Hello, Here: (Cantab) Index Vol. 1
Edited by Dr Tina di Carlo and Dr Sofia Singler
Designed by David Hurtado
Printed in London, June 2024
148 p., 22.54 × 32.55 cm
ISSN 3049–5059
The Department celebrates the launch of the eponymous catalogue which accompanies the Department’s end-of-year exhibition Hello, Here: (Cantab) Index Vol. 1.
Presenting hundreds of works produced by both undergraduate and graduate students at the Department, the catalogue suggests that Cambridge’s architectural pedagogy carries forward the thinking and practice of ‘an Other Tradition’.
Colin St John Wilson, who served as Professor of Architecture at the Department (1975–89) and designed the famed extension in which the exhibition is on display, famously characterised the ‘Other Tradition of modern architecture’ as a critique of modernism born within the movement itself, in reaction to its unrelenting utilitarianism and abstraction. The ‘Other Tradition,’ according to Wilson, embodies a ‘dynamic relationship in which not only is the new derived in part form the past but, by extending the scope of the traditional, changes (in turn) our understanding of the past’.[1] It consciously collapses pasts and futures into one another, resulting in a ‘true modernism not only of Eliot and Joyce but also of Matisse and Picasso, in which dazzling powers of invention hustle with ancestral figures’.[2]
This Other Tradition—which draws strength from its refusal to approach the world and life in polarised, dichotomous terms—reverberates in the ethos and work of the Department to this day. The past and the future, craft and technology, the beautiful and purposeful, and practice and theory, are all woven together in the work produced at Scroope Terrace.
The works produced in this spirit during the 2023–24 academic year are celebrated in the catalogue, edited jointly by Drs Tina di Carlo and Sofia Singler, and designed by David Hurtado. All degree programs offered by the Department of Architecture, from BA to PhD, are featured in the catalogue, making it a record of a year’s worth of collective work and learning.
Editors: Dr Tina di Carlo and Dr Sofia Singler
Graphics: David Hurtado