DS 2.4
Tutors
Eric Guibert
E.Guibert@westminster.ac.ukEric Guibert is a gardener architect and teacher. He researches through his built and grown architectural practice ways of co-creating spaces with ecosystems and species. This architectural animism aims to define more equal relations between humans and their habitats, nurture and express their emergence towards enhanced resilience.
Read More...Michael Spooner
M.Spooner1@westminster.ac.ukMichael Spooner is a scientist-turned architect. He studied biology in his native Canada and neurophysiology in Japan, before migrating to architecture at the AA. Twelve years at dRMM, he championed engineered timber and led award-winning projects including Hastings Pier, recipient of the 2017 Stirling prize. He combines teaching with collaborative practice studioSPOON.
Read More...Guest Critics
Adam Cossey – Hawkins\Brown Architects
Anthony Powis – Central Saint Martins
Chloe Harrison – Wilder Horsham District
Dain Son Robinson – Sustainable Development Goal Coordinator at the University of Westminster
Jeremy Rye – Jeremy Rye Studio
Julian Williams Karen Fitzsimon – doctoral researcher and landscape architect
Keb Garavito Bruhn – founding partner at Pilbrow and Partners Architects
Paolo Zaide
Sang Hoon Lee – Building Workshop Architects
Seoul
Thanks
This year would not have been possible without the support of Richard Black and Chloe Harrison from the Wilder Horsham District who have generously shared their local knowledge of the nature framework that Knepp Wildland is part of, and other pressures. We are grateful for their input on the students’ work and hope that the projects prove useful in return.
Read More...This year we challenged our students to develop Feral Architectures. The studio has taken a cosmopolitical viewpoint of “building back better” for the local and global ecosystems, equally for humans and all life; aiming to enhance the landscape, as much as human life. We located ourselves in Southwater, next to Knepp Wildland – the famous rewilding project in Sussex – to negotiate the conflict between increased housing while enhancing biodiversity. In response to an existing scheme, the studio has developed an alternative masterplan that protects a nearby wildlife corridor by allocating half of the site as a buffer zone limiting the negative impact of humans. Nature recovery is extended within the scheme of four islands composed of four plots. The brief was to create a synergy between human inhabitation, an economic activity, and the wilded landscape. The students have together tackled a diverse range of regenerative approaches from a cosmopolitical town hall, forest schooling, the development and sharing of ecological knowledge, to human funeral composting. The massing of the schemes have integrated the ecological connectivity within their site by using typologies with porosity for wildlife and humans. These micro-wildlife corridors have been enhanced with facades designed as ecotones – they form an in-between space where the boundaries between species, as well as between indoor and landscape, are blurred.
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