ADS5: And Now You Know

In 2022/23, ADS5 will concentrate on literal building elements and their origins, carbon sequestering materials and how they can be joined, bound and brought to completion. We aim to equip students with the knowledge, skills and confidence to help change the construction industry from a 40 per cent contributor of manmade atmospheric carbon to an industry that is actively carbon sequestering. From being part of the problem, to part of the solution. We will explore the structural, environmental and poetic potentialities of the physical materials that architecture must be made from. By collaborating with structural and sustainability engineers, cost consultants, stonemasons, digital fabricators, and material suppliers, we will develop the expertise to confidently articulate alternative ways of making buildings. Enabling conversations with future clients, bosses, friends, or colleagues. Together we will embrace the collective challenge of educating ourselves about the climate crisis and applying our skills, time and thinking towards mitigating these impacts.

To understand the origins of our approach to ‘joining, binding and completing’ we need to go back in history – to a fissure in the hermetic lineage of trained neo-classical architectural thinking and its ties to the classical language of Architecture. While on a tour of industrializing Britain, Karl Friedrich Schinkel found himself standing in front of towering mills, dockyards and bridges. Sketching with fascination their unconscious and newly formed architecture and more specifically their construction details. After a lifetime of mastering and developing his drawing techniques for creating neoclassical architecture, Schinkel questioned what he had been drawing all that time. Why one detail or motif over another? What did they truly mean? And how did they come about? What relevance did the classical language have to the industrializing new world?

Schinkel encouraged a young Karl Bötticher to continue this pursuit and he began to find the etymology of all applied arts and architecture, namely tectonics, the bringing together of materials to act as structure (kernform) and decorative envelope (kunstform). Bötticher then went on to explain that classical motifs – originally made of timber, metal and stone – had become abstracted over time and represented in more permanent stone features.

Auguste Choisy in Paris and Gottfried Semper, while exiled in London, both continued the subject to further define this process as “joining, binding and completing.” The former two being the tectonic choice of materials and the method of holding them together and “completion” being how these become emblematic of their time and culture.

Otto Wagner, a Semper pupil, brought with a renewed focus on visually expressing the nuts and bolts that held together facades, columns and roofs. Arguably even the Successionists of this era did not fully escape the gravitational pull of symmetry, colonnades, porticos, entablatures and friezes – the vocabulary of the classical language.

In many respects, these efforts to pursue a modern architecture were already too late. Other artist’s disciplines had moved on from a monolithic identity, instead coalescing into common interest groups. This was a more atomized modernity, one confidently asserted amongst Latin speaking nations, including Spain, Brazil, and Puerto Rico, in which the day-to-day normality of cultural overlap illustrated the limits of proposing yet another monolithic dogmatic style. Federico De Onis and Oswald de Andrade helped define “The Postmodern Condition”, the outcomes of which were a combination of ethical parameters and freedom of expression. In architecture, for example, ethical parameters would include structural and fire integrity and lifespan, thermal and sustainable performance, which would be represented by its “dress” (or what it looked like).

In the mid-twentieth century, political philosopher Hannah Arendt discussed two different modes of humanity – animal laborans and homo faber. For Arendt, animal laborans is the mode of humanity in which labour is carried out for mere survival (routine drudgery), whereas homo faber is the mode in which higher works – such as art, architecture, or legislation – are made. In his seminal book The Craftsman, Richard Sennett – who was Arendt’s student – challenged this separation between the people who do the thinking and the people who do the making. Sennett asserts that “thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making” and goes on to celebrate and advocate for the craftsperson – whether cellist, computer coder, architect or other – who hones their craft and brings ethical purpose to their skills, deploying them in service of public value.

During the 5th century BC, Protagoras argued there are no immutable values and no ethical grounds on which to impose your values on your neighbours. Nevertheless, he also observed that shared values support productive collaboration. To establish shared values requires proposition, negotiation and agreement. Shared values are renegotiated as times, thoughts and contexts change. In ADS5 we see the mitigation of climate change, as well as the care and regeneration of ecosystems, as shared values that unite our work with a common purpose.

Just as Schinkel questioned the relevance of classical language in an industrializing world, we now ask ourselves what relevance tectonics, style and expression have in the era of the Anthropocene? Can we build better and cheaper? Can our influence on the planet and society be positive and spatially enriching? What responses will it provoke and where does it lead? Are our ethical parameters and obligations reflected in a building’s freedom of expression?

Tectonics and the etymology of architecture are key theoretical concerns in ADS5. We will explore the lineage of these ideas throughout the year, discussing the interrelated thinking of Vasari, Winckelmann, Schinkel, Botticher, Semper and others. In the context of the climate and biodiversity crises, we think that our tectonic/material understanding as designers should include not only the poetic and constructional potentials of our materials, but also their embodied carbon, financial cost, methods of production, extraction and transportation.

We encourage students to develop sophisticated design projects that combine a highly resolved technical ambition with a carefully considered ethical and social mission. As tutors, we aim to support students in conceiving, challenging, and developing your own ideas and projects. Our previous student projects have varied from alternative models of housebuilding and reforestation, to the development of a systematic infrastructure for the re-use of old building components, to spaces of human care and healing, and to spaces for agricultural and ecological regeneration.

During the Live Project, we will continue and elaborate on the research undertaken in 2021/22. We will work with structural and sustainability engineers and quantity surveyors to assess a selection of newly completed buildings, or those about to break ground. By the end of the first term, each student will complete a report on the greener, faster and cheaper doppelgänger. The cohort will then have a menu of building elements from which they can deploy on future design projects to be developed throughout the remainder of the year.

This year we will also introduce a stone detail component workshop to produce a 1:1 prototype. In this workshop will be a collaboration with experts in the field of stone fabrication.

We will then evolve our research and investigations and address our findings within a variety of parameters. We can test our findings in both urban and rural settings and explore how these materials may be systematized and applied to a wide range of scenarios. We will visit quarries and stonemason’s workshops and other fabrication facilities to gain insight and in-depth understanding.

Graphic representation will play a key role. Both in terms of visually narrating the data-laden building counterparts from the Live Project, and in terms of how we draw and represent the joining, binding and completion of our ideas. Drawings convey our intent, our instruction, and above all, what we mean.

Tutors

Amin Taha was born in Berlin, moved briefly to Baghdad then Southend-on-Sea, before settling in London, where is currently chairperson of GROUPWORK – an employee ownership trust. Before establishing an independent studio, he worked in the offices of Zaha Hadid, Wilkinson Eyre, Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands and Richard Murphy in Edinburgh where he graduated. He has around 25 years of experience in practice, working on varying typologies from single houses, through housing, mixed-use towers, masterplans, galleries, museums and transport infrastructure. Amin continues to teach, write and lecture on architecture and currently also advises pension and investment property funds on sustainability.

Peter Rae is an experienced Architect with the London-based studio, Groupwork. He has led a broad portfolio of international projects with several design-driven studios in the UK, US and Spain. Peter is currently a faculty member at ESNE in Madrid, Spain, initiating design studios and visualisation courses in the newly formed English BA program and has taught several Architectural design studios at the University of Brighton in the UK. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Design, Architecture from Arizona State University, and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the recipient of the American Institute of Architects Henry Adams Medal.