Visions of Excess
with Cathy Hawley
Royal College of Art ADS 1 (2023-24)

Nan Goldin, Twisting at my birthday party, New York City 1980

What does it mean to design for pleasure in the context of climate breakdown? Is luxury antithetical to a sustainable society? Questions of pleasure and comfort can be overlooked when architecture’s success is increasingly determined by empirical measure, be it decarbonisation, material provenance, or thermal performance.

Reuse is by definition conservative; the more we contend with and maintain the existing, the more constrained we become in imagining – and indeed designing – new possibilities. Aesthetic concerns are marginalised, and “delight” itself becomes a decadence; architects become technocrats, and it can feel like we are simply ‘making do’.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation, 1984

BIM Model , 2020s

When it comes to reuse, the excesses of past generations have of course become the fuel of creative possibility in the present, but perhaps there is a new extravagance to be found in contemporary architecture – a new bohemianism, a delight of little means. This year, ADS1 will seek an architecture that both embraces re-use and upcycling, whilst pursuing new aesthetic clarity, learning from direct physical, embodied, experience. This year we will ask what role architecture plays in challenging notions of efficiency and productivity, in order to define new pleasures of living.

Instead we want to explore the potential that found fabric has for excess, its ability to be both provisional and hedonistic. In designing through reuse this year, we will search for unknown luxuries, accepting sustainability as simply the baseline of an architecture that re-engages with the body, aesthetics and sensory life.

Isamu Noguchi, The Footstep, 1958

Jasper Morrison, 1144 Series Handle, 1990

The unit will begin by working with found material at 1:1, the scale of the body, to develop physical ‘furniture’ pieces. We will document the ways these objects are used and misused in lavish descriptions of bodily comfort, joy, intimacy, collision. The abundance of scenarios that could surround these furnitures may in turn suggest new ranges of motion, new ways of moving through the world, (when the world as we know it is ending.)

Henry Dreyfus, Environmental Tolerance Zones – Measure of Man in ‘Human Factors in Design,’ 1969

Bodily Life

In its ordinariness, bodily life tends to go unnoticed, and in architecture’s technocratic turn, foregrounding systems and infrastructures, the body is being forgotten. This of course is no novel concern.

The early 20th century heard a chorus of calls for a return to the body in light of mechanization. Chief among them was Johannes Itten, whose preliminary course at the Weimar Bauhaus is well known for rooting its pedagogy in calisthenic expression, pushing back against rationalism and technological progress in its merging of aesthetics with bodily life.

To take interest in the aesthetics of bodily life, is to be conscious of the politics of bodies as subjects of movement and action.

Students writing rhythmical forms with both hands simultaneously (Bauhaus, c.1929)

Francis Bacon, Turning Figure, 1959

Judith Butler explains that ‘bodies assemble precisely to show that they are bodies, and they let it be known politically what it means to persist as a body in the world, what requirements must be met for bodies to survive, and what conditions make bodily life, which is the only life we have, finally, liveable.’

Through its responsiveness to a world of passions, actions and feelings, bodily life then becomes the crux of democratic expression.We don’t intend to further politicise or instrumentalise the body, so much as we intend it as a reminder of what we are dealing with as architects: first and foremost, we are dealing with bodily life. This year through a series of simple yet fundamental exercises, from motion sketches to life drawing sessions, we will begin to remember the body.

Alison and Peter Smithson, The small Pleasures of Life 19

Small Pleasures

Following our drawing studies, we will transition to working in three dimensions, carefully considering the interface between body and designed surface.

We will emphasise thinking through making at two distinct scales - the object (that which we touch and hold) and furniture (that which holds us). Our focus on these two scales of experience will take shape in the form of two workshops.

In the first workshop, we will work in the plastic arts, collaborating with ceramists and sculptors from Rochester Square to form ideas with the malleable material of clay, which itself will be extracted from a building site in London.

Jonathan Baldock, Grave Goods, 2022

Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism 1972

Bridging London’s prehistory with its current exhaustion and overdevelopment, we will design objects that mark our first tactile encounters with the designed world; we will fashion doorknobs and handles, handrails and vessels, engaging directly with the ergonomics of touch and form.

The second workshop will pursue an adhocism of the kind outlined by Charles Jenks and nathan silver, using available systems in new ways, and often on the edge of respectability. The workshop

will run in collaboration with architects Sam Chermayeff and Theo de Meyer, two modern decadents whose work is often focused at the scale of furniture and embodies a luxury of little means. They
will introduce us to their projects and methodologies, and help to guide and critique the furniture pieces we in turn will produce, prioritising the use of existing materials to make new and exquisite forms of comfort.

These workshops and seminars will focus our attention on elementary, everyday touch and movement, which in turn will enable a closer attention to spatial experience. The objects we produce will suggest something of “The small pleasures of life” as outlined in the drawings of Alison and Peter Smithson, from which we might generate new taxonomies of spatial comfort, new ways of adapting and adjusting our position in the world.

Plexiglass Sauna by Sam Chermayeff (2018)

More Than Making Do

Changing scale, we will move from the 1:1 object to the architectural project, tracing relationships between the individual body, and the architectural interior, before expanding our scope to more global concerns

The focus on the body’s interaction with the designed surface will lead us to the broader interface of nature and artifice. We will engage with, question and participate in, the ‘arts of living on a damaged planet’ at the same time embracing the wonders and terrors of the world we have inherited.

The studio will ultimately continue its
work with existing buildings and urban ensembles. We will focus on sites and structures that can be encountered directly, closely documenting and analysing them, seeking to understand their original functions, while at the same time exposing their mutability and openness to new potentials.

Reuse will be approached as both an environmental imperative and an inherently creative act; we will transform existing architecture and urban space as a means of survival, but also in the formation of new values and the pursuit of new pleasures.

Raniera Gnolli, Marmora Romana, 1988

The Good Life

The Domus Aurea, Emperor Nero’s extravagant Golden House in Rome, was buried and forgotten after his death in the first century AD and only rediscovered in the fifteenth century when visitors began to explore the underground grottoes.

During the Renaissance artists including Ghirlandaio, Pinturicchio and Raphael saw the Roman frescos by torchlight, inspiring the ‘grotesques’ found across Renaissance art. There is something wonderful and fragile about such reinvention following centuries of loss.

We will visit Rome where the remains
of a lost empire lie below and amongst the modern city. There we will talk about time, excess, the changing fortunes of
a civilisation and visit the fragments of beauty excavated and resituated in the present and the pleasure and joy they can bring.

In this moment of cultural and global transformation, where we are arguably entering a new era, our thoughts turn from survivalism and resilience to the notion of living well. Dignity, parity and equality are touchstones perhaps for a collective future, but alongside this we will learn from the decadents, embracing the synthetic along with the natural and accepting the world we’ve made for ourselves as we persist in transforming it.

Photography, Interviews, Teaching, Writing, Info

Matthew Blunderfield