All architecture students have an idea of what a contract is to a varying degree. Those of us with some experience of working in a practice know that there exist contractors and contracts to be signed with them, and that the other party (it appears) will always try to do everything in their power to make you breach the contract, so as to get out of fulfilling their side of it, later suggesting that you should have seen it coming. There seems to be something inhumane about a contract – is it not some physical proof that we are not prepared to trust each other? And with the construction industry being as corrupt as it is, surely we should be working by the traditional mafia rules? – as, to some degree, we do.
In the weeks leading up to the signing, all these thoughts were reverberating in our minds like unaccepted contract clauses bouncing between inboxes. We knew, of course, that the contracts we were about to sign would be quite different to those mentioned above. They are of a more delicate and poetic substance and involve making decisions about the feelings of others as well as our own. They are an exercise to make us believe that we are deciding our future and how it were to unfold over the next six months. A somewhat terrifying thought.
The Free Unit contract is an agreement of understanding between each student and the university, although it involves many other people, to crystallise the idea of the project to be carried out that year. It is like the outline brief all other students are faced with when they enter a unit. Between its pages we pledge that the varied, vast-spanning concepts for our projects would stand up to the expectations of our Friends and to the criticism of our juries, and to the disbelief of the RIBA. We wrote clauses, about existing political context, about our imagined clients and about their dreams, filled them with maps never previously seen, diagrams of future working processes, games and photographs, and it all seemed just a game.
Then quite suddenly it came to the presentation and the signing day. Being un-ritualistic as a group, we were suddenly faced with the power of the ritual, and the agreement we were entering into. On the afternoon of Thursday 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night, a distinct possibility arose: that our projects may not be deemed acceptable after all, and that our contracts would not be signed, by the school or by our witnesses and external critics.
Our guest witnesses were Lucy Musgrave (General Public Agency), and Anne Markey (ASD Projects), as well as our tutors, Robert Mull, Catrina Beevor and Peter Carl. A five minute presentation is not enough to explain the political and social context of Prizren in Kosovo (Crystal Whitaker); a miniature representation of an entire Favela in Rio (Joao Andre Wrobel); a multimedia take on the skylines of London (Alex Scott-Whitby); a retreat for those suffering from bi-polar disorder (Huma Ahmad); plants as professors in fertile learning environments for schools (Thomas Randall-Page); the future of the Redundant Architects Recreation Association (Sam Potts); or an innovative take on re-use through a library book (Rachael Marshall). Neither was it sufficient to explain the long-term creative transformation of acres of land in the Veneto (Caterina Da Via); tackling the decline of an industrial town in Anglesey (Elaine Radcliffe); Baked Potato World (Guy Shenton); the problem of CO2 legislation for all existing London housing stock (Jason Lawrence); a fairytale northern bathing idyll full of horror stories (Victoria Wagner); the re-invigoration of rural relationships around an English Estate (Jing Lu); or an archive for contemporary Russian culture in Moscow (me).
You can imagine our surprise and relief when our witnesses turned out to have a useful opinion on every single project. With a variety of subject matter so vast to draw from and the break-neck speed of presentations it was quite a relief to take our contracts in our hands, two copies, and gingerly inscribe first our own names, and then to see them passed around the witnesses and other contract parties to add their respective signatures.
The rest of the evening went off with a bang as Alex launched an official part of his contract into the night sky: wrapped around a firework.
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