THE (NEW) MONUMENT, PATCHWORKING ENTROPIES

09 August 2016 Architectural Association, London Unit 7: The (New) Monument, Patchworking Entropies proposed a reflection on London’s time as a continuum moving linearly towards progress. A city currently marked by the erection of towers upwards; London is also a city obsessed with its own collapse into ashes since the Great Fire that devastated it in 1666. Could we rather understand contemporary London as an entropic city moving towards failure? We argue that London’s claim for eternity is not in the accumulation of its history, or in strata of ruins, but rather in a perpetual logic of destruction and construction. The history of the city is a cycle in which destruction is a catalyst for new beginnings. In that edge between the end and the beginning, destruction and construction, we look for a space in which the architect stops being a projector of construction and turns into a projector of destruction. Ours is the production of a fictional documentary of the coming of a (new) Great Fire that devastates the city. Through the lenses of writers and film makers that read London in a state of collapse, we looked at contemporary London, bringing these readings to their radical conclusion: the burning of the city. As Semper saw in the origins of Architecture, we saw in the fire the possibility of a new beginning. For more information:

Unit 7:

Tutors: Javier Anton, Alvaro Velasco Perez

Students: Muhittin Can Binan, Aniket Dikshit, Michail Karamichalis, Patricio Pacheco, Caterina Pereira, Mahalakshmi Sivakumar, Tsz Wai Ip, Joey Yuwei Zhang, Chris Zinelis