Interior Architecture Year 2 ARCHIVE
Tutors: Era Savvides (Year Lead), Alessandro Ayuso, Sophie Ungerer and Jamie Whelan
Era Savvides is founding director of creative collective Urban Radicals. Her design philosophy centres around a materially-driven, crafted approach to digital design and the creative use of robotic fabrication within the built environment.
Alessandro Ayuso is Senior Lecturer whose studio-based practice and research focus on the intersection of representation, architecture and the body.
Sophie Ungerer is an architect with a particular interest in the threshold between the interior and the city. She is currently part of an interdisciplinary project which explores ideas of predictions, death and memory through Blake’s poetry.
Jamie Whelan is committed to the creation of architecture that is embedded in the tradition of craft and making. Jamie Whelan Studio focuses on the fundamentals – light, space, material – to help our ambitious clients realise creative solutions to their projects.
Culture, Alteration, Material and Detail
This year, our year 2 students looked for the materially sensuous and the impeccably crafted. Our studio focused on poetic, transformational spaces and interiors that have the potential to become catalysts for change. The year unfolded into two inter-related semesters, aiming to engage students with material experimentation and craft as drivers for sustainable design thinking. This allowed students to explore how small-scale processes can influence large-scale spaces and helped develop a deeper understanding of environmentally-conscious material and crafted modes of operating within interior architecture.
In the first semester, we celebrated our return to campus and the city by spreading across London in search of material and immaterial aspects of urban ‘softness’. Through a series of rigorous and playful design processes, the students tested themselves as architectural flâneurs, gathering information directly from the urban realm and applying this to the design of meaningful spatial proposals, responding to the needs of marginalised communities within gentrified pockets of London.
The second semester was an opportunity to focus on constructing spatial experiences and designing atmospheres for flagship concept stores in the retail sector. Through a series of process-driven material experimentation workshops, students were given the opportunity to develop a personal understanding of a set of seemingly incompatible materials and use this to construct innovative material applications and assemblages that would inform the production of immersive, atmospheric spatial proposals, responding to the creative agendas of emerging London-based fashion designers setting up shop in New Bond Street.
Archive of Year 2’s work from previous years:
