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PG Architecture Unit 07: Self Build: Furniture, House and Housing with an Emphasis on Timber Construction

Unit brief

Unit 7’s primary interest this year is self build, by which we mean, to self construct as well as to procure and manage the construction of a dwelling or dwellings.

Hackney Council recently initiated its Self Build Challenge. The council is welcoming innovative and environmentally friendly applications for plots of land too small for it to develop, with the aim of giving those priced out of the housing market a different route to security of tenure.

The major design task in the first semester will be to develop a self-build timber construction system for a three-bedroom house that could be applied to a site on Balcorne Street and adapted to other serviced plots as they are released by the council. 

In the second semester, students will undertake a more speculative project, exploring self build at a medium-rise scale on a site at 337-357 Kingsland Road. Students will be asked to design communal housing with a superstructure made from timber in true or composite form, that would require no more than five sub-contractors to complete, with any further construction work undertaken by the self builders.

We will be guided in this endeavour by the ten tenets of Lean Architecture and by Tom Emerson’s assertion that timber construction is “essentially democratic; existing skills are easily shared while collaboration encourages innovation, essential ingredients for the architectural imagination.”

The two major design projects will be preceded by a critical study of Enzo Mari’s intelligent, elegant, yet radical self build furniture project, “Autoprogettazione” from 1974.

The sites for both projects will be analysed in a project inspired by the French writer Georges Perec’s pursuit of what he called the infraordinary – “what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars and clouds."

Residential street with two-storey buildings, cars and trees

Details

Course
Architecture MA
Tutors David Grandorge
Ted Swift 
Where Goulston Street
When Monday and Thursday

Architecture Postgraduate Studios

 
1/2
Module of single storey building with openings and people

PG Architecture Unit 02: Creative Kentish Town

Tony Fretton and Jillian Jones

Exploration of the social and urban possibilities of contemporary work and leisure, and designing unusual forms and facades.
The viewing tower at Sutton Hoo for the National Trust, a Nissen Richards Studio project. Photography: Gareth Gardner

PG Architecture Unit 03: A Museum For Now

Pippa Nissen, Marie-Lise Oulmont, Andrea Hickey, Kate Coghlan

Our unit is looking at architecture from the point of view of experience and how we can design a series of spaces as a carefully choreographed route. We are working on two projects over the year. Firstly, a smaller building to house an exhibition, and then a new museum building in the Hackney Marshes. We will ask you to think about themes around light and materials and how we can make our cultural buildings relevant today; how has the pandemic changed our view of culture and society?
Man in winter clothing controlling a drone at edge of icy lake

PG Architecture Unit 04: Virtual Laboratory; Wilderness In The Making

Jonas Lundberg, Nate Kolbe

How can we plan cities and buildings adapted to physical distancing, remote working and increased resilience to extreme natural events? How can we reduce our ecological footprint by making new provisions for public space both real and virtual at the same time as we embrace the COVID induced thriving biodiversity of our cities? We work with digital tools in two design projects direct to factories in the exploration of engineered timber: timber pavilions and tall timber towers.
Isola Bella, Sicily

PG Architecture Unit 05: The Borrowed Landscape

Michael Dillon, Amy Bradley Smith, Lauren Shevills

This year we explore the layers between outdoors and indoors in dwellings. Forming skins and spaces that mediate climate. By manipulating thermal enclosure, we look to reduce the material consumption of building and make landscape more manifest in the interior. The borrowed landscape transgresses ideas of ventilation, enclosure, live/work and a more cyclical and outdoor life-cycle. We are actively engaging with the climate emergency, designing to reduce embodied energy.
Model of Timber Frame Studio University of Sierra Leone, Joe Davis 2015

PG Architecture Unit 06: Loose Fit City

Professor Maurice Mitchell, Dr Bo Tang

This year, Unit 06 will be investigating two London settings looking for ways to transform hard boundaries into loose borders into which students will introduce appropriate social infrastructure to create and expand common civic grounds. We will encourage you to find new ways of representing your ideas, fostering cooperation between fellow students and provoking new ways of looking, imagining and representing.
37 Balcorne Street, London E9 2020 David Grandorge

PG Architecture Unit 07: Self Build: Furniture, House and Housing with an Emphasis on Timber Construction

David Grandorge, Ted Swift

Unit 07’s primary interest this year is self build, by which we mean to self construct as well as to procure and manage the construction of a dwelling or dwellings. This idea will pursued at two scales at two sites in the London Borough of Hackney. The two projects will address some of the issues raised by the housing crisis and the impact of architecture on resource depletion and climate change.
Sir John Soane’s Museum Study, Paolo Emilio Pisano, t-sa Forum 2015 © Takero Shimazaki Architects

PG Architecture Unit 08: Enough Already

Takero Shimazaki, Paolo Emilio Pisano and Karabo Turner

We have enough already: enough resources, enough buildings, enough space. Unit 8 explores the notions that everyone might enjoy private sufficiency and public luxury, and that of a '15 Minute City'. Leading from a provocation that daily life can be organised within a small. accessible radius, we will propose singular architectural interventions, challenging ideas of private and public space, re-use of resources and building stock, minimal intervention, and juxtaposition of programmes and spaces.
Rus in Urbe

PG Architecture Unit 09: Rus in Urbe

Stephen Taylor and Theodoros Thysiades

This year in Unit 09 we will explore how architectural projects that sustain a feeling of the countryside whilst living in the city could be developed. We will work in a suburban setting and test how good design could help cultivate a sense of community and liveliness. We will aim at creating environmentally sustainable and economically viable architectural forms, suitable for a diverse urban society able to live in harmony with nature.
Kathy Drasky/Flickr

PG Architecture Unit 12: The Dream of the Metropolis

Peter St John, Fabienne Sommer, Ben Speltz and James Hand

At a time when its celebration is under threat, the studio will look at how we protect public life and sociability, by looking at the provisional and the festive social spaces of the city. Reflecting on some important questions of this time, we will look at architecture that is independent of the permanent city fabric, and is instead immediate, short-term, diverse and public. We will start with the design of a small interior, a café or a bar, and finish large with the design of a public park.
The Old Kent Road former gas works site and South London Timber, looking north towards Verney Road and the colossal Veolia waste handling building. This is where we will be working this year.

PG Architecture Unit 13: Industry in the City

Jane Clossick, Beatrice De Carli, Colin O’Sullivan, Mark Brearley

If you want a city with industry, with makers and menders as part of its diversity, join us to develop bold proposals for a chunk of the Old Kent Road. Start with the design of a large scale multi-let workshop building, later work to shape and advocate alternative plans to save the area from becoming a super-suburb of residential conversion and make space for industry and craftsmanship. Embrace one of the city’s big design challenges, and join the tussle over how this place should evolve.

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