nontypological architecture
Sacred Pilgrimage Highway - Wendy Jiawei Yao
University College London, Bartlett PG16
Archipelagos: Forms Of Architecture, Relationality And Practice Beyond Extraction
"Politics is not made up of power relations; it’s made of relations among worlds". – Jacques Rancière
In the first year of a new PG16, we asked how the discipline of architecture might move beyond its historical subservience to state and corporate patrons, and far too often alchemically making domination and assimilation desirable (or at least bearable). Instead, we explored how architecture might think with the archipelago as a heuristic figure and take the side of the dispossessed, who are always reclaiming an embodied relationality to and autonomy with their islands.
Archipelagos—clusters of islands separated by the very things that connect them—have long served as critical nodes in imperial and colonial networks. Today, they remain sites of a layered web of entanglements where the lines between infrastructure, body, land, water, politics, culture, and cosmology blur. They have become flashpoints where assimilation into dominant technopolitical, incessantly urbanising, and homogenising regimes and architectures is contested. On the archipelago, multispecies communities are always already experimenting with new ways of perceiving, relating, knowing, and building.
From this vantage point, we asked: Can architecture occur beyond dominant ontologies of technopolitics and extractivism? How might architects render infrastructure more visibly and explicitly the cosmogonic, political, cultural, and ecological artefacts and relations between things that they actually are? How might we amplify commoning and support alternative ways of knowing, owning, governing, and stewarding land and resources? By what means, and at what scales?
These questions shaped the studio’s work across diverse archipelagic naturecultures and histories—from the Canary Islands, to the British Isles, Bermuda, Indonesia, and Taiwan. Students engaged with questions of hybridity and radical experimentation in the architectures of infrastructure, law, technology, and concepts that shape our relationship to water, littoral zones, and the sea; to inherited and constantly shifting ceremonial practices as they adopt new technologies and appropriate infrastructures in new ways; to the architecture and glaciopolitics of pilgrimage as it mutates with authoritarian infrastructure; to the inventive profanation, misuse, and enjoyment of colonial roads, cricket pitches, and typologies of housing and settlement in Bermuda by Afro-Indigenous-American-Bermudian musicians and dancers; and to engaging with the representational spaces and forms of quantum computing, tracing its roots to predictive-deterministic ritual and architecture in ancient Mesopotamia and beyond.
Across these interventions, we questioned how we might work with the archipelago not as metaphor, but as method. Through this approach, architecture can no longer sustain its status as an uprooted object, but rather becomes a contingent process shaped by material, ecological, and cultural relations. Ultimately, the figure of the archipelago and the varied worlds already emerging there seems to teach us that architecture and politics could refuse assimilation into notions of instrumental forms of universality. Instead, it seems to insist that the world is composed of many worlds, and that these worlds are incommensurable, yet must coexist—not through harmony, but through negotiation, agonism, and shared uncertainty. In this light, architecture and infrastructure can be reimagined not as merely technopolitical artefacts but as an archipelago of sites where worlds collide, where different ways of valuing, relating, and existing coexist, coproduce the world, and come into confrontation.
Unit Tutors
María Páez González & Brendon Carlin
with James Kwang Ho Chung
Design Realisation Tutors:
James Mak, Jongwon Na, with structural engineering support from George Ramsay
Unit Students
Year 1: Lorenzo Angoli, Gregory Brookhouse, Park Jin Chan, Hei Ching Eunice Cheung, Sum Ho Angus Hong, Sami Kassim, Natalia Michalowska
Year 2: Finlay Aitken, Patricia Bob, Shouhui Chen, Kayley Gibbons, Tristan Hubbard, Zuzanna Rostocka, Rana Tabatabaie, Jiawei Wendy Yao, Kai Yi Zhang
Special thanks to the critics who supported our work throughout the year:
Tomiris Batalova, Matthew Butcher, Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Maria Fedorchenko, Ludwig Holmen, Tanuj Kohli, Rai Leironghua, James Mak, Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, Valerio Massaro, Tyen Masten, Mpho Matsipa, Inigo Minns, Jongwon Na, Olivia Neves Marra, Davide Sacconi, Isabella Synek Herd, Giles Tettey Nartey, Frederik Weissenborn
