Ateliers.
Each year, our final year architecture designers join a specific atelier in support of their interests and ambitions. The below explanations discuss the 2024 atelier options, and the ways that they have been explored.
Atelier 01:
SITOPIA: Feeding Our Future
Introduction:
‘Sitopia’ [or food-place from the Greek sitos, food + topos, place].
Food shapes every aspect of our lives from our bodies to our homes, to the cities and the world we live in. It not only affects the tangible aspects of our lives but also the intangible – our cultures & traditions, our society & economy, our values & rituals as well as how we think & ultimately feel about ourselves and the world around us. Carolyn Steel, an Architect & Researcher decided to name this phenomenon ‘Sitopia’ (Steel, 2008).
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Carolyn Steel (2020) argues that we can’t live in ‘Utopia’ (meaning a perfect world) but that we could get close to this if we followed Sitopian ideals, using food as our guide. Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could tackle the current food crisis? Millions of people are struggling to feed themselves & their families. This has been escalated recently due to the pandemic, climate change and conflict - the war in Ukraine has increased the cost of food, fuel, and fertilizers (Global food crisis | World Food Programme, 2022). Society, the environment, politics, and the economy all play a part in shaping food and the world we live in.
Topics:
Food shapes the places we live.
Food brings communities together.
Food is a powerful tool for changing lives.
Food can improve both the body and the mind of individuals and the wider population.
Food can help to create a convivial city and sustainable future (Parham, 2015).
Sitopian ideas might influence the making of architecture.
The Project:
The challenge was to design a civic ‘FOOD-PLACE’ for the future of Nottingham using Sitopian ideals. This applied to every aspect of the design including the function of the building, as well as the materials it is made from for example.
The ‘food-place’ took many forms, but ‘food’ and ‘place’ played a central role. ‘Food-place’ was understood and explored in its broadest sense and focused on food insecurities, the buying & selling of food, food production, gastronomy, culture/traditions/rituals of food or/and health & wellbeing etc for example.
The ‘food-place’ is likely to combine multiple functions which may or may not be interrelated with one another. Students were allowed to combine a food typology with something not usually associated with food to create an interesting juxtaposition. For example, some students have designed a market, others a cooking school, soup kitchen, brewery, bakery, vertical farm, banqueting hall, winery, food research centre or a combination of the above or a new food typology.
Atelier 02:
LEARNING NEIGHBOURHOODS: Knitting The City.
Introduction:
Urbanists talk about ‘knitting together” the public realm to reconnect spaces and places as one continuous urban fabric. In this Atelier we continue this process on to the site and into our buildings, intertwining learning institutions with the city that surrounds them.
Knitting mutually supportive threads between the community and the learning environment removes physical and power-related boundaries, enabling citizens to teach and institutions to learn. This approach stands in opposition to the stultifying effects of modernist planning zones. These separated industry from housing, education from commerce, and gave fast-moving vehicles dominant status on the arterial roads that defined boundaries. This Atelier seeks to knit back together the neighbourhood, with the potential for education, community facilities and housing combining seamlessly to meet local needs and explore new forms of Higher Education.
Topics:
What part can higher education facilities play in community and neighbourhood life?
How might higher education take place outside an institutional setting?
Can buildings be educators?
Why is it never all about buildings?
The Project:
As part of Atelier 2, a Higher Education facility was designed to support the teaching and practice of the next generation of professionals who, through completion of their degree course, would emerge (happy and healthy) with the skills and experience to contribute to a sustainable future. At the same time, the facility was integrated into a Learning Neighbourhood, both welcoming the community in, and reaching out to use existing facilities in the local area.
We were open to student proposals for the courses that would be taught at the facility and the functional brief that would be needed to support this.
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We asked students to challenge current conventions such as:
The Curriculum:
What is taught on the courses, and how would this be different to current practice, for example in furthering skills and knowledge about sustainability and wellbeing?
Teaching Practices:
How is teaching carried out on the courses? For example, what is the power relationship between students and academic staff, could students become partners in the process? Might the course become practice-based, involving the application of learning to real-life situations, benefitting the community?
Teaching & Learning Environments:
What is the best setting to support an innovative curriculum and teaching methods, and the wellbeing of staff and students? Can the building itself contribute to the learning process? Can the environment in which the building sits, both natural and manmade, offer up spaces for learning?
Atelier 03:
CRAFTMANSHIP : Phenomenological Production
Introduction:
Since the times of the ancient city-states, civic architecture embodied the powers and responsibilities invested in the city’s institutions by its inhabitants; hence, we could argue that the civic relationship between the citizens’ interactions, its institutions, and the achievement of order in the city has been symbolised in public spaces and architecture throughout history. Architecture and urban design construct the built environment where all our activities take place; they frame and define the spaces where our lives occur and create places that resonate in our memories and experience. This relationship has been further emphasised in the twenty-first century by the impact architecture has on the environment. The architecture of our time must be defined by our ability and capacity to respond to conditions emerging from climate change to create a sustainable future.
Atelier 03 brought into focus the culture/community/architecture/city relationship by concentrating on the notion of making & thinking and questioning the role that production can have in the contemporary metropolis. Richard Sennett pointed out that, historically the relationship between craft and community was inseparable. In the medieval guilds, the transmission of knowledge from generation to generation made them sustainable, as ‘knowledge capital’ translated into the guild’s economic power (2008). For these ‘communities’ knowledge was sacred, and it translated into powers of various types: economic, cultural, political, social, etc. However, as centuries progressed the vital relationship between making and learning, and the transmission of such knowledge back into the community deteriorated with the emergence of new professions and the invention/discovery of novel technologies. The weakening of this link resulted in the devaluation of the social standing of craftsmanship and the fragmentation of the connection between hand and head – between making and thinking (Sennett 2008).
Topics:
What is the contemporary relationship between making (craft) and thinking in the twenty-first century?
What is the role of production/manufacturing in enhancing communities and the city?
What constitutes a beautifully crafted and atmospheric sustainable building?
The Project:
The project explored a ‘CRAFTSMANSHIP CENTRE’ based in Nottingham, which embodied the notion of craftsmanship. Craftsmanship was understood in the broadest sense and the centre could focus on the production of an object, a process or a discipline. The object, process or discipline emerged from, and was aligned to the students line of enquiry in regards to production in the city and contributed to the improvement of the city’s urban spaces.