Recursive Operations

Unit 23, MArch Architecture, The Bartlett, UCL
Tutors: Maria Fulford, Farlie Reynolds & Ben Spong
2025-26

This year, we investigated how the voices of materials, objects, and places might participate more fully in architectural design. Our research was anchored by our travel to Athens, where we walked Dimitris Pikionis’s stone paths, studied the seminal Rodakis house on Aegina, and traced myths from the Acropolis to Corinth.

These encounters with Greece's material and mythical landscapes catalyzed our building projects. By weaving new plausible pasts and futures into global contexts—from a Bangkok theatre shaped by tree geometries to a sculptural stone temple in southern Athens—our projects reconsidered how buildings come into being within an ever-changing world.

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Situated Speculations: An Architecture of the In-Between

Unit 6, BSc Architecture, The Bartlett, UCL
Tutors: Ashley Hinchcliffe & Ben Spong
2025-26

UG6 explored the concept of "situated speculations," investigating how architecture can simultaneously be hyper-specific to its physical place and visionary in its outlook. We tested this balance across three contrasting sites—Rainham Marshes, Epping Forest, and the City of London—using material experiments and constructed instruments to build sited prototypes.

Our field trip to Barcelona provided a testing ground for these methods. Inspired by the city’s blend of urban resilience and architectural experimentation, our final building projects proposed architectures that intrinsically bind place and proposition together, demonstrating how speculative futures can emerge directly from material, cultural, and environmental specificities.

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Continuous Assemblies

Unit 23, MArch Architecture, The Bartlett, UCL
Tutors: Maria Fulford, Farlie Reynolds & Ben Spong
2024-25

Unit 23 bridges the gap between the poetic and the practical, championing a hands-on ethos that treats design as a process of direct experimentation. This year, the unit challenged the traditional status of the finished building, viewing architecture not as a static, iconic object, but as a continuous act of assembly. Inspired by Michael Wesely’s long-exposure photography, the work explores the temporal interweaving of people, materials, and environments - positioning architecture as an entity always in flux and perpetually incomplete.

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Design for (dis)Assembly

Design for Manufacture, The Bartlett, UCL
Tutors: Pradeep Devadass & Ben Spong
2023-24

image credit: Arkhive group

As disassembly becomes vital in the end-of-life phase of buildings, the assembly process gains new significance. No longer just a construction step, assembly now plays a key role in enabling disassembly, reuse, and recycling. This shift demands an integrated approach to sustainability and functionality throughout design and construction.

To address this, a 1:1 wooden prototype called Arkhive is built. Employing robotic assembly, it embodies design-for-disassembly strategies, prioritising adaptability and reuse. The manufacturing process, interconnected from design to reuse, ensures continuous feedback for sustainable outcomes. This project highlights the potential of integrated wood construction for real-world applications in the architecture, construction, and engineering (ACE) industry.

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Contingent Matters

Unit 6, BSc Architecture, The Bartlett, UCL
Tutors: Ashley Hinchcliffe & Ben Spong
2024-25

image credit: Yuhan Wu

This year, UG06 investigated architecture as a discipline of contingency, where unpredictable environmental and material shifts inform design. The work began on Hampstead Heath, where students fabricated physical and digital apparatuses to record temporal changes and landscape transitions.

The research expanded during a field trip across Belgium, moving from the intricate details of Art Nouveau to contemporary museums. These influences transformed initial material studies into building proposals for London and Brussels. By prioritizing the uncertain the projects reinvented disciplinary conventions through a reciprocity between inventive media and real-world realisation.

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Bound to Fail

Unit 23, MArch Architecture, The Bartlet, UCL
Tutors: Farlie Reynolds & Ben Spong
2023-24

image credit: Niamh Cahill

Standard architectural practice often "tames" the concept of failure, outsourcing it to scientific laboratories that produce rigid regulations and numbing conventions. While these ensure safety, they strip architecture of its ability to engage with the unknown. This year, Unit 23 challenged this reductive approach, encouraging students to reclaim the territory of failure as a site for affirmative experimentation rather than something to be feared.

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REGISTRATION

Unit 6, BSc Architecture, The Bartlett, UCL
Tutors: Stefan Lengen & Ben Spong
2023-24

This year, UG6 explored the theme of ‘Registration’—not as a traditional tool to impose order, but as an intermediary method of enquiry used to draw out worlds and allow differences to play out.

We began by building digital and physical instruments to speculatively probe our site: the Epping Forest District in Essex. These initial tools translated into sensitive building proposals deeply attuned to their surrounding ecologies. Our research was further enriched by a field trip to Copenhagen and Aarhus, engaging with leading Danish academic institutions and architectural practices to expand our understanding of environmental registration and production.

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CALIBRATION

Unit 6, BSc Architecture, The Bartlett, UCL
Tutors: Stefan Lengen & Ben Spong
2022-23

This year, UG6 explored the concept of ‘calibration’ by designing architectures as responsive ‘tuning instruments’ within the intermediate spaces of London’s Rainham and Wennington Marshes.

We began by building digital and physical instruments to dissect and measure site-specific phenomena across the area's history, geology, and environmental changes. These initial tools were subsequently translated into building proposals that utilized innovative, local construction methods and materials for diverse communities. By remaining in an open-ended state of calibration, the projects proved highly receptive to ecological change. Our research was further supported by a field trip to Copenhagen and Aarhus, engaging with leading Danish academic institutions and architectural practices.

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