Design Studio (Two) One BA Architecture

Corinna Dean & Ursula Dimitriou

Corinna Dean is a member of the Emerging Territories Research Group. She founded the Archive for Rural Contemporary Architecture, ARCA, and published Slacklands. Her current research looks at narratives around contamination in the River Lea, for which she is contributing to the British Council Gender Ecologies project in collaboration with a creative team from Pakistan. www.arca-projects.com

Ursula Dimitriou is a practicing architect and researcher. Her fields of expertise are public space, commons, design and social sustainability, grassroots urban practices, theatrical and ephemeral practices in the urban space. She is the co-director of studio SYN.

DS(2)1: The Ecological Roundabout: Resource and Waste

Students: Labiba Ahmed, Farzana Aktaer, Laura Alfararjeh, Selen Bayraktar, Maria Boanta, Aaishah Boutrig, Hattie Cosgrove, Mehek Khan, Effie King, Mohammed Manjra, Andreas Nicou, Illiana Pappa, Nirmit Pate, Umay Phildius, Pablo Sanchez, Ceylin Sozer, Matias Sterian, Ermis Tsolos, Natalie Warnaski

We have a limited amount of resources on our planet. Students in studio DS(2)1 engaged with what it means to design in this new era of limited resource management, a rejection of fossil fuels and a focus on how to explore materials by paying attention to how and where they are resourced.

In order to work in a ‘resourceful’ manner, we engaged with the Live client Bulmer Brick and Tile Company in Suffolk, (BBT), a unique example of a company supplying the raw material from quarry to finished building product. This is a form of circular design and students mapped and interpreted every stage of the process, from quarry to kiln.

Bulmer Bricks create a product which is carbon heavy due to the firing process to finish the bricks and tiles, but one which will have an embodied life of centuries. Students expanded their understanding of materials through these lenses as well as exploring the making of materials.

The director of Bulmer was our client. He is an educator who regularly works on conservation and heritage courses. ne of the topics we focused on is waste as a positive component with vibrant agency; whether this is brick dust, broken bricks, residual energy or heat.

For Semester One students designed iterations of visitors’ perspectives on Bulmer, starting with a viewing platform and developing this to a structure which played out the visitors’ engagement with the site. In Semester Two students designed a School for Alternative Technologies, incorporating technologies such as construction and craft technology or ecological technological approaches, such as regenerative farming or biotechnology.

Guest Critics: Roudaina Alkhani, Lana Fattah, Barbora Klaska Marcus Lee, Gabriella Schutz, Blessing Suliman, Riane Tarik, Sude Yilmaz