Atelier 6 2007/08:
Tutors: Jon Goodbun, Filip Visnjic, Cordula Weisser

This year the WAG studio has continued the work of previous cohorts, exploring the intersection of demographic, technological and environmental change. We consciously attempted to envisage new sustainable social forms by exploring the possibilities opened up by rethinking, from the bottom up and top down, architectural design method in the light of planetary limits.

We started the year looking at a single dwelling unit, and finished with a series of master-planning exercises for Hackney Central, which explored food production, energy management, cohousing and urban transport. In both cases we developed with the students a new kind of drawing – The Ecology Diagram – which aims to capture the material and energy forces and flows acting upon the site – whether environmental, economic, social, or technological. By working with Ecology Diagrams students were able to design processes as much as products, and imagine new social scenarios as solutions to new problems. WAG will be presenting the research of Atelier 6, as part of a wider study, to Hackney Council and local community groups over the summer.

You can see more examples of students’ work here.

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WAG personnel: Architects and urban planning

Project description: urban planning competition for Old Street

Estimated contract sum: £200,000

Award: awarded runner-up

Publications: partially published as Democratic Billboard in Architectural Design

This scheme came runner up in the second round of the Architecture Foundation organised, ‘Any Old St’ urban design competition. Our response to the brief embodied at an urban scale much of our thinking into ‘ecologies’ of material form, social space, living vegetation, signage and media technology.
The site was characterised by competing user groups. A few harmless and homeless ‘professional drinkers’ tended to spend all day occupying the few seats available. Local mothers with children would compete for the remainer, whilst the temporal rhythms of the site included periods with a strong movement through of local office workers and commuters. We felt an obligation to find a spatial solution that would be accessible to all of these social groups, whilst equally ensuring that none could dominate or devalue it for others.
The basis of our proposal were alterations to the ground plane of the pavement, to create what we call archetypal conditions. These included an ampitheatre and terracing, which shielded pedestrians from road noise, and organised seating in part towards the gigantic graphic surfaces of the current advertising hoardings on Old St roundabout. We proposed that this advertising hoarding, together with others on the site, be taken under local control, and used for local art, information and entertainment (such as showing World Cup football etc), perhaps part financed through advertising. This idea, which we call the Democratic Billboard Manifesto, has conceptually driven parts of much of our urban thinking.
The ground plane was further subdivided by a ’social landscape’ – a patterned field of plinths that could be sat on, and used to define territories. By positioning a pram and a shopping bag, it is possible to create a temporary playground enclosure. By occupying some seats off of the main pathways, it is possible to spend all day with a can of Special Brew, and not alarm anyone, nor be excluded from this public place.
Buried between paving slabs accross the entire space, we proposed to have sensor driven and choreographed fountain nossels. These would provide cooling and spectacle in the summer, and would wash down the entire place regularly – removing spilt beer and worse.
Within the trees we proposed to suspend lighting and media rigs, as previously discussed, and also ‘tree sculptures’, cones of branches and foilage which would be cut out from the heavy summertime tree cover – rather like an arboreal Gordon Matta-Clark piece. These cones would allow shafts of light to penetrate what is currently an overshaded place.

Frequently under-theorised, pattern is a surprisingly mobile intellectual concept, whether used by sociologists, anthropologists and urbanists to grasp complex cultural forms, or by mathematicians, physicists and cyberneticians to analyse configurations of matter, energy and information, or by cognitive theorists and psychologists to reveal the organisation of the human mind.
Our research into the use pattern in architecture, developed through our teaching and practice, addresses issues as varied as environmental performance, figuration and abstraction, ornamentation and decoration. Often this work is examined as a way of directly engaging the senses. Frequently, these studies have explored new production possibilities opened by CADCAM technologies. Working with pattern is proving to be a key strategy in our thinking around ecology, cybernetics and socio-spatial morphology.