Over the last four years The Bartlett School of Architecture has seen monumental changes in the buildings it inhabits and the facilities available to its staff and students. Three pointcloud animations document the transformation of the Bartlett from its original home at Wates House, via a temporary hub at Hampstead Road into a fully newly completed faculty at 22 Hampstead Road, and the addition of an enormous new facility at Here East, Stratford.
In early 2017, the Bartlett School of Architecture moved back into a transformed home at 22 Gordon Street (formerly Wates House) on UCL’s Bloomsbury Campus. The £30 million refurbishment and extension was carried out by architects Hawkins\Brown as part of UCL’s Bloomsbury Campus Refurbishments project.
The first scans of Wates House were taken in the final weeks before the building was vacated in 2014, and a further 900 scans were added during the 2017 Bartlett Summer Show in its newly re-fabricated home. The resulting data set was assembled and overlaid to create two digital pointcloud models. The dual phases of the film vividly reveal the substantial change in space and scale brought about by the refurbishment.
Capturing these spaces before and after renovations and subsequent occupation by the Faculties with over 2500 scans, detailing every studio nook and corridor crany, the transformation animation overlays the past and the present day school.
Throughout the animation the ambition is to present a sense of The Bartlett as a unique, densely packed, building scale machine for experimentation, creativity and learning.
During the renovation of Gordon Street, The Bartlett occupied a temporary home on Hampstead Road. The former warehouse buildings were an empty shell across 3 floors before the 2014 Hawkins Brown designed renovation took place. The renovated space contained digital fabrication suites, workshops, studios, offices, IT Labs, a cafe, lecture theatres and exhibition space.
The structure is scanned before and after renovation, complete with occupation. Key to the visualisation here is a technique of time swiping across the 3D data set as the camera moves. As the camera moves through space two versions of the building, from different times, are present and interchanged.
Alongside the renovation of the Central London home The Bartlett also opened a new campus in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford called Here East. Here East is a collaborative research and teaching space shared between The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment and UCL Faculty of Engineering Science.
The Here East campus (initially home to the Olympic media village) was captured as an empty husk. Stark and empty the animation brings to life the new cutting edge facilities in fabrication, robotics and prototyping. The video also brings in a series of still life moments from the building’s occupation as tutors deliver lectures, students weld and photograph models, and the robots wizz into gear.
Sound Design - Pascal Wyse
