The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings
About the School of Architecture and Cities
Location London W1 • Courses BA (Hons) Architecture, BSc Architecture and Environmental Design, MArch • Head of school Harry Charrington • Full-time tutors 35 • Part-time tutors 78 • Students 1200 • Staff to student ratio 1:15
Undergraduate
Reece Murray
Source:Reece Murray
Course BA (Hons) Architecture
Studio/unit brief Peripheral Landscapes: Reimagining the edges of the Thames Gateway (DS3.4)
Project title Cliffe Marsh – Developing the Periphery
Project description This project for a community centre highlights the sensitivity needed to develop areas on the periphery of London. The building, designed to celebrate a mixture of community, circularity, and craft, provides a new centre for the proposed 225 homes being built by Medway Council at Cliffe Woods. All materials are sourced locally, reducing carbon emissions and embodiment in construction, and are intended to be recycled and renewed throughout their lifetime. Reed from Cliffe Marsh is used as thatch, and Scots pine is sourced from the surrounding site. Recycled steel is taken from the local industrial area and rammed earth is made up of soil taken from site excavations.
Tutor citation Reece’s project to develop a local Kentish village can be read like a graphic novel: the continuous scroll of his delicate models and drawings capturing the ‘dark flat wilderness’ of the Thames Estuary described in Dickens’ Great Expectations. There is something quiet, caring and personal in this work – humble, light of touch, reflecting a sensitivity that is rare in a young designer. Paolo Zaide and Tom Budd
Postgraduate
Rebecca Kelly
Source:Rebecca Kelly
Course MArch
Studio/unit brief Northern Soul Productions (DS11)
Project title The Rig: Towards a New Biome
Project description It’s 2050. Climate change is happening. After a 10m rise in sea level, Yorkshire’s extensive, rich, agricultural land is under water. This project devises new methods of rehousing, replanting and resupplying and explores innovative ways to use resources. The overall design concept of THE FARM (Future-Flooding Alternative Regeneration Microcosm) is based on reversing the roles of land and water, challenging the dichotomous relationship to support life’s survival. Providing a new framework for living and farming with minimal environmental impact, it grows and manufactures alternative food sources and other agricultural by-products in abundance using pixel farming logic, not only approaching farming in a new light but also building a no-waste policy for living.
Tutor citation A futuristic and visionary project, imagined for a world significantly changed 30 years from now. Rebecca (with her masterplan studio partner Lavinia Pennino) chose Hornsea Mere in North Yorkshire as a laboratory within which to explore humane and architectural responses to the devastation of the climate crisis in our coastal regions. Both site-specific and universally applicable, the project and Rebecca’s approach to design are ambitious, fearless and rigorous. Elantha Evans and Dusan Decermic