Unit 8

As technology marches forwards, gaps emerge in our understanding of the world. When presented with information we cannot fully comprehend, it is human nature to attempt to plug these gaps with assumptions of our own making. The penning of these ad-libs is not always the product of benevolent forces however, and for conspiracy theorists, the often scarcely believable wonders of technological progress present opportunities to promote alternative truths.

In Project One we will unravel the social, spatial, and architectural mechanisms behind the false narratives of conspiracy theories, developing tools to disarm conspiratorial plots. We will employ investigative systems and forensic techniques to learn the ways of the Conspirator, in order to demystify the magic in the mundane, and distinguish Conspiracy from Conspiracy Theory.

Guided by personal agenda, geographic proximity, or simply an intuitive curiosity, we will each select a conspiratorial narrative for interrogation. In precise acts of counter-forensics, we will study manipulated mythology through the lens of new technology, searching for evidence of anomalies, glitches, inconsistencies, absurdities, and revelation. We will see beyond the binaries of fact versus fiction. Equipped with the know-how required to then precisely reconstruct the scene, we will replay the event in and out of real time and space until truths reveal themselves.

To generate counter evidence, each staging will require an exquisitely constructed prop, tailored to the plot and site under investigation. This might be a series of analytical drawings, a digital simulation, a model, an augmenting wearable, or an apparatus deployed on the site itself. Captured through photography and film, our findings will be broadcast and factchecked, wary of the obfuscations inherent in today’s modes of architectural representation.

Before staging our reconstructed conspiracies, which will be the focus of term one, we will begin the year with a week-long group project to break the ice. This first foray into conspiracism will yield a collective output and provide the platform for us to get to know one another.

We will learn from the creative stagings and precision props of others: Jeff Wall’s photographic (re)constructions, NASA’s neutral buoyancy simulation labs, Marguerite Humeau’s pseudoscientific installations (fig.1), Miriam Bäckström’s parallel-reality stage sets, Thomas Demand’s political facsimiles, and Forensic Architecture’s evidentiary systems that reconstruct physical and virtual worlds to fight socio-political injustice. We too will treat our forensic (re)staging as a critical tool rather than simply an architectural end-product; a model for questioning and (dis) organising ideas. Conventions like the architectural drawing will be our enablers rather than our outputs. We will embrace first principles, see-saw between intuition and precision, (mis)use digital technologies to advance physical learning, and prototype over and over again.

Building Truths

In Project Two, we will apply and refine the explorative practices established in the first term. We will develop designs for cultural buildings dealing with complex spatial, structural, and climatic conditions, asking how architecture might be reimagined, or refigured, when it becomes the refuge from (or target of) mistrust.

We will study Noémie Goudal’s biodegradable photographic performances of glacial melt (fig.2), made for climate change deniers, and David Adjaye’s Mass Extinction Observatory, a bell tower that tolls each time our actions on the planet cause another species to be lost. These works will teach us how to design programmes of resistance against propagating fictions, such as museums, theatres, town halls, courthouses, monuments, and research institutes.

Building on the success of last year, we will continue our collaboration with Flimwell Park, a woodland workshop and creative laboratory in the High Weald of East Sussex. The area, famous for its folklore and mythology, will be the site for the building project and a fertile testing ground for our ideas. Here, we will establish a close dialogue with the local community of foresters, ecologists, historians, makers, and architects. If Covid developments restrict access, we will call on resources already at our disposal to help us better understand a place we may not initially visit: LiDAR scans, cartographic site data, and a unique collaboration with last year’s Y3 cohort, who know the woodland like the back of their hand.

Unit 8 fosters a shared learning environment across Y2 and Y3, but each year is tailored. Y2 teaching will focus on the tools and techniques to realise the design of carefully crafted, modestlyscaled buildings. Y3 will be supported in the development of individual working practices that thread together the building project, design technology, and thesis, into an intellectually ambitious architectural output.

Working Methods

Interested in material, structural, and spatial experimentation at a range of scales, Unit 8 champions innovative architectural strategies that boldly address the environmental challenges of our time. Welcoming the brave and the curious, we nurture a prototypical testing-led methodology in a safe space in which you are not expected to play safe.

Our experimental agenda will continue this year in spite of (and embracing) the disruptive circumstances we find ourselves in. The unit’s well-established practice of prototyping and handson thinking will be maintained through close collaboration with our experienced technical and digital tutors, Steve Johnson and Tom Budd. Together we will explore the potential of new technologies and age-old crafts. As per the unit’s strong tradition, this enables the production of novel technical dissertations and sophisticated buildings, that are as precise as they are provocative.

We support curious students with a strong will to discover new approaches to building design. We focus on developing the tools and skills required to generate, communicate and construct architecture in practice. To achieve this, we run workshops in visual communication, portfolio curation, fabrication detailing, digital drafting, rendering, photography, film-making, and animation. Communicated clearly and seductively, our work equips us for both the student portfolio and for practice beyond the walls of the school. These working methods will enable us to move fluidly between the analogue and digital, the technical and the psychological, the remote and the real, to develop a well-judged selective sharpness in these blurry times.