Fourth Years @ Brochure Presentation

How are you feeling right now?

I’m feeing super! No I don’t drink! This is white… water … I’ve had the time of my life this week so sad it’s over. Yeah, I want to do Basil Spence every day. I do, I honestly do, I’ve had so much fun! The thing is, it’s all about group work. When you’re doing individual projects, you’ll just feel like, “Sh**, I’m f***ed!” And then when you’re together you’re like, “We’re f***ed! We’re all f***ed together!” It just feels so much better!

I think it’s... interesting, because we have these placements, to see what people work, cos everyone has a different experience at their placements, so…

I guess everyone brings something extra…

Yeah, you have unique skills, and your skill is in a certain expertise, like Ben, he does the visuals, that’s what he did a lot of in placement. You can, that’s obviously what you did on placement, that’s where your focus is at… so everyone has different areas and it’s really interesting to see… it’s what you’re passionate about I guess…

How’ve the past few weeks been?

Imagine really wanting to go home, but never actually going home… and never sleeping, and just getting… … and being whipped, ptchu!

… more and more sad but happy you’ve worked so much. Like, “I wish I could go home, but I’ve got to do some much work! Ah, I really wanna go to sleep, but I’ve done so much work it’s brilliant!”

You get schizophrenic within these last two weeks. I think everyone develops a slight bipolar disorder…

How do I look for a good engineer?

Chill out. Just chill out, it’s hypothetical, it’s not real life. You’re not designing a building that’s actually gonna be built.

It is hypothetical…

It’s all hypothetical…

What makes an epic engineer?

Him.

You’ve got to understand sustainability, and you’ve got to understand embodied carbon. You’ve gotta reduce your embodied carbon and embodied energy in everything!

An engineer that can understand the architecture is really good!

What about the other way around?

How did you win?

I dunno!

We worked well together. We’re… we’re still friends!

If you see some of the groups… a lot of people are very good on their own but when they start working together it doesn’t work that well. I think what we did really well, was work together. We picked up where the other ones left off…

Is that with the engineers as well?

Even with the engineers. Just everybody picked up together! ...To be honest, nobody ever thought we would win. There were like 10 people in our crit whereas the crit before, the whole year was there. Nobody gave credit… we were the dark horse, the underdogs, when they announced our names everybody was like, “What the f***?” As soon as we broke off, we went to our corner to clean up and get everything off the wall, and loads of people were there asking us questions like, “What did you do? How did you win? Tell us about your project! Nobody’s heard of your project! Where did it come from?”

How does that feel?

Really good. More than anything, it was the teamwork! We worked so well as a team.

Basically, when it all gets screwed up in fourth year, look at how happy everyone is now! You’ll get here eventually!

Everyone’s knackered yet so happy!

Knackered, slightly drunk and really happy, so it’s all good!

The same! You’ve gotta understand the architecture and take it to a lower embodied carbon. You can do everything with low embodied carbon…

It only works whilst your considering the other field, otherwise you’re constantly going together with ideas and then they’ll go, “That won’t work”… you’ll kind of bounce. It’s better if you’re both agreeing…

We were practicing this the other day! How to be really harsh to everyone. Or preparing people for their crit by telling them that… everything’s just sh**. “How does this look?” “Sh**.” That’s how we handle every situation.

I, erm, I like studio, I don’t like lectures. What’s there not to like about lectures?

Sunpath diagrams [laughs]

We’re all poor because we’re spending all our money on model making supplies from Fresh. Lauren came in with £1 in her bank account the other day to last her two weeks.

Are you managing to stretch it out?

I’ve got more money today. It’s already gonna go in like two days.

All on materials. Materials and alcohol.

The ghosts of the architects of this building, Allison and Peter Smithson, come out at 3.33 in the morning, they come into studio and wander about.