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Commendation
Serjeant Award for Excellence in Drawing

A Habit of Building: Considering Labour, the Architect and the Construction Site

Part 1 Project 2023
Michael Becker
Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture | UK
In a shallow blue box are eight handbound books from which the following proposal unfolds. Spanning the 70-year lifespan of a timber softwood from sapling to sawmill, the proposal charts the construction of a community in three phases. Linking an urban croft with a food poverty charity in the first, establishing a ‘community-construction-site’ in the second and finally, introducing pigs to the park and an abattoir to the city. In each arena of the proposal the community sustains itself through a direct and adhoc approach, skipping supply-chains to directly connect with material and landscape. Uninterested in completion, the proposal lingers ‘under construction’ as to draw out the latent potential for change the construction site holds for our cities. This unfinished state invites a kind of participatory urbanism where architecture acts as the scaffolding for a perpetual metabolism of material and memory, ruin and repair, waste and renewal. Building on a dissertation which attempts to imagine a language of architectural drawing that accounts for the labour involved in the making of architectural objects, drawing is used as a pedagogical tool to unpick the centralisation of industrial tools and technical specialisation - or as declared by Paul Klee: ‘to be exact without limitations!’
Michael Becker

Tutor(s)
Rachael Hallett
Jamie Henry
2023
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