Semester one begins with a drawing of a window; analytical and precise, and the memory of a door; speculative and uncertain. Together, these exercises start to equip students with the tools to observe, describe and imagine the physical world, but they also suggest an exchange between architecture’s measurable and its sensory realities: a dialogue that extends through the chapters of the year.
From the study of a singular element to the design of a public building and its environment, in semester two students were invited to re-imagine a former market square in Letterkenny, County Donegal. Seemingly modest, practical considerations often suggested poetic possibilities: how the negotiation of a sloping site could improve accessibility and produce an elegant spatial sequence; how the placement and sizing of a window would admit light and air, and make a façade of a certain character; or how a particular material chosen for its low embodied energy could communicate with others in the periphery.
The breadth of projects that arose enjoy the capacity for buildings to assert their own voice, whilst participating in the town’s everyday life. In so doing they acknowledge architecture as an autonomous discipline, but also as a cultural practice inevitably bound to the concerns of its place and time.
Students
Rebecca Adlard, Esthefany Alberto, Jack Chapman, Jennifer Jara Chiriboga, Torrance Reilly, Lexx Scott-Robinson, Tilly Thompson, Mark Velasco
Georges-Marie Akobe, Haoyang Chang, Hannah Coles, Sherie Hizon, Abdullah Hussain, Ajanth Keetharajan, Radija Raposo, Kinga Rybarczyk, Isaac Wilson-Deane
Studio Tutors
Paco Esteras de las Heras & Jack Hawthorne
Guest Critics
Yannick Guillen & Emily Scott