A thorough grounding in the city: Portsmouth Student Show 2023

‘We are global’ is a slogan that the University of Portsmouth uses to promote itself, playing on its port city heritage: ‘open to adventure and to explore the world’ and counting among its current cohort, students from 150 countries. Walking around the Portsmouth Architecture School end-of-year show, held over three floors of the Penoyre & Prasad-designed Eldon Building, the geographic spread of projects ranges from Sardinia to Bogota. But what is more striking is the thorough engagement and grounding of so many projects in and around the city of Portsmouth itself. It’s an area known for its dockyard heritage and architecture as well as having a legacy of massive post-war redevelopment. As a result, it provides a rich canvas for the retrofit and urban renewal seen in many of the students’ work.

Photo: Max Underhay

In the BA course, this is exemplified by the work of Studio C, which looked at ‘dwelling tactics’ across three sites in Portsmouth. The display is centred around three impressive timber masterplan models, each showing graphically how the warp and weft of a different chunk of the city has been shaped by its housing schemes – from terraces to mega-structure post-war reconstruction. The projects explore urban renewal through new hybrid building types, described as ‘at the threshold between housing and other uses’. Each student focuses on varying residential types and occupational mixes, from multigenerational to student housing in impressive explorations and reimaginings of existing housing types and how these can contribute to neighbourhood renewal. One example is Oscar Hopkins’ Wake the Buck Up project, which reworks the brick-clad mega-structure social housing block of Buckland Wall, giving it a new skirt of cultural spaces and retail, using rammed earth technology created from excavated ground and demolition spoil.

Other BA studios focus on sites in and around Portsmouth Harbour. Studio Flow (the name reflecting how studios are encouraged to present collaboratively and rebrand themselves akin to architecture practices) takes as its focus the adjacent town of Gosport, looking at the reuse of the buildings of the old naval dockyard and former Haslar naval hospital to help reintegrate them into the town. Meanwhile, Luminous Architects studio has as its site the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight. It takes the annual carnival there as a focus and inspiration for proposing new community projects to act as cohesive elements for the local area – among them, a social rehabilitation centre proposed by Andreas Andreou and Belal Abuzaina's wellness centre.

Photo: Nicola Crowson

Studio Flow’s display is arranged as a series of carnival stalls, each dedicated to the work of an individual student. It forms a distinct, corralled space, as is the case for each of the BA studios’ displays, with all presented using timber display stands but differing from studio to studio, each designed and constructed by that unit’s students. The stands show a similar tight edit of material – often a poster/large display board, primer or booklet and model – with all the displays centred around impressively realised site models. ‘Presentation is part of the student’s learning,’ says Phevos Kallitis, the school’s principal lecturer (learning and teaching), as we walk around. ‘They have to put together a budget and concept for the show – it both teaches project management skills but underlines the value of group work.

Overall, the well-structured displays contribute to a clear navigable structure, although at times you slightly miss the creative chaos of work often found at other schools.

In the case of Studio C, its display was supported by local Isle of Wight-based practice Mitchell Evans, an example of how the school has a close connection to the region’s architecture scene, with many students and alumni landing placements and jobs with local firms.

Photo: Sean Mihael

The BA Interior Architecture and Design course, meanwhile, is more free-form in its display, with a large central plinth containing myriad smaller exploratory working models. Kallitis points out how the work is ‘less scenographic than in the past and more focused on social engagement’. The course’s final year theme of repair is explored convincingly in projects such as that by Lemisse Al-Baggou for an Islamic Cultural Centre. This proposes the repurposing of one of the historic naval boathouses in the dockyard – a scheme that creates a central courtyard lined by mashrabiya within the shell of the original structure, reading like a building within a building.

The work of the MA studios, which run as vertical units, exhibit similar themes of social engagement and retrofit. The Open Cities lab looks at alternative models of urban development to the current destructive, resource-hungry one we have. Under the title, Localising Global Inequalities, students worked in partnership with the University of Bogota in Colombia, to understand specific social issues faced in Bogota and then develop projects designed to mitigate these. The series of projects that were developed – despite students not having been able to visit on site – exhibited an impressive and detailed level of research and analysis of the fabric of the city. These range from Karolina Stephenson’s scheme for a community tourism initiative, which proposes a series of plug-in interventions to bring employment and regeneration to less-visited districts, to the vocational and skills-training hubs for women proposed by Shatel Kissi Bamfro, which also looked at improving street safety in the city.

Photo: Rob Wilson

The work in Studio D, meanwhile, takes the form of strategic mapping projects that are then developed and impressively resolved down into buildings. Each student’s work is strikingly and boldly displayed on two long-format poster-sized panels, ranging from the more light-touch ecological stitching of Amy Blencoe’s Fragile Edges/Salt Song project around Portsmouth Harbour to Kai Alexander’s utopian-infused Surviving Dystopia project with its rework of Brutalist structures that nicely invoke the long-demolished ghost of Owen Luder’s once much-denigrated yet later much-lamented Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth.

Studio F takes as its focus the Venice Lagoon (rather than the city of Venice itself) with a series of projects looking to embed social as well as environmental sustainability to an area where both the lagoon's natural environment and its small towns are equally under pressure and dying. One striking scheme by Reuben Paradise, based on the island of Murano, proposes a new glassmaking school housed in an elongated structure-cum-building that both provides new infrastructure supporting a switch to renewable energy for this local industry as well as acting as an urban promenade and connecting link.

Photo: Sean Mihael

All through the work runs a clear thread of making and construction at a range of scales – with investigations from strategic, city-wide mapping to the level of a construction detail. This clear focus on making is reinforced by the Architecture in the Woods project, open to all students to participate in each summer. Run in partnership with Whiteland Wood CIC based in the South Downs, the project this year was designed by students from second-year BA Architecture and BA Interior Architecture and Design courses. It takes the form of a semi-enclosed classroom for children to use during holiday club/forest school and was built over three days by students from across the school of architecture.

It seems emblematic of the school’s work that from the evidence of this show, students gain a thorough understanding of scale and grounding in particular sites and conditions and a real sense of social engagement in their work.

The University of Portsmouth Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries Graduate Showcase 2023 ran from 16-21 June 2023

Photo: Sean Mihael