Architects might be known for wearing black, as if in permanent mourning for the lives they once had, and for spending months searching for the perfect shade of grey. But judging by this year’s student shows, that monochromatic hegemony is under threat: the next generation appears to be plotting a psychedelic revolution.
It’s taken architecture a long time to catch up with music and fashion but it finally feels as though New Rave has reached the drawing board, a decade after leg-warmers and glowsticks returned to the dance floor. From candy-coloured toy towns to eye-searing digital worlds that take their cues from early video games, this year’s graduates are sampling from vibrant visual cultures with promiscuous relish.
Their projects are more likely to riff on Monument Valley or Game of Thrones than Peter Zumthor or Gottfried Semper. There are echoes of Italian design group Memphis, with their busy patterns and paper-thin surface treatments as well as the dreamy, pastel-tinted lens of Wes Anderson. Some students have embraced comics and kids’ toys, crafting souped-up Polly Pocket worlds and dynamic action-figure terrains; others, with their carefully tuned palettes of complementary colours, have concocted spaces that would make Kim Jong-Un proud.
There are strains of the New Aesthetic and the slick, slippery visual memes beloved of post-internet art. Oozing optimism and often drenched with a synthetic, saccharine sweetness, these escapist fantasy lands could be a response to austerity or equally a reaction against years of po-faced politeness.
Visual culture operates in cycles and, with even Historic England now considering listing postmodern buildings, ornament, wit and fun are back with a vengeance (even if the memo hasn’t reached the Riba awards). Whether this energy will seep out into the built environment remains to be seen, but you’ll need sunglasses.
1) Matteo Mastrandrea, ADS4 (Royal College of Art)
Employing a colour scheme reminiscent of your favourite 1980s shell suit, Mastrandrea speculates on the consequences of global language extinction. With only six languages estimated to remain in the world by 2150, he proposes ways to keep myths and legends alive in ways that aren’t linguistic, but embedded in monumental landscapes. “Our ability to make clear and subtle distinctions between things like colour will start to suffer,” he says. “The resultant world will be one awash with jarring and conflicting colours.” Bring on the kaleidoscopic cacophony.
2) Jimmy Liu, Unit 4 (The Bartlett)
This undergraduate studio, taught by Ana Monrabal Cook and Luke Pearson, took the Japanese culture of otaku (roughly translated as “nerd”) as its starting point, immersing students in the synthetic, saturated world of manga, video games and anime pop stars. Liu’s work samples the historical layers of Tokyo, from ancient Edo to the modern metropolis, and combines them into a teetering tower informed by comics, ink paintings and woodblock prints. He has conjured stage-set interiors that recall the camp colours and patterns of Memphis, combined with the “superflat” aesthetic of Takashi Murakami.
3) Aikawa Mok, Unit 4 (The Bartlett)
Aikawa Mok also plunged headlong into otaku culture and used the video game engine Unity to build a virtual world that explores the four rituals performed in a Shinto shrine. Inspired by the form of a Shinto donation box, her “Roboshrine” takes players on a journey of purification, down a spiralling slide in a super-glossy environment where walls graduate from cerise to teal, before plunging into a purple-tinted underworld.
4) Yolanda Leung, Unit 21 (The Bartlett)
Leung has sampled from the realms of video games and sci-fi comics to imagine what a pomegranate factory-cum-theme park in the port of Marseille might look like. Her distinction-winning project, depicted in dynamic perspective views and exquisite coloured paper models, takes inspiration from children’s toys and pop-up books, with a gaudy palette of yellows, pinks and reds, set against a churning turquoise ocean.
5) Felicity Barbur, Unit 11 (The Bartlett)
For a unit taught by sci-fi funsters Smout Allen, Barbur imagines an artificial mountainscape as the setting for a new river festival in Chicago. Taking inspiration from the city’s existing festive calendar, the vertical park incorporates a chunk of the Great Wall of China to be scaled on the lunar new year, along with a zigzagging alpine cycle path for the Patriotic Peloton on Memorial Day weekend. The pastel-coloured hillside is dotted with water towers salvaged from the city’s rooftops – all painted pink, natch.
6) Henry Schofield, Unit 12 (The Bartlett)
These ornamental totem poles don’t immediately call to mind the world of law and order, but they might be what the future of policing in the City of London looks like if Henry Schofield has his way. “The application of exuberant colour and geometry to the physicality of the police force aims to generate the idea of exuberance in association with intimidation,” says Schofield, “whilst also reinventing the mass of desaturated 20th-century modernism found within the City of London.” Right then.
7) Maya Laitinen, Dip 5 (Architectural Association)
A product of the determinedly psychedelic Diploma Unit 5, taught by colour-loving Spanish architects Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda, Laitinen’s project imagines a new platform for discussing global climate politics in an abandoned coal mine in the Arctic landscape of Svalbard. “We are living in a fast-paced society where stress is a new lifestyle and climate change is a global threat,” says Laitinen. What better way to distract yourself from environmental armageddon than with a zinging neon-hued discussion platform?
8) Michael Quach, Unit 10 (The Bartlett)
Known for producing large-scale, incredibly detailed drawings and intricate paper collages, Unit 10, taught by CJ Lim, has discovered colour – and gone for it full throttle. Quach’s project looks at how the Conservative government could exploit planning strategies to win more elderly votes in northern constituencies. As Quach puts it: “The urban development metaphorically forms the critique of social and political aspiration for the elderly, and highlights the oppression of the working class and young generation.”
9) Clare Hawes, Unit 12 (The Bartlett)
With the wonky, playful look of something plucked from a Grayson Perry tapestry, Hawes’ project is a new civic centre for the east London borough of Tower Hamlets. She imagines a crematorium, wedding chapel and town hall built from donated materials, located on the site of the doomed Robin Hood Gardens estate. Confetti sacks hang from the frame and holders for floral tributes line the communal staircases. “There is a duality to the language of the architecture,” says Hawes. “Fear and optimism, youth and ageing, sweet and sinister.”
10) Diego Ariza, Dip 5 (Architectural Association)
Also a product of Dip 5’s acid-doused vision, Ariza imagines what he calls a “kaleidoscope of linguistic celebration” in Lagos, Nigeria. Taking visual cues from artist Michael Craig-Martin and sampling motifs from some of the 200 tribal communities across west Africa, his drawings depict a new citadel housing a grand public arena where “linguistic and cultural knowledge is shared through celebration and traditional methods of production”.
11) Iain Jamieson, ADS4 (Royal College of Art)
Another witty project from ADS4, taught by Tom Greenall and Nicky Koller, Jamieson has dreamed of a world of “commuter belt castles”, where Game of Thrones meets Barratt Homes. Based on the observation that priced-out millennials might increasingly be driven to live in suburbia, he imagines a future where volume house-builders will adapt their product to cater for a generation nourished on fictional fantasy lands. Taking King’s Langley station as its site (geddit?), the design imagines a mixed-use scheme of housing, station, community services and landscapes for productive play, constructed as a medieval walled castle.