Interior Architecture - Year 2

This year, our year 2 students looked for the materially sensuous and the impeccably crafted. Our studio focused on poetic, transformational spaces, and interiors that have the potential to become catalysts for change. The year unfolded into 2 interrelated semesters, aiming to engage students with material experimentation and craft as drivers for sustainable design thinking. This allowed students to explore how small-scale processes can influence large-scale spaces and help develop a deeper understanding of environmentally conscious material and crafted modes of operating within interior architecture. In the first semester, we celebrated our return to campus and the city, by dispersing across London in exploration of material and immaterial aspects of urban “softness”. Through a series of rigorous and playful design processes, the students tested themselves as architectural flâneurs, gathering information from the urban realm and applying this to the design of spatial proposals, responding to the needs of marginalised communities in Peckham Rye. The second semester was an opportunity to focus on constructing spatial experiences and designing atmospheres for concept stores in the retail sector. Through a series of process-driven material experimentation workshops, students were given the opportunity to develop a personal understanding of a set of seemingly incompatible materials, and use this to construct innovative material applications, finishes and assemblages that would