Architecture (MA)

Head of Programme, Architecture – Beth Hughes

Grounded. Grounded is the word to describe these graduates. Grounded in the challenges this generation feels keenly, grounded in site and place, grounded in materiality, technique, and craft. Grounded in communities and spaces of care and grounded in the bleak reality of contemporary politics and an unravelling world.

Ambitious. Ambitious is the other word. This cohort have a quiet ambition that leads them to struggle and wriggle free, to identify new forms of engaging with the challenges we face, to seek a redefinition of architecture, which shakes off its object-centric obsessions to embrace new systems of value and relevance. They seek to achieve a measure of intervention, sensitivity, and balance of intent that allows a more holistic understanding of space and place and the built.

The projects take time, claim time, and propose new time. They have spent time with communities – conversations, cups of tea, meals cooked and eaten, fences broken and fences mended, gifts given and received. They have visited factories and manufacturers, supermarkets and shops, parks and benches, forests, rivers, and unloved buildings. The projects and practices of architecture shown here are as much about this time spent as they are about final proposals – they explore what it is to create architecture that seeks to understand and value time, place, people, critters, matter, and our world.

From cyborg feminism and questioning of AI, to cruising spaces and reusing buildings, mines, and quarries. These practices need their own language, method, form, and representation. Each project is a brave and worthy attempt at defining these new territories.

The work is serious, the questions are serious, they need presence and engagement, you need to sit with the work. The students have taken an enormous amount of time and care, we ask you to do the same.