Biennale Architecttura 2018

June 2018

The 2018 Venice Biennale opened to the public on the 26^th May. This year’s theme “focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers”.

Our contribution is a collection of six large-scale models, each representing a hall for gathering that the practice has designed. These models are placed upon a rotating table which is a calendar and a cosmic machine. Each hall has a different purpose yet they all bring people together in a rhythmic and cyclical fashion daily, weekly and annually. The specific uses of each building are regulated by a calendar of events, rituals and times of congregation. Their calendars are inscribed on the outer rim of a turning table. The table can be rotated by hand. When you turn it, varying light falls upon the models representing the passage of the sun through the day from dawn to dusk. It is a manual and mechanical process.

The intention of presenting these models in this way is to emphasise the relationship between the enduring frames of the buildings and the endless procession of fugitive elements that pass through them periodically.

RIBA President’s Medals Student Awards

December 2013

Two members of the practice have won the main awards at this years RIBA President’s Medals Student Awards. The two medals were chosen from over 300 submissions, the best student work from 65 schools around the world.

Ben Hayes received the President’s Medal for his project entitled Kizhi Island, which proposes the restoration and reassembly of 250 wooden Orthodox churches on the small island in northern Russia. The proposal is for a curated museum landscape that incorporates the re-located ecclesiastical structures and an associated restoration and research facility.

Tamsin Hanke received the Dissertation Medal for her thesis, Magnitogorsk: Utopian Vision of Spatial Socialism. The work explored how the political ideology of the city was expressed spatially in the city during the years 1930 to 1953 and how the urban form has manifested in a social-economic legacy that remains to this day.

Ben and Tamsin studied with Niall and his teaching partners Yeoryia Manoloupoulou and Michiko Sumi in Unit 17 at the Bartlett School of Architecture in University College London. Tamsin’s Dissertation Supervisor was Sophia Psarra.