PART 2
2025
STUDIO ONE: Cinematic Commons
STUDIO ONE: Cinematic Commons
This project builds on Ecology After Nature, an online screening series interrogating extractive, administrative, and instrumental treatments of nature, to explore how moving images can reassess infrastructural, elemental, and communal (human/nonhuman) relations. Focusing on Channelsea Island in East London, it examines the territorial functions between industries, communities, and environmental memory through visual cultures and the tectonics of terrain. By reimagining water infrastructures as material and social configurations—including new natures, water types, and behavioural imaginaries—the project proposes an “infrastructure of new natures” as a means to enhance hydro-urbanism, biodiversity, and air quality within the complexities of urban ecological systems.
Brasiskis, L. (ed.) (2020) Ecology After Nature: Industries, Communities and Environmental Memory. [Online] e-flux Video & Film. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/video/ecology-after-nature/
Staff
Sarah Mills
Students
MARCH FT Year 1: Kirti Hemath, Ezhilmathy Anbarasi Kanniappan, Seren Emily Ozmen, Dhananjayan Partheeban Sundari
MARCH PT Year 2: Adil Akhtar, Thomas Brown, Peter Morrison
MARCH FT Year 2: Najiatajeni Alamin, Niall Ellis, Allice Grodon, Anna Hague, Hicham Jaraoud, Katherine Payne, Hagaar Yousif
MARCH PT Year 3: Maryam Najeeb
STUDIO TWO: unitfifteen
STUDIO TWO: unitfifteen
This year, the unit commemorates the 40th anniversary of William Gibson's ‘Neuromancer’ (1984) and the 30th anniversary of Neil Spiller's ‘Architects in Cyberspace’ (1995), both crucial for understanding the integration between architecture and digital environments. The unit has delved into the concept of a technologically driven utopia envisioned for the year 2055, focusing particularly on the challenges posed by a potential sea-level rise of 3 to 6 meters in the Northeast coastal cities. The central theme of the unit is ‘Augmented Cities: Towards Ludic Architecture(s).’ Students are tasked with designing a tangible, technologically enhanced utopia by augmenting cities and architectures through both physical and virtual means, treating the city as an interactive game that engages with urban life while addressing the impending environmental catastrophe.
Staff
Hyun Jun Park
Students
MARCH FT Year 1: Ayomipe Adeniran, Omamakpo Ashaka, James Higgins, Patrick Roobottom, Anh Dung Tran
MARCH FT Year 2: Anastasia Christopoulou, Jessica-Joy Consterdine, Joseph Johnson, Nathan Lammiman, Natalia Mata, Aminat Moruff, Darshan Narasimha Murthy, Ayesha Shaik, Kabilesh Suseendiran, Saba Tabrez
MARCH PT Year 3: Joe Clark, Pascale Mestdagh, Sam Pick
STUDIO THREE: A City Reborn: Coventry’s Past, Present and Future
STUDIO THREE: A City Reborn: Coventry’s Past, Present and Future
The studio investigates Coventry’s contested urban regeneration through the lens of critical spatial practice. In response to the controversial ‘City Centre South’ redevelopment, students examined the city’s socio-political, historical, and architectural narratives. Grounded in critical urban theory, their projects challenge the erasure of post-war modernist heritage, as well as dominant top-down planning approaches through imaginative, site-specific interventions. These proposals aim to reflect a deep engagement with context, theory, and creative process, and envision bold, thoughtful alternatives for Coventry’s urban future.
Staff
Dr. Ahmadreza Hakiminejad
Students
MARCH FT Year 1: Luke Bonnell, Chloe Cooke, Taher Kitabi, Diala Hasan Ibrahim Saffouri, Venkata S. R. V. Vegesna,
MARCH PT Year 2: Mikzong Gurung, Phoebe Millard
MARCH FT Year 2: Abduljalil Alasa, Joe Downing, Benjamin Holmes, Dennis Mitchell Nwachukwu, Aron Walker
MARCH PT Year 3: William Cooke
MAUDE: David Cruzat, Abeyrathna Herath Mudiyanselage Chamodi Vichakshana Abeyrathna, Daniel Panos
STUDIO FOUR: Speculative Histories / Narrative Past
STUDIO FOUR: Speculative Histories / Narrative Past
The studio explored ideas of conservation, preservation and working with architecturally and historically significant buildings.
Focusing on the Holbeck area of Leeds around Temple Mills, we investigated the district’s large urban voids, the legacy of diminished use, industrial ebb and flow and lost communities.
The studio explored how we might work with the rich heritage of these blank, vague territories and re-conceptualise the abandoned uninhabited regions of the near centre.
Projects developed the theme of archive and artefact, and explored how an archive might act as a vessel for narratives, rituals, and as a repository for our myths and memory.
The void was considered as being as meaningful as the realised, the imagined as viable as the concrete. Speculative histories, narratives and fictions were used to develop research interests, design explorations and site investigations.
Staff
Stephen Leighton
Students
MARCH FT Year 1: Olivia Fawcett, Charlie Jarvis, Sandhyaa Venkatraman
MARCH FT Year 2: Abdulhameed Alasah, Curtis Black, Connor Brogden, Alexander Hemming, Grace Kelly, Alexander McKenzie, Tang Tien Onn, Karina Orizarova, Daniel Chukwudumebi Ovia, Sobaan Rehman, Amir Saghir
MARCH PT Year 3: Tara Johnston, Connor McGregor