Tutors: Dr Victoria Watson and Kirti Durelle
Victoria Watson is a Senior Lecturer. She is the director of Doctor Watson Architects who design and publish work about architecture.
Kirti Durelle is an architect and PhD student in architectural history at the Bartlett UCL. He also teaches at the LSA.
Victoria and Kirti have a common interest in the shared histories of architecture, engineering and archaeology.
Burning to Beam-Out
The studio continues to design buildings, spaces and places for the International Institute of Cosmism (IIC).
In the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the IIC has become interested in developing a site in London’s historic centre and financial district known as The City. Since lockdown, the City has lost something of its dynamism, it is not as dense with bodies and business as it was before. The IIC look upon this change as an opportunity to think about a potential new kind of architecture for the City.
The IIC plan to develop their new City architecture by travelling in two different directions at once. On the one hand they want to go back in time, to the seventeenth century and to look at the adventures in architecture and science that arose at the time of the Great Fire of 1666. On the other hand, they look forward to the future and are already speculating about a not-too-distant time when tele-transportation will become available as a viable alternative to current modes of transport.
To get their plans underway, the IIC will be looking for architectural proposals for the design of two related buildings for a site, close to St Paul’s, on Ludgate Hill.
The first proposal asks for the design of a Mathematical House (MH), the second asks for the design of a College of Natural Philosophy (CNP). Taken together, the House and College will be a kind of school, or research institute where Cosmists will think, experiment and study, looking to the past and to the future, of science and architecture, as a way of metabolising the present.
The IIC would like to work with imaginative and talented young architects on their City project and the teaching and learning of DS(2)06 is conceived as a training ground for just such individuals.
To see work of the studio from previous years please look through the slideshows at:
and
https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/schools/design/heritage-to-helios/