DS%2016

DS16 continues to engage with cultures of materials and techniques of making to inform critical and inventive architectural responses within specific social, cultural, political, economic and environmental contexts. This year, under quite challenging circumstances, we’ve adapted to experimenting and collaborating with significantly limited means for making. The theme of the year was VERSATILE CITY and we used London as our site. Students were asked to speculate intelligent and imaginative designs in response to the shifting conditions of the city before, during and after the public health crisis when addressing the versatility of our urban centres has obtained heightened relevance. We started this journey in the first term with a project entitled PLAYING THE CITY to discover how we could keep making to engage with London 1-to-1. The collection of these projects can be seen in the flipbook attached. Many students brought the themes and research of their first projects into their main individual theses in writing their own briefs, selecting their own sites and devising their own programmes. They sought to imagine a more reactive and holistically sustainable and civil city, questioning traditional norms to invent unorthodox programs and typologies that facilitate the continued use and/or re-use of the city and its civic soul - in its streets, squares, theatres, churches, galleries, etc.

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