Preface – Oliver Lowenstein

Within many architecture departments in the developed world the current zeitgeist fascination for all things material can be found expressed across individual student projects; unit modules; and whole school design & make, live project workshops. What was once the province of architectural outriders, from Alabama’s Rural Studio to Helsinki’s Wood Studio at the beginning of the noughties, has moved – as far as the academy is concerned – into the mainstream in the decade since the economic crash of 2008, rewriting architecture’s core script.

The School of Architecture & Design at the University of Brighton is no exception, with its architectural department regularly using its geographic co-ordinates within the South Downs as a starting point for a diverse spectrum of place- and materials-related student projects. Studio 15, co-led by Ian McKay and Phillip Hall-Patch, is both a recent and one of the most intensive of these investigations into materials: a materiality grounded in place, as this record of the module’s results – and indeed, its project title, Making Place – testifies.

The choice of focussing on Lewes, the small market and county town of East Sussex, eight miles east of Brighton, has introduced a very particular materials palette to the students. A town-wide repository of the vernacular tradition, the protean haptic encounters Lewes provides, brings home the Finnish theorist Juhani Pallasmaa’s conviction that older, non- and pre-industrialised materials can act as counterweights to the experience of the chromatic, uniform surfaces that increasingly dominate building products and production. Flint, mathematical tiles, timber, chalk and local brick traditions are all found across the town’s distinctive urban grain and morphology, all the while containing stories regarding these materials’ sources, provenance and origin.

Such in-the-body experience of Lewes’ sedimented layers of building isn’t merely an introduction to the vernacular, nor the archaeology of place, but to history and time. They are bridges between the temporal otherness of non-modern materiality and our temporal abode, the early twenty-first century. All the examples of the student work drawn together within this book document these encounters, be they with flint, rammed chalk, glass or reclaimed slate. The publication implicitly suggests a next step of integrating live building alongside this formative research. In the meantime, the students’ exposure to history and, indeed, the old, in weathered, worn and time-encrusted materials, will have nurtured and broadened their experience of architectural and building culture.

Introduction

This book is a celebration of the work of Studio 15 at the University of Brighton, School of Architecture and Design. It seeks to convey the thesis that emerged out of the process of conversations with students over a two-year period: conversations that attempted to work through assumptions and preconceptions to arrive at new understandings of the material world around us.

Dialogue, in many forms, lies at the heart of this work, whether this be through the process of making or – through making – to an engagement with the environment, landscape and ultimately with the making of place.

In the chapter ‘Making’, we explore both the underpinnings of our theoretical position as well as showcasing the student work, whilst in ‘Making Place’, we speculate as to the relevance and impact of this on architecture, the built environment and larger questions of sustainability.

“Isn’t everyone designing with sustainability in mind these days?” a colleague asked before introducing our Studio to an assembly of expectant undergraduate students. He had a point, yet something niggled in the asking. Was it that “sustainability” has become an empty buzzword, the definition of which is as diverse as the definers? Or perhaps the implication that we might be complicit in educating another generation of architects paying lip-service to the urgent needs and precarious situation of humanity?

As a pairing of tutors we were curious to see how our divergent interests and experiences might coalesce in leading a studio: one a classically trained Architect with a profound belief in the importance of sustainable design; and the other, coming from a non-traditional, contemporary arts and materials-led background.

Notions and forms of dialogue became intrinsic and permeated through the Studio in many ways: from the easy and complementary rapport that quickly developed between the tutors, to the more theorised terms of “dialogue” and “conversation”, along with Tim Ingold’s further developed notion of a “correspondence” between material and maker.