At Kingston, in the first semester students begin their journey in Architecture with a sequence of short projects – a measured survey of a window, analytical and precise and a drawing of a distant memory of a doorway or passage, intuitive and personal; the design of siteless building and a space within, discovering, through experimentation and iteration, the universal potential stemming from the symbiosis between spatial expression and natural light; a precedent study of a window, learning through a physical model how spaces and places can be meaningfully related; the siting of the once siteless building, consolidating skills and gathering the learnings of the previous projects. In this sequence of short projects students acquire skills of representation by handling a variety of scales and representational techniques, whilst constructing the ability to begin to seeing the world through the critical lenses of the discipline – seeing, drawing, thinking, imagining.
The four short projects lead to a slow and long project in semester 2. From the scale of the window, to the scale of a space, a building and a site, in the redesign of the Market Square in Letterkenny, county Donegal, Ireland, students will engage with the urban scale of a civic public space. The project starts with the ergonometric study of a chair, followed by the close study of the complex topography of a sloping site, prompting students to carry the human scale into the design of market hall and a public space.
Students
Noor Abdulhamid M A Abdulla, Ghid Al-Saeedi, Shilpitha Bhimireddy, Romaisaa Bilam, Jennifer Coote, Robyn Doyle, Nura Hamami, Claire Kotte, Renor Sagun, Hamad Tahir, Shehram Tanoli
Alina Bulai, Katherine Higgins, Avas Hussain, Soha Memon, Meryam Milaslioglu, Somaa Rahim, Marikos Tecleab, Maria Trezza Apaza
Studio Tutors
Mary Duggan & Bruno Silvestre
Guest Critic
Julian Lewis