Graz, arch stage 3, 2008

Architecture BA(Hons)

What does an architectural work actually do?  Little until it is occupied yet, at this moment of inhabitation the performance of a building becomes unscripted and unpredictable.  For generations new architecture has been photographed empty - perhaps a telling signal of distaste for the untidy presence of humankind. We ask - is there action in architectures apparent passivity? Or, more directly: is a building its effects?  Falke Pisano combines the imagined perception of a proposition by spectators into the actual work and, whilst this could perhaps be interpreted as an attempt at excessive control, it prioritises the expenditure of time and imagination by the artist to look forward to the qualities of the unscripted events that might accompany exposure of the proposition to the everyday.

Our students address contemporary issues in architecture across Europe.  Throughout the course they work with us to use spatial design as a tool that enables critique and response to issues in philosophy, culture, society and technology today.

Oliver Froome-Lewis

 Warsaw PKiN | arch stage 3 |2009

Karim Samuels | Ljubljana

The project presented the opportunity to generate dialectic between today’s Ljubljana and its counterpart tomorrow.  By selecting a particular attribute of life experienced by the individual in Ljubljana and by contrasting it with an equivalent in the UK students created a point of comparison. The attribute was selected with a view to the promotion of social sustainability between present and future cultures.  The proposals also operated as devices for the positive interpolation of individual experiences collected from the eastern and western extremes of Europe. (Ljubljana brief, extract)

Oliver Sprague | Ljubljana

Adam Hiles | Ljubljana

Akram Fahmi | Urban Sustention | Lee Valley, London (Akram won the Paul Davis Prize in the RIBA presidents medals 2007 with this project)

The modern port at Rotterdam demonstrated to us the vast scale of international trade.  In London such activity is handled downstream at Tilbury.  Thus, though both cities are ‘trading centres’ the trade is invisible from within.  We use the goods, but we don’t register their arrival.  Contrast this with the period when the Port of London was in the city centre.  Ships moored twenty deep alongside warehousing in the ‘Pool of London’.  The imported material rendered additionally exotic because of the visible presence of its means of transport.  Material from overseas transported through an effort of manpower by the wind rather than by fuel oil burning whilst bored crew watch reality TV.  Perhaps with the slip of available visual reference to the realities of distance and endurance – the struggles of delivery that hint at rarity, novelty and exclusivity – part of the pleasure is lost?  And perhaps another part is lost through over-familiarity? (Urban Sustention brief, extract)

Beth Lambert | Urban Sustention | Lyle Park, London (A project using gradated habitats for butterflies as a device to indicate climate change through creeping extinction)

Joseph Deane | Urban Sustention | Lee Valley, London

Gary Kellett | Urban Sustention | Lee Mouth, London (mussel farm)