UNIT 1 | GOTHIC

MICHAEL RICHARDS, DR MANOLO GUERCI, PHILIP BASTON, BEN GODBER AND PATRICK OSBORNE

Unit 1 believes the past is never far behind us, and that understanding it is essential to designing the most compelling architecture for the future – we are less interested in repeating a historical ‘style’ as a ‘neo something’ or a ‘something revival’, nor in the restoration (as opposed to preservation) of an ‘old’ building – but hope to imbue contemporary, innovative design with complexity and nuance that has heirloom quality (it could be imagined to last, and take on its own patina), and one where technology in so intrinsic that the architecture often is what it does, and does what it is.

At the beginning of this academic year, now almost forgotten in the shock of the pandemic, the events of 15 April 2019 had provoked a global outpouring of sympathy and unprecedented pledges of financial support in response to the fire that destroyed the roof and spire of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. Amid immediate declarations to rebuild within a period of five years, a wider question arose: what is 21st century ‘Gothic’, and what does it mean? 

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Watch Stage 5 student, Andy Kong's Unit 1 Year in Review 2019-2020 to get a glimpse into life in Unit 1.