PG Architecture Unit 08 Postgraduate Architecture – Units

Unit brief

We will work in the city of Coventry, in the West Midlands, studying existing medieval and post-war buildings to propose an alternative city centre, beyond the confines of capitalist logic that have historically ordered our cities. We will do this through the notion of reuse. This is applied at the scale of the city, as well as its buildings and landscapes.

In particular, Unit 8 will reflect upon climate breakdown from a critical and creative perspective: how cities, gardens and buildings are affected by the weather and how weather has always been part of architectural expression. Weather and weathering are interconnected with the wider themes of climate, ecology, decay, memory, and inhabitation. The Unit will consider architecture as integral and entangled into these interwoven themes.

Understood in this way, architecture and the city has many authors — human and non-human, living and non-living, real and imagined. Architecture is not corrupted by their influence, but enriched. Inseparable from the complex context in which it exists, new and old become part of the same continuum; the city is formed of ruins, a building under construction is a ‘ruin in reverse’. The existing buildings which we will study represent a form of ‘inheritance’, constant and vital to our present and the foundation for our imaginings of the future.

We will study the work of architects, artists, historians, urbanists, and gardeners whose works embody these principles. We will do this through a programme of workshops and seminars, referencing for example: Jonathan Hill's Weather Architecture and A Landscape of Architecture, History and Fiction; Pier Vittorio Aureli’s edited volume The City as a Project; and Robert Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, among others.

These investigations will inform our work towards a new cityscape for Coventry. Urban-scale ideas will build on a series of reuse projects of existing buildings, acting as agents to renew the city itself. Gardens, landscapes, and ecology may feature in these proposals, not as accessories to architecture but part of its essential whole.