DS 16

DS16 likes making physical things. The studio is run on a platform for students to experiment and invent architectural and spatial concepts initiated through in-depth investigations of material techniques and the making of artefacts, created both manually and digitally. This year we invited students to radically re-make; to re-invent, re-use, re-cycle and re-think, emphasizing the relationships between technology and nature and directed at re-vitalising and/or re-inventing lost, marginalised communities. We started with a 5-week project entitled “Cast & Re-Cast” when we collectively evaluated and re-evaluated materials and techniques of artefacts produced at Grymsdyke Farm. Here students created six new engaging site-specific pieces employing different material processes; rammed-earth, paper, concrete, fabric and ceramic casting. The Radical Re-make was brought to Puglia Italy, the general location of main individual projects. Puglia is today one of the most disadvantaged regions in the EU, suffering from many years of de-population as a result of de-industrialisation, recently burdened by drought and a devastating blight of its prized olive trees. As always, students developed their own research, wrote their own briefs, found their own sites and devised their own programmes to speculate critical and experimental interventions for unorthodox building typologies of a civic nature.