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Summer Show 2025
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Typha Tales of (Un)taming Swamps

Project details

Programme
Unit PG11
Year 4
Award
  • Bartlett School of Architecture Medal, MArch
  • Charles Knevitt Award
  • Design Realisation: Innovation in Detail Prize
  • History and Theory Prize

The marshland in the Pontine Plain is already a place where the line between nature and human settlements is fluid. With a long history of failed human attempts to tame the marshes, the fascist regime's implementation of a pump system in the 1930s drained the land, enabling intensive farming practices and thus accelerating soil and habitat degradation. Pontine nature is replaced with culture.

The Marsh Clinic is introduced as a bridge where fluidity and solidity of land collide, creating an emerging marshland habitat symbiosing human and non-human activities, as the American professor Donna Haraway set out. Identifying Typha as a natural purifier of polluted land and water, the common marshland plant is intended to be enabled as the main material of the Marsh Clinic, contributing to its carbon-positive footprint.

Where Typha takes over the land, the Marsh Clinic nests within to requalify and heal the area and labour workers so that it can return to its natural state. In the challenge of the right to the marsh to establish a cohesive Nature Culture, the Marsh Clinic is embracing an alternative way of living and renewing traditions of commons to heal the people and the land.

The proposed Marsh Clinic sits at the verge between the solid agricultural land and the fluid marsh, reinviting nature to take over, syncing with the seasonal cycles of the ‘marshscape’.

(Re)setting the Marsh

The proposed Marsh Clinic sits at the verge between the solid agricultural land and the fluid marsh, reinviting nature to take over, syncing with the seasonal cycles of the ‘marshscape’.

(Co)existence of Nature and Culture

(Co)existence of Nature and Culture

Embedded within the Pontine Marsh, the Clinic responds to the existing flora and fauna, inviting them in, celebrating human-non-human interactions and creating a safe environment for all to thrive.

(De)composing Materials

(De)composing Materials

Driven by the ethos of a site-sensitive design, conscious material choices have been explored using local Typha plants as a low-carbon option. Testing and designing Typha blocks sourced on-site makes the project modular and easy to maintain.

(In)side by Side

(In)side by Side

Sections capturing moments where human and non-human habitats are blurred mirror the proposal’s philosophy to promote healing through their togetherness. Public baths for local workers, plants, birds and fish lead such a peaceful co-existence.

Several techniques have been explored to combine architecture with research and narrative. This model combines them representing tufted marsh layers on which a fragment of the clinic sits, made for disassembly as its planned circularity.

(Dis)assembling Components

Several techniques have been explored to combine architecture with research and narrative. This model combines them representing tufted marsh layers on which a fragment of the clinic sits, made for disassembly as its planned circularity.

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The Bartlett
Summer Show 2025
26 June – 13 July
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