BA show catalogue 2014 by Architecture@LJMU

2014

ARCHITECTURE

BA Honours Architecture at LJMU

BA (Hons) Architecture offers a programme of study that is thoughtfully balanced to address the creative and technical demands of the profession. Taught principally through a studio environment that is seamlessly underpinned and informed by lectures and workshops, the over-arching ambition of the programme is to create graduates with artistic flair, and who are technically skilled and grounded in the demands of the professional role of the architect. The learning and teaching environment is progressively informed by research in pedagogy in the creative field. While teaching the curriculum, the programme also develops less tangible skills in students, such as communication, presentation and self-motivation; a key ambition is to create independent thinkers, adept at resolving problems with creativity and originality. A broad educational experience is offered within which students can develop diverse rigorous and creative approaches to design issues that explore and test appropriate resolutions in relation to contemporary and anticipated contextual issues. Design projects form the backbone of the core teaching strategy. These projects are seen as primers to a divergent creative and critical thought process: they are characterised by individual interpretation and interest of the subjects that encourage imaginative solutions through discursive studio forums. As you progress through the degree, the design projects gradually become larger in scale, more complex and ambitious in their intentions and integrative in their nature. At degree level, predominantly, the city of Liverpool is used as a contextual laboratory to test concepts that have a local flavour with global implications. The aim is to develop graduate skills and knowledge such that they become autonomous thinkers who are capable of analysing, visualising and testing potential solutions to increasingly complex spatial and social issues within an increasingly holistic global scenario.

technology and practice are linked to, integrated with and have outcomes from these design projects. There are two design projects at level 6 which serve as an introductory project during the first third of the academic year and a major design project during the second two thirds of the academic year. Students are expected to develop critical positions and conceptual propositions in relation to briefing documentation as programmatic primers. The large project is an option project where several briefs are presented as directional architectural and conceptual objectives: students select one of these briefs. The large project is referred to as the Comprehensive Design Project, which aptly describes its objectives ‘to pursue a design project proposal that is comprehensively researched, developed and resolved in presentation drawings’. These drawings become part of each student’s ‘unique design character’ exhibited in the end of year degree show and in their portfolios, which are utilised to initiate and secure practice placements. History and Theory, Technology and practice lectures constitute both parallel weekly course building knowledge gradually throughout the year and project specific lectures, seminars and workshops timetabled at critical points in the design process.

Ian Wroot, Programme Leader

The final year focuses on environment, sustainability and ecology where architecture is seen as emerging from and responding to a holistic context of contemporary cultural and environmental programmatic issues. There is a clear vocational aim, to equip students with the skills and knowledge to practice architecture, through a creative, diverse yet rigorous approach to design project work. Design is at the core of the course and wherever possible supporting studies such as history and theory and

creative hybrid fashion & performance

Gary Brown

Rob MacDonald

Michael Bates-Tracey Glen Bilsborrow Ryan Blair Kari Bradbury Harriet Cox Anna Eager Dean Eccleston Dominic Garrett Lauren Gwynne Lauren O’Donnell Christopher Shaw Georgina Wileman

Carrie Cavanagh Natalija Chavina Rhys Hughes Patson Makangadza Yasir Naeem Colleen O’Neill Tom O’Reilly Henry Opoku Adusei Charlotte Roche Daniel Rush Oliver Townsend Caroline Walsh

Simulation has replaced production at the centre of our social systems. Contemporary culture has gone beyond the classical value distinctions and now operates on the basis of ‘sign value’ as the unit of gravitational attraction and possession. The real is in danger of becoming a useless body. As McLuhan states “the medium has become the massage”. Image production as a cycle of different worlds yields the end of ideological critique, there is nothing to demystify because the image has been disassociated from the real. Image has become a reality in its own right where it no longer relates to ‘that which can be reproduced’ but to that which has already been reproduced. The simulation of artifices has become cyclical and self referential where media constantly references itself. Technology has extended and simulated mans body functions, now it extends his consciousness. The aim of the programme is to combine several use activities as a gravitational counterpoint to influence urban space such that the symbiotic inter-reaction between creative actions and public space stimulates interest and activity in the city matrix. The Creative Hybrid is envisaged as a combination of retail, entertainment, accommodation, creative applied design and an urban space (or spaces) as primer to the urban renewal of the new creative quarter. The hybrid should create a combination of gravitational activities such that there are reasons for the populace to move towards and pause within or adjacent to the space throughout the day. Activities stimulating events within the space on a daily, nightly, weekly and seasonal level should be considered in order to catalyse a twenty four hour mix of activities. The hybrid acting as a three dimensional social theatre spilling activities as events onto the external urban space.

should relate to and promote the ethos of the fashion brand. Some areas that you may consider as activity spaces in the fashion house are as follows; reception; conference room convertible to a small show room; admin office for buyers and sales staff which may be integrated with media staff who write articles take photographs for a profusion of magazines ; samples room; design work room; head designers room; cutting room; stock room. We know our bodies intimately, a three dimensional mental map is imbued into our subconscious repository as an ‘ideal’ image. This image construct, its natural appreciation and subsequent preference in terms of those primary desires of reproduction and sex meaning that we analyse and criticise other bodies relative to this ideal, generating a tendency to appreciate other bodies which exhibit similarities to our own ideal. Reciprocally projecting this ideal onto the aids and artifices that we construct. This preference remains essentially visual, ‘skin deep’ one might say, the contradiction being that our skin as an organ is more than mere surface. Analogies of the performance systems of organic skin to the skins of our inhabited artifices have preferentially selected protection and sexual attraction and dismissed the other performance criteria which make organic skin interactive with its environment. Despite the move from a closed machine system understanding of our universe to an open organic one, we still selectively segregate systems into parts rather than viewing them as open systems and integral parts of their contexts. As our environment becomes increasingly complex the counteractive drive for increasing environmental control has lead to an over enclosure to our inhabited artifices using impermeable unresponsive skins.

The fashion house is the primer and anchor of the urban hybrid.. In order to instigate the design you should select and research an avant-garde fashion designer and the fashion design industry in order to design a fashion house around your interpretation of his / her personality and work. Fashion is a high profile commercial business, as such the architecture