SUSANNE ISA NICK ELIAS
In 1960 the critic Reyner Banham wrote an article for the Architectural Review titled STOCKTAKING. We too need to “take stock” of the present. Working as a research group, students are asked to consider how Architecture adapts.
to meet the demands and challenges of the 21st century. supporting systems, alongside inequalities in availability of resources means that we are poorly equipped to cope now let alone the future.
Architecture needs to remain relevant in the 21st century. To do this it needs to engage with external disciplines and an understanding of the past and present for the future.
Unit 16 is interested in investigating the hinterlands and their relationship to the world we live in.
We are interested in the trans-disciplinary fields of art, architecture, geology, museology, archaeology, and anthropology to explore the psychology of places, narratives of history, mythologies, rituals and magic and made work.
U 16 focuses upon collections, typologies, and curation in order to create episodic, surreal and transformational spaces and landscapes.
This presents a profoundly complex matrix of technical, social, political, economic, moral, and ethical questions confronting us all with the necessity to act on preexisting knowledge to avoid an act of ‘betrayal’ as put by Greta Thunberg.
We will continue to investigate LAND as a fundamental unit. Land is materially expressible; Land is spatial; Land as unit of measure; Land as an expression of time; Land culturally assigned; Land exploitable for leisure; Land exploitable for capital; Land management. Sites can be seen as frontiers, material and immaterial territories, places at the limit of what has been known, a place that is not a place, that is unknown, a place with no indexes, no roads, no signs, no names.
Unit Sixteen recognizes there is a need to conserve and preserve there is also a need to rethink.
The memory of place and journey are different for different users, and we are interested to discover innovative ways to represent things geographically which can create new territories and landscapes.