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lucinda anis village sea
‘Fantastical’: Lucinda Anis of the Bath school’s A Village at Sea.
‘Fantastical’: Lucinda Anis of the Bath school’s A Village at Sea.

Student architects’ annual shows: the shape of things to come?

This article is more than 8 years old
Architecture schools’ yearly exhibitions offer flights of fancy, sci-fi visions and things of beauty from those destined to shape our built environment

Around this time of year, all over the country and at no charge, the public can wander into various seats of learning and get a glimpse of the future. For this is the season of the annual shows of the nation’s schools of architecture, where students at every stage of the five-year academic part of their training (there are also two years spent working in offices) present the best of the visions and designs over which they have been sweating since the previous September. The aim is to show their work to the world and, it’s hoped, catch the eye of a future employer.

Mostly, the public pass up on the opportunity for enlightenment, the shows being mostly visited by parents, loyal but a little bewildered by the “urban breathalysers” or “aeroponics institutes” that their offspring have produced. Indeed, enlightenment is not exactly what you get, the experience being more to witness a flurry of creative energy of uncertain direction, sometimes dazzling imagery, a maelstrom of suggestions of ways in which the world might be different.

There is not one future on offer, but hundreds. At the most factual level, most of these students will end up working for practices that design the buildings that will surround us. But there is also the belief held by almost all schools of architecture that their job is not only to train students to do their job, but to incubate new and better ways of creating buildings, which they might eventually put into practice. Students are typically grouped into “units” or “studios”, run by two or three tutors who will have their own ideas of how the world should be. The shows are displays of their ideas as well as those of the students.

To tour the show of the Bartlett school in London, for example, is to see a trade show of utopias, in each booth a different manifesto, each one of which carries the trappings of a movement that might have driven architecture forward for a decade or so of the 20th century. “Can we not take in our hands the history of the city and use it as a feeding ground for creating new narratives?” asks one unit. “What happened to architecture being used as a medium for resistance, if not rebellion? For challenging the status quo and the dominant power structures?” “The work this year,” says Unit 19, is “both speculative and critical, responding to fluxing densities of inhabitation in surprising and novel ways”.

‘Theoretical speculation amplified by the power of computerised design and rendering’: Elliot Mayer’s Pneumacity.

Theoretical speculation is then amplified by the power of computerised design and rendering into projects such as Pneumacity, where inflatable structures unfurl over Tokyo’s freeways to create emergency shelters in the event of an earthquake, and Havana Energy Forest, a structure consisting of “ventilation pipes, cables, ethanol storage columns and dust control mesh, a mix between an energy container, a hotel and an amphitheatre”. This project “discusses materiality as a political device” in ways that space does not permit me to describe.

Other schools are more down to-earth, but still motivated by a belief in betterment. Students in the Welsh School of Architecture want to “promote equality in the urban realm” to create “a built solution for unemployment” or “heal urban non-places and nourish social wellbeing”. Projects include some sober proposals to protect and encourage the informal qualities of the flea market in Marseille. There is also a line of investigation into innovative ways of building in wood.

The University of Bath produces projects that, more than most, look like buildings you might actually expect to see built soon. They choose more downbeat places – Belfast, Bratislava, Weston-super-Mare, the district of Tradeston in Glasgow – to the Californian/Cuban/Brazilian locations favoured by the Bartlett. A brownish/orange hue pervades their images, soft and autumnal. The briefs are plausible – cinemas, a sailing centre, a lido – and there is an emphasis on the materials of which buildings are actually made. A Village at Sea, a prism-shaped offshore centre for rehabilitating offenders, is as fantastical as it gets.

At best, the work in the student shows is committed, hard-worked, brave, skilled, thoughtful and/or imaginative. At worst, the exhibitions offer bad sci-fi, lazy politics (“Let’s all hate America”) and cod poetry. There are cliches that have been going round the schools for decades, such as the idea that the student’s work is a quasi-science (a “surgical operation”, a “laboratory”). Certain buzzwords float around (there’s a lot of “liminal”). Well, the students are young and not all geniuses, but too often their teachers seem to be steering them towards rather than away from these traps.

Influences from real, practising architects tend either towards the extravagant computer-generated form-making of Zaha Hadid or to the reflective, crafted manipulation of masonry and timber practised by Peter Zumthor. Nothing wrong with looking to leaders in your field, but in running the gamut from Z to Z, more nuanced approaches tend to get left out.

At root is the central question of architectural education: is it about preparing students for the realities of practice or is it about taking a freedom they will never have again, to dream and speculate? The obvious truth is that it should be both. Educated with too much fantasy, students become disempowered when thrust into the machinery of the profession; with too much pedantry they will never raise their horizons.

Some of the architecture school shows have already closed, but many stay open for a week or two. There could well be one near you. A visit could be revelatory and diverting, as long as you don’t expect to understand too much.

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