Fifth Year Fun!

By Harry Streuli

The ‘icebreaker’ for old and new students into the first year of the MArch is the ‘threshold project’.

Small groups with a shoestring budget, five days, and the starting point of ‘threshold’ were tasked with creating a series of campus interventions, that both excited and confused passers by.

What followed ranged from a strange door floating in space that welcomed people onto the parade, to stripes of orange tape that got more and more intense as you walk up, past 6E from the bus stop.

Later into the second semester, half of the year group travelled to the AA’s Hooke Park, where they carry out a ‘Design and Make’ programme. Littered throughout the park are small timber projects that are leftover from this and previous iterations of the programme. Some projects had become over-run by the working forest, and being stuck inside a giant floating wooden ladybird was certainly a highlight!

With games such as ‘asking looking playing making’, and ‘muff on a huff puff’, students found themselves with an opportunity to play with materials, and explore what can be extracted from them. Ed Robertson (left, in a felt scarf and masking tape knee pad) was captivated by the ‘mesmeric’ quality of the River Avon, while Mike Lewis set fire to everything.

The fun was rounded off by a trip to the North, where Manchester’s scummiest area was beautifully master-planned in just five days! Followed by a whistle-stop tour of Yorkshire’s finest architecture, this was certainly an entertaining week.

Architecture at Bath is quite often considered serious, pragmatic, and technical. This doesn’t mean that students are too - the casual approach to the Fifth Year means that we have an opportunity to explore the fun side to architecture, and not lose sight of what may have drawn us to the subject all those years ago.