10 minute read
Building an inclusive generation of designers
The Accelerate programme was developed and established by Open City, and is a pioneering design, education and mentoring programme providing access to built-environment courses for a wide group of young people, increasing diversity in these fields. The programme is supported by the London branch of the Landscape Institute.
Siraaj Mitha, Accelerate
Siraaj spent three years working predominantly on affordable housing for Allies and Morrison, where he qualified as an architect. He then spent six months living, working and educating in Nairobi, Kenya for an architectural NGO, after which he returned to the UK and spent three years working for Stanton Williams . He joined Open City in the Summer as the new Head of Accelerate and has also started teaching Undergraduate Architecture at the Bartlett.
The built environment affects us all; from how we form relationships and navigate our cities, to where we choose to spend our time and who we choose to spend it with. Our personal stories, journeys and memories are never without a physical backdrop to contextualise them. Surely, then, the decisions affecting the construction of our built environment should be made democratically, and should represent the population it serves?
Over the last ten years, Open City’s Accelerate programme has encouraged more than 350 young Londoners from underrepresented and historically marginalised backgrounds to experience, explore and gain access to built-environment professions, and has introduced more than 700 built industry professionals to mentoring and teaching opportunities.
With an ever-evolving pedagogy, the programme strives to equip each student with the skills and confidence to make strong applications to study built environment subjects at leading universities and apprenticeship schemes. Students are exposed to a series of workshops in exciting locations across London, from the labyrinthine raised walkways of the Barbican Estate to the antique rooms of the Museum of the Home, and take part in one-to-one mentoring sessions with built industry professionals where they gain a sense of the working life and environment of those operating in the industry. Each year culminates with a summer exhibition showcasing the work produced during the course. Accelerate was established by Open City, a charity which has dedicated the last 30 years to making London’s architecture and landscape more open, accessible and equitable to every community and resident of the city, and to this day continues to explore new and creative ways of doing this.
Since its inception, UCL has been a longstanding partner of Accelerate, and has provided a platform for the programme to experiment, evolve and expand. The programme now operates with UAL in addition to UCL, and can offer places on the course to 60 students. With a proven record of positive social impact on the trajectories of its participants and the demographics of the sector – 75% of Accelerate graduates secure offers to study architecture and related subjects at university – Accelerate is looking to expand in order to provide more young Londoners with opportunities to explore a career in the built environment industries.
Sketching in the landscape in Broadgate Circus
© Siraaj Mitha
The legacy of the programme is those who have taken part. This year, we look forward to celebrating a decade of Accelerate and the alumni that have come through it. This will provide us with a good opportunity to take stock of what the programme has achieved during that time, and to reflect on what more can be done to further our unwavering commitment to bring equity to all parts of our built environment and to amplify the many voices, cultures and identities of London.
Sahar-Fatema Mohamedali – Alumni (2012)
Sahar-Fatema Mohamedali is a newly qualified architect and the champion for social mobility at Weston Williamson + Partners. She studied at the University of Westminster and KTH in Stockholm.
As built environment subjects weren’t taught in my school, Accelerate was my first exposure to architectural education. It gave me the head start I needed and equipped me with skills and critical thinking so I could find a place in university and hit the ground running. Accelerate helped me to confirm my goals as well as achieve them.
The course helped me to realise that design is so much more than functionality and aesthetics. It highlighted the importance of community and how architects in their designs must reflect the society that we design for. I saw a place for myself within a field that I previously perceived as impossible to enter, thanks to the mentors, course leaders and tutors.
The most interesting part of the course for me was work experience at David Miller Architects, where I got the chance to overhear conversations, peek at screens and participate in design discussions and site visits to get a better understanding of what the day-to-day life of an architect entails. Academia is so different to practice, and I was grateful to have a glance at what work could be like for me in the future before deciding to study architecture. This also exposed me to the real-life constraints in the built environment and how they shape architecture, which has influenced my design ethos and helped me to develop a considerate and practical approach to projects.
My Masters thesis, ‘Solace under shade’, looked at informal uses of spaces under bridges and viaducts in Karachi. This project was peoplecentric and involved ground research, which I thoroughly enjoyed and learnt a lot from. This project was as much about process and politics as it was design, and the freedom to steer the direction myself helped me to discover new interests – I would love to pick up this project again in the future and see it become a reality.
In practice I have worked primarily on bridges and infrastructure in a variety of scales, from a small footbridge in Guildford, now nearing completion, to my current work on HS2 near Birmingham, which is at the detail design stage.
The legacy of transport infrastructure projects and the impact they have on communities motivates me to continue in this sector.
As I move forward in my career, I would like to branch out on the typologies of architecture to broaden my experience. I am also excited to be mentoring with Accelerate in the coming year, engaging with schools and universities. I am optimistic about the future of our profession and would love to be a part of shaping it.
Bareera Borhan – Alumni (2014)
Bareera graduated from Central St Martins, UAL in 2020, and developed an interest in people focused architecture and codesign. She is currently a member of the Open City Accelerate Advisory Board and is currently working as a Part 1 architect at David Chipperfield Architects.
I was a GCSE student when I took part in Accelerate in 2014. My project at the time was a response to the theme ‘Moments’. I identified walking through thresholds between spaces as an interesting moment and was particularly interested by the contrast between open and compressed spaces. I felt that the threshold between the street and my school entrance was uninspired, which led to a series of iterative drawings and models through which I designed a new gateway for my school.
I also really enjoyed discussing texts by Kant and Junichiro Tanizaki on complex topics like ‘Raum’ and ‘Genius Loci’ with her. These explorations of space have continued as threads throughout my education and working life in the industry. I was so inspired and excited by every conversation with my mentor. I remember thinking I was interested in architecture but second guessing myself, because at 14 you don’t really understand the world around you, let alone what felt like a nebulous profession. Accelerate made me feel like architecture was for me and I had a place in the industry, which I couldn’t wait to take up.
My future plans are to complete my Masters, during which I hope to be working on projects that put people at the centre of the design process. I believe architecture is a tool for storytelling and can be used to reassign agency; I want to work with communities across the world and celebrate them through the design of spaces.
Robinson Sivalingam – Alumni (2018)
Robinson Sivalingam is 19 years old, originally from London and currently in the second year of Part 1 at the University of Nottingham.
I came into the Accelerate course with an interest in architecture but not much understanding of it. However, from the moment I started the course, this began to change. From the resources provided to the experiences I gained, Accelerate allowed my curiosity in the built environment to grow. I always wanted to pursue a career in architecture, but through the course, I was pleasantly surprised to learn about various aspects that I was unaware of. One of the main thoughts in my mind that changed was that architecture was just going to consist of ‘straight lines and making technical models’, but I was wrong. Over the year, I was introduced to so many creative processes through workshops and trips, which increased my love for architecture and the built environment.
One of the trips that I was interested in was visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum. Here I became aware of something that I had never thought about before, and that was flow. The flow of people and its correlation with space. We were all told to go to different parts of the museum, to observe and sketch different people’s movements with different colours. This created an overlapping flow of coloured lines, which we understood represented the importance of certain spaces and how this information could be used, for example to regulate the level of light. This tied in with an earlier workshop, where we were introduced to mapping and site analysis. We looked at green spaces, traffic, the topography and learned to represent this on layers of tracing paper. This helped build the foundation for when I entered university and we had to do site analysis in more detail.
Something I really liked about the course was the ability to meet and make lifelong friends with likeminded, creative people and gain confidence while being surrounded by similar situations to that of a design student. From a tour of The Bartlett campus to visiting the rooftop of the Islamic Gardens, every aspect of Accelerate enabled me to learn.
In terms of my future plans, I hope to finish my Part 1 in Nottingham and eventually return to The Bartlett for Part 2, and from there eventually become a qualified RIBA architect after Part 3. I also hope to explore my love for content creation in my architectural design, and inspire many others in the future.
