{"id":6490,"date":"2019-09-06T16:27:47","date_gmt":"2019-09-06T15:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/?page_id=6490"},"modified":"2019-09-06T16:27:47","modified_gmt":"2019-09-06T15:27:47","slug":"march-unit-14-2019-20","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/march-unit-14-2019-20\/","title":{"rendered":"MArch Unit 14: The Long Project. Mike Aling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Image: Lucas Cranach the elder, Der Jungbrunnen (The Fountain of Youth)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As the slow wheels of progress turn and\nhealthcare provisions improve, we clamber forward into what has been termed an Age of Longevity.<\/em> As a species we are living\nincreasingly longer lives, and the UK is no exception with its top-heavy age\ndemographic model. Even London – the youngest region in England – is ageing,\nalbeit at a slower rate than its neighbours. In cities across the world, for\nexample in Tokyo or Seoul, a number of services for growing ageing populations\nhave been introduced to keep loneliness and boredom at bay, from cheerobic workouts\nto rugby clubs and raves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But longevity is not limited to those in their\ntwilight. With a longer life comes a longer youth, a longer period for our\ninner puer<\/em> or puella aeternus<\/em>. And consequently, it offers a\nlonger stretch to bathe in the\nsplendours of middle age. The constraints of being seen to \u2018act your age\u2019 are gradually\nbeing disregarded and reformed; we find septagenarian parentage on the rise,\nand the FIRE movement (\u2018Financial Independence Retire Early\u2019 retirees, usually\nin their 30\u2019s) gaining momentum. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ideas around the desirability, or sheer horror, of living an unimaginably long life, or the dream\/threat of immortality, have long permeated through culture, a history abundant with elixirs of life and fountains of youth. Sci-fi and speculative fiction has a rich canon of immortality-imaginaries, including Shelley, Wilde, Borges, Moorcock and Doctorow to name a very small but notable handful. The role that technology plays in our longevity is ever more intrinsic, both in fiction and in reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year Unit 14 will explore programmes for\narchitectural proposals that are intentionally age-inappropriate,\n<\/em>as we prepare for a future with altered attitudes towards longevity. We aim\nto question the assumption that our social behaviours follow a linear nature in\nline with getting older. We will challenge age specific, and age discriminate\nspaces, in all their forms, and for all their age ranges. The Unit will continue\nits fascination with current and emerging technologies and ask how they might\nbe utilised in relation to our ageing processes, both psychologically and\nphysically\/bodily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unit 14 will begin the year by investigating how\nlongevity manifests through the canon of architecture\u2019s long projects<\/em>. These projects, both built and\nunbuilt, span extended periods of their designer\u2019s life (and beyond). From\nLedoux and Lequeu to Webb and Spiller, from Cheval and Rodia to Constant and\nKiesler, we will explore architecture projects of entire lifetimes, projects\nthat shift with the concerns of their designer through their changing life\nsituations. The unit will travel to Barcelona to visit Gaudi\u2019s as-yet-unfinished\nSagrada Familia<\/em>, currently 137 years\nin the making, amongst other delights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The unit agenda is to develop projects through the processes of modelling and the outputting of models. As increasingly advanced BIM software becomes ever more prevalent in the profession (considered to be going 10-dimensional!), we seek to explore the potentiality of the architectural model in its manifold forms. Our models will be long projects: additive investments over the entire academic year. We are interested in the architectural opportunities that emerging modelling processes and technologies afford, and we aim towards proposing new model languages and methods (physical, immaterial, co-existing and otherwise). At its most ambitious, Unit 14 is interested in how modelling has the capacity for both worldbuilding<\/em> (the construction of an imagined worldspace) and Worldmaking<\/em> (the design and making of the actual world): architectural projects as thought experiments<\/em> of vast scales and complexities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Y1 students will be asked to develop building programmes in the more mature constituency of Bromley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Final year students will develop\ntheir (long) projects based on their individual themes and agendas.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe model is the entity\u2026 the object is mere hard copy\u201d.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

– Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the slow wheels of progress turn and healthcare provisions improve, we clamber forward into what has been termed an Age of Longevity. As a species we are living increasingly longer lives, and the UK is no exception with its top-heavy age demographic model. Even London – the youngest region in England – is ageing, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6490","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gre.ac.uk\/architecture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}