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UG Architecture Studio 04: City as a School

Studio brief 

Studio 4 will be working in London, proposing new school buildings on urban sites. Engaging with real projects and stakeholders, we will develop proposals that imagine new types of learning space and interrogate preconceptions about school environments.  

In England, 90% of schools have significant defects, with children learning in cold, leaky, cramped and even dangerous buildings. Government initiatives to address this value cheap and quick over imaginative and long-lasting. School-aged children have suffered over the last two years, with long absences and hasty adaptations to meet Covid guidelines. This summer, extreme temperatures also saw many schools close.

Our schools are neither fit for purpose nor future-proof, and the potential for architecture to inspire and bring joy and creativity to learning has been largely forgotten. 

School Street

We will start by working on the threshold of schools to support the creation of school streets. Designs will identify and manipulate ordinary aspects of the walk to school making small scale, playful interventions in the public realm. Proposals will be tactile and engaging and begin to test material and construction ideas that will later be explored further in the school building proposal.

Study trip

The study trip will bring us to the Netherlands to explore radical visions of the twentieth and twenty-first century, including the Apollo School by Herman Hertzberger, which displays a range of spaces to encourage activities outside the classroom.

Main project

Studio 4 will challenge students to conceive a new school building in a constrained site in London. Beginning at the urban scale, students will immerse themselves in the site and instinctively propose a first massing before moving to the scale of the room. Physical models will be used to develop the spatial and tectonic qualities of the proposals encouraging students to think about the relationship between the constructional language and expression of the building.

Throughout the year, workshops and debates will be organised to develop our understanding of school architecture, construction methods and develop key skills, such as image and model-making, photography, hand-drawing and lino printing.

illustration of cluster of green trees with white screens and seats in between

Details

Course
Tutors

Fran Balaam
Ingrid Petit
Where Goulston Street
When Tuesday and Friday

Architecture studios

 
1/2
line drawing of an internal elevation of a debating chamber, with an architectural construction set within the space

UG Architecture Studio 01: Building for Goldilocks: The Hot, the Cool, and the Just Right

Owain Williams, Holly Crosbie and Kieran Wardle

Studio One will work with old and new buildings to propose a thoughtful, adaptive architecture to serve an uncertain future.

Collage exploring relationship between street and home entrances

UG Architecture Studio 02: After City 3 - Reversals

Charlotte Harris and Colin O’Sullivan

Studio 2 returns to Portugal to examine the changes associated with our post-pandemic world. The pull of the city to the detriment of rural life has been a long-established reality here but now that many have accepted a more fluid relationship with work, study and home life, has the seemingly inexorable pull of the city been slowed or even reversed? What can our cities learn from the past three years and how must our buildings respond to the change?
Tables in factory space, steam, lit from above. People in yellow uniforms

UG Architecture Studio 03: Weaving the Factory Village

Sandra Denicke-Polcher and Jane McAllister. Academic Facilitator for Calabria: Rita Elvira Adamo

This project imagines a textile factory set within the fabric of Belmonte, a partially uninhabited hill village in Calabria, Southern Italy. It is intended to entangle small, medium, and large scales of tectonic, social and cultural processes. It is in favour of architecture as a social ecology as opposed to picturesque conservation.
illustration of cluster of green trees with white screens and seats in between

UG Architecture Studio 04: City as a School

Fran Balaam, Ingrid Petit

The studio will be proposing new types of school buildings for London. Working in the context of an uncertain future, we will design at a range of scales to explore the potential of school architecture to inspire and engage children and be resilient to changing needs and climate. Robustness and longevity will underpin the studio’s work with each proposal developing a close understanding of materials, tectonics and construction methods.
10 metre diameter ovoid section of the facade of a disused building cut free allowing it to rotate

UG Architecture Studio 05: Existing/Proposed: Making the most of what is there already

Theo Thysiades

In the context of the current energy, climate, and cost of living crises, we will explore the possibilities of the conversion and creative reuse of existing buildings in North East London.