative Thinking Award, and the international TECU award.

 

Sara is an associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and a teaching Fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She has previously taught at The Ecole Speciale D’Architecture, Paris and Leicester School of Architecture. Sara is a visiting critic at The Architecture Association (AA), Westminster University, London South Bank University, Cardiff University and has run workshops at the AA, Oxford Brookes, Leicester School of Architecture and Brighton University.

 

For more info please visit: www.saraben-academia.com

2014-2015

URBAN RITUALS

Unit 0 Summer Exhibition

UNIT 0 SHOWREEL

Monastery for Gardening Monks / Konrad Holtsmark

Set in a scenario when government cuts mean that the state can no longer afford to maintain Regent’s Park, this project envisages a monastery for ecologically focussed monks who collect the plant waste in the park and process it in an anaerobic digester, maintaining the park and rendering themselves self-sufficient. The monastery combines spaces aimed at religious devotion and a desire to live sustainably on the threshold between London’s urban environment and the park, exploring the overlaps between the sacred and the everyday. Located around are sunken spaces for collective contemplation. Whenever enough believers are gathered together and standing on the floor-plate, the resulting weight triggers the unexpected opening of the roof ‘petal’ segments overhead.

Health in Chaos / Jack Sardeson

In a future where bacteria have become fully resistant to our current antibiotics, this project suggests an innovative form of health clinic where recovering patients can be fully isolated and hence escape any fear of hospital super-bugs. It also remembers the past history of the now-buried Fleet River, turning it into an entrance tunnel that leads into the new Crossrail station, while also harking back to the Fleet River’s medieval reputation as a notable spa with healing waters. In the culverted tunnel, special devices automatically open and light up whenever there is no water present, and yet are triggered and closed whenever the tunnel becomes inundated after rainfall or tidal surges.

Park Hin Yeung / Self-Sufficient Restaurant

This scheme imagines that the part of the Kings Cross redevelopment zone that lies next to the incoming Eurostar trains will be transformed into a self-sufficient terraced growing zone. A complex network of hydroponic tubes and planting beds are mixed with vegetarian restaurants for visitors to enjoy and brush up against a new breed of urban farmers who are growing their own produce. Taking its layout from the gentle curve of the railway line above, the aim is to enhance food productivity in London and bring vibrancy to a regeneration area that is otherwise likely to become a dull office environment.

Nine Elms Flower Market (Underground Station) / Rufus Edmondson

As part of the regeneration of the Nine Elms area, an underground spur is to be added to the Northern Line. Rather than the usual dull box, this design envisages daylight and planting cascading down into the central void that will be cut for the tube station. Set within a small park, the various entrances into the station are mixed with flower markets linked to the adjacent New Covent Garden Market. The structural design builds upon a series of investigations into beautiful lightweight objects, each of them held in place by a minimal tensegrity structure. Fluttering glass canopies provide a glimmering aesthetic for the station’s lightweight structure at night.

Organically Grown Market and Restaurant / Andrew Yap

Borrowing from the Hackney ideal of an organic restaurant that can grow all of its own food, this project proposes a giant food market and hydroponic growing centre at the eastern end of Oxford Street, set over a street entrance into the forthcoming Crossrail station. A stratified section places the market stalls on the level just above the main entrance, while on the floors above are a street food hall, a more deluxe sit-down restaurant and then the growing greenhouses. Ingeniously, the building is heated by siphoning off the excess heat produced in the train tunnels below for Crossrail and two underground lines, solving also the problem of overheating in trains.

Orthopaedic Rehabilitation Centre / Alexandra Edwards

Using a colourful illuminated palate of materials and lighting effects from an initial project to design far livelier and attractive bus stops for London’s dreary streets, here a similar line of investigation went into how one might subtly alter the daylight levels inside treatment rooms and courtyard spaces for a new health building. In the scheme, set on the western edge of Hampstead Heath round the corner from the Royal Free Hospital, patients can undergo orthopaedic treatment and/or physiotherapy for problems with joint movements in their arms and legs. Echoing this idea of joint movement, pivoting coloured screens within the ceilings enable interiors to become lighter or darker, and provide enclosure for the courtyard gardens.

A Cycling Bedlam / Christian Georcelin

There are over 540,000 bicycle journeys in London each day, yet cyclists have a very tough time. In the busy Old Street area, this project creates a new social centre where London’s cyclists can meet together to exercise or play cycle hockey on the giant sculpted roof canopy, get their bikes repaired, or contribute to the energy supply for the workshop pods by plugging in special dynamo batteries they have charged up through human-powered flywheels. The building’s structure seeks as far as possible to recycle materials from old bicycles and other sources, offering overall a more collectivised vision for those who choose to cycle around the city.

Multicultural Student Dining Centre / Benedict Tay

There are around 100,000 overseas students in London and yet the social integration between them remains weak. Here is a project for a new kind of student facility in which different ethnic groups can come together to share knowledge of food and cooking. It is located within a small community park in the West End that lies equidistant between a few major universities. As part of the building’s external skin, fine screens cover the external terraced areas and are able to collect rainfall and then release it slowly  such that they drip for effect over a period of a few hours, helping to cool the heat produced in the kitchens inside.

Sclater St. Jazz Club / Doug Croll

As a place where jazz musicians from London can mix with those from around the world, this project envisages a building enlivened by music and the noises of the city around. Onto Brick Lane is a small speakeasy-type club and behind is a small hostel for visiting musicians, plus a series of platforms where jazz musicians can improvise for those shopping in the market outside. A prosthetic piece was built to test out the ideas, being worn under one’s outer clothes, and able to played and strummed as one passes through the city. It allows one to create an entirely different aural experience of London as we know it.