After some years of neglect and a sabbatical for the studio in 2015-16, the DS16 website is being overhauled and updated with student work since 2013. There is a large number of notable projects and bits of research that deserves mentioning. This will take some time to fully publish so please bare with us.
Past Resonances & Future Anticipations: Food Preservation & Consumption in the Post-Agrarian Landscape.
Brooklyn Co-operative is a cluster of re-configured agrarian structures which act as food production and consumption sites in an alternative supermarket proposal for Admiral’s Row.
The project is a response to current plans which are to demolish the row of abandoned houses to build a suburban supermarket. Once home to high ranking naval officers the eleven structures have been left to decay since 1960. The response is an alternative food market which aims to incorporate the row of houses and re-kindle the consumer with the origin of the food produced and promote regional traditions, gastronomic pleasure and the slow pace of life which finds its roots in the Slow Food Movement NY.
The proposal takes on the link that can exist between the decay of a building coupled with the promise of giving it a new lease of life as it is welcomed into the world of food consumption. The project explores the significance of the collection defined not only through its reinstatement as a memory fragment, but also as a reinvented artefact in a landscape generated in ways that allow the past to resonate into the manifold of the current realities of food production and consumption.
The food co-operative is made up by the symbolic re-configuration of traditional North American Barn structures. Despite their credentials in times gone by, several among the features of the architectural forms which emerge are endowed with such an air of transitiveness and constrained temporality that, when juxtaposed with the evidently longer lasting, albeit decaying, residences of the Officer’s Quarters, give rise to a deep sense of contrast. A contrast pregnant with ambiguity as it pays respect to the longevity at the same time as it asserts superior current relevance and functionality. In so doing the new outbuildings act as ghosts of a distant past and function, inter alia, as a symbolic manifestation of the decline of the agrarian landscape. The landscape proposal thus becomes a play on subsistence: an exploration into what persists over what dissipates.
2014 RIBA Presidents Medals Commendation http://www.presidentsmedals.com/winners_list.aspx?w=0&dop=1&m=0&part=1&page=1&year=2014
DS16 continues as Anthony Boulanger, Stuart Piercy and Guan Lee.
Stuart brings to the unit years of ambitious teaching from the Bartlett, while running award-winning practice Piercy and Company. GuanLee, director of Grymsdyke Farm and currently finishing his PhD at the Bartlett, brings with him his design based research in materials and fabrication, with the farm forming an informal testing groundf or students. We have teamed up to continue the ethos of DS16, with an added focus of interrogating concepts and structures.
This year the theme of the studio is entitled Field-work Our brief is to challenge students to think about the relationship between rural and urban environments, and question how the countryside might play an inventive and positive role in contemporary urban life. The theme forms the starting point to enable students to explore a DS.16 pre-occupation with craft and creation of elegant and refined
architecture. During the first term groups of students conceived and built installations at Grymsdyke Farm in Buckinghamshire. Each installation piece was derived from a different concept of rural life and culture. Themes such as “migration”, “seasons”, “boundaries” and “livelihood” were scrutinized to invent site specific objects and devices. The projects were developed and made during intense design sessions on the farm and fabricated with support of the farm’s workshop. The objective was to inform concepts by materials, techniques and the site. For the remainder of the year students where asked to research and develop individual architectural propositions that examined and questioned the reciprocal relationship of London with its rural surroundings. They were invited to invent their personal take on a theme from the first term and support that with a brief,programme and site location. There was a continued emphasis on the process of testing ideas through making, now with a need to address social and environmental sustainability. Projects vary in approach, scale and setting; some being based on the intensity of centralLondon and others addressing more peripheral/suburban conditions of the green-belt.
INNOVATION AS SPECTACLE: DESIGN SCHOOL AND EXHIBITION HALL
The project focuses on the park within the city. Crystal palace’s legacy of spectacle and celebration of innovation is reimagined within a new building, combining a design school with a series of radial exhibition spaces. e UK’s innate creativity, inventiveness and competitive spirit brought together, and celebrated in a centre of excellence for design engineering. Situated below the Italian terraces of the original crystal palace, the building carves into
the steeply sloping site with its radial hyperboloid shell forms. ese intersecting shells provide discreet conditions in each of the exhibition spaces and also a circulatory ‘underbelly’ connecting between them. e family of forms generated from this simple ruled surface are tailored to suit the varying sculptural and lighting qualities of the space, from elliptical amphitheatres to controlled dark room spaces. e design school and inventor workshops/ incubator units attach to this composition of spaces in a series of buried legs that sequentially rise from the drop in site level
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alexander haggart, galiya baisseittova + andreas andreou description under construction...
DS16 