The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings
About the School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment
Location Nottingham • Courses BArch (Hons), MArch • Head of school Gavin Richards • Full-time tutors 13 • Part-time tutors 30 • Students 370 • Staff to student ratio 1:12
Undergraduate
Louis Huband
Course BArch (Hons)
Studio/unit brief The New Bauhaus. Rethinking Architecture: Sustainability is Sexy (Design Atelier 01)
Project title The Biophilic Micro-City
Project description This project explores wellbeing through human and environmental needs. A school becomes an urban organism that embodies complex and diverse thresholds of the city, of past, present and future, where nature permeates the building from the programme to the structural make-up. This organism involves students in a cradle-to-grave process that sees school by-products being converted into construction materials within a ‘Mushroom Factory’, which explores the potential of biomanufacturing technologies to help mitigate waste and encourage environmental design.
Tutor citation Louis’ project is a sophisticated demonstration of the creative re-use of building materials, the influence of the site’s national industrial identity and an innovative programme that fuses environmental and social sustainability together as a platform for architectural education. Rebecca Pallett
Postgraduate
Susannah Hudson
Course MArch
Studio/unit brief NTU School’s Out
Project title The Vennel Seat
Project description The proposal is for a school for sustainable furniture design at Edinburgh College of Art, where renewable and recycled materials are at the heart of the making process. The scheme explores how sustainable choices can be echoed in the building design, moving away from the campus’s existing architecture and towards timber as a predominant material. Arranged as a series of stepped platforms, the proposal follows the site’s slope. The platforms are sheltered by a stepped sawtooth roof designed to encourage cohesion between activities and gives a discreet single-storey presence on Kier Street, ensuring adjacent buildings maintain their unobstructed view of the castle.
Tutor citation Susannah developed her own narrative, resulting in an elegant architectural proposal resolving level changes in this historic part of Edinburgh by finding new links. The design draws on the brief of making in timber at a range of scales and becomes a rich spatial experience. Kenneth Fraser