Going to Eleven

I've just been reading an awesome new publication by students from the Bartlett School of Architecture's Unit 11, whose instructors are Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Augmented Landscapes fame.

[Image: The "House of Drink" by Margaret Bursa, Unit 11].

The publication itself is called ELEVEN, and it will apparently be published twice a year; this particular issue has the running theme of "Field Operations." While there is some brief theorizing about "guidelines of actions," and how those guidelines can frame architectural space, it's the individual projects that deserve attention.
What's inside?

[Images: A display of Unit 11 projects; all images by Stonehouse Photographic].

There are "prophylactic wars and military utopias" by Luke Pearson (Pearson's work, of course, having been previously explored on BLDGBLOG); a hydrological reengineering of the U.S./Mexico border by Joel Geoghegan; and weird 3D scans of the abyss, via the opiated writings of Thomas de Quincey, by Rae Whittow-Williams:

...the aim of the project translates the various hallucinations of Thomas De Quincey into the envelope of [an] existing house. Each environment is developed using differing techniques and processes of collaging space, forced perspective and iterative modelling in order to create a series of scale-less and absorbing hallucinatory spaces.

There are resonating buildings full of "drone pipes" and "sound bags" by Chris Wilkinson; the "rapid prototyping of a hyper-real Manhattan" by Alex Kirkwood; replicated replicas; Fabergé menageries; and much more.

[Image: From "The Survey of London" by Will Jefferies, Unit 11].

It only costs £3, and it includes a foreword by Sam Jacob. Jacob suggests, praising the students for their initiative in starting the publication, that "we can argue – despite what Tafuri says – for the importance of architects writing their own histories, publishing their own agendas and documenting their own landscapes. By confusing (or fusing) production, reproduction and dissemination with the practice of architecture an expanded, speculative field opens up."
You can buy it at the Architectural Association, RIBA, and Magma, as well as via smoutallen.com.