In an attempt to save and evolve architecture from becoming a static and inanimate background noise to our highly dynamic digital culture, Diploma 1 set out to design a series of investigative prototypes for the ongoing and all-encompassing informational revolution. Through a series of workshops, lectures and conversations with invited guests, we engaged and adapted a number of simulative technologies, physical computing and sensor-based data models that were shown in an exhibition in January.
After a short trip to the artificial political enclave of Hong Kong, we returned enabled, inspired and equipped to convert, fuse and translate actual and digital impulses within a dynamic site condition as our testing ground – the city of London. Working within this area, which epitomises the tension between the scarcity of the real and the abundance of the virtual, we ventured out to manipulate an outdated political, ecclesial, cultural and economic tectonic through prototypes situated and bound within the in-between of data highways, sensorial accumulations, social web applications, CCTV, data archives, high-frequency trading, GPS systems, Skype and web 2.0 platforms.
So Yeon rearticulates the relation between the virtual construct of ecclesial architecture in the context of St Paul’s Cathedral by investigating continuum and palimpsest. Yoo-Jin reevaluates the notion of political space, communication and propaganda in a time of digital representation at the hierarchically structured Guildhall. Kin and Adrian construct an architecture consisting of the London Underground’s piston effect and heat-sensitive data exchange of 300,000 bankers on and below the grounds of the Royal Exchange.
James and Ji address the idea of invisibility in the realm of a CCTV-monitored city by articulating an architecture of soft malleable cloaking, hiding the economic fatalities of a failed insurance system.
Workshop Tutors
Arnaud Declercq
Al Fisher
Buro Happold
Joran Hodgson
Alex Kaiser
Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu
Shrikant Sharma
Tasos Varoudis
Denis Vlighe
Many thanks to our Critics
Jeroen van Ameijde
Valentin Bontjes van Beek
Carlos Villanueva Brandt
Roberto Bottazzi
Mark Campell
Javier Castañón
Nigel Coates
Mark Cousins
Anneli Giencke
Jon Goodbun
David Greene
Louis Hall
Samantha Hardingham
Alex Haw
Jordan Hodgson
Francesca Hughes
Will Hunter
Kenny Kinugasa-Tsui
Dietmar Koering
Justin Lau
Douglas Murphy
John Ng
Christopher Pierce
Eva Sommeregger
Douglas Spencer
Theo Spyropoulos
Brett Steele
Seamus Ward
Thomas Weaver
Liam Young