YEAR TWO – DS2.5

Tutors: Camilla Wilkinson & Chris Bryant

Camilla Wilkinson is an architect and lecturer, who has worked in Germany and UK for leading architects Allies and Morrison, Sauerbruch & Hutton, Will Alsop. Her current research is into Dazzle Camouflage as Experimental Practice.

Chris Bryant is a founding director of London practice Alma-nac Collaborative Architecture. After graduating from the Bartlett he worked at Arup Associates and taught at Birmingham School of Architecture. Alongside practice and teaching he is currently co-editing an issue of AD, Re-invention – New frontiers in architectural practice, with his fellow directors at Alma-nac.

Fun Palace Futures: Laboratory of Fun

We took the programme for Polyark 4: Fun Palace Futures, as an opportunity for students to make connections between the brief – the communication of scientific research – and the process of experimentation in architectural design. We set two speculative projects:

Indoor Weather

A pavilion for Imperial Festival – a temporary pavilion housing a weather condition that enables scientists to engage the public in their area of scientific research.

Laboratory of Fun, Hackney Wick

A laboratory that spawns ancillary spaces for public use or laboratories that transform into public space.

Experimentation through making and drawing is central to the studio design process. Large scale experiential weather drawings, 1:20 structural concept models, and 1:50 sections were developed as ways to propose, test and communicate architectural ideas – before being refined into a more formal architectural language. We held tutorials in the café’s of great buildings in London – and Paris. The Pompidou served as the nearest accessible experiment on the theme of movement and time in architecture and represented the Fun Palace for many of our students.

On our tour of research space at the Blizard Institute we learnt that nothing interesting comes out of a tidy laboratory.