Best of Student Shows 2012
This year the Blueprint team and a panel of 14 critics traveled to student degree shows around the country. After viewing hundreds of presentations from a diverse range of disciplines, we have compiled our findings, bringing you some of this year's best work from the designers and architects of the future.
Here, the graduates explain each project in their own words.
Click on a name to skip straight to that section:
Architectural Association School of Architecture,
Bartlett School of Architecture,
Brunel University,
Bucks New University,
Central Saint Martins,
University of Edinburgh,
Glasgow School of Art,
Greenwich University,
Leeds Metropolitan University
Liverpool John Moores
Manchester School of Architecture,
Northumbria University
University of Nottingham
Oxford & Cherwell Valley College,
Royal College of Art,
University of Salford,
University of Strathclyde
UEL
Westminster Univeristy
Architectural Association School of Architecture
Alexander Laing, Dip Arch
Project Title: Ghost In The Spectrum
Alaska’s Northern slope is ruled by an eternal night for 83 days of the year. The onset of darkness is kept at bay by our desire to control diurnal cycles and construct a perpetual day. The flow of electric light floods the streets fixing the shadows from November to February. Barrow’s fragile landscape is the site in which the opposing world views of scientists and native Eskimo’s collide. Both seeking ways in which to understand the world, technologies of sight are employed to search for answers to our future within a landscape rich in ancient mythology. Within the solitude and isolation of darkness, cultures throughout history have conceived legends and tales communicating the limitations of man. Darkness is a space of the imagination, harbouring all of our real and unreal fears within the abyss of blackness that consumes this barren landscape. The uncharted lands that previously sited our mythologies are all but colonised. The darkest reaches of space, the deepest oceans and tallest mountains are now familiar spaces. The perceived darkness of the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum's define our limitations as humans and provide a site for future mythologies. The ghost in the spectrum is an alternative navigational system that mediates between the Eskimo's mythological relationship to landscape (that provides a sense of place) and the visual technologies employed by the scientific community to analyse it. An architecture of mythologies is sited within the darkness of the infrared and ultraviolet spectra, only revealed through the objective lens of optical technologies. Ghost in the Spectrum is an architecture that exists in the space between the landscape and the instrument that records it.
Dessislava Lyutakova, Dip Arch
Project Title: Harmonic Frequencies - An Allegorical Construct of Vibrating Architectures
Harmonic Frequencies is the design of a vibrating allegorical landscape that physicalizes the ephemeral processes in Modern Finance – Black Box Algorithms that account for more than 70% of Wall Street trading. The project uses BP share prices to investigate these algorithms as a Brit- ish company drilling for oil in Alaska. The model is a vibrating instrument, an allegorical stage that exhibits their behavior. It uses vibration as a mode of connecting to and experiencing this flow of data. It is a project conceived by Wittgenstein’s notion of making these calculating machines occur in nature and continued by the traders to bring these queer mathematical constructions to life. It is an exploration for a visceral method to relate to them so we can read fluctuations in the algorithm in the same way we read fluctuations in weather. Because just like weather used to shape commerce, trade winds and growing seasons, this is the contemporary weather shaping our world today.
Edith Wunsch, Dip Arch
Project title: Space of Spectacle
The University of London is one of the most crucial catalysts to London as a city and this proposal seeks to augment this catalyst. The project takes two observations of the University of London's Bloomsbury Area into account: 1. The student strikes and occupation in 2011 and the fashion in which the students transform their ordinary environment into the extraordinary, using the existing university fabric as a backdrop to their stage. 2. The parasitical way in which high-pressure groups use the university for recruiting new members. Learning from these observations and translating the urban choreography these groups employ, Space of Spectacle creates a non-conditional space, intensifying the frictional overlap between university and city.
Reo Suzuki, Dip Arch
Project title: Theatre for history yet unseen
As opposed to our conceptual understanding about the issue, Barrow, Alaska is conceived as a ground zero of global warming.
There its effect has been exposed as the real crisis disconnecting the relation of landscape phenomena and cultural implications of Inupiaq. To respond the context of the perception gap around the global issue, a private exhibition collecting lost land scape phenomena is held at AA school in 2065.
Series of on-site phenomena recreations in Barrow, are translated and Archived as dioramas for the remote audiences in the metropolis. The dioramas carefully encompasses sea smoke formation used to role as landscape indicator in traditional whaling, snow blindness damaged hunter's retina and ice terminology flourished between culture and the extreme landscape. It is architectural syntax as the context for imagination, as the fictional nostalgie in the future directing todays audience towards an as yet unseen tomorrow.
Samantha Lee, Dip Arch
Project title: Landscapes of Plausible Uncertainty
How much is a caribou worth? And is that worth more than the unknown quantity of oil in the Arctic Refuge? Is the cost of extracting that unknown quantity of oil, lower than the cost of cleaning up the possibility of an oil spill? As a landscape in the state of becoming, its value is contested through its potential futures. Supercomputers become the new oracles as they attempt to calculate these variables to inform policy and long term strategy. As these supercomputers model the complexity of nature, they become increasingly indistinguishable from the landscape they are modeling. The project speculates on a landscape re-imagined and re-engineered as the most advanced supercomputer on this planet. Through an Operating Manual for Sedna, nature becomes biological hardware, landscape survey equipment now measure computational outputs, and nature documentaries are reimagined as petaflops of risk calculations. Through this machine, our perceptions of Nature as cultural construction take us to an increasingly paradoxical evolution as we encounter questions that will define how we operate within the natural world, and value living systems.
Bartlett School of Architecture
Amy Hiley, Dip Arch
Project title: The Green Living City Wall
In response to urban industrial decline in New Jersey, this project explores an integrated green infrastructure across areas of barren wasteland. The 'Green Living City Wall' is developed as a key regenerative intermediary between retained residential communities and areas of reintroduced wetlands and agricultural land. It is an imagined hyper-dense edge synthesizing landscape, green infrastructure and architecture, to create a legible identity and continuous urban definition for the communities; an ecological, recreational and social catalyst. It is designed as a utopian mega vegetative frame, consisting of large greenhouses for food growth, interconnected with walkways and cycle paths, sky forest tree towers, recreational event roof lawns and gardens, fruit orchards and neighborhood allotments within farm market towers, fed through a circular metabolic method of managing local water cycles.
Emma Flynn, Dip Arch
Project title: Trash Can Utopias: Transforming the Waste Landscape of Long Island Suburbia
Building suburbia the old way is no longer working on Long Island. Inherently wasteful and unsustainable, in terms of both space and resource consumption, the current suburban model needs to be readdressed in the face of increasing energy and environmental concerns. In response to this problem Trash Can Utopias explores waste’s historic role and future potential in the vision and creation of utopias, and how, in the specific case of Long Island suburbia, waste, and waste technologies, can transform the suburbs from a wasteful dystopia to its promised utopia. It explores how the taboo and unpopular issue of garbage can be worked with in a positive way, with the aim of tackling the specific garbage problem in Long Island and the inherent wastefulness of the suburban model. Challenging the invisibility and unsustainability of the current garbage infrastructure, it proposes that waste management should be brought closer to our everyday environments, incorporated and become productive. With the future of Long Island suburbia looking increasingly uncertain, this project explores how waste and its technologies can revitalise an area, increase energy efficiency and off-grid communities, whilst retaining the utopian image of suburbia to which many still aspire. Ultimately, the project proposes a new way of living and working with garbage, and through this admittedly polemical investigation, hopes to challenge our relationship with waste and wasting.
Janinder Bhatti, Dip Arch
Over recent decades cities and urban landscapes have become increasingly susceptible to flooding. With predicted future climatic extremes, growing populations and increasing urbanization flooding problems are predicted to exacerbate. The scheme proposes the ‘Sacrificial Flooding’ of Central Park as an alternative approach to dealing with urban storm water flooding whereby, parks are flooded as a means of protecting inhabited areas of the city and storm water is exploited as a resource. A network of city streams are proposed to collect, clean and channel storm water to Central Park which is redesigned as a blue belt at the heart of the city. Polluted storm water is drained through the city streams to a peripheral moat, from which water is processed through bio-filtration ponds into a large water storage basin. Through a series of inhabitable infrastructural and architectural interventions, this newly collected water source is exploited to produce micro climates, energy, food and drinking water for the inhabitants of the city. Vertical gardens, forested promenades and garden gates are inserted as inhabitable water infrastructures housing both recreational and water processing facilities. Existing landmarks are retained as preserved bodies of land within the water basin of the newly flooded park. The scheme proposes Central Park as a productive infrastructural landscape which subsequently redefines and enables the future inhabitation of New York City.
Madhav Kidao, Dip Arch
Project title: The Theatre of Synthetic Realities
The Theatre of Synthetic Realities is a series of real and fictitious locations and events, actors and devices that attempt to question our production, embodiment and perception of social space as mediated through technology. Through the use of ubiquitous personal and mobile computing we have become both constant consumers and producers of information, both live receiver and transmitter. We, and our environments, exist simultaneously as physical and real-time digital manifestations, as such augmenting our relationship to space, time and experience. Ultimately, however, the project aims to not only question our understanding of space and time but to also interrogate the ethical nature of the methodologies in which we do so. The project envisions a world in which the design process is predicated by the development of bespoke, open source and collaborative technology; technology that acts as a physical and cognitive extension of ourselves; a symbiotic prosthesis that facilitates new forms of behaviour and thought. In the cyclical translation between the physical and the digital, our perceptions of the world are reinterpreted, redefined and reconstructed. Reality is filtered and manipulated in real-time to suit the individual's desires and it is within this domain that the project operates.
Martin Manfai, Dip Arch
Project title: ETERNAL AUTUMNAL MICRO-CLIMATES FOR KYOTO
Created by Hong Kong-born Martin Tang, The City of A Thousand Autumns is an energy hub for Kyoto, aimed to create Eternal Autumnal micro-climates and engage a carbon neutral Biomass energy system for the city. 1000 Origami Cranes floats above the City, passively shielding and supplementing the city from extreme weather conditions. Martin, a graduate of the March course from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL, London, found inspiration for his project in the book The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and Buckminster Fuller’s idea for a dome over Manhattan.
Ned Scott, Dip Arch
Savan Patel, Dip Arch
Project title: The Urban Oasis for London 2100
With Ballardian predictions in mind London begins to prepare and redevelop its urban landscape to cope with the arrival of a new arid landscape. Using existing and proposed infrastructure, London transforms itself over this century into an Urban Oasis. The remaining inhabitants of the city are given a second opportunity to live sustainably in craters forming around the existing rail stations. These craters form the Water Temples. The use of fog collecting and dew harvesting with sand filtering of wastewaters provides the city with a sustainable water cycle. Whilst water forms the new currency of London in the desert condition, a new industry of Aloe Vera production is born.
Thomas Smith, Dip Arch
Project title: Simulating a Crashed Architecture
An animated world of twisted spaces is constructed from four crash simulations, forming a technological ballet designed to choreograph its own violent destruction. The project is a richly saturated orgy of fetishism and precision inspired by both the meticulous reconstructions of crash-test simulation rigs and the mouth-watering collisions that unfold in slow motion across the cinema screen. The simulations form a surreal extension of an unfinished motorway exit off the M40, and together they construct a very peculiar roadside motel, where the occupation and observation of the car crash play a central role. The project began as a rereading of J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash in relation to cutting edge crash test simulation technology and explores the spatial and aesthetic qualities of the modern car-crash including the effects of high speed collision on the human body, drawing on Ballard’s fascination with the ‘crashworthiness’ of a car. Tom played into these ideas by designing with, incorporating and subverting contemporary crash simulation techniques to create a set of highly articulated animations that replay a precisely choreographed sequence of high speed architectural collisions in luxurious slow motion.
Brunel University
Alec James, MA Product design
Project Title: Cork Aid
This project is focused on creating products that give aid to people with reduced hand mobility and strength, made from a material of cork and resin. The two products designed are a cutlery grip that adapts to anyone's cutlery and a cup sleeve that fits around regular coffee cups. The inspiration for this project was based on personal experiences of people having issues using their hands and a previous project that had been of interest. The cork material being used has been developed to aid in gripping while taking advantage of its natural qualities.
James Ward, MA Product design
Project title: Pitched Green Roof Tiles
Green roofing is an ever growing environmental trend increasingly used as a tool to tackle many problematic issues linked with urbanisation as we place greater emphasis on the wellbeing of our planet. It is this re-creation of natural habitats, otherwise lost to the footprint of construction, that encourages a swing towards a green and sustainable future. Current limitations and consumer perceptions of green roofing has led to the development of this product, the first pitched green roof tile. Traditional roofing techniques, advanced material developments, and purposeful design has allowed this green roofing product to explore an unchartered roofing market.
Sarah Hutley, MA Product design
Project title: Starling Lunch Carrier and Eating Accessories
Women are increasingly taking their own lunch into work in a bid to save money and control exactly what they eat. However current lunch bags on the market are poorly tailored to their needs; the Starling Lunch Carrier therefore provides a sophisticated alternative as it caters to a more discriminating taste. But more importantly it integrates with the busy lifestyles working women lead. Its slim design enables it to be carried in multiple ways, with the bag itself unfolding to unveil food containers, creating a structured space for the user to enjoy their food from whether it’s at the desk or on a park bench. Finally, after use the lunch bag can fold even smaller for storage purposes - these features along with the high quality cutlery make using the product a dining experience rather than a chore.
Simon McNamee, Product Design Engineering
Project title: Off the Hook
Trapezing is an exhilarating technique for balancing high performance sailing dinghies against the wind. Current harnesses use a crude hook and ring system, which can snare on ropes or boat fittings during a capsize. This causes 30% of capsize entrapments and has led to 6 fatalities since 2001. Experienced sailors have been consulted during the development process to ensure the device meets the needs of the most demanding user. The innovative new system bypasses the need for a hook and makes trapeze sailing faster, safer and more intuitive. Designed and engineered to be dependable in the most extreme marine conditions.
Bucks New University
Lucy McKenzie, BA(Hons) Textiles and Surface Design
Project title: Bio-Mesh Work
Bio-mesh work is a collection of surfaces investigating the potential of mesh structures. A theme inspired by a study exploring the prevalent history and visual appeal of the Cornish China clay industry, an industrial heritage that is essential to the making and identity of the British landscape. A manufactured landscape of exposed and unearthed clay, generated ideas for process. Perforated and printed layers with a use of sensitive colour and line create subtle tonal pattern. A visual play created through cut and spray effects to create illusive 3D meshwork. Light becomes an essential to the design and function of this collection because mesh is a transparent and breathable surface it has great appeal for the interior setting. Bio-mesh work is ideal for screens or blinds that can be altered to reveal or conceal parts of the decorative design
Central Saint Martins
Carolina Ortega, MA Textile Futures
My project is about body movement while we work. Most people believe that eating well and exercising will reduce the chances of illness and obesity. However research shows that leading a sedentary lifestyle, i.e. spending around 6-8 hours working sitting in front of a screen, can counteract such good intentions. Humans are designed to move. Movement is fundamental to the proper functioning of the brain and body; increasing metabolism to speed up our blood flow. As a result we think, feel and perform better. I was inspired by dr. James A. Levine 's research NEAT (non-exercise thermogenesis) which states that even the smallest and meaningful movement counts and helps reactivating our metabolism.
This project aims to promote repetitive unconscious movements within the workplace to help promote a healthy body and mind. I have used textiles as a way to reinterpret office furniture aiming to bring a sense of play to the work place, encouraging people to interact more with the objects around them so they move more and more often. I found very interesting how using textiles we can change an object's aesthetic making it more desirable and at the same time provide longer use to the object itself. The colours of the chairs are inspired on Colombian traditional crafts.
Charinee Artachinda, MA Textile Futures
Project title: Take a Breath
Thai architect Charinee Artachinda wanted to explore the contrasting cultures of death and legacy in Eastern and Western cultures. Through workshops with terminally ill people, she arrived at the following idea: through a sequence of client-centred, psychologist/counsellor supported workshops, together with family members, the ‘patient’ can decide what thoughts, ideas and emotions they might wish to leave behind. A lump of rock sugar is melted and then blown into a bubble, capturing that person’s spoken ideas in their breath for posterity. It is then tied and sealed. Charinee devised a simple but appealing ‘gift’ kit of a lump of sugar and a few glass tubes, with instructions, presented in a simple card box.
Erika Renedo Illarregi, MA Industrial Design
Project title: Empathology
I believe that you have to accept diversity in order to become equal. My Project is about attracting that diversity. The objective is to shape the elements that would turn this diversity positive even in the most complicated situation, thus mental distress, especially schizophrenia. In this case, diversity acquires its most extreme manifestation, madness, which may all together be influenced by the constant lack of its acceptance – diversity. The objective is to help families bypass judgemental perspectives; go beyond the pathological view of the affected person. The static archetypes of the everyday are `dynamized’. The objects make the static matters of our minds, dynamic. “They make the sane mad and the mad sane” P.B NHS Funding for Mental Health is decreasing lately, and generally patients no longer have periodical visits to a psychiatrist or psychologist. The care of the affected people depends on the community and charities, opening a new area for design intervention. On the other hand, research and general understanding about psychiatry is predominantly biological, and psychotherapy as alternative to medication that have been proven to work better and for less cost in long terms basis are generally ignored, probably due to the increasingly rational society that we live in, or because they need a bigger initial investment. The speculative nature that we apply to some of our projects, … hardly links back to the `real world´ and lacks of mediums to do so. This project explores the therapeutic value of these design approaches; a new context has been given.`Empathology´ is a set of objects that by being analogous to the principles that govern dreams and troubled minds help to generate empathy among couples, families and friends affected by mental health.
Inkee Wang
Irene Tong, MA Product Design
Project title: Swirl
A premium chocolate gift to bring along with a bottle of wine when you are going to a friend’s gathering. A design for Tesco Finest*, the packaging allows it to hang on to a wine bottle’s neck so that customers can carry both to a party. The thermoformed plastic tray and lid secured each piece of chocolate in place to form an inspiring shape, while the back of the pack fits well to the wine bottle. With the unique and elegant shape of the chocolates, it creates an unforgettable experience as the chocolate melts on your tongue and swirl together with the wine sipped. Ideal to share on varied occasions, three types of chocolates are available to pair with different kinds of wine.
Julie Yonehara, MA Textile Futures
Project title: The Transformative Chronotype
The Transformative Chronotype is a collection of objects, which explores the future of manipulating the human circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm is a 24-hour internal clock regulated by the natural light and dark cycles of the day. The advent of artificial lighting and the ever increasing demands of our modern lifestyles make rising with the sunrise, and resting at sunset a thing of the past. As a result our relationship with light and dark has become similar to that of stimulants and sedatives – manipulating our bodies to accommodate the needs of our busy lifestyles. This collection is designed as a luxury vanity set, and therefore designated for the bedroom or bathroom, a place where one would prepare or wind down for the day. The project consists of two parts, which deal with the biological effects of light using the red and blue colour spectrums. The red light spectrum promotes melatonin production, signalling rest, and the blue spectrum blocks melatonin production signalling wakefulness. The first part consists of the circadian compact, which defines levels of stimulation through textile filters, thereby manipulating levels of blue light intensities. The second is a series of Sedation masks, which filters out external light with delicate red transparent textiles promoting melatonin production and rest.
Lynsey Coke, MA Textile Futures
I believe randomised processes, which remove conscious and strategic decision-making, can result in more innovative design output. Exploring and questioning a recognised design process, I have created a series of rules looking to diminish ultimate control from the designer. I use variables such as lottery numbers, cars passing by and random shops to dictate my material choice and the context of final design articles, thus generating a more randomised output. I aim to use my skills as a designer and stylist to respond to these randomised scenarios and create unexpected results.
Matt Thom, MA Product Design
I had initially focused my intentions on producing a communal cycling website, allowing London cyclists to come together and share information, but through research I discovered the state of the London Cycling Campaign website and its unrelated connections to borough cycling communities. I opted to rebrand this existing community, to strengthen the brand through a consistent identity system, that allowed cross over to sub brands of the London boroughs.Each borough is recognised through its own colour, relating to a range of colour shades and chain-ring shapes that associate the borough with their London region.
Shamees Aden, MA Textile Futures
Project title: The Amoeba
The study of Protocells is a new and emerging science that has the potential drastically to revolutionise future materiality. Essentially Protocells is a form of synthetic biology that blurs the gap between the non-living and living. Encouraging the emergence of life from lifeless liquid chemicals manufactured artificially in the laboratory could provide us the building blocks to create a new man-made nature. Through this project I seek to envisage and propose tangible product concepts that communicate the future potential of Protocell science. The Amoeba surface-adapting trainer uses printed biotechnology to create a second skin around the user foot. The effect to the athlete is that the Protocell synchronise to the individual foot because this living technology is responsive and reconfigurable, adapting in real time to the current activity of the runner by adding extra support in high impact areas.
Shiho Yokoyama
Project title: Yokoyama Font Family
A font family is typically a group of related fonts which vary in weight, orientation, or width. I liked the way it's called a family and I used my own family's handwriting to create Yokoyama font family. The idea extended to my degree show, where visitors of my space were asked to submit their own handwriting to be part of a font family. This family consists of total strangers. Currently, I am in the process of manually creating fonts with submitted handwriting and also developing a way of integrating all these fonts in one system. The degree show became not a way of showcasing my old work, but a start of a brand new project.
Ting Chun Lin, MA Product Design
Project title: Magical Furniture
People understand an object based on our previous experience and memories. Some of the memories and experience are gradually becoming our fixed notions over time. Can we somehow influence peoples thoughts? To stimulate people, to reflect, calls for an inspiring experience.
This project is motivated by a desire to raise a large-scale, and complex, notion that people have stereotypes. It aims to find out whether industrial design can influence peoples perception and behaviour. As industrial designers, are we able to design a product, which inspires people and stimulates people to
rethink the relationship between our ordinary lives and ordinary products? To learn from magic, and use illusion to challenge our sense of reality in order to offer people a new perspective of looking at the world we understand. Making an experience, which can impact on people's eyes and minds, the same as art does. Furthermore, to create a product, which is between art and design, instead of making a standing sculpture,this project tries to make ordinary products into extraordinary ones, yet still maintaining their functions.
Illusion Drawer -A handle affords us to do different actions as lift up, slide, roate, etc... But over 90% of people try to pull the handle to open this drawer, We expected it work like this way, whereas we would like to see a jewelly box opened differently.
Victoria Thay
Victoria’s most recent collection was heavily influenced by illusions in many different forms, such as paintings, statues, installations and objects. Influences have come from artists such as Bridget Riley whose work appears to flicker, pulsate and move, encouraging the viewer’s visual attention. As well as the designs of John-Leung who creates illusive, ingenious & magical designs, that make you look twice, think twice & use many times. Urban architecture was also a big influence on her work. Living in a city, the buildings that she sees everyday reveal new hidden qualities when viewed from different angles and perspectives, even if it is only seen for a split second. Looking at architectural perspectives has brought a great sense of structure to her work with the use of strong lines and angles. It is not only the buildings that have inspired Victoria, but also the boundaries that surround them and the shadows they cast.
University of Edinburgh
Laura Templeton, BA Jewellery and Silversmithing
I have always been fascinated with the process of construction and its repetition within the urban environment. Taking inspiration for steel framework of bridges, cranes, stadiums, building sites and scaffolding. I approach each piece as a miniature construction. Limiting myself to a considered language of materials my aim is to produce a collection of jewellery with a heavy industrial aesthetic. My passion lies within the design development process. Using photography, drawing and collage I capture the patterns, lines and rhythms of often complex steel structures that I observe on my travels. Industrial processes such as casting and electroforming has given me the ability to create multiples in metal. Using these shapes as miniature scaffolding my aim is to construct pieces that interact with the female form. My work is devoted to the juxtaposition of the bold, straight and repetitive geometric shapes against the softness of the organic human form. Obsessive research has inspired the manufacture of a variety of silhouettes experimenting with different surfaces, textures and finishes playing with visual and physical feeling of balance and weight. Each piece when displayed is designed to reflect the essence of the steel structures of which it was inspired in the shadows of which it casts.
Glasgow School of Art
Anthony Moles, Architecture
Project title: Human Scale Biogas
Anaerobic digestion is a microbial waste treatment process that has the potential for ordinary households to control and reduce their environmental impact. The process accepts almost any form of organic matter and its products, biogas and organic fertiliser, are useful and able to be utilised on-site in people’s homes and gardens. As far as owners are concerned they are doing ‘composting with benefits’.
Lauren Li Porter, DipArch
Project title: Repository of the Bastard Isle
The project navigates uncontrollable change through quantification, the interface of natural phenomena and engineered human means of appropriation though recording and organisation of the hoarded artifacts they generate. This is pursued through the registration and public dissemination of research on Surtsey (trans.‘bastard isle’) an island that sprung overnight from the Icelandic sea bed in the ‘60s and since kept as a scientific reserve forbidden to the public and kept as a study of how life colonises and then departs a virgin landmass as it is eroded back into the sea. The Repository Tower forms a reference facility for academics as well as gallery of artifacts to the public charting past to present, whilst the public forum for research and presentation extends this to cover new developments. As it fills up over time, the tower traces a vertical trajectory of change, manifesting the story of its subjects to visitors. The finite situation of Surtsey which is predicted to be below sea level within the century, is paralleled in the building anticipating the effects of the ocean’s erosion and rising levels in its division between the stronghold of the tower and the more ephemeral elements of the program which are lost to the sea, leaving only the tower cut off from the coast, a monument to the island.
Solveig Suess, DipArch
Project title: Tlatehiin- Jewel of the Arctic
Tlatehiin (Inuit for sparkle on the water) is an island that recently appeared from the melting of the arctic ice, establishing itself as a country in the year 2000. It has reign over vast reserves of oil that lies in the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, only recently being more accessible due to the withering of icebergs. With its wealth, Tlatehiin has decided to reinitiate the construction of the world’s incomplete monuments to the capitalist system-incomplete due to the system’s very own failures. Tlatehiin will show off it's new city in a snow globe themed pavilion situated in the upcoming "2012 World Expo".
Zichao Chen, DipArch
Project title: Sensory Factory
With the advent of aggressive urban development in Dublin, streetscapes are gradually lost to make way for larger block developments. The fate of Moore street is not spared with the imminent demolition of the street and the surrounding row of terraces to make way for a new shopping mall in 2014 - part of the city’s urban renewal project. Moore Street Sensory Factory proposes an alternative take to the current situation by proposing renewal through building upon existing sensory-scapes on site, and by providing the necessary framework for this sensory-scape to grow and manifest into something new and exciting!
Greenwich University
Katie Brown, MArch
Project title: Separation Task
The separation task is inspired by performance artist Marina Abramovi?’s ‘Great Wall Walk’ (1988). For this piece Marina and her partner at the time, Ulay, walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China meeting in the middle to give their relationship a dramatic ending. I imagined a structure for couples wishing to give their relationships an equally dramatic ending. Events such as the couples last supper would take place in a space that gradually mobilised them in opposite directions activating an emotional landscape.
Leeds Metropolitan
Daniel Bangham, Textiles
The inspiration for my final project was from Ancient Greek Vases. I took all the inspiration i could from the vases such as the figures, animals, the decorative patterns and the vases shapes themselves, and with these then created a collection of own patterns and placement prints for fashion fabrics and also a collection of scarves, pocket squares and T-shirts.
Liverpool John Moores University
Robin Graham, Architecture
Project title: MARYPORT COOKERY SCHOOL
SLOW FOOD ~ SLOW ARCHITECTURE
The thesis for the project is to create a design of ‘slow architecture’ that reflects the slow food program advocated in the cookery school. The architecture of the school is to reflect that program. Most architecture created today is the equivalent of fast food – quick and cheap. The cookery school will be the opposite; using locally sourced, high quality materials; developing in phases to allow the school business to grow organically; be carbon neutral to minimise its footprint on the earth; and to reconnect people with where their architecture comes from by maintaining a close relationship between the building and nature. This is the very embodiment of sustainable architecture. Having an understanding of the implications of the choices we make on the environment, biodiversity and our own health is essential to sustainability. The slow architecture should be of high quality and be produced in a clean way that does not harm the environment.
Manchester School of Architecture
Andrew Thomas, Architecture
Project title: Postcards from the Future
Postcards from the Future is a thesis project that explores strategies to combat rising sea levels and their effect on edgeland environments. The thesis aims to achieve a heterotopian solution to the future global crisis of rising sea levels. Through extensive research it is apparent that a multi-disciplined strategy must be devised in order to be successful. This strategy was derived from the military terms ‘attack’, ‘retreat’ and ‘defend’ and utilised a sequential test to decipher which approach best suited each individual case.
David John Noble, Architecture
Project title: Biochemical Ethnoscapes
The project was conceived as a response to Arjun Appadurai’s book ‘Modernity at Large’ and his concept of ‘ethnoscapes’. The Cistercian Monastery known as Stanlaw Abbey in Ellesmere Port can be interpreted as its first true ethnoscape, providing connections to people nationally and internationally. Despite these connections true globalisation did not occur until the completion of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894 which provided Ellesmere Port with connections globally particularly through the evolution of the Oil Refinery and the Vauxhall Car plant.
Research suggested that oil as a fuel source will not be viable economically by 2050 and in turn the closure of the refinery is a virtual certainty. Alternative fuels are already being sought and industries and economies are already seeking alternatives. The BRICS and in particular Brazil now rely heavily on biofuels. There are several key issues with this:
- Reduce Biodiversity | Loss of Rainforest | Land Use (food crop vs. fuel crop debate)
The masterplan thus evolved to utilise the brown-field refinery site to grow and experiment with biofuel production and yield. The site is also proposed to host an annual Biofuels exposition to encourage collaboration & investment with economies and industry worldwide, providing Ellesmere Port with a viable & responsible ‘ethnoscape’.The site will incorporate Biofuel plots, pavilions, recreational facilities as well as sustainable housing for delegates & tourists powered by the bioethanol produced at the facility. The Biofuels Research Facility itself acts as a catalyst for the change, and incorporates laboratories and pilot plant facilities to experiment with biofuel technology, address the above issues & produce bioethanol. Together with this private element of the program a public aspect to the building also evolved. This was done to encourage interaction from the local populace and to reinvigorate the use of the canal along Ellesmere Port’s waterfront. Mimicking the method by which ethanol is produced and linking to the abbey’s history of producing beer to sell to the local populace, the facility will also incorporate a Whiskey Distillery. This will allow visitors to gain a tangible connection to the processes which occur in the facility. Having a mixed program also allows the building to be more commercially successful, maximising the hours in which it can be used.
Jack O'Reilly, MArch
Project title: Memory archives
‘Peatlands are areas of land with a naturally accumulated layer of peat. These are formed under water logged conditions from carbon rich, dead and decaying plant material. However, over many centuries man has destroyed these lands, through drainage channels excavating the peat to be used as fuel’ Peatlands provide essential services on many levels including economies, society, climate and biodiversity acing on global, national and local scales. It has therefore become of utmost importance to restore these natural climatic regulators. ‘The Memory Archive’ is an architectural intervention which explores the possibility of using architecture as a means of restoring the peat lands found in the hinterland of the Manchester Ship Canal at Chat Moss and restore some of the lost services such as tourism, biodiversity and research. The programme fits within a landscape masterplan that is designed as a place of isolation. It reinstates the landscape offering a series of pavilions as areas of creativity for artists or peace and relaxation for authors.
Roxanne Kanda, BArch
Project title: The Mothership
The Mothership is a centre for enterprise, apprenticeship and learning whilst also having community spaces and hosting events. It aims to support people beyond school education of all ages with a range of start-up units, platforms to learn a new craft and offers a range of apprenticeships with local businesses. The ethos of the Mothership is about creating a support network with an innovative design that allows all people to be involved in the same space; constructing, working, dancing, singing. The Mothership sits within a wider site strategy that addresses coastal access the remediation and recycling a landfill edge-land. It develops a dialogue between industry and social provision, the city and the coast, and through the strategy of ‘festival’ it aims to tackle problems of unemployment, abandoned post-industrial wastelands and social deprivation in East Wirral.
Sophie Corfan
Project title: Multi-life
My practice is inspired by the intrinsic flexibility of fabric, structure within textiles and the consumer’s relationship with a product. Exploration of these interests led to developing multi-life; a series of interior textiles which can be adapted by the user to fulfill a variety of functions. Made from reclaimed materials, the looped textile structure allow the pieces to be manipulated and linked with simple attachments, creating user-defined forms and a multitude of possibilities for interaction, tactility and comfort.
Northumbria University
Chris Corkery
Project title: Book Storage
This project looks at how a piece of furniture can be used to aid, support and promote the act of reading. Taking inspiration from the classic Penguin Donkeys, a hands-on investigation of efficient manufacturing materials and processes was carried out. The role of books in an age of digital media has changed but printed matter still pays an important role in everyday life. The project celebrates books as ‘things’ as well as the stories and information they hold. The result is a simple plywood book holder, which is minimal in appearance but useful in a variety of contexts as the holder of books.
University of Nottingham
Clarissa Wenborn, BArch
Project title: The Urban Weave
The Urban Weave Project focuses on the integration of the textile recycling manufacturing process within the dense urban context of Nottingham. Working in collaboration with two other projects, fabric-printing and hydroelectric power, the group scheme is situated within a neglected alleyway in the city centre. By adopting a concept of reclamation and regeneration, the project aims to reinvent the alleyway site to reestablish a pedestrian link between Market Square and the Theatre Royal. By exploring themes of colour, movement, sound and activity, the project utilises a traditional waste resource to enhance the life of the streetscape and promote textile recycling within the city. Ultimately, the project intends to encourage urban exploration by revealing the intrigue of the three processes.
Nikolai Almeida, Dip Arch
Project title: Ocean Rescue Chemisty
The ocean is a rich mineral soup. As land mammals, we only make use of a diluted composition through our food. Intensive farming has given rise to trace element depletion, which adversely affects our nutrition. A concentrated solid salt extracted from the sea serves to re-mineralize the fragile lands. As a seemingly counter-intuitive concept, teaching the benefits and science behind applying sea solids is a core part of the programme. The lack of contemporary testing requires there to be a continuous feedback from the farmers. Forums house this open dialogue, which aims to spread knowledge using the Fens as a beacon of successful integration.
Xu Xu, Dip Arch
Project title: Bath in Stone
This design interrogates the interaction between performance, bath stone and visitors, exploring how the performer may act as an intermediary in this three-way dialogue. The project space needed to be shaped architecturally to exhibit both the stone performance and street performance, and it was also necessary to resolve the interaction between these two forms of display. In the heart of the city by the riverbank, I have appropriated and enhanced a place containing the most significant layers of stone work from different ages: massive stone works compress to form a dramatic series of spaces, revealing the spirit of Bath over the ages. The project brings out the character of the abandoned spaces, whilst celebrating the wonderful history of stone work in the city of Bath. The existing fabric is made more visible and given added clarity, which accentuates the hidden spirit of place; translating the whisper of stones and also activating the atmosphere of the space. Something arises from this interaction between people and stones, where the social dimension is predominant, underscoring elements of the local collective imagination.
Oxford & Cherwell Valley College
Judith Hammond, BA (Hons) Design Crafts
Project title: Plastic Carrier Bag Lace
Approximately 13 - 17 billion plastic bags are used in the UK each year. On average we use over 200 plastic bags per person but recycle only one plastic bag in every 200 we use. Judith Hammond, BA (Hons) Design Crafts graduate from Oxford & Cherwell Valley College has developed an innovative textile. Shopping lists, “thoughts of the day” and traditional lace motif were freestyle machine embroidered onto over 300 plastic carrier bags before heat treating them to reveal a new contemporary lace. An orange “dress” produced entirely from plastic carrier bag lace and three other dresses of recycled materials hand screen printed with this unique lace imagery and adorned with plastic carrier bag lace demonstrates this unique textile is more beautiful than its mundane origin.
Royal College of Art
Ai Hasegawa, MA Design Interactions
Project title: Carboniferous Room Portable
The Extreme Environment Love Hotel simulates impossible places to go such as an earth of three hundred million years ago, or the surface of Jupiter by manipulating invisible but ever-present environmental factors, for example atmospheric conditions and gravity. How do the effects of this new environment alter our definitions of love and intimacy and the way couples relate emotionally in such a situation? And what might it mean for our evolution to entertain ourselves and potentially conceive new life in these extreme conditions? The Carboniferous Room Portable forms a part of the Extreme Environment Love Hotel. Here couples can share intimate moments in the environmental and atmospheric conditions of unreachable places. In the Carboniferous Room Portable, couples are thrust back three hundred million years to a period in Earth’s history of high oxygen and bearable carbon dioxide levels. The device also releases smells and aromas of that period into the shared bubble that couple inhabit.
Christopher Green, MArch
Project title: Data Harvest : Farming the City in the Age of Information
Information is food. In an age of omnipresent digital data, continually grown across webs of connectivity, the digital crop has become as critical a nutrient to the city as its natural counterpart. Like agriculture, data-farming is operating far above subsistence level, generating exponential surplus. How can we design the city to sustain its own data-harvest? An office tower for technological startups, situated at the heart of Silicon Roundabout, becomes the site of a hybrid urban agriculture that takes the insect as its main protagonist; a compact sustainable food source and a unit of information via the process of digital tagging. Breeding within the walls and floors of the structure, the insects charge the building with their capacity to carry data. With a performative architecture constantly replenishing its insect numbers, the structure becomes entangled in a symbiotic play-off between its two critical energy sources, food and information. The life of the building hangs in the balance; low levels of data consumption force the excess insects to be excreted as food. However, excessive data consumption compromises the insects’ reproduction rate, spelling the death of the building.
Eirik Helgesen, MA Design Products
Project title: East Local
The new raw material in east Iceland is aluminium. This project explores the potential of unconventional collaborations where the hyper-automated meets the handmade. The Alcoa factory in the Eastfjords processes 940 tons of aluminium a day, none of which is used locally. Introducing the cut-offs from the aluminium smelter as the novel raw material, I collaborate with local craftsmen and merge with their traditional sources of material and skill. EASTLOCAL aims to connect the local community with the recent aluminium industry, to provide seeds for a fresh way of thinking about production, possible economies and local identity.
Emma Emmerson, MArch
Project title: FENCE CITY 2015 – 2060
Zero Conflict Urbanism – Community Boundary Trust (ZCBT)
An Agency for Temporary Use
From the reinterpretation and hybridisation of the ‘fence’, can we establish new social orders and urban future myths and ideologies? In light of the 2007 financial crisis the role of the ‘informal sector’ as a savior of urban networks in times of hardship has not gone unnoticed. ZCBT is a sustainable organisation that temporarily inhabits liminal boundary components with local informal communities. This entirely self-sufficient commodity provides developers and local councils with site management and security through STREET ACTIVITY and sets seeds for future local urban networks. Policy makers view it as a key tool in making sustainable the privatisation of the urban realm. This is top down urban management with a bottom up feel.
Henry Cloake, MA Vehicle Design
Project title: Rental Vehicle
Looking at sustainable transport for cities of today and tomorrow I have created a flat folding, rental for two people vehicle that offers solutions to issues of cost, congestion, pollution and parking. Two large wheels rotate within casings powered by electric motors and balanced by the shifting forward and backward of battery packs.
Hilda Hellstrom, MA Design Products
Project title: THE MATERIALITY OF A NATURAL DISASTER
The foundation of this work is research about the psychology of the public mind and ideas from postmodern philosophy regarding the nature of ‘reality’ in today’s society. The project starts with the notion of ‘the myth’. Hellström has investigated the idea that the mythical object is a tool that helps us understand or relate to our reality. A small piece of the Berlin wall can be used to symbolise and help process a big part of history - and as such it becomes an object loaded with a lot of meaning and emotion. Hellström found similarities between the mythical object and what Winnicott named the Transitional Object, i.e. how the teddy bear is used by a child to be able to meet, understand and make sense of the surrounding world. The aim with the project is to, in a similar way, construct an object that speaks of a much larger event than the object itself and inhabits a narrative that goes far beyond its form or function. Hellström’s thesis is that there are places and people that inhabit more narrative than other, or have a story that everyone can relate to. What if you are able to extract materia from this person or this place, and create objects of this materia? Could these objects serve as, or become mythical objects? Through research, she learnt about Naoto Matsumura, the last man still living in the evacuated zone by the Daiji power plants in Fukushima, Japan. With help from The Foreign Correspondence Club Japan, Hellstršm got in contact with Matsumura who showed great interest to collaborate. For four days Hellström documented Matsumura’s day-to-day life inside the evacuated zone. In an attempt to make use of the wasteland, which due to radiation has become useless, they collected soil from his rice fields to create symbols, reflecting the situation inside the zone. From this soil, Hellstršm made a series of slightly radioactive food vessels, which are just as useless for their purpose as the land and the farmers of Fukushima.
Imme Van Der Haak, MA Design Products
Project title: Beyond the Body A perception of appearance and identity
My work focuses on altering the human form by affecting its figure with just one simple intervention. Photos of the human body are printed onto translucent silk which will create the possibility of physically layering different body’s, ages, generations and identities. In a dance performance, the moving body manipulates the fabric so the body and the silk become one, distorting our perception or revealing a completely new physical form. The movement then brings this to life. Beyond the body brings into being an ambiguous image that intrigues, astonishes or sometimes even disturbs.
Joseph Popper, MA Design Interactions
Project title: The One Way Ticket
Today we find our frontiers for manned exploration and adventure into the unknown on the brink of exhaustion. Out of this predicament, The One-Way Ticket proposes to send one person on a voyage into deep space from where they will not return. The notion of not coming back opens up an exceptional scenario, so far unprecedented in the history of human space travel. Focusing on the experience of the lone astronaut, the exhibited works are a response to research into a range of human factors particular to the mission that also underline its extraordinary nature. Running parallel with this research was a production of filmmaking props, contraptions and sets, with the aim of presenting the scenario as a cinematic spectacle. The final short film comprises a collection of episodes transmitted from the spacecraft. Based along the path of the mission trajectory, the images simulate the experience of being in space and also infer some of the unique psychological phenomena that could occur on a one-way trip. The space capsule film set stands as an artefact of the filmmaking process. Constructed using low-end and found materials, it encapsulates the honesty of the project aesthetic: zero gravity, zero budget. Furthermore it represents a consistent endeavour to bridge the gap between the imaginary and the pragmatic, or what it means to be in space and what it means to get there.
Kim Thome, MA Design Products
Project title: The Reflection Range
Developed further from work presented in the ‘Works on Reflection’ installation, these object build on the relations of objects and people that surround them. The project explores the potential within different sheet glass material. Materials such as glass and two-way mirror offer visual scenarios that can be explored and choreographed by the viewer, an optical relationship forged between the viewer’s visual perceptions through their movement. These undefined objects explore a new potential for glass and mirror and reconsidering their use within a functional and architectural context. Such a semi-transparent and reflective material is manipulated by naturally illuminated shapes in the fore and background of the piece in such a way that the graphic aesthetic becomes something of a relational experience with the viewer. The objects change at the viewer’s discretion, as perspective, movement and light affect the experience every element.
Laurie Schram
Louis Hall, MArch
Project title: Good Intentions (a counterfactual history)
In 1991, Margret Thatcher opened the largest inner-city ring road in the world, London’s Motorway Box. 30 years hence, the Heritage Alliance have become integral to development within the Localism Bill – brought to power after the destruction of 14,000 would-be-listed buildings over the course of the road’s construction. Set against this backdrop, the Greater London Authority outline planning policies for the spatial re-development of London’s ‘Grey Belt’ (a zone of wilting light industry located either side of the motorway), the last vestige of developable space. The guidelines enable London’s boroughs to raise much needed income, recently severed by central Government, through permitted development and the resulting Section 106 payments.
The ‘Case Study for the RBKC Box’ illustrates what might be in a London that nearly was – questioning what could occur if big business rather than Big Society dominates planning. Building over, under, and around the motorway, a new infrastructural architecture emerges. Subservient to the motor-vehicle, and occupied by programmes typically associated with motorways and out of town shopping centres, the modular systems do their ‘very best’ to blend in with the historic surroundings. Social and private housing merges with Homebase, Little Chef, Matalan and NCP (to name but a few). As was the case with the development of the Motorway Box, the GLA and Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea planners mean well; the inhabitants of Earls Court, however, may not see the necessary development in the same way…
Nina Khazani, MA Jewelry Design
Project title: A hairy tale
I believe that hair inherits power and beauty and is the ultimate garment growing from within us. It is part of our body, and therefore part of our identity, it helps us to differentiate ourselves as individuals yet at the same time it is changeable and detachable. Our relationship to it is quite paradox, having it on the right places it represents beauty, youth and vanity, however it is considered grotesque, uncanny and disturbing when removed from the body. Sometimes the perfect hair seems to last only for a moment. Its always in movement and undergoes various transformations. I gain pleasure of controlling it and transforming it into living objects and jewellery. It is beautiful and soft and yet stubborn to work with. It likes to go its own way but so do I. Through my work I intend to tell stories and evoke emotions by capturing a moment of beauty aiming to make it last longer than a glimpse of time.
Samantha Donaldson, MA
Rock collections fascinate me. I am particularly interested in ‘Lapidaries’, the professional craftsmen that became skilled at cutting precious stones to obtain the best optical effect. I am therefore exploring the parallels between this and my work, individual specimens capture the succession of events and hint at the transformation to its present state. Minerals like agate form under intense pressure and heat, I am intrigued by the way that such multi-layered and multi-coloured order forms out of such chaos. An associated interest of mine is ‘Stratigraphy’, the study of rock layers and layering. Deposition of one layer is separated from the next by a clear interval or change in texture, colour, or mineralogy. Layers may merge with one another so that boundaries between them are unclear. As I cut and polish the surface of my specimens, my excitement of enquiring cold work techniques liberate the curious lore of this precious material and bring my forms to life. I thrill to see the freshly exposed interior, reveal the captured fragments of the moment of its formation. I have always been particularly interested by the interactions between humans and objects, how one encounters an unfamiliar object of desire.
Tina Tian Qui, MArch
Project title: House of the Big Beautiful Body
From the Caryatid to the sexless Neufert (wo)man, architecture has been based on the idealised human body. Society now sees the bigger body as a taboo subject. Both men and women are under huge pressure to follow the trend of the “super waif”. But unlike media perceptions of the 'beautiful body’ as being small is better, the average UK person has been growing from big to bigger. This project embraces the larger body and celebrates it. What emerges is a new aesthetic born of the architecture of indulgence and excess. A hybrid of a banqueting hall, a wellbeing centre and a ‘Big Beautiful Body’ Club, the project discusses the pleasures between food and the body. Moments of opulence and food fetishisms are catered for by the exploration of a maximalist architecture. The fundamentals are readjusted to serve new laws of proportion, gravity and balance as shaped by the bigger body. The architecture plays to these principles whilst capturing moments of collapse, where the body can no longer function to support itself."
Zemer Peled, MA Ceramics
Project title: I am walking in a forest of shards
I went to see the dead forest; it was the most beautiful, quiet and peaceful place I have ever been. Silence. No sound of animals, or wind blowing on the trees, no evidence left of the catastrophe that happened there only a few weeks earlier. I was walking alone a forest of black naked trees. My pieces are made of thousands of ceramic shards. Layers of black and white clay fired and smashed to pieces, then reformed back together to create new life out of the chaos of broken fragments. The resulting forms appear soft from far away yet reveal their sharp brutality when close up.
University of Salford
Fiona Lauris, BArch
Project title: CROP – Salford, be a part of it
We are CROP, a group of media-neutral creatives who are committed to resolving genuine problems and making a difference using our design thinking. After becoming particularly interested in the relationship between Manchester and Salford and how people differentiate and acknowledge the two, our challenge has been to define the city of Salford as a separate entity. Through engaging with the community we aim to showcase its worth and redefine its place and purpose within the area. Staging a forum back in April, we brought together stakeholders, key opinion formers and people passionate about the city to gain a valuable insight into what it really means to be ‘In Salford’. Using the information gathered we created a manifesto and a list of intentions we wanted our design output to encompass making sure we listened to and fulfilled the wants and needs of the community. Recognising the 20 different wards that make up the city form a large component of Salford’s identity, we sought to highlight and celebrate these individual parts using a range of media including interactive and large format screens both on and offline. We wanted to create an experience that would communicate the value and individuality each ward holds, provide a voice and channel of dialogue for the people as well as allowing the potential to work alongside the current Salford City Council branding ‘INSalford’ to further reinforce the visual identity of the area.
University of Strathclyde
Dale Smith and Michal Scieszka,
Project title: Nordic Exodus - Moving Kiruna
The project focuses on Sweden’s Northern-most city, Kiruna and the unique situation in which it currently finds itself. The City of Kiruna is changing. The very reason for its existence, iron ore, is also the reason for its demise. By 2050 almost the entire City Centre, and a large amount of housing, will be lost to the deformations from the City’s iron ore mine. A new City Centre must be developed to the East of the current one, safe from the effects of the mining. The New Kiruna is contextualised through the creation of a masterplan in which important architectural landmarks are moved from the old City to the new. This will create a visual reference which the people of Kiruna can readily identify, whilst memorialising the old City. Those landmark buildings within Kiruna which cannot be moved will be learned from, such as the Ortdrivaren Quarter housing by Ralph Erskine, whose architectural philosophy has been a continuous reference. The movement of the City is an opportunity to further diversify the economy away from mining into the growing sectors of tourism, research, education and space industry, and to preserve historically and culturally important buildings, whilst allowing the addition of layered complimentary functionality.
John Kennedy
Project title: Ariadne’s Thread: Edinburgh Book Labyrinth
Concerned by the uncertain future of the printed book in a digital age , a group of Edinburgh's citizens establish a labyrinthine network of places and spaces in which books and the liturgy of reading are celebrated. This labyrinth is made manifest by numerous discrete architectural additions, literary vignettes of various scales which are hidden amongst the existing cityscape. Book dropboxes, meeting places, monuments, literary markers, and other spaces associated with reading are concealed across the UNESCO City of Literature, follies which enrich further the intricacy of Edinburgh's urban texture through the addition of another historical city layer. The labyrinth is a motif common to the imagery of both formal gardens and libraries. Therefore, the largest component of this new labyrinth is the Garden of Books. Hidden behind the Royal Mile, in the centre of the city and close to a number of existing literary institutions, this sequence of abandoned and ruined courtyards contains an archive protecting a facsimile collection of Edinburgh's books, a book-making workshop, a reading room within a disused medieval church, and an intricate landscape garden of terraces through which runs a narrow thread of water, its source a disused medieval wellhead located on the Royal Mile.
UEL
Vitali Andrei Stanila
Project title: Project Title: Inhabitable columns - Glass Blowing Workshop
Westminster University
Sanna Rautio
Project title: The New Elizabethans
The project is an extension to Claude Nicolas Ledoux’s Saline Royale containing six material guilds and five food producing guilds. Originally designed as a ‘Temple of Labour’, the proposed Utopian masterplan is a new kind of journeyman narrative, where craftsmen travelling round Europe settle in a geometric constellation of trade-specific communities- from timber to tarmac and plastic; each craft building a living, teaching and working community centred on the main working space; developing their own clusters of houses or communes, individual or collective land- use, and linked by railway to the Saline, which acts as a vast recycling yard and sales point for their work.
Steve Wilkinson
Project title: The Surveillance City
The Surveillance City re-interprets the rational geometries of Ledoux’s Early Enlightenment design of the Saline Royale in Arc d'Senans. By reinstating the role of The Eye as a driver for a new urban typology the human binocular field of vision is extended into the realm of architectonic space. The Surveillance City addresses urban opportunist crime by designing for maximum, meticulous, natural surveillance - capable by all inhabitants, whilst offering a critique of the specifically visual culture we have inherited today.
The Panel
Thanks to our critic panel, who each year take the time to visit the shows and select the best work.
Paul Kelsall, website
Michael Hudson, website
Nelly Ben Hayoun, website
Johnathan Adam, website
Veronica Simpson, website
Ali Abbas
Lizzie Mchugh
Kate Bowen
Jan Rose
Holly Stanton
Colin Priest
Cate St Hill
Jonathan Middleton
Herbert Wright
