PART 1 2023

YEAR 3

From regenerative architecture based in an abandoned railway line in central Paris, to sensitive site recordings of ruins in rural Portugal, this years studio practice has encompassed the re-interpretation of existing site conditions. Across five studio groups, students have worked to independently define their own brief while responding to the ongoing political, social, culture and economic issues which arise from living in our ever changing cities and communities.

STUDIO ONE: CityZen Agency

The CITYzen Agency studio situates its explorations in overlooked places. We consider global imperatives and local issues together, exploring their interconnection and consequence of each on the other. By understanding resources within the community and considering techniques of engagement we become receptive to their effects on design process.

This year, working alongside Interior Architecture students our explorations began with an appraisal of collaboration, investigating how a group design and build project could lead to enhanced integration. This led final year students to consider the role of Leeds Beckett as an Anchor Institution within Leeds, and how higher education providers could better serve the communities they neighbour. In semester 2, second year students worked with Leeds Sustainable Development Group to propose ideas for a new ‘House of Architecture’ on The Calls, with a remit of encouraging discussions and consultation on placemaking and urban development within the West Yorkshire region.

The CITYzen Agent constructs a design methodology that generates an urban assemblage which explores and communicates ideas of architectural intervention and invention, proposing socially, economically and environmentally resilient solutions for a brave new world.

Our praxis is derived from Bruno Latour’s term, ‘critical attention is shifted from architecture as a matter of fact to architecture as a matter of concern’.

Staff

Craig Stott

Students

Georgia Clayton

Grace Fryda

Bethany Hall

Melissa Kennedy

Joseph Oates

James Robertson

Jodie Simpson

STUDIO TWO: Regenerative Ecologies

Regenerative Ecologies look at how, why, and where we interface and engage with natural systems, i.e., human, and non-human processes, and infrastructure in our daily lives.

The studio is interested in nature as a controversial ecology between human, and non-human organisms in a changing climate. How does a changing environment affect this relationship between human and non-human organisms? The studio examines the concept of ecology and the concept of habitation as contested spaces of communal activity.

Based on research, field studies and forensic analysis projects are developed through the production of models, narratives, and prototypes. Regenerative ecologies rethink the culture-nature divide to provide new ways in modern thinking and living.

The studio aims to contest this framework of knowledge that has deadlocked nature and culture, tradition, and modernity, scientific and indigenous to make a case for rethinking architecture beyond the nature-culture divide. What will the future demand in the emergence of a changing climate and how will it shape our attitude towards architecture and urbanism?

The studio aims to re-consider and re-imagine new relationships among living organisms in a changing environment. And in doing so present a new dialogue for the value of rethinking architecture beyond this division.

Staff

Ian Fletcher

Students

Jack Aldworth

Emily Angell-Brooks

Elisabetta Angius

Niamh Ashley

Mason Giles

Ewan Jones

Sanika Nair

STUDIO THREE: Abstract Machine

The studio projects were based in Brick Lane London, exploring the following propositional themes:

• Research into the cultural manifestations of political entities, with students critically defining their own position.

• Exploration the spatial systems through which political organisations could manifest themselves.

• Exploration and engagement in a dialogue with a defined urban context

• Exploration of how an architectural language, can represent the ideals and values of the defined organisation within a particular culture.

• Exploration of sustainable methodologies.

Live-build: St Chads Broomfield Cricket Club

Parallel with the above the studios long term community engagement project a new self-built cricket pavilion for the St Chads Broomfield Cricket Club, broke ground in April, with the superstructure being completed by volunteers from the club and university over the two-week easter vacation.

Staff

Keith Andrews

Students

Melos Abdiu

Omamakpo Ashaka

Matthew Bowcock

Matthew Coyne

Charles Harrison

Stavri Kozakou

Benjamin Palmer

Samuel Rigby

STUDIO FOUR: The Land In-Between

The Land In-Between studio searches for answers between Portugal’s urban and rural settings, laying the foundation to explore the inevitable impermanence of built form and those that use it.

The ‘ruin’ forms the starting point of all projects, where reimagined and reinterpreted spatial sequences, often filmic, allows students to explore the potential for integration of new cultural infrastructure. The studio encouraged new modes of representation, particularly of the architectural drawing, mediating between filmic, diagramatic and imagined realms.

Third year projects are set between two locations - the urban, Lisbon, and the rural, Santa Clara-a-Velha, a small rural village in southern Portugal. Defined through site specific research, projects independently draw upon cultural, political, historical, dystopian and even folkloric scenarios. From Mackenzie’s sensitively poetic reconnection to water in a region where access to water is limited by the government, to Ruth’s reuse of the pigmented terracotta landscape in a tile making facility for criminal rehabititation.

Fieldwork experiments documented and examined traces of built existence as a type of visual ethnography study. We examined everyday life between the urban and rural, not the monumental or heroic, but the commonplace of daily life routines; the embedded memories of both city and countryside that can exemplify cultural vernacular. Everyday life was used to critique and judge our decisions by and to recreate ‘scenarios’ in our site environment to draw out new narratives.

We set out to reanimate the rural and to document the ‘ruin; as a method of forming site specific interventions. As a starting point, we examined cultural repair in built form to understand the sequence of modifications that have happened to localised vernacular over time. Students extracted those ‘scenes’ that have undergone a succession of independent renovations and expansions, and to interpret the traces of built form as they are found.

The Land In-Between studio is distinct in its search for analogue ways of representing information; experimenting with processes that leave our traces imprinted onto each stage of the process. Through making and curation - we have explored design as a consequence; an interconnected sequence of additions over time. Students worked in the peripheries between film, print, casting, projection and drawing.

The projects seek to rethink, reframe and redraw spatial concerns that lie in the space between built and human traces.

Staff

Ashley Caruso

Students

Ruth Amissah

Mackenzie Best

Sam Dempsey

Johnathan Greenwood

Owais Hussain

Maryam Moghal

Aidan Salari

STUDIO FIVE: REVIVE/ RESOURCE!

Studio REVIVE / RESOURCE explored architecture’s role and potential in the shaping of our cities and communities through the sequential projects of REVIVE! (Semester 1, BA2 + BA3, Tutor: Naina Gupta) and RESOURCE! (Semester 2, BA2 + BA3). Students’ projects were located across London’s Southbank and in the Highfield area of Sheffield, demonstrating varied approaches to revival and resourcing communities which come from these different contexts.

A number of methods were used to lead the investigation of our projects and design responses. Semester 1 started with students responding to their project location with the provocations of: the individual (mind + body), the community, the river and the city (and its inhabitants). Provocations, experiments and inspirations of their emerging projects were collected akin to a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, and developed into architectural responses in the form of sketch schemes. In Semester 2 we studied everyday objects as dialogical devices: taking time to look deeper at objects and using them as opportunities to have deeper dialogue towards meaningful issues, and develop the narrative of our emerging projects. We studied and designed our own objects to engage in these dialogues, and considered these same dialogues at community, infrastructure, and urban scales.

Students extended the intent of these functional and dialogical objects into architectural proposals which demonstrate the possibilities of community infrastructures: Coffee tables become an analogy of negotiated spaces between multiple community enterprises; Toilets are used to illustrate the need for better public facilities activated through a city-wide crazy golf festival; Skatable objects develop into a facility for DIY interventions enabling the skate community to safeguard the festival spirit of the Southbank; Studies of chairs are used to communicate formal and informal activity reflected in productive combinations of programmes such as adult learning with play, and archiving oral histories with social spaces.

Staff

James Harrington

Students

Aaron Broadbent

Anas Elgheddafi

Emily Hodson

Ahd Hussain

Kabika Kauseni

Luana Silva Higgs

Enoque Zola