Design Studio 13 Master of Architecture (MArch RIBA Part 2)
Andrei Martin & Andrew Yau
Andrei Martin is a partner at PLP Architecture, a London-based multidisciplinary design practice, and co-founder of PLP Labs.
Andrew Yau is a design director at Urban Future Organisation, an international practice and design research collaborative.
Dreamscaping the Symbiocene
Year 1: David Akindipe, Afnan Iman bin Abdul Halim, Szofia Bohoszlovec, Irina Coraga, Jane Ezechi, Camilla Martellino, Maddison McGuinness, Ana Maria Mitrica, Kleanthia Neophytou, Freya Eugenie O’Donoghue, Shivani Panchal, Chloe Pegeot, Leonardo Pelli, Andreea Laura Petrescu, Elis Reah, Michelle Tang, Polly Thompson
Year 2: Hasibe Dilan Senocak
Symbiocene
We exist in the Anthropocene, an age of interconnected planetary crises – an unsustainable maldevelopment of modernity poised to undermine the very foundation of life on Earth. It is a time of poly-crisis, defined by uncertainty, unpredictability, chaos, and perpetual rapid change.
This year, DS13 set out to explore a potential antidote to this alarming status quo: the Symbiocene. If the Anthropocene is based on human domination, the Symbiocene is predicated on symbiosis, living together for mutual benefit; a new era of possibility derived from the interconnectedness of the man-made and the natural. That role would architecture play in such a context? We have undertaken an approach akin to Laugier’s Primitive Hut, a manifesto disguised as architecture’s origin story in which nature plays a crucial role.
Dreamscapes
In a time of polycrisis, perhaps the most radical response is to tactically retreat and dream the world anew. Using digital environments we crafted new worlds by blending the real and the fictional. In these spaces we suspended disbelief and enjoyed para-plausible scenarios that speculate on new ways of inhabiting our world.
River Thames
Our site was a 13-kilometre stretch of the River Thames between Tower Bridge and the Thames Barrier. ominated by industrial warehouses and derelict land, we approached this seemingly ubiquitous and familiar Terra Incognita as a locus for retreat, experimentation and world-building.
We embedded ourselves within the cultural, political, historical and material contexts of the river as nautical territory, thoroughfare, landscape, ecosystem, trade route, habitat and legend. More than a site, the river constituted the very medium of architecture as we explored floating, submerged and amphibious structures; those that retreat within their alluvial beds, resonate with the tide and tether the river to the city.
Buildings as Worlds
What happens when buildings are conceived as ‘worlds within worlds’? Operating at the boundary between architecture, landscape, ecology and the city, we blurred the threshold between building and nature, imagining our interventions as cabinets of curiosities where samples of the city, the living world, tectonic conglomerates and typological fragments co-exist together as a collective, exuding nearness, provoking strange adjacencies and a sense of wonder at every scale.
Guest Critics / Special Thanks: Marco Catena (Atkins), Elliot Hill (Lawson Ward Studio), Mingyang Li (Foster + Partners), Alastair Mealey (Laing O’Rourke), Francesco Montaguti (Hawkins Brown), Ross Powell ( Stephen Taylor Architects), Alejandro Vicente Soto (AHMM), Xin Swift (Populous), Larisa Tsydenova (Foster + Partners), Jean-Paul Tugirimana (Foster + Partners), Tony Yu (RYD)
Archive of DS13’s work from previous years:
