Village Underground

More about Village Underground (PDF)
http://www.villageunderground.co.uk/

Simon Velez, Temporary Cathedral in Guadua at Pereira, Colombia

Today people are rediscovering the advantages of bamboo, one of the world’s key construction materials. Not only is it cheap and enduring, but also has an unmistakable aesthetic appeal and in terms of its inner structure, bamboo astonishingly enough resembles many high-tech compounds. Often environmentalists call it vegetal steel.

This lecture focuses on the work of architect Simon Velez, who comes from Colombia and is the most renowned contemporary architect working with bamboo. It explains the intuitive but very disciplined process through which Velez designs and constructs his buildings. He has now completed over 250 buildings.

Ajay Khanna trained as an architect in New Delhi, India. After working in several London practices such as Foster and Partners and Allies and Morrison, he gravitated towards the work of more environmentally conscious architects such as Shigeru Ban, Glen Murcutt and Simon Velez. He is now more interested in low-cost, ‘one-off’ architecture that involves using natural materials such as bamboo. For the last three years, he has travelled to Colombia to study the work of Colombian architect Simon Velez who has build over 250 buildings in bamboo. Currently, he is also an MA student on the Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources at London Metropolitan University.

The lecture will take place in the Cinema, ground floor.

Rut Blees Luxemburg

Rut Blees Luxemburg is an artist, whose work explores public spaces of cities, where ambitions and unexpected elaborations of the modern project are revealed, seeking moments where layers of history are revealed in architectural form.

She has explored diverse locations such as London, Dakar, Santiago and Swansea, often collaborating with architects, philosophers and poets. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the UK as well as internationally. Recently she has made a temporary public art installation ‘Piccadilly’s Peccadilloes’ commissioned by Art on the Underground, for Terminal 4, Heathrow Airport.

Private View and Alumni Lecture on Wednesday 19 November 2008
6.30–8.30pm

The Alumni Lecture will feature talks by the Head of Department Professor Robert Mull, Professor Florian Beigel of the Architecture Research Unit and London Met alumnus Steve McAdam of Fluid.

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00:/ Architects

00:/ is a research and strategy led architecture practice, focused upon designing projects as prototypes for people-centred sustainability. Presently we are working on a range of projects from ethical workspaces for social entrepreneurs and not for profit organisations, to community living rooms, and low carbon public and private housing.

The practice is driven by a common aspiration to create sustainable design founded on social and environmental principles. 00:/ believes in architecture not simply as object but as part of a process, where design solutions are developed through close relationships of participation, awareness, empowerment and culture-change in order to deliver responsive and enabling environments.

Cities, like people, are what they eat. The effort necessary to feed them arguably has a greater social and physical impact on us and our planet than anything else we do – yet few of us are aware of the process. Food arrives on our plates as if by magic, and we rarely stop to wonder how it got there. But when you consider that every day for a city the size of London, enough food for 30 million meals must be produced, imported, sold, cooked, eaten and disposed of again, and that something similar must happen every day for every city on earth, it is remarkable that cities get to eat at all. Industrialisation has made feeding cities seem easy, but with food prices soaring and Peak Oil looming – to say nothing of the threat of climate change – that illusion is wearing off. With the world’s urban population set to double by 2050, we need a new urban model: one in which city and hinterland are treated as a single, organic whole.

Carolyn Steel, Hungry City

Carolyn Steel is an architect, lecturer and writer. Her work has focused on the everyday lives of cities, and she has run successful design units at Cambridge University, London Metropolitan University, and at the London School of Economics, where she was inaugural studio director of the Cities Programme. She was a Rome Scholar in 1995-6, researching the mundane order of the Rione S. Angelo, and her lecture series Food and the City is now an established part of the architectural degree at Cambridge University. A director of Cullum and Nightingale Architects, she has completed several major buildings for the Central School of Speech and Drama. Her media work has included presenting on BBC TV’s ‘One Foot in the Past’, and she is a regular columnist for Building Design. Her first book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, was published by Chatto and Windus in 2008. It won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, and was recently featured on a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme.

2012Architecten

2012Architecten is a Rotterdam based architecture office that utilises the contextual potential for design. This specific potential is inherent in the existing environment, energy resources or various waste materials.

2012Architecten consider ‘reuse’ to be an integral design strategy. By taking the existing characteristics of the waste material into account in the early stages of the design, innovative applications and surprising forms are created. The design process is not seen as linear but rather as one phase in a continuous cycle of creation and re-creation.

In this lecture 2012Architecten explain how they manage to find “waste” materials using the harvest-map and how they intergrate their findings in their designs. Inspiring projects will be shown. Duchi, the shoe-shop in the Hague made with reclaimed carglass windows and leftovers from a window frame factory. Worm@VOC, the design of a masterplan for temporary residence for an experimental multimediacentre WORM. The Miele Space Station, the experiment with white-goods which ended up in Espressobar Sterk. And of course Holland’s first waste Villa, Villa Welpeloo in Enschede will be treated.

Links:
Superuse by 2012Architecten (see www.010publishers.nl) | www.superuse.org
A recent documentary on 2012Architecten Superuse (narrated by Brad Pitt) can be found on http://www.pbs.org/e2/episodes/306_super_use_trailer.html

Superuse by 2012Architecten

Hosted by Sandra Denicke-Polcher

This Thursday’s talk was about ideas. Not glamorous Big Ideas, but the ones that should be at the heart of any architectural practice concerned with its responsibility towards society and the environment. Unfortunately there are few practices that approach the implementation of these concepts as thoughtfully and thoroughly as Waugh Thistleton Architects.

In the first part of the talk Anthony Thistleton introduced the underlying philosophy of the practice, the fascination with the everyday experience of living in a city and the little corners of intimacy people carve out for themselves. Three main concepts guide their design process as a practice, aiming to enhance this experience: accessibility, sustainability and value for money. As these are rather vague phrases (who does not mention “sustainability”, mostly without offering further explanation of this overused and general term), Anthony went on to demonstrate the implementation of their design approach with three projects.

The Leaside housing scheme in Hackney provides accessibility beyond its conventional interpretation, which is often limited to wheelchair turning circles and ramps. The orientation of the housing blocks and the mix of private gardens and public pathways will allow everyone to visit and enjoy the bank of the Lea and the lush views over Hackney Marshes. Furthermore their office operates as a shop front, allowing anyone to access their work space and enquire about their proposals, while they use public consultations to gage the needs and wishes of future users.

The development of their understanding of sustainability was demonstrated in two schemes: the Ramsgate Street development in Dalston and the Murray Grove tower block. The Ramsgate scheme took a more technology-driven approach to sustainability, incorporating a beautiful but expensive breed of special wind turbines making use of the wind speeds generated by the shape of the building. The inability of the British electrical grid to accommodate the fluctuation of use and production of energy led the developer to fit the wind turbines with breaks to prevent the production of excessive energy. While the forced futility of the turbines and their high maintenance cost has turned Ramsgate Street into a Green Elephant, the nine storey Murray Grove housing block explored a different approach. The structure of the block, which is the tallest modern timber residential building in the world (Anthony Thistleton) consists entirely out of prefabricated cross laminated timber panels. The skin and the rotated floor plans act together as honeycomb structure, providing the necessary stability. Sourced from managed forests in Austria, the panels are “carbon negative” (binding more carbon than their production process emits) even though they have to be transported to the UK. The comparative ease and speed of the timber construction compared to concrete further brought down the embodied energy of the building as well as any risks to safety and health of the site workers. Internally all wooden surfaces were covered to create a “standard” interior for the developer, who, happy enough to experiment with the structure, did not want to take a risk in how it looks inside.

This talk had no detached discussion or justification of aesthetics, even though the Murray Grove scheme involved co-operatoins with artists Gerhard Richter and Marcus Harvey for the design of the facade. Instead, Anthony spoke passionately about the role of the architect in the design process under the heading of “value for money”. The developer and the estate agents, which at times take on the role of design consultants as their expertise lies in the commercial viability of the flats or houses, often create dwellings with a thirty year life span (or even shorter). In particular if working in this context the architects can find themselves to be the only advocates of the design quality of the scheme and hence the quality of the environment of the future users.

One aspect of sustainability that Anthony only touched on lightly was “social sustainability”. From Anthony’s answer to a question probing in this direction, it seems the practice considers these issues as carefully as the environmental sustainability agenda, while not overly challenging the developers or housing associations. Admittedly the 45 minute talk did not leave enough time, but it would have been good to hear more on this aspect of their work as in my opinion social and environmental sustainability go hand in hand.

“Someone needed to do this” was the answer as to why Waugh Thistleton embarked on the timber challenge of the Murray Grove scheme, proving that a housing scheme of this scale can substantially reduce the energy consumed during its entire life cycle. I hope they continue to design sustainable and accessible schemes on their terms, informed by their thorough and critical testing of seemingly simple ideas. We all should.

Waugh Thistleton, Murray Grove Timber Tower, Hackney, London

Waugh Thistleton Architects is dedicated to designing buildings that acknowledge their impact on the environment. The practice strives to produce environmentally sustainable design, using leading edge technology; adding value through imaginative, innovative and positive design solutions, and is a member of the Green Register for Construction Professionals and the Association for Environment Conscious Building.

A highly experienced, close-knit team, the entire Waugh Thistleton office meets regularly to discuss every project currently on the digital drawing board. In addition to computers models, photography and hand sketches are crucial to the design process and to communicate the work effectively.

In this way, the team has successfully delivered affordable housing and private residence projects, offices and commercial spaces, and buildings for mixed, cultural and leisure uses. Our success is reflected in the competitions and design awards that we have won.

Waugh Thistleton's Hackey timber tower

Hosted by MA&DE

Eden Grove

First thank you to all of you who made last years summer show a success. The show was very well reviewed and seemed to capture the spirit of the Department. Also congratulations to Anna Page who was one of the BD class of 2008 and Stef Rhodes who won the RIBA Boyd Auger research award to carry out work in Bosnia.

The New Year promises much. We have new staff including Diana Cochrane, Jane McAllister, Signy Svalastoga and Peter Carl all whom have been appointed to take areas of the Department forward in new directions. We have also focussed this year on bringing exceptional graduates into the department to teach and we welcome back Nina, Ulla, Hana and Alex.

Over the summer we have secured a new building, Eden Grove. Recently 4 units and 1 studio moved in to the first floor. It’s rough and ready at present but in time will provide more formal studio space for many of you. MA& DE have been central in helping to get Eden Grove working. So many thanks to Linda, Anna, Caroline and Tabitha. MA&DE are also sharing control of our lectures and exhibitions this year. The positive effect can already be seen and our Caruso St John exhibition which opened on 10 October.

As we await the results of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) research and live projects have been flourishing. Florian and ARU are one of three winning teams to design a new city in South Korea, Bo and Shamoon have returned from India where they have started work on sanitation projects for the Water Trust and ASD projects have been appointed to work with the RIBA and the Department of Children, Schools and Families on research into the nature of future school provision. All very exciting.

So a good start to the year and I hope free from the pressures of RIBA visits and the ARB we can look forward to a creative and exploratory year. Good luck.

Robert