STAGE TWO

Stage 2 Studio Work continues to ask students to explore the convivial potential of architecture to foster a community’s freedom to interact and to contribute creatively to the environment in which they live, outside the dominant forms of production and consumerism. The entire year’s work is set in Bo’ness, a small commuter town on the shore of the Firth of Forth.

Semester 1 focuses on housing typology and terraced housing in particular, as a generative tool to explore spatial organisations that can support new forms of living and working together, those which promote sustainable lifestyles, reduced transport needs, lower energy use and the sharing of resources.

Semester 2 is informed by the material harvesting approach developed in the urban mining exercise examined in the collaborative Studio Practices exercise with Product Design Engineering students. The final project of the year asks students to become acquainted with the contemporary debate on adaptive reuse through intervening on the existing local library building, carefully crafting a tectonic strategy to reimagine the nature of this public institution for the future.