Course: Unit XX Designing Histories
Unit XX operates at the intersection of architecture, history, mythology & preservation as a means to nurture critical thinking and architectural storytelling. Expanding and interrogating architecture’s perpetual relationship to the framework of memory, time and meaning, we strive to create poetic and provocative designs.
Memory
Recalling the fragmented yet lyrical writings of Aldo Rossi, who argued there is a dialectic between the city as stones and mortar, as a physical artefact, and the city of our minds and in our memory, we have examined the complex and contingent relationship between memory, artefacts and monumental buildings.
Can buildings and objects act as analogues of memory? How can a monument stand for collective imagination or subjective identities when no-one shares the same knowledge or experience? Equally, can monuments be relied upon to prolong remembrance when they are prone to obscured and altered meaning over time?
Mythology
Understanding building heritage as a corpus of inherited knowledge and dialogues that migrate across time and place, we have traced architectures genealogical lines; exchanged in ideas and stories with architects past and present. We are not historicists, but we are interested in generating new meanings on top of old – of thinking historically in the present.
Blending digital and analogue modes of production, we utilised filmwork as a narrative and creative device to develop the mythological and mythopoetic dimensions of our work. In addition to theoretical texts, we have drawn widely upon, literary, cultural and artistic sources to expand our topographical and thematic enquiries. Using words, images and architecture to tell stories we have learned to tell, we have asked- how should architectural heritage be confronted in the present? What should we remember, and what should we forget? What is the future of the past?
Monument
Situating our proposals within the City of Westminster, through a process of addition, subtraction and intervention, we have explored the opportunities set out by existing bodies of expressive material. Conversing with structures of any age or scale, we have designed combined works- questioning the impact of architecture on architecture- that is to say, how can one artefact or building affect the meaning of another when different expressions combine and interact?
Contextualising the writings of Alois Riegl within contemporary paradigms, we have tested the philosophical dimensions of architectural preservation. We have generated new heritage; propelling monuments that strive to be located within an historical moment and yet be adaptive to change, in this sense, to being part of the present, as well as the past.
Many thanks to our critics & collaborators: Stephen Davies, Ashwin Goyal, Mark Hopkinson, Orla Kelly, Simon Kennedy, Sophie Percival, Jonathan Tuckey & Natalia Wotjowicz