AIS Open Stage for The Bartlett Summer Show 2023

This dinner celebrates the greatness of interdisciplinarity by flagging the AIS SAY YES manifesto. This Outside Force dinner will explore the concepts of manifesting and encourage discussion between everyone who enters the room. Hosts Mads and Nicole will greet guests by the door, adorning them with a paper plate rosette as a tool to eat and discuss.

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

During the UCL Family Day, Bartlett AIS Students Yiwen Zhao and Tea Texier will present their Colour Workshop using their inks and pigments. Tea Texier uses blue flowers to extract pigments as a ritual to map the cracks in the pavement of London. Yiwen Zhao studies perception and control of natural spaces with inspiration from traditional Chinese ink paintings. This workshop will be fun and engaging with activities for everyone regardless of age and skills.

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

Explore the bottom of the pond with Bartlett AIS student Nicole Onstad. Using ceramic tools this workshop explores sensory elements of the pond floor and its many layers. During the Design and Creative Practice 2, Field Work event, Nicole asked students and tutors to remove their socks, allowing them to fully experience underfoot the tactility of tiles that she had made that were replicating the pond floor.   

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

Wild Bloomsbury Nature-Based Design Workshop, led by community gardener and ecologist Benny Hawksbee (Eden Nature Garden) and Environmental Design Lecturer and AIS Greening Cities module leader Blanche Cameron, with award-winning biodiverse landscapes designer John Little (Hilldrop) and Mark Gardner (UCL Estates Operations).

The workshop includes a tour with Mark of some of UCL’s green roofs and Medawar Garden rain planters, then mapping existing and potential opportunities in Malet Place for biodiverse design interventions, producing proposals that could be delivered through the Wild Bloomsbury Living Lab.

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

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Sean Louis has designed a board game that requires the players to navigate the complex world of contemporary housing, with each player being assigned a randomly generated character and required to interact with each other. As part of his third year Design and Creative Practice project, Sean Louis developed the board game which he titled Equality Street: Empathy Trading Game. This board game is essentially a corrupt version of the 1904 Landlord’s Game by Elizabeth Magie, that aimed to teach players about Georgism and ownership of land.

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

Networking is taken to new dimensions in this project by three second year BSc AIS students Mads Christoffersen, Marius Sidaravicius and Harang Seo. For their final Design and Creative Practice exhibition in April, they launched the ‘Oat Brick’, claiming to be the greenest, cheapest and most sustainable brick ever. Essentially, the three perform as businessmen, they are imposters attempting to infiltrate the building industry with a brick that would destroy the hard and permanent cityscape, allowing for softer, greener and more public accessible spaces to grow. These three businessmen will be performing alongside pull-up banners, leaflets and prerecorded Teams calls – all featuring an obscure, yet curiously familiar commercial language, imitating the very characters they fear that they could become.

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

Published every other year by the Heritage Crafts Association, the ‘Red List of Endangered Crafts’ categorises crafts as if they were animals at risk of extinction. Third year AIS students Merle Nunneley and Katharina de Mel are concerned with the preservation of endangered crafts, and they will provide some skill-sharing and making during their willow weaving workshop. For their final year project, they have been making withy pots, otherwise known as lobster catching pots, to engage a local community and connect human with nature, to bring about an understanding the natural materials exist around us – and how we can utilise these in the city context. 

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

The Bartlett School of Architecture welcomes strawbale builder and trainer Salli Gosling of the School of Natural Building (SNaB), Margit Kraft, architect at Material Cultures and BSA Design Tutor, Cypren Edmunds co-founder and chair of SBUK - Straw Bale UK and Blanche Cameron, BSA Environmental Design Lecturer and ecological designer and advocate, to discuss whether the time is right for a straw-based design revolution? Chaired by Mihaela Suciu, AIS student and Blanche Cameron, BSA Environmental Design Lecturer

With an ever-increasing energy and cost of living crisis, climate change impacts and biodiversity collapse, the time has never been better to look anew at the potential for strawbale and straw-based materials. Straw itself is an abundant agricultural ‘waste’ material with excellent thermal, acoustic and structural properties. Strawbale buildings are achieving Passivhaus standard and Light Straw Clay is also attracting interest, alongside other local, renewable natural insulation materials. 

Location: Christopher Ingold Lecture Theatre and G.11

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Year 1 AIS student Lucy Linton has been investigating how market stall discarded fish parts could be used productively. Lucy has been rediscovering the lost craft of fish-skin tanning and celebrating just how durable and yet delicate, fish leather can be. Lucy Linton has created a portable fish leather toolkit and has learned the skills to sustainably transform everyday fish, seabass, haddock and freshwater carp skin, into leather. Come by for a half day of skill-sharing and making.  Lucy has promised to do the very messy prep work herself, allowing visitors to work with pre-treated fish skins.

For over three months, third year AIS student Stela Kostomaj has been working with the diverse users of Calthorpe Community Gardens. As a fellow volunteer, she has been learning plant names, mapping and exploring the community gardeners’ own use space and that of the other users of the gardens. The collaboration culminated in an ambiguous metal bench, that stimulates interaction and play. As part her ‘Community Structure Launch’, the council community garden will host an event with food and music to commemorate the launch of a community structure, the bench, with everyone welcome!

Location: Calthorpe Community Garden, WC1X 8LH

In December 2022, second year AIS students Marius Sidaravicius, Harang Seo and Kingsley Luo presented their “Oh Don’t” (Throw It Out) proposal for legislation, after observing an alarming trend within the Bartlett School of Architecture. Despite UCL’s conviction to reduce and reuse waste, Marius, Harang and Kingsley observed that structures, models, and materials from student projects are likely to be discarded without consideration of their longevity and potential re-use. The “Oh Don’t” Legislation proposes to put sustainability and adaptability at the forefront of design: building for re-usability and demystifying design so that standing forms can be re-contextualised and surpass the original intent.

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

The Shadow and Motion Workshop by Rush will feature elements from her first-year project as part of the Design and Creative Practice module. This free workshop will help visitors thoroughly investigate and present the impacts of shadows by carefully observing their density, size, and diverse types. Shadows will be categorised into primary and secondary shadows, where the primary ones originate from a single light source, whether natural (such as sunlight) or artificial (like streetlamps or window reflections), and the secondary shadows arise from another light source. To document findings, visitors will employ methods such as mapping and a Camera Obscura, capturing these observations and producing detailed maps manually. 

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

As a celebration of interiors, second year AIS student Iona McVean is showing an installation featuring wooden sculptures and drawings. Her work has been inspired by meeting a local florist, their conversations have developed into carved wooden sculptures, glazed ceramic lamps and informed a series of interviews with friends, family and fellow students about their ‘lucky interiors’. Iona will be curating a collection of this work upon the AIS Open Stage.  

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

Second year AIS Student Alexia Akasaka questions whether people can broaden their limited vistas, and who would this be helpful for? Looking into this phenomenon, Alexia’s Unseen installation reimagines perception as a recollection of visual memory. Cognitive psychology shows that photos can trick us into recollecting false memories, and it is a fine line to seeing more and seeing things that are not there, where one’s open mind or the concept of the ‘permeability of consciousness’, has been associated with a proneness to mental illness such as experiencing hallucinations and Schizophrenia. 

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

How can earth-based buildings and materials contribute to a local, low-carbon, sustainable building future? What are the opportunities for education, research, design and construction? The Bartlett School of Architecture welcomes internationally-recognised earth building expert Rowland Keable, co-founder and CEO of EBUKI - Earth Building UK & Ireland, Laura Marcheggiano, architect and senior designer at Arup, Peter Scully, Director of B-made - Bartlett Manufacture & Design Exchange, and AIS tutor Alice Hardy and Glen McDonald, bott of Global Generation, working with communities on natural materials buildings and projects. Chaired by Mihaela Suciu, AIS student and Blanche Cameron, BSA Environmental Design Lecturer

Location: Chrisopher Ingold Lecture Theatre, WC1H 0QB

Drinks Reception, 19:30 - 20:30: G.11, 22 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

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'Waste' materials re-presented for re-use. Join Architectural & Interdisciplinary Studies students as you hear about their work intercepting ‘waste’ for a new sustainable, circular materials culture. Materials that would otherwise be burnt at an energy-from-waste incinerator. Curated and hosted by Marius Sidaravicius, Harang Seo and Mihaela Suciu BSc AIS Y2/Y3, Solomon Ayres M.Eng Y2, and Hannah Simon and Iolo Rees Y2 BSc Architecture, in association with the BSA Society and B!CAN. 

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street WC1H 0QB     

Second Year AIS students Freya Leonard and Grace Bonham will be closing the AIS Open Stage with a creepy concert as part of an interactive installation, inviting Bartlett community to collectively engage with their research through a conducted foley orchestra.  

The method is a collaborative and iterative synthesis of visuals, film, objects and sound, with particular reference to Susan Hill’s “The Woman in Black”, and its subsequent adaptations. Come along for a lovely day of music and horror! 

Location: G.11, 22 Gordon Street WC1H 0QB