The master's in architecture design at the Bartlett is going through a really important
phase right now.
The school is the oldest school of architecture in the UK, it was founded in 1841, but this
course was set up in the 1990s to look at research, new ideas that are free of the regulations
of the discipline.
So it's very much the cutting edge arena of the programme.
There's a very interesting group of senior staff, led by Frederic Migarou, but also Mario
Carpo, Lisa Andrusack, Marcus Cruz, Rory Glenn, who are pushing really profoundly new ideas
for architecture, and this is a programme which challenges what the boundaries of the
profession are.
The overall intention of the programme is to produce work which is of international
architectural relevance.
The AD course is structured around three laboratories.
Each of these laboratories has a specialism, and each laboratory is staffed by people who
are international experts in their field and international practitioners.
For me, what's great about architectural education is that it invites people from all
sorts of backgrounds to be involved.
You don't have to be just a special designer, you could be an industrial or a fashion designer,
you could be a musician or a dancer, as well as being perhaps an engineer or a biologist.
It's always welcome, I think, to become part of the conversation about how we make our
built environment.
The Interactive Architecture Lab is a very multi-disciplinary group.
What's brought us all together really is this fascination with this emerging world of technology
and interaction design.
We're part of the B-Pro, which is a one-year programme that allows people to come to the
Bartlett to learn how to design, how to code, how to make, how to think, and we hope help
people to develop their own personal and unique agendas.
WonderLab is a new design research lab at the large umbrella of B-Pro at the Bartlett
School of Architecture at UCL.
We are working with a simulation of physics, physical properties of material, not only
gravity, but for instance viscosity, friction, things like that, really molecular properties
of matter.
In that context, we have some of the most talented emerging young designers worldwide,
someone like Daniel Wiedrich, or some very daring young architects such as Gilles Retzin.
Wonder refers to a quest for knowledge or curiosity, poetry and aesthetics, while laboratory
implies something that is possible to analyse, measure or engineer.
Biota, which is the biotechnology and architecture lab, which I run with Richard Beckett, is an
innovative facility and set up, which allows students and architects from a diverse set
of backgrounds to investigate through design tools how we can merge organic matter with
architecture.
We are very interested in biotechnology and synthetic biology and how the advances in
these fields are influencing architectural design.
This program is a 12-month concentrated program exclusively on experimentation and research.
It's an exciting time because this workshop is a key part of that program's trajectory
right now.
They're looking at how the technologies of making things, the technologies of computation
and representation are converging right now to produce new paradigms of architectural
design.
As we were late and so much late as architects in coming to terms with the industrial technology
of mass production, we have been the first to understand the spirit of the new post-industrial
logic of digital production and the Bartlett is at the forefront of this new phase of digital
innovation.
So if one is interested in technology, schools of architecture, the Bartlett in particular
are today the place to be because this is what at present we do best.
