About

Design Studio 18 has been running for 11 years. Our interests lie in the intersections of architecture, urbanism and landscape, understood as active agents within earths material and energy systems, played out across the deep-time spans and planetary scale of our Anthropocene era, as well as the more immediate impacts of our global climate emergency. Across geology, hydrology and atmosphere through the material framings of earth, water and air, the studio has developed unique methodologies around design-research, cartography, simulation and representation, exercised through architectural projects situated within the wider environmental, societal and political concerns of our time. Last year, the studio embarked on a new chapter focused around the concept of emergence, intersecting these material framings and fore-fronting process-driven design methods for the generation of landscape and architectural form.

The term emergence refers to the phenomena of complex entities and new behaviours arising from the interactions of its constituent parts. This year we will continue our journey exploring this an architectural and climatically infused design approach, applying evidenced-based systems thinking to inform adaptive and procedural design workflows. These will not be shaped around traditional formal concerns or architectural styles, but derived from a study of the dynamic conditions, processes and interactions of its siting, reproduced and tested through experimentation, simulation and computation, explored through form, motion and matter. Our interests remain around the design of the design process, as much as the architectural artefact itself. We see this as a fluid, abstracted and non-linear process, to inform intelligent yet unpredictable architectural outcomes appropriate to the instability and extremity of our times.

Context

Our investigations this year will be focused along the Great Glen fault, a strike slip fault line visibly dissecting Scotland’s landmass for 100km from Inverness to Fort William and beyond. This tectonic fracture, formed at the meeting point between supercontinents Gondwana and Laurentia around 400 million years ago, provides an ideal transect to observe earths system processes in action. This ancient continental collision sprung volcanic and seismic interactions along its opposing lateral movement, as later glacial retreat further carved out and exaggerated this valley of troughs and lakes visible from space. This resulting topographic condition would in turn influence meteorological weather systems, directing rainfall, solar exposure, drainage and sedimentation, forming patterns, conditions and climates that birthed the landscapes globally unique habitats and ecologies. As civilisations emerged, this linear incision provided a strategic barrier and key mobility passage, as industrialised societies linked infrastructural canals and railways along its spine, distributing and shaping surrounding settlements, industries and local economies over the centuries.

However, based on our current emissions trajectory its estimated by 2080 this regions climate will transform to that of nowadays Southern France. With rising temperatures, modified rainfall patterns and extreme weather events, comes increased risks of flooding, erosion, wild fires and disease. As climate change accelerates and destabilises these once delicately balanced earth systems, our interests lie in the tensions, interactions and collisions between. From the geologic, hydrologic and atmospheric, across deep-time earth movements to instantaneous aerial exchanges, violently disrupted and reorganised by anthropogenic practices.


See Past Studios:

2023-2024: Flows, Forms & Functions, UK
2022-2023: Thermal Domains, UK
2021-2022: Climate Futures, Dungeness
2020-2021: Carbon Transitions, UK
2019-2020: +Other Climates, Norway

Site

Students

Year 1

Dominika Zofia Budzinska
Edoardo Ripamonti
Hossain Takir
Maritsa Raveneau-Joseph
Matas Janulionis
Ruhsan Roxan Sadrettin
Samuel Calkins
Sandra Dus
Sarah Muldoon
Sofia Rota
Taja Dennis

Year 2

Bradley Fletcher
Christopher Briggs
Hannah Ismail
Shaima Al-Jalal
Valeria Golban
Yueyue Su

work in progress to be showcased Feb 2025