Murray has left the university and DS.16 to take up a post at UCL. His energy and passionate teaching will be greatly missed by all involved in DS.16! We wish him great success in his new role. (Murray on Etna in Feb)

DS.16 will carry on in 2011-12. More on that shortly…

The remaking of the spaces beneath the Westway flyover in west London has been one of the most remarkable transformations in the city in the last decade or so. Now a centre for growing different kinds of mushrooms, including shitake and truffles, is inserted effortlessly under the concrete sky of the A40. People come to shop for these organic foods in London’s first night market.

What would happen if, as the worst predictions suggest, there were no bees in London? Here a headquarters in Kew Gardens releases millions of delicate floating inseminators, like artificial spores, across the city. Locally, in places like Victoria Park in Hackney, small repair and collection points work constantly to recycle the proxy bees: architecture to pollinate a wilting city.

Winner of the RIBA CLAWSA Student Award 2011

See Ben’s project on Dezeen:

www.dezeen.com/2011/06/28/london-without-bees-by-ben-kirk/

Ben’s work is part of the Tallinn Architecture Bienalle 2011:

www.tab.ee/#exhibition

Herding travelling bees to act as pollinators is emerging as a technique in the USA to overcome the rapidly bee population. In London, bees could be taken around by specialist minders in canal boats, releasing them in each area and then collecting them up again, before moving on. In between times, these bee boats are lifted up to be repaired and restocked in workshops along the canals.

The east-west ‘super sewer’ is a vital project for 21st-century London but is causing controversy as it requires giant access holes on the surface. Taking advantage of one of these holes at King’s Stairs on the Thames, a new community fuelled by methane from the sewer, and built with bricks made from human waste, is linked through sinuous ‘green corridors’ to Southwark Park inland.

The annual migration of swifts to and from Africa is an vital ritual, and while these birds spend most of their life in the air, even sleeping on the wing, they require protected nests to breed during the spring and summer. A series of towers close to the Trellick Tower in Notting Hill combine apartments, flexible spaces for local artists, and myriad intricate nesting boxes for swifts.

A feature of the economic recession is the empty building sites in London where nature is reclaiming itself. These sites offer mini-ecosystems that can be explored by archaeologically-minded scientists. Objects such as security huts are transplanted, along with vegetation, to a collection point in Aldgate to create a slowly emerging scaffolded museum above the underground research labs.

Halcyon days indeed: the term comes from the Ancient Greek for kingfisher, and today the presence of this bird is a sign of ecological repair. Kingfisher sightings already happen along London’s canals, so this former gas storage site in Bethnal Green is reused as a nature reserve and testing ground for remediation. A new block forms an edge to the site. It hosts research and public facilities and acts as a water filtration mechanism, while birds bring life back into the disused gas-holders.

Our brief this year challenged students to think about social/environmental sustainability in an inventive, inclusive and sensuous manner. The usual hair-shirt, do-good approach to ecological design just won’t do: it is hypocritical, holier-than-thou, and only puts everyone off. Equally, however, we need to think collectively about how we live and build our cities, and the need for us to reduce energy consumption and environmental damage is vital — even if, paradoxically, the principles of free-market capitalism appear to militate against such aspirations.

The theme for the year focuses on the biodiversity of cities, given that — by UN estimates — about half the world’s population already live in urban environments, and this will increase to 80% by 2050. Cities cannot be seen in opposition to ‘nature’; instead all  areas of the globe exist within a sophisticated and interconnected network, and the preservation of our animal and plant life is just as important as cutting pollution, saving energy or reducing the ‘greenhouse effect’.

As ever, the DS.16 brief asked students to research and question what urban biodiversity might mean, and from this develop a personal take. We want to see a delight in aesthetics, atmospherics, cultural activities, etc being foregrounded in analysis. Issues of biodiversity — and associated social/environmental sustainability — will need to be tackled at the level of your building programme (as in suggesting collectivised ways to reorganise urban space), or at the level of construction (through new environmental strategies or building processes), or at the abstract level of theory, aesthetics, meaning, etc. But it mustn’t be too worthy!

The main building project sites could be of any size in any part of London. It was vital to arrive at novel architectural/urban/landscape interventions that improve the level of biodiversity in the city, whether of birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, fish, trees, flowers, plants, etc.

Students began the year by exploring concepts of biodiversity in the different central London Boroughs. Small groups of students developed and made models, drawings, installations and devices which dealt with the site, species or area specific themes.

Our fieldtrip was to tremendous trip around Sicily in February.

Yr 1 Diploma Students:

• Galiya Baisseitova
• Selina Cheung
• Naomi Crawford
• Zeta Freeman
• Sabba Khan
• David Lindsay
• Judith Poole
• Lemma Redda
• Alexandra Reed
• Isabella Theofanopoulos
• Nicola Whetstone

Yr 2 Diploma Students:

• Natalie Benes
• Sarah Custance
• Andrew Diggle
• Viktor Hagstrom,
• Aaron Holden
• Ben Gifford
• Stefania Gyftopoulou
• Benjamin Kirk
• Laurence Pinn
• Libby Walton
• Jacqueline Yeung, Man-Yee

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BEN KIRK   (Dip Yr 1)         The New Religion, Finsbury

With the decline of Christianity in London, and the resulting emptying of churches, remaining devotees get to commission praying machines to represent them in churches. But as they too die off, these machines begin instead to dismantle the churches and recycle them into centres for a new religion — cryogenics, a different kind of search for immortality.