The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings
About the School of Architecture
Location Oxford • Courses BA (Hons) Architecture, MArchD Applied Design in Architecture, Architect Apprenticeship (Level 7), RIBA Studio (Part 1 and 2) • Head of school Christina Godiksen • Full-time tutors 37 • Part-time tutors 65 • Students 714 • Staff to student ratio 1:7
Undergraduate
Simon Bossen
Course BA (Hons) Architecture
Studio/unit brief Making Housing Public. Cooperative Living in Urban Environments (Unit L)
Project title The Streets in the Sky
Project description This is a co-housing community project in Hoxton that focuses on young families facing the difficulties of the London housing market. The design has been inspired by 1950s British Street Party culture. The project’s tower is wrapped in semi-stepped streets covered in a metal mesh, allowing children to roam freely with supervision. The design’s massing is generated in response to the east London context. A simple glue-laminated timber construction gives the modular apartments adaptability, so that occupants can avoid moving home when their families grow.
Tutor citation Responding to the studio’s co-housing objective, Simon has entrenched his project within a real locally contested site. From research into community and government discourse, from Twitter to local notice boards, he has developed an extremely humane retort to the seemingly default premise of building more, at whatever cost, to solve the housing crisis. Mark Rist and Natalie Savva
Postgraduate
Samuel Huntley
Course MArchD Applied Design in Architecture
Studio/unit brief Zero Carbon Futures. A New Timber Revolution (DS4)
Project title Boat to the Future
Project description The project proposes a strategy to address the shortage of housing in Oxford by revisiting an alternative: the use of the city’s extensive waterways as part of the urban body. It re-invents the relationship between town and narrowboats and re-invents the narrowboat itself to make it more sustainable. The project aims to take away the stigma of living on a narrowboat by creating a place of connection for boaters – the boaters’ hub – offering workspace. The architecture is inspired by traditional boat-building techniques, combined with advanced technologies.
Tutor citation Sam’s project is commendable not just for the proposal, but for the breadth and depth of his investigations across a wide range of spheres, and his determination to take things apart, understand them and put things together into a material vision of what he believes would be a better future for Oxford and beyond. Micheal Kloihofer, Jason Coleman, Tomas Sullivan and Jonah Maxted