This is England

Yale School of Architecture, Spring 2010
Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland, and Sam Jacob (FAT), with Jennifer W. Leung (YSOA)

Two sets of introductory design exercises: the first, exploring material, fabrication, and formal
possibilities inherent in heraldic devices and environments; the second, considering the
polemical condition of historical and contemporary border crossings, were reviewed on both
sides of the Atlantic by architects, artists, graphic designers, and urban planners.
Subsequently, students developed architectural proposals that were calibrated to a self-determined
agenda suggested by the idea of Englishness - as both a high and low form of
custom, behavior, taste, and cultural production. The work of the studio brought the site –
Dover and its White Cliffs - into relief through a number of analytical frames including that of a
historical sea-side fortification, the sublime natural edge of England, a prototypical town
economy and population, and an infrastructural and economic link to the continent. Final
proposals ranged in scale from discrete waterfront buildings to town-scale rehabilitation
strategies. Programmatically, the former included projects that housed ferry terminal
infrastructure, a casino, or mixed-use housing. The latter operated at the convergence of
contemporary global economies and the local townscape through designs that variously
employed a networks of truck stops, community agriculture allotments, a 21st century world’s
fair, the Picturesque landscape, or a linear intermodal transportation hub. Projects
demonstrated several shared interests: The first was the recognition that site is a dynamic term,
subject to historical perspective – the Roman Empire, the Grand Tour, and WWII in the case of
Dover, political ideology, transitional populations and economies, and here the infamous
weather of the English Channel. The second was the relative architectural value of
iconography, symbolic form, and material traditions taken from both specific cultural contexts
and mass consumer culture. While the pre-modern heraldic offered a graphic and geometrical
logic by which to marshall figural and symbolic form into a dense set piece, Denise Scott Brown
posed her conception of the heraldic as the dialectical opposite and better half of the
physiognomic in her decorated shed versus duck typologies. The innovation of the studio was
the attempt to modernize and challenge these definitions of heraldry through intersection with
contemporary political and programmatic issues, and new material technologies.