UK schools’ projects, as we know, are as amazing for the strength and ingeniousity of their narratives than for their concern for interesting and evocative means of representations. In this regard, the Monastery of Irrigation by Alistair Williams (also selected by the President’s Medals and also for the University of Westminster) is striking for its use of an hybrid of hand drawing and computer generated images, thus creating a unique poetic vocabulary serving the program. The latter is a building that organizes its monastic life around water rhythm and power.Everything in this architecture recounts the calm and the insular aspect of the monastery which is to be contrasted with the talkative vocabulary used by urban cathedral recently designed by Hernan Diaz Alonzo’s studios or Tobias Klein and Jordan Hodgson respectively at the Bartlett and the Royal College of Arts (see previous article).
In the same spirit, one would like to (re)read the article about Chen Xinyang’s Space Monastery/Prison project at Pratt Institute. Continue reading
