UG Architecture Studio 02: Spaces of Birth – Spaces of Death

Studio brief

In our continuing efforts to understand the changing nature of our cities and the needs of their inhabitants we will look closely at small adjustments and larger infrastructural change to some of their least examined places. You will propose small temporary structures and later, larger more permanent buildings that respond to your individual and collective findings.

The theme of our year will centre on research by AAD Cities Research Group, University College London and Glasgow University who are investigating the places where people give birth and die: usually hospitals and birth centres.

You will propose changes and additions to these spaces so that the profound transitional journeys of birthing and dying are made better for those experiencing them.

Field trip

In October the studio will travel to Venice and visit the 2023 Architecture Biennale. We will spend a long period carefully examining the works included and trying to grapple with the issues raised by Lesley Lokko, the current curator.

Assemblage

Students are invited to consider assemblage as a form of map making and as a conceptual framework for proposals. The process of mapping, which includes reviewing through collaborative workshops, is on an equal footing to the artefacts made. In a sense, you will construct (pre-field trip) and reconstruct (post-field trip) the site in the studio, and as a group you will derive new insight into the location. This process will lead to your individual design proposals which will explore new spaces in relation to a wider and shared landscape. 

You will develop your own techniques in making, capturing the qualities of a particular location. Through modelling, sketching, montage and writing you will begin to be propositional.  We encourage you to be more deliberate and conscious in this creative act, drawing out architectural interventions that offer something special to the locations you have been recording. With ideas and ways of working gathered from investigations in Venice, you will be encouraged to develop strategies of conglomeration and projects that allow for spaces to deliberately conflict and converge; propositions that have the capacity to absorb additions, creating a social architecture with the potential for activities to take place within and around a building. 

silhouette of child against window through Indian fabric

Details

Course
Tutors Colin O’Sullivan
Charlotte Harris
Where Goulston Street
When Tuesday and Friday

Architecture studios

 
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