Teaching

Brief

The act of making means engaging with an idea that can be made, unmade, and reconsidered before being realised. Model-making has a critical role in formulating and realising an idea. Materiality and form are developed through discussions while we construct the maquette. Nothing is fixed in this process; our ideas are continually evolving as we transfer them into physical form. Every model or drawing embodies a design decision and acts as a catalyst for future phases of the architectural process.

Each student was given a drawing from the Drawing Matter Collection and asked to respond to it. This began an exploration of what the drawing represented and its relationship to medium, paper or canvas. The intention was that this elective would help define the use of the drawing as a vehicle to produce a maquette as a tool of transformation. The model embodies an idea beyond the drawing, developing and transposing our first thoughts. The aim was to address scale and materiality as a form of representation and use the historical references of drawing to develop a new form of representation.

Student work by Allison Wenner, Bushra Aumir, Christina Xie, Genevieve Gary, Jeremy Huelin, Kate Heath, Rosenda Au, Sang Hun Luke Cho

in collaboration with Freddie Phillipson

Brief

This year’s thesis is an exploration of placemaking through the cultural and historic identity of a material edge beyond form - from the edge of a country, to the edge of a city, to the edge of a building. As we find ourselves confined to our homes and cities this year, we see this as an opportunity to look at the significance and material context of the city and the way that materials form our human experience of a boundary. We can discover so much through the material language of a place that defines how the morphology and typography of sites evolves. The importance of how settlements and cities evolve historically is often formed through the identity of the material that forms this context but also the scale and content of its application.
The material we will focus on is stone. Through collaborations and visits we will work with experts to immerse the unit in a material approach to developing our thesis. We aim to think through a material application to develop a critical and thorough response to building and placemaking through the limitations and possibilities of stone.
We will move through three “edge” conditions that relate to our experience of place and identity.

We will evolve a language of architecture through a process of experimentation, making and material research. This will embed the work of Term 1 into the final thesis which will reconsider our relationship to place.

Student work by Jessica Guy, Manvag Bhogal, Fion Parry, Manta Patel, Adriesse Laurence

with Dr. Helen Thomas

Brief

The city and the countryside are intimately connected in ways that are mostly invisible to the naked eye. This year, we will invent ways of revealing some of these relationships through architectural means, working with a site on the Craignish Peninsular on the west coast of Scotland to develop an approach to settlement in this remote landscape.

We will begin to develop strategies for observation from the first day, during a visit to the Drawing Matter Collection in Somerset. Soon afterwards, we will travel to Scotland, first to Glasgow, and then to inhabit the site for a short while. There, through group workshops and individual investigation we will consider who uses the site on a permanent basis, from fishermen, farmers and yachtsmen to retirees and artists – and how their different perceptions and views of it make up a multi-faceted reality. A more conventional measurement of its physical dimensions alongside that of its atmosphere will culminate in the construction of a temporary structure recorded through drawings, writing, models, films and performances. These first observations will provide the context for a small temporary structure involving reuse of a ruined or unused fragment on the site.
The investigations into the atmosphere and experience of being in Craignish will be developed into strategies for dwelling, made tangible by the legislation and planning law relevant to a real site, including restrictions on protected views and intervention into areas of significant beauty. The second part of the year takes this work and develops it in the context of a collective housing brief for a small permanent community on the Craignish Peninsular. Contributing to the design process and focussing on issues of economies of material and methods of construction, we will collaborate with the University of Évora’s Architecture and Landscape school. This workshop will take place at Álvaro Siza’s Malagueira housing project during our field trip to Lisbon and Évora in Portugal.

Student work by Rueben Roberts, Harpel Singh, Thom Wood-Jones