THEME:
This year we continue to help students develop their own experimental research practices, with a special interest in how ideas become things, and things become ideas.

Our brief this year examines how architecture can operate between necessity and delight. It asks how practical needs might become sites of cultural and sensory richness. At a time of ecological constraint, we focus on how architecture might draw out forms of pleasure from limited means, proposing alternatives that are both responsible and compelling. Central to this is a methodological interest in how ideas take material form, and how making, in turn, generates ideas.

Over the year, students developed design research through experimental modes of working, with a research project running alongside and informing their architectural proposals. Students began with a site in London, using workshops to establish positions, programmes and lines of enquiry. Alongside this, each student identified or developed a practical skill such as cooking, instrument-making, or performance, as a way of testing how knowledge from outside architecture might inform their design work. Through iterative experiments, drawings and models, their projects have explored how conceptual intentions can be embodied directly in architectural proposals.

Students are working across analogue and digital media, encouraging careful use of computational tools alongside physical making and drawing. The students have also worked collaboratively throughout the year, on a group site model.

We visited Venice earlier this year to study the work of Carlo Scarpa and Canova, alongside the craft of gondola design and construction. We also visited Do Ho Suh’s studio in North London and the Drawing Matter archive to encounter examples of work where ideas are embedded directly within material, process and form.

IMAGE CREDIT:
The Bell X-22 plane (experimental aircraft).