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Since the end of September term has commenced and unit choices have been made. The focus of Unit 2's attention is the Victoria Embankment, Blackfriars to Chelsea, and its effect on the cities and villages which now constitute London. Alun, Biba and Patrick are much more eloquent on what the Unit intends to achieve:

http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/architecture/courses/postgraduate/units/unit2/201112.cfm

As a start we separated into groups, each to study an existing building along the Embankment. From east to west these were: The Temple and Inns of Court, The Royal Courts of Justice, Somerset House, The Adelphi, The Banqueting House, Westminster Abbey and Chelsea Hospital. As a group of three we began to look at the Royal Courts in a variety of ways and at various scales.

Immediately it was recognised that there were several key topics for exploration. First was the rigid organisation of the plan form which separated the building into lightwells and purely functional fragments. Functional in terms of their involvement with the courts as a ritual, or the physical manifestation of civil law in Britain. Judges, jury, barristers and the public were separated by corridors, halls and foyers which lead to the same place - the courtroom. This room has a vertically structured hierarchy which sites individuals dependent upon their role within the trial. Many architectural commentators have liked the courtroom to theatre. This is both simplistic and and inaccurate. The court is not a space of spectacle but rather one of participation. Michel Foucault's analysis of the mechanisms of discipline and surveillance which evolved from the gallows and dungeon into the  institutions of the State. Within the court the exercise of power is supervised by society a a whole. Foucault makes it clear that there is not a repression of the individual by this analytical partitioning of space. Rather that the individual is carefully fabricated into it, becoming a part of its mechanism. One piece of work we made was a topographical cast of the courtroom which sets up the vertical hierachies. On top of this we built the wood furniature of the courtroom which through joints and decoration sets up the horizons of the enclosed space. The creation of what Arendt calls The Space of Public Appearance is a crucial part of the legislative apparatus in action. This occurs in the courtroom, in the balconies which allow for the appearance of the human figure within the main hall, and the tectonic qualities of the staircases.  

Courtoom Ten at 1:50.  

Other lines of enquiry included the effects and intentions of the sculptural program, the choice of Neo Gothic as the buildings style and for almost all of the Victorian public buildings, the competition and the entries, the appointment of Street- considered the best man at Gothic elevations and hence dealing with the inconsistencies of the plan- despite not winning the competition, the way in which the building deals with the topos - the slope which moves from Lincoln's Inn to Temple, the effects of the Courts upon the mythos of the city and its insertion at the junction between the jurisdiction of the cities of Westminster and London and its proximity between the various Inns of Court. 


All of this is tied into the abstract of our unit brief:




Human experience of Being is not simply of the material ‘real world’. A city is not simply a collection of built objects of course, and all of the institutions along the Embankment embody and house profound ideals about the nature of society and situate each of these amongst the conflicting demands of the others. Neither the law, religion, capital, government nor high culture can dominate each other in a democracy; and the deep reciprocity between these various modes of serious play forms the basis of the pragmatic and poetic character of urban life. Architecture is the most visible and material manifestation of the tension between these characteristics; as designers the pleasure for us lies in the difficulty of the task, between fear and desire.