Large City Architecture at the Bartlett

Between 2016 and 2019 Daniel Koehler and Rasa Navasaityte ran two research clusters at the Bartlett B-Pro under one title, Large City Architecture: Research Cluster 8 in Architecture Design, Mereologies (2016–17), led by Koehler with Navasaityte as consultant, and Research Cluster 17 in Urban Design, The Fourth Part (2017–18) and When Numbers Dwell (2018–19), led by both. The premise: modelled as data, the city is encapsulated in architectural parts, plot, wall, courtyard, window, and a building can be composed as a city from those parts. In place of typology the clusters proposed mereology, the historical name of the research: parts in resonance rather than content or form.

Each team took one part as its instrument. In 2017 Meros read the house as a nesting of walls, Scendobia read it through its spines, stair, corridor and escalator, and Wa(o)nderYards sampled the courtyard as the void-room of the house. In 2018 NPoche sorted self-aggregating housing by k-means clustering into a city of sameness, Blockerties turned the ledger of the blockchain into overlapping private and shared spaces, Enframes counted the city as corners after O. M. Ungers, and iiOOOI folded inside and outside into an urban enfilade. In 2019 the question was how numbers dwell in a city shared peer to peer: Endlessscape after Kiesler, MultiYards as courtyards of shared access, Slabrose as a high-rise without core, Comata as a house whose parts organize their own estate, Enfilade as an architecture of less and more.

At the three B-Pro Shows (26 September to 15 October 2017, 25 September to 14 October 2018, 24 September to 13 October 2019) the results stood on plinths before wall-sized prints: stacked slabs, printed aggregates and open frames, all in white. Christoph Zimmel consulted on computation throughout; Anqi Su assisted in 2018, Ziming He and Sheghaf Abosaleh in 2019.

Three reports edited by Koehler and Navasaityte document the work: Mereologies (2017), The Fourth Part (2018) and When Numbers Dwell (2019). NPoche won the UCL Gold Medal in Urban Design 2018, Enfilade the Silver Medal 2019, and Sheghaf Abosaleh’s thesis When Architecture Thinks! was named Best Thesis Project in Urban Design. The vocabulary of the clusters carried on into the Mereologies Symposium at the Bartlett in April 2019 and the first issue of Prospectives in 2020.

Mereological Tectonics: Wall of Parts, a parallel unit led by Koehler and Navasaityte at the University of East London in 2016–17, took the same questions to the wall. Its students reworked the grands ensembles of Paris, beginning from a slab of prefabricated concrete parts built at Montparnasse in 1958; projects by Nur Bahirah Abdul Rahman, Kirk Slankard and Anastasis Troullides were shown at the university’s Docklands campus from 15 to 30 June 2017.