Design Talks

Observations on design

Shift Happens: Critical visions of London

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Craig Allen

Four young architects are looking to find innovative solutions for pressing issues facing London’s future.

One proposes a partnership of private enterprises exploiting the happiness index in order to create a new social housing model.

Another suggests how the London stock exchange can reach a mutual agreement with the Church of England to archive its data safeguarding both their futures.

One young architect questions how environmentalism can work with genetic engineering to form a consumerist eco-industry where factory and nature merge as another explores a reverse imperialism where socialist façadism conceals hidden capitalist agenda through inviting partner nations to earn their aid.

The four graduates from the Royal College of Art are exhibiting their work in London as part of Shift Happens in August.

A Happy Thamesmeadium by Craig Allen

‘From April next year we will start measuring our progress as a country not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving, not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life,’ stated UK prime minister David Cameron on 25 November 2010.

It’s 2021. The British government’s newly-established Office of National Well-being has partnered with the Office of National Statistics. Private enterprises begin to adapt a set of tactics in order to convince local authorities of their capability to provide the best realisations of the governments’ happiness targets.

Candy & Candy [developer of luxury residential building One Hyde Park in London], look toward Thamesmead – an area with the highest levels of negative equity, mortgage fraud and repossessions in the capital – as virgin land for lucrative investment towards creating its very own twenty-first century Happy Grosvenor Estate.

What if private enterprise exploited the happiness index?

This project speculates on the developer Candy & Candy turning its focus away from the luxury market and towards social housing.

By designing in value plucked from the happiness index and establishing a funding partnership with Coca-Cola’s Institute of Happiness, a new saccharin social housing model begins to emerge in a Thamesmead divided up into an archipelago and reliant upon the arrival of Crossrail.

Repository of the Eternal Now by Robert Ware

Cyberattacks threaten increasingly vulnerable digital data whilst technologies dictate that we continually rely on its ubiquity. The country’s economy thrives off global trade establishing the London Stock Exchange as a principal terrorist target. The Church of England invests £4.5 billion in the Stock Market as donations from churchgoers decline, so an interdependent solution uses new technologies to 3-dimensionally print volatile, digital stock market stat in stone in a perverse regression, providing a prophylaxis to modern terror and bestowing mutual longevity upon both the church and the economy.

My addition to St Paul’s Cathedral continuously builds itself up in real-time using data from the 41 stock market industry sectors, safely archiving the subsequent physical data in towers which grow in relation to the sector’s success. The repository finally fulfils Wren’s unaccomplished ambition for St. Paul’s incorporating a stark, securocratic exterior with a dynamic interior richly adorned with intertwining iconographies.

Free Tr[aid] by James Christian

Free Tr[aid] imagines a future in which further budgetary constraints has lead to the privatisation of the UK’s international aid commitments. Through a mechanism of ‘reverse imperialism’, the UK invites partner nations to earn their own aid by establishing self-run territories on British soil.

Located in the hinterlands between the North Circular Road and the Brent Reservoir, the project explores the development of an Indian ‘Aid Earning Zone’ in suburban London, examining the associated political and cultural tensions. Is a thin façade of socialist rhetoric enough to conceal the high-capitalism lurking beneath?

Human Nature by Marie Kojzar

In 2021, the government’s privatisation of nature has changed the English landscape and its value. The world of luxury goods sees an opportunity to capitalise on enhancements and improved beauty from genetic engineering as well as a growing demand from eco-guilty consumers who have lost their faith in climate science.

Responding to dichotomies in human behaviour, the eco-industry sees possibility in a genetically engineered nature, ensuring an authentic concern for environmental conservation through consumer attractions: a perception of nature hanging between heritage and haute couture.

Human nature: the Landscape of Desire proposes a new nature and material factory for luxury goods masqueraded as a revamped eco-industry located in Epping Forest. The proposal seeks to merge architecture and landscape into a new industry to be unveiled at the Festival of Britain 2021.

The material production facilities use the forest landscape as a pallet to engage with a new holistic architecture in which forum meets harvest and order meets chaos.

All rights and labelled images are covered by ©

Stillspotting nyc: To a Great City

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Sean Jackson

For the second edition of stillspotting nyc, To a Great City, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and US and Norway–based architect Snøhetta are creating urban soundscapes around Lower Manhattan to explore the relationship between space and sound.

Organised by the Guggenheim Museum, stillspotting nyc is a two-year multidisciplinary project that explores the relationship between space and silence within the crowded urban environment.

Working with a select group of architects, artists, designers, students, composers and philosophers, it combines urban experiences and public education programs – taking the museum’s architecture and urban studies programming into New York’s five boroughs.

Pärt has described his music as a frame for silence and uses reduction of sound rather than augmentation to create his compositions. Pärt’s concept of tintinnabuli – “little bells” in Latin – which forms the basis of most of his work, was born from his vision for an extremely nuanced aural environment that could not be measured, so to speak, in kilometers or meters but only in millimeters. His pieces often revolve around a central tone that reappears consistently throughout the work.

Snøhetta has selected — and in some cases subtly altered — urban spaces that embody the concept of a central tone and extend the perception of sound into the realm of space.

Visitors will experience this confluence of music and architecture at five separate locations downtown that quietly celebrate the city, ten years after the September 11 attacks.

Travelling through sites along the periphery of Ground Zero, participants may encounter a green labyrinth created by The Battery Conservancy, reflect in an underground chamber at Governors Island National Monument, and enter otherwise inaccessible spaces in landmark skyscrapers.

The stillness and seclusion of these spaces heightens awareness and recalibrates one’s senses. Over the course of a day, participants may visit each space multiple times at their leisure to understand how their perception changes based on circumstances such as time, stress, appetite, and sleep. Listeners become increasingly sensitised as they are drawn in and ideally will be transformed to a focused and still state.

Most of these images are from the first edition of stillspotting nyc. For more information visit here.

Guest blogger Sean Jackson

To a Great City, the Manhattan edition of stillspotting nyc, will be open to the public for two extended weekends on September 15–18 and 22–25, 2011 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, US.

All rights and labelled images are covered by ©

Show RCA: Young architects’ future vision

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Sean Jackson

Emerging architects are faced with real issues that demand some innovative thinking. Here three young designers from the Royal College of Art in London explain how they hope to make change with their graduate show projects.

Project Title: A Happy Thamesmeadium
Student: Craig Allen

Could a failed vision of utopia be sustained through a re-appropriation of aspiration values?

What if private enterprise exploited the happiness index?

This project speculates on the developer Candy & Candy turning its focus away from the luxury market and towards social housing.

Project title: Foreign Bodies – The Refugee Hospital
Student: Luke Smith

Foreign refugees living in London struggle to become integrated with public services, including the National Health Service. The range and severity of medical problems faced by these transient groups are greatly increased as a result of the less developed health services in their countries of origin, and compounded by the traumatic conditions which forced their exile into the UK.

The Refugee Hospital is an independent institution where refugee patients can access free medical treatment provided by doctors who are themselves refugees. This allows the effective treatment of medical conditions which are rarely seen amongst the host population, by doctors who have experience in treating them.

The hospital also functions as monitoring centre for global heath trends, as well as highlighting the inequalities between heath services of different countries. These issues are exposed and presented to public and political audiences as means of raising awareness and inciting change.

Project title: Ministry of Chinese Culture
Student: Pierre Shum

In the last twenty years, Chinas has become prominent on the global economic stage. However, its cultural status is still lacking in comparison. How then can architecture be used to promote, integrate and display Chinese culture within the City of London?

Nostalgic repetition of cultural references can no longer provide a viable strategy for integration between Chinese and British cultures. Now cultural relationships will dictate the future of this integration.

The Ministry of Chinese Culture, located near Bank [in the heart of the City], celebrates the colossal and pervasive phenomenon of ‘Made in China’ as a telling and contemporary element of Chinese culture.

This ‘excessive manufacturing’ will be displayed in this Ministry, part of a London-wide masterplan of over 30 ministries which aim to promote Chinese culture.

Craig Allen, Luke Smith and Pierre Shum exhibited as part of their masters in architecture at the Show RCA 2011. Read our report on the Vehicle Design Show published in Wallpaper*.

Guest blogger Sean Jackson

All rights and labelled images are covered by ©

Second chance for forgotten spaces

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Sean Jackson

How do you make use of forgotten sites in cities? This was the question raised by the Royal Institute of British Architects in its recent competition Forgotten Spaces where it challenged architects, designers, artists and students to find alternative uses for overlooked spaces in London and Sheffield.

Amongst the highlights includes the Firepits by Studio 3 Hawkins/Brown, an exciting new proposition for Crystal Palace, which caught fire in 1936. The idea is to turn the 1851 Great Exhibition building into a place for celebrating international food and music in a riot of smells and colours – much like what you see in places like the Djeemaa el Fna square in Marrakech.

Jumpers for Goalposts by GRID Architects focuses on a forgotten space in the Eastern Olympic Fringe in East London. Here the architect proposes ‘doorstep’ sports facilities, implemented using quick, low capital cost and low infrastructure methods – their purpose ‘to encourage sports participation, local ownership of space and foster community cohesion’, says the architect.

Moxon Architects has looked at the ?land beneath and adjacent to elevated sections of A40 Westway between Paddington Green and Meanwhile Gardens in West London. WEST_WAY is a proposal to transform this forgotten area by taking advantage of what the architects call ‘glamorous and beautiful existing spaces’ and giving them new functions.

Bee Project by Studiodare Architects is a combined urban park, ‘agroforest’ and bee-keeping aviary promoting a mutual dependency between the community and eco-system in the area between Kempton to Cricklewood Pipetrack. The project offers the potential to create an economic market for the exchange of produce.

Other notable London schemes include artist-inhabited church spires across the City, climbing tunnels in South London’s Clapham, and a project by AP+E in Bethnal Green that involves inhabiting and activating the forgotten rooftops of East London’s council blocks.

In the northern city of Sheffield the shortlisted schemes includes a giant golden frame that floats down the city’s canals, Sheffield’s own version of the Hollywood sign, an urban beach in a city centre car park and a shower block for urban potholers.

‘The range of proposals was particularly impressive and it is clear from the great ideas we saw that people had really had a lot of fun with it,’ says London judge Julia Barfield. ‘The shortlist is a great provocation for everyone to think about the use of space in their local area. The challenge now is to try and realise at least one.’

With 138 submissions in London and 60 in Sheffield it has been one of the largest open ideas competitions of its kind run by the RIBA.

Winners will be announced in the autumn with exhibitions to follow at Somerset House in London and the Crucible in Sheffield. First prize will receive £5,000, second prize £2,000 and third prize £1,000.

The full shortlists for London and Sheffield with galleries are available to view at Forgotten Space London and Forgotten Space Sheffield.

Challenge thinking on architectural space

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Sean Jackson

A corridor so narrow that strangers brush shoulders, a platform through a densely inhabited house that challenges the relationship between inhabitant and visitor, and a room reshaped through a graphic pattern – these are just a few of the exhibits that aim to challenge contemporary thinking on architectural space.

Concrete Geometries: How Spaces Move People at the Architectural Association School in London features 20 projects by a group of international architects and designers. It is the culmination of the School’s Research Clusters Programmes, an 18-month project by architecture students, staff and outside partners.

‘The topic seems quite an obvious thing to be exploring, but it is not a discussion that is being held in architecture today,’ notes Marianne Mueller, co-director of the cluster and diploma unit master at the AA School.

‘By involving designers and artists we are able to rethink our practice on the creation of space. Digital design has provided architects with new tools to experiment with the use of space. We need to challenges our current thinking of space and how we as architects create it.’

The research programme and the exhibition focus on the relationship between people and built spaces using recent international design, architecture and art projects as case studies.

The aim is to change architects’ attitudes towards how they view and approach space, something that Mueller believes is often created out of technological convenience rather than a study of how people interact with their environment in real life.

Research began in January 2010 with an international call for submissions exploring how geometric aspects of space, such as size, shape or relative position of figures, are perceived and influence behaviour in a very real sense.

From the 415 entries from artists, architects and designers around the world, over 30 were chosen for further research. 20 of these projects have been selected for the exhibition.

These include Room Drawing Installation by German artist Christine Rusche that uses graphic patterns on the walls to transform the perceived space of a room.

Connecting Corridor by Dutch designers Studio Elmo Vermijs is an installation connecting two buildings, too narrow to allow two people to pass, forcing its users to interact with strangers.

UK artist Fran Cottell’s House Installation Project is an installation in an existing domestic setting, where a raised platform acts as a walkway for visitors, bringing into play conflicting and contradictory power relations. It serves as a social experiment to see which prevails – visitor or intruder.

German architect Brandlhuber + ERA’s Brunnenstrasse 9 is inspired, rather than constrained, by the legal space guidelines governing the site.

Another German Kai Schiemenz has created Splendid Modernism. The installation serves as a venue for temporary events transforming the familiar formats of speech and lecture into a dialogue between visitors and speakers.

Voussoir Cloud by US architect Iwamoto Scott Architecture is a site-specific installation consisting of a system of vaults, exploring the structural paradigm of pure compression coupled with an ultra-light material system.

Social Clusterings by Antony Coleman is a series of photographs depicting social clustering – a fishing competition, Canary Wharf, Westfield Shopping Mall, Sports Hall, North Sea and Camber Sands.

Dymaxion Sleep by Canadian duo architect Jane Hutton and artist Adrian Blackwell, is a structure of nets suspended over a garden that changes the viewer’s fundamental spatial relationship to plants.

Guest blogger Sean Jackson

Concrete Geometries: How Spaces Move People is at the AA School until 27 May 2011. Read other reports on exhibits at the AA School here.