unit-code
Architecture is a discipline of contingency – and a contingent discipline. As a discipline of contingency, it navigates the complexities revealed by design: circumstances of an unpredictable and changing nature that affect how buildings are conceived, constructed and adapted over time. As a contingent discipline, it is informed by, and makes sense of, other bodies of knowledge – from geometry, history and philosophy to music, law and science. Through contingency, chance and relationality emerge as central themes in architecture, offering great potential to reconsider the terms of architectural practice and production – a question that gains increasing pertinence as the fragility of the world's ecologies continues to intensify.
This year, UG6 took up this question first by making physical and digital apparatuses attuned to contingent conditions on Hampstead Heath in London, our site for Term 1. From material studies that reveal the temporal dimension of matter to positional devices that frame body and landscape, a series of inventive design and fabrication methods were developed – each drawing on individual interests, a key characteristic of the unit’s ethos.
Inspired by our field trip across Belgium, where we studied a range of intensely detailed Art Nouveau buildings, weird and wonderful museums, and exemplary contemporary architecture, the larger spatial and material implications of our earlier apparatuses began to grow. These were tested in sites across Belgium and London. Straddling poetic and practical concerns, building proposals emerged that privileged the contingent over the predictive, and the uncertain over the certain.
UG6 is an experimental unit that encourages individuals to draw on their own architectural fascinations. By embracing the reciprocity between media, methods, and the worlds they create, the unit moves freely between ideas and their realisation – reinventing disciplinary conventions as we discover our architecture.