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The Bartlett Fifteen Show 2022 Prizewinners
14 December 2022
Three graduates from Design for Manufacture MArch, Design for Performance and Interaction MArch and Situated Practice MA were honoured with prizes at The Bartlett Fifteen Show launch party.
At The Bartlett Fifteen Show launch party, which took place last Thursday 08 December, Director of School Amy Kulper presented three graduates with prizes recognising the excellence of their work. The winners represent the three exhibiting programmes, Design for Manufacture MArch, Design for Performance and Interaction MArch and Situated Practice MA. Their projects are the culmination of study in the school's fifteen-month Master's programmes, and propose radical, imaginative and diverse ideas and possibilities across a multidisciplinary spectrum.
You can browse the Fifteen show online to see all the exhibiting projects, or visit the show in person at the school's Bloomsbury campus at 22 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0QB. The show is live until Friday 23 December.
Prizewinners
Design for Manufacture MArch
‘Selective Earth Forming’ by Sadek Ahmed
The Bartlett School of Architecture Medal for Design for Manufacture MArch
Earth has been used as a building material by humanity throughout history. It is only since the recent introduction of industrialised, standardised building practices that earth has lost its credibility as a building material. A resurgence of earth architecture can be seen over the last two decades, although innovation in rammed earth is relatively untapped. Current innovations in pre-fabrication, mechanisation and geometric variation are still confined by undynamic and conventional formwork limitations.
Selective Earth Forming aims to address these limitations and achieve geometric freedom without the need for one-off formwork. Capitalising on the adaptable properties of earth, it can be harnessed in its non-binding state to dictate form through the selective deposition of intentional ‘fault lines’ throughout the fabrication of the rammed earth block, enabling a fully circular and uncontaminated material cycle. In this way, 3D printing principles can be applied to enable a flexible sub-practice within rammed earth construction that helps free it from its geometric constraints and provide a strategy that suitably augments the functional capabilities of rammed earth.
Design for Performance & Interaction MArch
‘Threshold’ by Haoran Mai
The Bartlett School of Architecture Medal for Design for Performance & Interaction MArch
Threshold is a two-player extended reality game experience interrogating power dynamics in Chinese fandom culture. Through an asymmetric gameplay structure, it illustrates the changing dynamics of idol-fan relationships in attraction, collaboration, defence, antagonism, and termination. This forms the basis of player interaction, one performing the role of ‘idol’, the other of ‘fan’, to explore five different stages of the dynamic relationships: entertainment-social, intense-personal, borderline-pathological, antagonism, and termination stage.
Threshold is based on the mapping of relationships between real and virtual game spaces, where characters and props test the porosity of boundaries between virtual and physical worlds. The virtual world guides players’ movement in space, interactive props and human actuation then build a bridge of physical interaction and emotional connection. Structured as a linear narrative, the game, and its corresponding interaction design, provides ways and means of interrogating the often ambiguous and immaterial nature of para-social relationships through a powerfully direct embodied experience.
Situated Practice MA
‘Her Story’ by Xiaowen Fu
The Bartlett School of Architecture Medal for Situated Practice MA
Her Story is an autobiographical project about domestic labour refracted through three generations of one family in China. It proposes the shared experience of the kitchen as a site to resist problematic masculinities, exploring how the kitchen might be transformed from a private site of oppression to a shared space of discussion, refusal, and repair. The film is a 24-hour overlay of three kitchens, collapsing geographic boundaries from London to Wenzhen in which three generations of Chinese women cook and speak about their everyday lives, raising awareness about gendered domestic labour.
A set of interventions performed across London invite the public into the project, making public these private lives and experiences, engaging the audience’s five senses. They witness this footage overlayed with fragments from telephone conversations, photos from albums and personal memories, creating a space for reflection on the role of women in Chinese homes, families, and societies. Her Story is situated within a body of feminist artistic practice that challenges patriarchal systems and amplifies private memories.
More information
- Visit the Fifteen show
- Find out more about Design for Manufacture MArch
- Find out more about Design for Performance & Interaction MArch
- Find out more about Situated Practice MA
Lead image: ‘Threshold’ by Haoran Mai, Design for Performance and Interaction MArch