In their first year of the MArch, students explore the relationship between architecture and the city.
This year, following an established multi-year pedagogical framework entitled Remote Discovery, the studio looked at contemporary London, and its kaleidoscopic condition: a dynamic pattern of separate fragments – infrastructures, districts, highly repetitive urban types, social and ethnic groups, ecosystems – involved in never ending cycles of transformation and renovation.
The studio was structured around a series of interlinked modules.
The first semester started with ARCH401 Design Culture: a series of consecutive assignments and seminars which introduced methods of spatial awareness and analysis. In theARCH402 Urban Survey and Strategy module, students were first involved in an intensive work of survey, physical modelling, and in-depth analysis of the sites and their urban contexts; secondly, they developed socially and environmentally sustainable strategies of urban densification, through innovative mixed-use housing typologies.
In second semester’s Arch403 Architectural Design module, large “urban” architectures were brought to full architectural resolution, by focusing on the architectural composition of structural, circulation, fire safety, and environmental strategies. In the final Arch404 Detail module, individual buildings were developed in their full technological, material, and environmental components.
Three studios addressed the relationship between housing and the city of London, each one through a different lens:
Studio1, Living Garages, led byPietro Pezzani and Tony Lees, worked on a series of council housing estates built between the 1960s and the 1970s in the north London borough of Islington. Focusing on the estates’ largely unused integrated garages plinths, the studio tested radical operations of demolition, addition, reconfiguration, densification and repurpose;
Studio2, The Ideal City,led byMarco Iuliano, Caoilinn McConville and Jack Dunne, sought to rediscover the fundamentals of architecture and urban planning, reconfiguring the relationship between humans and nature in search of a contemporary ‘ideal city’;
Studio3, Ebb & Flow, led byKaterina Antonopoulou and James Jones, looked at the layered history London’s Docklands. and. The studio interrogated the complex architectural legacy of the Canary Wharf development, and the future of its urban imaginaries, by situating itself at the intersection of representational and material practices.
Throughout the four modules, student attended classes and received tailored tutorials on Environmental Design (Spyros Stravoravdis), Structural Design (Carlos Medel Vera), and Detailing (Simon Davies). The studio experience was enriched by study trips to London and Milan, Italy.
Alongside the studio, taught modules in Urban Design Theory (ARCH406, Fei Chen), Practice Management & Contract Law (ARCH405, Jack Dunne), and Sustainability in Practice (ARCH410, Stephen Finnegan and Spyros Stravoravdis), provided further support to students’ academic development, while Research Methods in Architecture (ARCH480, Barnabas Calder) prepared the ground for the work on dissertations to be carried out in the second year of the programme.