Design Studio 25 Master of Architecture (MArch RIBA Part 2)
Alessandro Ayuso & Mary Konstantopoulou
Alessandro Ayuso is a designer, author and teacher. His studio-based practice focuses on the intersection of representation, architecture and the alien body. His research is the subject of his book, Experiments with Body Agent Architecture, published by UCL Press.
Mary Konstantopoulou is an architectural designer and illustrator. Her work explores the theme of humans’ relationships with environments and culture, and invites a questioning of architecture’s role in sustainability and myth-making. She currently works with Jan Kattein Architects on community engagement and public realm projects.
Things Have Feelings Too
Year 1: Jake Bone, Elissa Dergham, Jessica Gabriel, Karolina Hejduk, Georgiana Ilie, Angharad James, Sameera Kaddoura, Anastasia Kolioliou
Year 2: Amabelle Aranas, Conrad Daniel Areta, Laura Bull, Cara Kinzelmann, Aleksandra Kwietniewska, Luke Aaron La Thangue, Alcina Lo, Imogen Power, Zahraa Shaikh, Alannah Wilson
DS25’s brief this year was based on a narrative premise. In this scenario, a group of activist philanthropist-philosophers, Other Constructions, put out a call for radical architectural proposals sited in the Isle of Dogs. The group framed this call by positing that ‘Things Have Feelings Too,’ encouraging architects to attempt to step outside of their anthropocentric perspectives to better understand non-human agencies and their ecologies.
To mediate between the human and thingly realms, each student began the year by designing what we called an Odradek Body, a sentient figure comprised of a collection of objects. These figures became catalysts for each project, raising critical issues, bringing up imaginative possibilities, and informing architectural languages. The Odradek Bodies were unleashed into Isle of Dogs via animations and films that set their stories in motion in selected sites. To enrich our outlook, we visited the Cosmic House and saw fascinating objects by Madelon Vreisendorp on display; we visited Edinburgh, Dundee and Newcastle, seeing building projects such as the V&A Dundee design by Kengo Kuma and the Scottish Parliament by EMBT; and we saw different approaches to monumental figuration by visiting the Angel of the North by Antony Gormley and the Lady of the North by Charles Jencks et al.
The adventurous proposals created by the students imagine architecture that exists in a temporal continuum of changing ecologies and contextual relationships. For instance, Conrad’s project began with the design of A.L.I.C.E., a glitching android that develops its own ecological agenda, proposing a landscape that blends pure and hybrid forms of nature, inhabited by pleasure-seeking cyborgs. Anastasia’s project was told from the point of view of a time-travelling scientist obsessed with beneficial impacts of bacteria; considering the proposed building as a generator for bacteria that would propagate throughout Isle of Dogs, the project proposes a speculative, utopic social vision. Alcina’s project explores the role of social media in contemporary life; inventing a pervasive and exclusive social media platform called Vermis, she proposes a monument that is at once data collector, data server and space of worship, pushing the current social media environment to absurdity and testing how archetypal and sacred forms of architecture could address mediated and commodified lifestyles.
Guest Critics: Filippo Cocca, Giorgos Christofi, Eleanor Evason (Piercy and Co), Hanna Hendrickson-Rebizant, Asena Koksal (The Bourne Partnership), Jane Madsen, Deniz Özbek (Tack), Samir Pandya, Chandni Patel (East Architecture), Alex Tzortzis de Paz
Special Thanks: Bourne Architects, Bourne Management & Construction Limited, The Harris Partnership, Klaud – Koepf Lechthaler Architecture, Urban Design
Archive of DS25’s work from previous years:
