first entry – UFO unit 4 london MET

first entry and six million things in my head to clear out…

architecture student : 5th year of full-time study + year out = 6 years + part 3 (minimum 1 more year…) oh my god.

the first three or four weeks of the year have gone surprisingly well and have been enjoyable too. we have been working in a group of three (chosen by tutors steve and jonas) and each group has ended up with at least one 5th year. mine has just one 5th year(me), one 4th year and and one part-timer (kang and kokyee). we have our first crit on thurs, which will mark the end of the groupwork, so far we have come up with a proposal/study for an urban array of terraced housing, with a system of interwoven raised habitable areas to avoid ever increasing flood danger and to free-up or return the landscape to nature.

we are off to china on the 5th of december to work with students at a uni in Guangzhou (about 2 hours train ride west of Hong Kong) and we will work with them for a week learning flood simulation programmes and studying the architecture of the region (a region in the Pearl river delta, very prone to regular flooding, but extensively developed).

i then intend to stay on in china by myself and spend a bit over a week (up until christmas) traveling by train further west towards Tibet (and then back again, to fly home from Hong Kong on the 24th), i will be studying the timber architecture in the mountains, and looking at how the various vernacular styles (such as the ‘hakka’ in southern china) are adapted for the uneven terrain and how the production of construction materials is managed on a local scale.

i am interested in the challenges that arise from changing global climates and increasing human populations, i therfore  intend to base my final year project on the design issues of building housing in areas that have broadly been avoided in the UK up until now, but with projects like the thames gateway running full steam ahead, the increasing danger of flooding is making us look at ways of designing this risk into the projects (the sea level is expected to rise by two meters by the end of this century) – or on the other hand we look to building on previously avoided un-even or steep terrains to avoid the expected floods.

i am very keen to design with timber as i see it as the sustainable material of the future. i will be looking at how timber materials are, and can be made available locally for construction.

i am appling for the RIBA student resarch travel award to enable me to afford the travel costs of the trip to china and hopefully across into Tibet, so that in the time i have there i will be able to make the most of the wonderful study opportunity. i will draw, photograph and research the timber architecture and i hope to meet with the people who both build and live in the houses and monasteries that have been perched on some of the most unlikely and technically challenging terrain in the world.

i will then use this research to design my 5th year project, which will be based around a UK site, and will look at the increasing densifications of towns and cities and the potential of terraced housing typologies combined with sustainability, with my researched proposals (from the study trip) for the challenges of difficult terrain.