Studios

Studios and Units 2022-23

An undergraduate 'studio' is a smaller study group taken by Year 2 and 3 architecture students at the University's School of Art, Architecture and Design. A postgraduate 'unit' is a smaller study group taken by students of the Architecture RIBA 2 – MArch course. Each studio or unit is led by a member of academic staff, often in association with a professional practitioner or organisation. At the start of the year, the leaders of each studio and unit present their studio's themes, position and approach to all students during a market day. Students then choose their preferred studio from the wide range of issues, methods of working and types of projects available.

Studio Image: Unknown lady, on steps outside a home in Kingston Jamaica. Dissertation Studio 03: Fashioning the African Diaspora, lead by Elli Michaela Young

Archive studios

Our studios evolve year on year. You can see details of older studios in our studio archive.

Undergraduate Architecture

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.

Postgraduate Architecture

1/2

Colour photo of gridded glass facade above wooden structure with trees, cyclist and pedestrian

PG Architecture Unit 02: Building in the Landscape of the City

Tony Fretton and Jillian Jones

To design an Embassy in Park Square, a large enclosed garden in the south of Regents Park, consisting of a Chancellery, the offices of the Embassy and a Residence, the home of the Ambassador and their family, and a place of social and political gathering. There is space enough on the site to allow design in radically sustainable materials and processes.

Exhibition design showing how light and materials combine to create an atmosphere

PG Architecture Unit 03: New Ways of Seeing

Pippa Nissen, Marie-Lise Oulmont, Andrea Hickey, Kate Coghlan

This year our studio will be designing a major public building in East London by the Regent’s Canal. The brief will be to design an art gallery or museum, that includes an archive and learning spaces around a collection of objects or art. The response will need to challenge traditional display; discussion, debate and learning embedded in the whole. The studio’s theme builds on our work at Nissen Richards Studio, where we have a particular focus on cultural buildings and narrative spaces.

image in 3 parts showing virtual reality environments

PG Architecture Unit 04: The Palimpsest of Futures Past

Jonas Lundberg, Nate Kolbe

Working on several UNESCO world heritage sites in Sicily as an integral part of provincial and rural development in collaboration with invested actors. You are asked to imagine, design, and develop a time-based architecture adding a layer to the historical palimpsest of an UNESCO world heritage site. Unit04 urges you to regain the agency of architecture as the harbinger of change, delight and vision adding equally precious layers to the present and the near future to the palimpsest of the site.

Elevational view of a run-down housing block with balconies, with a motorcyclist passing in front

PG Architecture Unit 06: After the Arrival City

Dr Bo Tang and Robert Barnes

“Never demolish, always transform. Transformation is the opportunity of doing more and better with what is already existing. The demolishing is a decision of easiness and short term. It is a waste of many things — a waste of energy, a waste of material, and a waste of history. Moreover, it has a very negative social impact. For us, it is an act of violence.” Lacaton & Vassal, Winners of the Pritzker Architecture Prize 2021. Unit 06 will explore housing and social infrastructure in Athens

brick wall with weeds and yellow flowers growing at base

PG Architecture Unit 07: Poetic Pragmatism I: Housing in the Hinterlands of Hackney

David Grandorge, Ted Swift

The studio will continue to address how global heating impacts upon the practice and production of architecture, in this case, through the design of low and medium-rise housing for social rent in east London.

A collage of figures inspired by Matisse

PG Architecture Unit 08: 余白と間 – yohaku and ma

Takero Shimazaki, Paolo Emilio Pisano and Karabo Turner

Starting from the concepts of 余白と間 – yohaku and ma, we will focus on existing sites in London – proposing a future life for overlooked buildings, structures, and landscapes to incorporate new public programmes. We will continue to work with the notion of re-use – challenging ourselves to propose ambitious, civic architecture using an economy of means within our current climate crisis.

Cobbled lane with medieval stone buildings and church spire

PG Architecture Unit 09: HOUSE AND GARDEN

Stephen Taylor, Giles Townshend

This year Unit 9 will undertake live projects, focusing its attention on the remote hill town of Florac in the French mountains of the Cevennes National Park. Working with the local mayor we will design a cluster of houses, gardens and workshops.

Wooden planks milled from repurposed London trees that are given a second life, ensuring the carbon stays in the wood

PG Architecture Unit 12: Second Life

Peter St John, Fabienne Sommer, Ben Speltz and James Hand

The studio will investigate the theme of Second Life in the context of the design of buildings. Our interest is wider than the theme of Reuse and will address the broader question of a Renewal of our approach to construction, moving towards a future where buildings are indivisible components of a regenerating ecological system. With an interest in imagining alternatives to our problematic present, our main project will be the design of a timber building for a Housing Collective in south London.

Dissertation Studios

1/2

Installation view The History of My Pleasure, Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago). Collage of photographs on fabric on wall dividers.

Studio 01: The Pensive Image

Aikaterini Gegisian

Do images in the information age displace texts and become the main vehicle for expressing thought? How do images communicate? What are they are saying? Can images write histories?

Studio 02: Sport and Aesthetics

Ajay Hothi

Dissertation Studio 02 will examine the concept of aesthetics as applied within that most everyday activity: sport.

A painting by Wangechi Mutu, showing a mythical creature in a pink landscape embracing a white snake-like animal

Studio 03: The Bone Pile. Archive and Myth as Methodology

Ania Dabrowska

Starting with the archive as a ‘commons of imagination,’ Studio 03 is testing the bonds between the personal and the collective, the interconnection of heterogeneous histories, archival temporalities and deep places of myth and storytelling.

Tents in front of St Paul's during the Occupy Movement 2012

Studio 04: Public Protest – Spaces of negotiation

Carl Fraser

How do we shape the city? How do we claim, occupy and inform spaces as people who live, work and play? All places have a history of negotiation over territory and its use – which helps to bring them into their current form. Understanding this legacy through acts of dissent and protest can better uniform us about the places that we inhabit.

Anonymous stencil of a quotation from a letter from Leopold 1 of Belgium to his niece, Queen Victoria

Studio 05: “If I stay silent nothing will change:” Identity, Politics, Social Change and Creative Culture(s)

Christina Paine

This cross-disciplinary studio considers how power, culture, politics, identity, representation, activism, social media and mass culture theory intersect with a range of arts practices, including photography, architecture, design and fine art, film studies, fashion and music, sound, pop art and theatre.

A misty view across the tops of trees to further forested hills on the horizon. In the middle distance a series of large structures rise from amongst the trees. Their surfaces are decayed and their windows are broken. The structures include wide buildings of 1 to 3 storeys and a tall tower, they are topped by large white domes which are also broken and decayed.

Studio 06: Thinking with Ruins

Danielle Hewitt

Thinking With Ruins begins with the idea that to think about ruination allows us to approach subjects that are of interest materially, aesthetically and politically and it allows us to work across scales – from dust to debris to object to landscape.

Sculpture of a woman with writing on her skirt

Studio 07: Feminist Approaches

Edwina Attlee

In this studio you will be invited to take a feminist approach to your dissertation and its topic, whatever that topic might be.

Unknown black man with cigarette, white shirt, in front of a poster, Kingston Jamaica, circa 1950

Studio 08: Fashioning the African Diaspora

Elli Michaela Young

Exploring the fashioning of the African diaspora and with a particular focus on the Caribbean Island of Jamaica, this studio aims to think through how fashion and dress is used to grapple with ideas of self.

Etching by Hogarth showing a grotesque family scene

Studio 09: Sartorial Culture

Elisabeth Gernerd

This studio examines the intersections and relationships between objects and their visual and discursive representations through the lens of the history of fashion and dress. It locates fashion, or fashionable dress, in the conversations about it, the images portraying it, and the artefacts left in its wake.

Studio 10: “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology”

James Payne

Studio 10 questions the role of technology in our lives and investigates the environmental ethics concerning how we relate to, and operate within the world and each other.

A choir walking through seaside town carrying colour and plants

Studio 11: The Hammer without a Master

Joseph Kohlmaier

Studio 11 explores the idea that we think, remember and decide ‘in the world,’ rather than in our heads, that we are connected in unexpected ways and that this connection may be a key to unravelling some of the paradoxes of modern life and culture.

Studio 12: The Voice of Things

Lesley Stevenson

This studio will offer a challenge to the idea that objects are unruly things and need to be brought to heel by labelling, categorising, taxonomising. Instead, it offers an invitation to give voice to the mute and invisible, by listening to objects and treating them as allies.

Studio 13: Suck it up

Matilda Moors

This studio takes a sideways looks at the intersection of youth culture and late capitalism considering the impacts and influences of desire, the cartoon, consumerism and cuteness in shaping our lived contemporary experience.

A glass bubble somewhere in outer space, future living

Studio 14: Futures Past and Present

Matthew Wraith

Cultural history, from high art to kitsch, is littered with visions of the future; some inspiring, some ridiculous, almost all of them wrong.

Studio 15: A River with Standing

Mercedes Vicente

What happens when a river is conceived as a living entity instead of the prevailing perspective of human sovereignty over nature? What political impact may this unprecedented legal status have on the ecological crisis? What do Indigenous cosmologies contribute to current posthuman philosophical debates?

A view from a driving car window, tower blocks, trees

Studio 16: “I can’t see the wood for the trees:” Ecology as Methodology

Nicholas Temple

This studio aims to provoke discussion about the ’reality’ and the ‘myth’ of ecology: the ease with which one can theorise about it, and at the same time the persistent challenges of enacting it as an everyday lived condition of human (and more-than-human) existence.

Studio 17: The Practice of Space – Writing Atmospheres in Art and Architecture

Nico de Oliveira

Dissertation Studio 06 looks at space as practice, since each location is a mutable entity framed as a moment in time, populated by individuals and shaped by their actions as artists, musicians, curators, designers, architects, writers and spectators.

Studio 18: The Poetics of Making

Paul Harper

This studio will consider the value of making in itself, independent of the product or outcome, exploring the idea of craft as meaningful work.

A view through concrete pipes, sun, sand

Studio 19: The Erotics of Infrastructure

Rachal Bradley

Studio 19 questions how our body and subjectivity is formed through our encounters with infrastructure. We will explore what constitutes contemporary infrastructure, such as the digital sphere, financial products and how these may impact the formation of our subjectivity and social organisation.

Code of Hammourabi, Stele, Musée du Louvre

Studio 20: A History of Efficiency

Trevor Norris

There is nothing inevitable about the way we organise our societies. Changing the harmful structures of economic efficiency, which are making the planet uninhabitable, is up to us. This studio is for students who are interested in exploring any aspect of the climate emergency.