Unit 2

Unit Brief

I will teach each of you directly, while your fellow students listen, on a single day per week. Design will start from the first moment.  For each of the two projects, I will give you an area brief, a site plan, some photos, a little background information and a short lecture. I will leave a great deal of reality intact in each project but strip away restrictions so that you can think freely and make investigative, buildable architecture.

The first will be a scheme of market housing in a rural suburban location in Pewsey, Wiltshire, a project of ours that is being built right now and we will visit.

In November, we will go to Rotterdam and Amsterdam, hire bicycles and look at Dutch housing, including two projects by my office. This is intended to show what organised Dutch culture produces. It may or may not affect your project, that will be up to you. It will however broaden your knowledge of housing. While in Rotterdam we will visit one of the existing locations of the next project, SKVR (Stichting Kunstzinnige Vorming Rotterdam) and a site where you will design a new building. SKVR holds public classes in drama, writing, painting and many other subjects. It is education as pure enjoyment. SKVR will be for the second semester, but I will ask you to turn it over in your mind while you design the housing. 

The interaction of private, public and local life in varying ways in all architecture is a theme, but the heart of the studio will be the development of your design skills and thinking. I start from your views and show how they can make architecture, and architectural ideas. In this way, I believe, architecture can be both diverse and intelligent, and individuals can be freely creative while socially responsible.