MA Interior Design

from AVA Yearbook 2022

Professional Landscape Architecture

Design of any scale responds to – and in parallel leads – cultural, political and social change. Our MA course examines the role of design in forming places, connections, communities in a socially and environmentally sustainable way, through speculative and pragmatic design exercises, some of which lead to real-life built projects. Through this MA programme, we challenge the limits of the role of the designer and we explore how design pertains to different aspects of our everyday living. Political and cultural debates are rearticulated and expressed through a hands-on poetic and creative making approach.

Displacement; performative mapping, immersion, montage and active machines

‘Thinking involves a wrenching of concepts away from their usual, configurations, outside the systems in which they have a home, and outside the structures of recognition that constrain thought to the already known. Thinking is never easy. Thought-events, like language-bodies, are singularities, which mix with and have effects on other materialities, with political, cultural, cinematic, or architectural events.’ Elizabeth

Grosz

For Deleuze and Guattari mapping is an open discourse, an open process, ‘an experimentation in contact with the real’. Mapping, in this context, as opposed to tracing, reflects on the performative, the immersion in a place. In this type of performative mapping, the distinction between the map-maker’s intention and outcome is not valid; intention and outcome are intertwined within the action of its making, which is considered as ‘praxis’. ‘Praxis’ here is meant as ‘thinking-in-action’, as Gadamer would call it, which does not follow a thinking process but precedes it, encloses it, and, as Snodgrass and Coyne describe it, it breaks down the dichotomies of thought and action, theory and practice. It becomes obvious that in this context there is no clear distinction between mapping/ praxis and designing. The contact with the real, the act of immersion in a place, does not only transform one’s understanding of a place, but is transformative for the subject itself. In Zizek’s words, ‘what is namely an act? The act differs from an active intervention (action) in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent): the act is not simply something I ‘accomplish’ – after an act, I’m literally ‘not the same as before.’ In this sense, we could say that the subject ‘undergoes the act (‘passes through’ it) rather than ‘accomplishes’ it: in it, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not), i.e., the act involves a kind of temporary eclipse, aphanisis, of the subject.’ Slavoj Zizek

In this Masters course, places are studied in ways drawn from a broad theoretical context, and often discussed in relation to the notion of displacement. Performative acts in a place are acts of immersion and, simultaneously, of displacement. Through such processes a transformative encounter with the place occurs, which – in other words – allows the students to gain a better understanding of the place, while transforming both.

Notes:

Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001). p.61, with reference to Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. [1988]. London: Continuum, 2004. p.13

Snodgrass and Coyne, Interpretation in Architecture: Design as Way of Thinking. p.212

Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York: Routledge, 2001). p.44, see also: Tony Myers, and Slavoj Zizek (London; New York: Routledge, 2003).

Students

January 2021 start: Shijin Cheruvakkara, Rushil Gaba, Ambika Katta, Shivangi Purohit, Elizabeth Teye, September 2021 start: Jamshid Abdukayumov, Kratika Jain, Jhanvi Patel, Lorraine Ruskin, Nahla Juilany, Rabih Khalil, Josh Mcveigh, Ashna Shakir, Fatemeh Mohanna, Shadi Moradi, Preksha Patel, Jessica Pope-Alkarkhi, January 2022 start: Samreen Naaz, Nandeesha Matha, Aditi Bhole, Merlin John, Victor Omorogbe, Shaymaa Alnaji, Part-time: Martyna Lapinska www.uel.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/ma-interior-design www.instagram.com/uel_mainteriordesign

Special thanks to our guest critics and guest tutors: Amanda Wanner, Rachael Brown, Dina Al-Qusous, Carl Callaghan, Israel Hurtado Cola, Phevos Kallitsis, Belinda Mitchell, Dorian Wiszniewski.

Special thanks also to our collaborators on the Blue Community Space and Cinema project: Russell Dryden; Blue Bermondsey BID Manager, Sanchez Benton Architects, Really Local Group and its founder Preston Benson. Their input, views and conversations were invaluable.

The Blue Bermondsey Community space and cinema

In Term 1 the students developed a series of performative processes for encountering and exploring the Blue market square in Bermondsey. They interacted with the local community and developed strategies for designing the new community space currently developed by the Really Local group alongside the new Blue cinema. Poetic processes allowed the students to break away from the division between mapping and designing. They also meant to function as transformative experiences –in contact with the real life of the place. These processes led to design strategies for the community space of the new local cinema.

8 Fatemeh Mohanna. Upcycled fabric; shreded fabric used for creating prototypes of blocks and panels, to be used for interior clading and for interior design elements. Plaster, resin, paper, sawdust and other materials tested and used together with the recycled fabric.

Wearable folding table created by the student, and used for serving coffee the locals who were passing by. Through this performative process, the student engaged with the place and the locals.

The experience of both the performative encounter with the site, as well as of the upcycling experiments informed the design strategy for the community space.

The Engine House – Between the Museum and the City

In Term 2 the students developed design proposals for the Engine House; a small Victorian industrial building, situated next to the entrance of the New Museum of London. Each student developed their own brief and vision for this building, addressing this important threshold between a major cultural organisation and the everyday life in the city. The significance and radiance of this location triggered the students to contemplate on what broader change they would like to see happening in London, and on how this small intervention could be employed for testing and manifesting it.

11, 12 Shaymaa Alnaji. Childrens centre. Pedagogical theories were translated into design strategies and informed the programme and the detailed designing of the space.

13 Josh Mcveigh. The city as theatre and the theatre as the city. A different space for performing arts; theatre, promenade theatre, bar and open air performances interweave.