Insoo Hwang, It’s the difference between a package tour and hitching a ride, 2012
Architecture Everywhere – The Pursuit of Approximation
Samantha Hardingham and David Greene
Inter 5 Film New Nature October 2012
This unit is interested in an architecture that is conditioned by the processes and technologies of search and retrieval. We really do mean search and not research: both a methodology and a design brief for speculating on the architectural consequences of today’s culture of continuous ventilation and circulation of information – what most people are doing most of the time. Students are invited to respond to a series of architectural provocations* – rethinking them in the light of now – with consideration to time, form and behaviour. Each student will design and build their own bill of quantities to include technical and cultural components with an emphasis on primary sources. The tools of search, documentation and articulation are as follows:
FILM
BOOK
MODEL
Outstanding development of search and retrieval skills will produce possibilities for an architecture for the simultaneous search, storage, retrieval and deployment of information at a designated time and location.
– We encourage a multiple aesthetic, individual interests and collective action across the school –expect the unexpected.
– We are interested not in solutions but in responses.
– We ask that students take care of their ideas and be generous with them too.
– We shall work with expert searchers in the fields of science, digital anthropology, art, medicine and food.
– We will travel within a one-hour radius of WC1.
* Garden of Enamel (1974) at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands by Jean Dubuffet Greenbird (1975), by Cedric Price Horse ecology (1978) – Search/Informal Architecture, L.A.W.u.N Project #19, p. C190
Unit Staff
David Greene, born Nottingham 1937, usual English provincial suburban upbringing, Art School, elected Associate member of the RIBA and onto London to begin a nervous twitchy career, from big buildings to T-shirts for Paul Smith to conceptual speculations for Archigram which he founded with Peter Cook. RIBA Gold Medal 2002 (Archigram). Joint Annie Spinks Award with Sir Peter Cook (2002). Currently visiting Prof of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University and External Examiner on the Masters in Advanced Research at the Bartlett.
Samantha Hardingham is an architectural writer and editor publishing work in several editions of the original ellipsis architecture guide series. She graduated from the AA in 1993. She was senior research fellow in the Research Centre for Experimental Practice at the University of Westminster 2003–09. She co-edited a book and cocurated the accompanying exhibition for L.A.W.u.N Project #19+20. She is currently researching a publication on the ‘Complete Works of Cedric Price’.
