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.