Archive blog of Unit H 2009-10. Please check back later for updated site with student work or view previous years at ava-unit-h.blogspot.com

AVA Showcase 2010

The UEL Architecture End of Year Show is on until 9th July at the AVA, UEL Docklands campus. http://www.uel.ac.uk/avashowcase/

Well done everyone!

some links that may be of interest:

Fen habitat management from the point of view of Invertebrate conservation
The Bat House project now built in Barnes Wetland centre
information about the old Willingham West Fen pumping station (north-west of Cambridge)
Environment Agency info on eels
DEFRA info on eels including links to the Anglian area management plan
some more eel info, about what they don't know, from a London Zoo event
Last of the Honeybees a channel4 programme available online

Architecture Open Jury 23.02.2010

pin-up as part of the annual mid-year Open Jury

visit to Woodwalton Fen NNR and Welney Wetland Centre

Talk and guided walk of Woodwalton Fen NNR and the Great Fen Project
Visit to Welney Wetland Centre bird reserve on the edge of the flooded Ouse Washes

site and programme

Pin-up with Roland Karthaus to review choice of site location and development of programme.

Hybrid Home

Brief to the final project.


Resources and exhibitions:
BFI Mediatheque (includes films on the Fens and domestic architecture)
24 hours, Pavey Ark by Michael Maloney and John Hooper
On the Move at the Estorick Collection (free with NUS card)

Wicken Fen
Cambridgeshire Green Vision
Natural England
Visit the Fens

Other fen and wetland conservation projects:
The Great Fen Project
Welney Wetland Centre

preparing for the Hybrid Home

The site for the final project will be located in or near Wicken fen. In the next semester you will be offered a choice of sites that will provide suitable locations for the design of a dwelling in the fens. All the sites are, or will be, owned by the National Trust as part of their Wicken Fen Vision. This 100 year project is a proposal by the National Trust to buy 53 square kilometres of Cambridgeshire, between Wicken fen and Cambridge, with the aim of returning it to fenland. It is absolutely essential that you have a thorough understanding of the National Trust's Wicken Fen vision and their environmental strategy in order to ensure a good start to the final project in the new year. All the relevant information can be gleaned from their website. The links below are only an introduction so explore the whole site. Make sure you do as much research as possible now so that the majority of your time in the next semester can be dedicated to design work.

http://www.wicken.org.uk/vision.htm
http://www.wicken.org.uk/resman.htm
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-chl/w-countryside_environment/w-environmental_practices.htm

Remember, you will use your device in the early stages of the next project to record your chosen site, so your device must be operational and able to produce a coherent image by the next semester.

Use any spare time during the vacation to finalise and document the first and second projects for your portfolio.

camera space / fenland exhibition: 11 - 18th december 2009

the fens of east anglia are a place where boundaries are blurred between the natural and the man-made; a palimpsest that describes a history of intervention and the creation of a synthetic nature embedded within the landscape. unit h students took their ‘camera spaces’ to this restless landscape to record and respond to wind and water, light and time, qualities of perspective and horizon, and the man-made interventions that attempt to cope with the forces of flooding and weather.

Crit of Camera Space project with Nick Westby, followed by
Private View 6:00pm, 11.12.2009, Unit H studio space.

Burwell visit 4-6 december 2009

photo from Burwell Lode by Guillem Vaquer Piza

Guided walk of Anglesey Abbey gardens and Hoe Fen, Lode
Guided walk of the ancient fen, Wicken Fen reserve, with the grazing warden
On-site device testing, Burwell House, village and lode

exhibitions and events

these are current and look interesting:

Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers at Whitechapel Gallery until 3 Jan. http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/sophie-calle-talking-to-strangers

Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs at the British Library until March. http://www.bl.uk/pointsofview/

Of Dreams and Cities - this week at BFI Southbank and their mediatheques http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/mediatheque/of_dreams_and_cities

V&A museum photography galleries: http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/photography/index.html

Passing thoughts and making plans at the Jerwood Space

photograms and photographs

darkroom work and photograms/photographs seminar

Nick Westby

presentation and workshop by Nick Westby

cameras

cameras seminar

Camera Space

Day trip to St. Wendreda's church in March and Ely Cathedral, travelling by train across the fens and crossing the Ouse Washes.

Brief to the second project, also see the reading Camera Space from The Apparatus and its image in Photography by Steve Edwards.

Jonathan Hagos and drawing

Installation detail from Imaginary Homelands: Salman Rushdie in his study

Presentation and seminar by Jonathan Hagos.
http://studiojonandnina.com/

Drawing seminar, 23 October.
Pin up of Building the Hybrid Drawing with guest critics, 30 October.

galleries

The Prisoner - 2008 by Rosalind Nashashibi

Rosalind Nashashibi at the ICA, Castellani/Flavin/Judd/Uecker and Thomas Heatherwick at the Haunch of Venison and Space Tea House by Yuko Shiraishi at Annely Juda.

Building the Hybrid Drawing

Brief to the first project, also see the reading from Perspective and other drawing systems by Dubery and Willats.

The Hybrid Home

Using both analogue and digital processes we seek to explore a time-based architecture, an architecture that is designed in four dimensions. The unit aims to develop an awareness of temporal, narrative architectures using film, photography and motion graphics to communicate a relationship of human interaction, experience and occupation.

This year Unit H will investigate the idea of the home as a hybrid space; in negotiation with its environment, its landscape, weather and other processes. We will explore the possibilities for developing a new architecture of the home that might respond and change in relation to light and weather.

As light can be either natural or artificial, so weather now also has its own 'manufactured' elements, i.e. the electromagnetic smog of mobile phones, wireless and other telematic devices. Landscapes defined by human intervention, where once inhospitable environments were made arable and habitable, are now threatened by the consequences of large-scale engineering, extreme weather patterns, changes in rainfall and rising sea-levels. Unit H will explore new architectural propositions that embrace extreme weather and the changing climate both natural and man-made.

We are interested in examining the ways in which architectural space, drawn space and film space combine, collide, inform and reconfigure one another. The processes of use within an architectural experience will be explored so that we can begin to understand immaterial/intangible architectures, the spaces ‘in between’ the buildings; the atmospheric and ephemeral within the tactile and tectonic.

Lebbeus Woods, "Shard Houses"

market day handout for The Hybrid Home