Architecture (MA)

Before setting up the show, the studio was a mess! Dirt, moss, lichen, flour, bamboo, resin, rubber, endless sheets of laser cutting and punched metal, tea-bags, paint-brushes, plastic sheets, fabric, yarn, play-doh, bricks, clay, cables, wires, pins, tape, cutting mats and blades, saws, drills, hammers, nails, screws, buckets of water, concrete, amorphous lumps of molten foam, prints, sketches, rope, scraps of models jumbled into accidental architectures, perfume, incense, casting moulds, frames, canvases, knitting needles, wool, plants and microchips, oats and tinned tomatoes, woven reeds and test tubes. It never seemed to end. Or stop proliferating.

It's taken time to understand and appreciate what the studio is, to understand its importance. It is the glue that holds it all together, the conversation between tutorials, about the work but also just chat, it's our community. As architectural education reflects on itself, interrogating pedagogy and practice, we value that messy studio space more than ever. It reflects who we are, what we produce, the programme, the education, and the community we strive to have fostered with care, collaboration, ambition, ingenuity and inventiveness.

It is astonishing what this graduating cohort has achieved – both in terms of their work and who they are. Generous and caring, collaborative, sensitive and respectful of those who teach them, engaged in every way. Their work reflects this care. They have asked brave, bold, and important questions of architecture. Their projects propose new forms of ecological practice situated with indigenous knowledges, unravel networks of colony and capital, understand material and craft and intergenerational knowledge, challenge epistemologies of history and archive, speculate on what our emerging digital futures can mean, explore building reuse, give new values to unloved old buildings, welcome refugees and find places for migrant communities, and revel in ethical, equitable new ways of living with plants and other species.

Congratulations to all the students and tutors of 2021/22 for all your hard work and achievement and a special thanks to all the support teams who help everyone to get there.

Beth Hughes

Head of Programme