PG Architecture Unit 08 Postgraduate Architecture – Units

Unit brief

This year, Unit 8 will work with a theme of tolerance in architecture practice and design, exploring a way to design that is embracing of the anomalies and the ‘uncontrollable’ physical elements in the idea of re-use.

This year, Unit 8 will work with a theme of tolerance in architecture practice and design, exploring a way to design that is embracing of the anomalies and the ‘uncontrollable’ physical elements in the idea of re-use.

We welcome Katherine Nolan and Alex Butterworth of Studio KA to our teaching team, collaborating and exploring the potential of re-use in architecture today and for the 21st century.

We believe that our future involvement with the design of the built environment will need to be through careful and considerate evaluation of what is already there and working without the need to demolish unnecessarily.

This approach will of course require us to ‘accept’ a lot of the existing built fabric, embracing and celebrating the quirks and the materials into the proposals.

Tolerance in architectural practice could mean formal, structural, material, programmatic as well as, of course, in the act of construction itself.

We will explore this theme through organised workshops on loose and formal drawings, paintings, model making, image-making based on the precedent studies of an architect-artist pairings – including drawings by Louis Kahn and Palladio, works by Phyllida Barlow and Blinky Palermo.

Our site will be along the Sutton High Street in South London, where we will propose alternative future community and public use for a large, disused former BHS warehouse - as well as investigating the future role of such typical suburban hight street. The brief will ask for the proposals to last at least 100 years: both in terms of resource and sustainable materials, as well as how the building and public spaces might be used throughout. The building can of course be repaired and maintained; ideas of maintenance would need to consider this new ‘tolerant’ architecture. We will study the existing building and its surroundings precisely, aiming to incorporate unexpected things too.

Unit 8 will continue our Monday seminars, which this year will focus on the selected architects and artists to develop a core relationship between subjective method of drawings/making/process of design - and the possibility of incorporating tolerance in the architecture of re-use.