Architectural Technology - Year 1

The studio aims to scaffold students' essential architectural design skills through workshops and lectures. Students produced an individual illustration essay about the architecture that inspired them in the first semester. Then in the second semester, they design a small dwelling with a site context. Students were taken on a local walking tour, seeing Walter Segal's self-built houses, Richard Roger's Ladywell Place pre-fabricated social housing, Owen Luder's Catford Centre and the neighbouring buildings, aiming to be inspired by the area's creative and community history. The small dwelling project was a keyworker house proposed in the newly established forest school in the St Mary Primary School, Lewisham. The site was a small landlocked land within the residential and community buildings. Students were requested to respond to this small, complex, overshadowed site by constructing a dwelling to add positive spatial and functional quality to the forest school. What was on the site, and what would the students retain? Where would this gatekeeper's house be placed on this site, and how does this coexist and contribute to the quality of the student's study? Did the site constraints form the architecture and programme? Did the student respond to the brief playfully, poetically, and logically? What will be preliminary sustainable, spatial, materiality and structural approaches? Many questions would need to be unlocked, setting the exciting beginning for the student's archit