AJ Student Prize Nominees: Reece Murray from BA Architecture DS3.4 and Rebecca Kelly from MArch DS11

This year’s entries for the AJ Student Prize from the School of Architecture + Cities, University of Westminster were brilliant projects by Reece Murray from Year 3, BA Architecture, Design Studio 3.4 and Rebecca Kelly from MA Architecture, Design Studio 11.

“The AJ Student Prize celebrates the brilliant emerging talent of students graduating from undergraduate and postgraduate architecture courses across the UK.”

AJ
Student: Reece Murray
Studio: Architecture BA, RIBA Part I, DS3.4
Tutors: Paolo Zaide and Tom Budd

Cliffe Marsh – Developing the Periphery

Project Summary:

Cliffe Village, located on the periphery of London is a historically working town with a proportion of the Marsh located north of the site used for munitions production. This project is a community centre located on the periphery between Cliffe village and Cliffe marsh, offering a new approach to how we develop villages non-specific to London. This will be a critique on the proposed intentions for the new Cliffe residential, the project provides the means and opportunity for the residents to dictate the village they want to see.

The project is dictated and influenced by the history of Cliffe as well as its vernacular. I aim to provide the community the means and education for work relating to the construction of the new Cliffe, celebrating the mixture between community, circularity and craft:

  • Community: The client and funding for the project is Medway council, providing a better solution for the proposed 225 homes intended to be built in Cliffe woods. The centre aims to become the solutions for appropriately developing Cliffe, allowing the community to dictate the Cliffe they want to see.
  • Circularity: All materials are sourced locally reducing carbon emissions and embodiment in the construction processes. The materials used is the construction processes are intended to be recycled and renewed throughout their lifetime like the changing of the seasons.
  • Craft: Water reed is taken from Cliffe marsh being used as thatch, with Scots pine sourced from the surrounding site. Recycled steel is taken from the local industrial area with rammed earth made up of the soil taken from site excavations.

This project invites us to pause and question the sensitivity needed when developing areas found on the periphery of London.

Tutors’ statement:

‘There was the red sun, on the low level of the shore, in a purple haze, fast deepening into black; and there was the solitary flat marsh; and far away there were the rising grounds, between which and us there seemed to be no life, save here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull.’

Charles Dickens

Reece’s project to develop a local Kentish village can be read as a graphic novel. Viewed as a continuous scroll rather than as individual images, his delicate models and drawings capture the ‘dark flat wilderness’ of the Hoo peninsula, at the very edge of the Thames Estuary described in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

His proposal is to work with the heritage of Cliffe Village, imagining incremental ways of expanding the community within this unique landscape. This reflects his deep concern for what has been there before, to learn from the local vernacular and to interpret these findings into a contemporary context. Growing the village over time allows Cliffe to re-frame specific fragments of the landscape, atmosphere and culture of this distinct setting.

There is something quiet, caring and personal in this work – it is humble, light in touch and reflects a sensitivity that is rare for a young designer.

Studio Brief Title: Peripheral Landscapes: Reimagining the edges of the Thames Gateway

The UK Government has marked the edges of the Thames Estuary as ground for regeneration and further urbanisation. Connecting the point of Westferry in East London to the Isle of Sheppey and the pier of Southend, this 70 kilometer stretch has also been described as the Thames Gateway. Once home to many hard and commercial industries these lands are characterised by a lack of access to public transport, services and employment, whilst at the same time, the surrounding farm and wild salt marshlands host some of the country’s most fragile ecologies. With tidal flows continuously shifting this landscape, what is this a ‘Gateway’ to? This year Studio 4 explored these peri-urban and the blurred edges of the River Thames. From Gravesend out towards the Hoo Peninsula at the very edge of the Thames Estuary, the story of the river was mapped – its heritage and the unique landscape features that make up this ‘dark flat wilderness’. We challenged traditional notions of boundaries and explored analogue and digital Landscape Urbanism Strategies to plot, adapt and reimagine these unknown fields. The Studio welcomed projects with character, risk and a wonderful sense of speculation.

Student: Rebecca Kelly
Studio: MA Architecture, RIBA Part II, DS11
Tutors: Elantha Evans and Dusan Decermic

The Rig : Towards a New Biome

Project summary:

It’s 2050. Climate Change is Happening. The Rig exists in a future where civilisation is facing the eventuality that the climate crisis has overridden our attempts to restrain a habitual resource-intensive mode of operation. With just a 10m rise in sea level, Yorkshire’s economic extensive, rich, agricultural land – is underwater. Innovative ways of how we inhabit and use its resources must undergo a paradigm shift.

There has been a loss of 4.1 acres of agricultural land and 3.2 acres of residential land from a total of 9 acres in Hornsea. Yorkshire must devise new methods of rehousing, replanting and resupplying. THE FARM (Future-Flooding Alternative Regeneration Microcosm) is an overall design scheme that proposes a cellular regeneration model to address the issues of future-flooding in the Hornsea area caused by climate change.

The concept is based on reversing the roles of land and water, challenging the dichotomous relationship to support life’s survival in the eventuality of farmlands near the coast, rivers and lakes being flooded due to consequence of unchecked climate change. Similarly, housing will be significantly impacted, resulting in the forced relocation of settlements on the current uphill farmland. This will also necessitate alternative agricultural production and cattle breeding methods.

The Rig is an exploratory and propositional response to this call. Providing a new framework for living and farming with minimal environmental impact, it grows and manufactures alternative food sources and other agricultural by-products in abundance using a pixel farming logic not only by approaching farming in a new light but also building, a no waste policy for living. The Rig in the Mere is a prototype of an architectural typology to create green jobs, build a resilient economy, achieve net zero carbon and work with nature to invest in our future.

Tutors’ statement:

Futuristic and visionary, imagined in a world significantly changed, yet only thirty years from now. Hornsea Mere in North Yorkshire was identified and chosen by Rebecca (with her master-planning studio-partner Lavinia Pennino) as a laboratory within which to explore and develop specific, tangible, humane and architectural responses to the devastation that the climate crisis is imminently going to have on our coastal regions. Whilst convincing as designed for Yorkshire, ‘The Rig’ can expand, be multiplied, and located anywhere on our retreating coastline, with its composition (orientation and programme) able to adjust to specific socio-economic and environmental conditions as demanded. Both site-specific and universally applicable to this real-life contemporary concern, the project and Rebecca’s approach to design are ambitious, fearless, and rigorous. Her deep concern for the future of the human condition in the world we are mercilessly depleting of its resources, is expressed here by presenting a new way of living; with the possibility of intelligent cultivation, a new symbiotic relationship with the ‘land’ as ‘water’ and a self-sustaining progressive and productive attitude to the making of the ‘buildings’ themselves, their materiality and longevity.

Studio Brief Title: Northern Soul Productions

In the midst of a world-wide, 4th (technological) ‘revolution’, the ‘climate crisis’, what was a seemingly endemic ‘pandemic’ and the necessity to embrace new ways of living (outside the EU)… DS11, went NORTH… big challenges, fundamental questions… together we considered how a repositioning of the territories, towns, trade and turmoil in the North of England, might serve as an imaginative context for developing new understandings and visions for future human life and inhabitations. Guided by Elantha Evans and Dusan Decermic, the studio is conceived as a supportive, open-minded, self-reflexive and critical framework. By negotiating design ambitions at large geographical or urban scales and their implications as architecture and as inhabited spaces, projects carefully explore the relationships between abstracted urban / rural genetics and unearth unexpected possibilities for material rendering of space. Relevant, sensitive and emotive programmes are developed by each student in response to the contextual, socio economic and political concerns exposed through careful collaborative study and reflection by the studio.

AJ Student Prize 2022 nominees: Reece Murray (BA Arch DS3.4) and Rebecca Kelly (MArch DS11)

Congratulations to Reece Murray from DS3.4 BA (Hons) Architecture and Rebecca Kelly from DS11 MArch on being nominated for this year’s AJ Student Prize.

To read more about their projects visit here.

Book Launch: “The Intrinsic and Extrinsic City” DS11 2008-2017, Wednesday 13th June, 18:30, Marylebone Campus

When: 13th June 2018, 18:30

Where: 35 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LS (Sign in at reception and follow directions)

This studio-as-book is not predicated on a fixed research agenda identified with a design studio’s performative practice or a theory of architecture. MArch 2 Studio DS11 has rather been conceived as a self-critical framework, so this book presents the work of the studio from a critical perspective towards ‘design research’. At its core is a development of a series of urban projects over an eight-year period. The emphasis is focused on the ‘after-life’ of the ‘design-studio’, a subject explored by ex-students’ reflections on the relationship between studio-based education and their subsequent experience. Resisting the view of architectural design produced as a model practice, it is the longer-term effect of a studio education and its embodied research that informs this book. (Editors: Andrew Peckham and Dusan Decermic)

OPEN2017: The Future of Architecture _ Part 2/2

Hello and welcome to Part 2 of our report on OPEN2017.

Here we bring you some of the MArch RIBA Part II, Interior Design (BA Hons) and Architectural Technology (BSc Hons) students’ work, which had been on show in our Marylebone studios from June 15th until July 2nd.

 

MArch RIBA Part II

The MArch programme is underpinned by critical agendas, which through its studio culture, are explored as speculative realities. […] The evolving nature of the city, environmental intervention, digital craft, cinematic investigations of space, chance operations, spaces of conflict, industrial regeneration – these are just some of the themes explored by staff and students. (Darren Deane, Course Leader, OPEN2017 Catalogue)

 

DS10 lead by Toby Burgess and Arthur Mamou-Mani believes that architecture should be fun and is obsessed with giving the students an opportunity to build their own projects in the real world. The studio is focused is on physical experiments tested with digital tools for analysis, formal generation and fabrication. This year, students worked on three different briefs: From Symbols to Systems: Pavilion Proposal, Pavilion Construction and The Big Plan. The three briefs are 3 steps towards a creation of a pavilion for Burning Man 2017. This year’s field trip was to the utopian city of Auroville and the many temples of Hampi Valley.

 

DS11 lead by Andrew Peckham, Dusan Decermic and Elantha Evans, had chosen Budapest as the location and focus of their studio projects this year. This choice was directly related to an initial interest in the constitution of twin cities, where twinning as a theme might be understood at different scales: from a transnational context to that of the city itself, its urban districts and interiors. The studio developed three short study project themes, however the main Year One design project was Reconfiguring the Baths, and the Year Two design thesis associated with Architectures of Stasis and Flux. Both were introduced before the visiting Budapest and conducting a city survey.

 

DS12 lead by Ben Stringer, Peter Barber and Maria Kramer, focused on imagining and designing densely populated and ‘publicly owned’ city island villages in the Thames Estuary, a project that intersects issues of housing, industry, ecology and environment. A key issues that studio deals with is a severe shortage of housing in London and the construction of the Thames Tideway ‘super-sewer’, which will help bring new life to estuary ecology. Both were taken as catalysts for imagining new and better modes of existence and new ways of designing the cities. At the beginning of the second semester students went on a field trip to India, where they visited three big cities: Delhi, Ahmedabad and Mumbai.

 

DS13 lead by Andrew Yau and Andrei Martin operates as an applied think-tank, performing cultural analysis and design research. This year the studio focused on the role, relevance and political agency of architecture in contemporary cultural landscape defined by affect, mood, atmosphere and sensation. This was done through the context of Hong Kong’s urban transformation.

 

DS15 lead by Sean Griffiths, Kester Rattenbury and Ruby Ray Penny studies ‘chance’ as a design method via the transposition into architectural design of the American composer John Cage’s aleatoric techniques for musical composition. The studio’s approach encourages students to divest themselves of existing prejudices, tastes and preconceptions in the development of inventive design processes that challenge the underlying assumption that design is rational, linear and preordained activity predicated on intentionality.

 

 

DS16 lead by Anthony Boulanger, Stuart Piercy and Callum Perry returned from a sabbatical this year to continue to build on an ethos that challenges students to create experimental spatial design project that are informed by a critical response to social, cultural, political and economic contexts with an emphasis on an engagements with materials and an understanding of craft. The year began with an intense 5-week creative collaboration with the ceramics expert Jessie Lee at the Grymsdyke Farm. From there the investigation shifted to Porto, Portugal, which became a base for the main individual design project, where students conceived their own briefs and conducted their research.

 

DS18 lead by Lindsay Bremner and Roberto Botazzi has been participating in the research agenda of Monsoon Assemblages since 2016, a 5-year ERC funded project taking place in three cities in South Asia: Chennai, Dhaka and Delhi. These cities are places where neoliberal development is conspiring with changing monsoon patterns to produce floods, heatwaves, outbreaks of disease or water shortages and making urban life increasingly vulnerable.  In 2016/17 the studio began simulating monsoon rain as a way to develop its programme and aesthetics. The students visited Chennai where they were hosted by the School or Architecture and Planning at Anna University.

 

DS20 lead by Gabby Shawcross and Stephen Harty uses film to design and represent architecture. The aim of the studio is to explore animated relationships between architecture and occupants, simulate moving experiences of space, describe dynamic events and speculate on future scenarios. The year the students looked at motion in architecture and architecture in motion. They made journeys through space (quick direct routes and choreographed spatial sequences) in search of architecture that permits encounter and elicits delight.

 

DS21 lead by Clare Carter, Gill Lambert and Nick Wood is interested in edgelands. Working within a post-industrial landscape, the studio made a proposition for revitalising and re-imagining the town of Doncaster and its former mining colonies. The year began with a forensic study of the land, resulting in richly illustrated mappings, followed by production of artefacts which came as a result of working with the material culture of local communities. The major design project Doncaster Works had students speculating on the idea of a resurgent Doncaster, whether to make a new civic space, repurpose an existing structure or suggest a new industrial infrastructure for the town and its environs.

 

DS22 lead by Nasser Golzari and Yara Sharif aims to create a strong link between the practice, research and academia, so this year the studio continued ‘research by design’ journey across ‘absent’ and uncertain landscapes where time and mobility have become irrelevant. Looking at the Mediterranean sea as a prototype for hyper-connected and enduringly fragile world of present, leading to the edges of the Red Sea, Dead Sea and Persian gulf, the students tried to unpack the and expose the hidden layers and dynamic potential of coastal cities.

 

Light and Flight is a collaborative project between DS22, Palestine Regeneration Team (PART) and Golzari-NG Architects, in collaboration with Amos Trust. Exhibited at the OPEN2017, the project was also part of London Festival of Architecture (LFA). The installation celebrates notion of memory – this year’s theme at the LFA.

 

Interior Architecture (BA Hons)

Interior architecture is a distinct context-based practice concerned with re-reading, re-using and altering an architectural shell. Whether at the scale of the city, a building, or a room, the ‘interiorist’ always starts with something and within something. By altering those structures, Interior Architecture allows a building to have many different lives. London is our campus and projects this year included study spaces in the Victoria and Albert Museum, installations at Wilton’s Music Hall, live-work dwellings on Columbia Road and a broadcasting facility in Unity House, Woolwich. (Ro Spankie, Course Leader, OPEN2017 Catalogue)

 

Year 1: lead by Lara Rettondini (Module Leader), Sue Phillips, Yota Adilenidou, Allan Sylvester, Matt Haycocks

In the first year, students on the BA Interior Architecture course are introduced to underlying concepts and principles associated with the discipline and learn fundamental processes, skills and techniques relevant to conceive and develop, resolve and communicate spatial design proposals. They are also get to grips with the use of graphic design, CAD and 3D modelling software, as well as the Faculty’s Fabrication Lab. The projects undertaken over the course of the first year range from short-term tasks in semester one, followed by a study space design for researcher-in-residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, to the interior design of a small building in semester two.

 

Year 2: lead by Matt Haycocks, Mike Guy, Mohamad Hafeda, Tania Lopez Winkler, Alessandro Ayuso (semester one includes: Julia Dwyer, Diony Kypraiou, Ro Spankie) 

This year the students were asked to look at two very different buildings: Wilton’s (a Victorian music hall in London’s East End) and Unity House (a marine engineering workshop on the banks of the Thames in Woolwich). Both studio projects were focused on the role of the existing building fabric in the process of regeneration, but also the role politics and the place play in interpreting the present and imagining the future. In semester one the students joint the third year students to work on the ideas related to domesticity and home, then worked on design proposals for the temporary inhabitation of Wilton’s Music Hall and finally in semester two they devised their own proposals for the adaptation and reuse of Unity House.

 

Year 3: lead by Ro Spankie, Alessandro Ayuso, Diony Kypraiou, Matt Haycocks (semester one includes: Julia Dwyer, Mike Guy, Mohamad Hafeda, Tania Lopez Winkler)

Third year students started this academic year working together with second year students on a joint project Home Acts. The aim was to explore an idea of home constructed through acts and rituals, rather than brick and mortar. Their own experience of home was then rehoused to a public realm, culminating into an installation and/or performance at Wilton’s Music Hall. The final Major Project in BA Architecture is self derived with students selecting their site and setting their programme.

 

Architectural Technology (BSc Hons)

Architectural Technology offers specialism in the technological, environmental, material and detailing decisions necessary to solve design problems. It requires sound understanding of design process, design and architectural composition, construction technology, and management tools for the effective communication of design information. (Virgina Rammou, Course Leader, OPEN2017 Catalogue)

This year, the second year students were asked to design a nursery school for 85 children and the third year students a new building for White Cube Galleries.

Year 2: lead by Adam Thwaites, Paul Kalkhoven, Tabatha Harris Mills, Virginia Rammou

Year 3: lead by Adam Thwaites, Paul Smith, Tabatha Harris Mills, Virginia Rammou

 

Make sure you like and follow our Instagram and Twitter pages, as we plan to reflect back on the OPEN2017 throughout the month of July.

Happy summer everyone!

Cristina Popescu’s project on AJ pin up

An MArch, DS11 student Cristina Popescu‘s proposed water research centre project on Obudai Island in Budapest was featured on AJ pin up.

AJ pin up is the AJ Student Tumblr – gallery of students work aimed at showing “what tomorrow’s architects are working on.”

Browse their gallery: http://architectsjournal.tumblr.com/