‘ As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown. .’ Sir Norman Foster, British Architect architect-makers Good morning everyone and welcome to Loughborough University. I’m Rob Schmidt, I’m the programme director for the architecture course here at Loughborough. I’d thank you all for coming today, I know for some it’s a long journey. It’s nice to see a mixture of familiar and new faces. How many of you have been to Loughborough before? I hope everyone is as excited for today as I am as you are another step closer to starting your educational journey to become an architect…(who’s excited?) It’s not a short journey it will enviably have its ups and downs, but here’s the really important bit, it will all seem trivial when you step foot into the first building you designed. ARCHITECTURE is not easy, but the reward is absolutely amazing. 1
// special_course_features lu _ arc QUALITY (over quantity) + LEADING EDGE What I would like to do this morning, is to share with you a flavour of the journey we’ve crafted with this new course to allow our students to excel in their educational environment and be successful in their transition to practice. How many of you know this is a new course? This year is our first group of students, so you would be part of the second group? As a new course, one of the very first things we did was review all 51 UG courses of architecture in the UK; yes, 51 courses…so its a relatively saturated market, so understanding how we would fit into that market was crucial. We also ran a series of workshops with over 100 practitioners to discuss what they saw as the good and the bad from graduates. This diagram clusters a number of special features of the course around four themes…. I will expand on a number of the smaller bubbles this morning. 2
// programme_structure lu _ arc I will start with the overall programme structure. The top bar shows the conventional pathway to becoming an architect. Who knows how long it takes to become a registered architect? The lower bar shows the pathway that we’ve designed for this course which is slightly different. If we just focus on Part I for today, you can see that we’ve moved the first year of practice experience inside the undergraduate structure. Why do you think we’ve done this? Loughborough has a long history of sandwich courses, and in engineering we do it better than anywhere else in the UK…it emphasises our ethos of integrating theory and practice AND the benefit that we see from that. 3
You benefit from the extra work we do… the network of practices we’ve established, you get full support… 4
Year 3 Placement Year The School had an existing network of practitioners, but we held 6 practitioner workshops this summer – 4 in London, one in Loughborough for the East Midlands and one in Birmingham. This was two-fold: to get feedback on your proposed programme and to begin to establish a network of practitioners to engage with our students on placement. And these varied from major global practices such as Fosters+Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects and AHMM to well-established local practices in Franklin Ellis Architects, Watson Batty Architects and CPMG Architects. While the programme is new, we have already begun developing the relationships needed to support placement opportunities and sponsorships. We have organised 6 events with practitioners in the Midlands and London in which we will have met with over 80 practices including We cannot guarantee placements for every student, we work hard to help provide those opportunities. RC Slide 11: really nice 5
Degree award, does anyone know our degree award here? I’ll talk more about this perceived dichtomy through the curriculum, but I think the chosen degree award is much more than a symbolic gesture… I believe it represents the ethos we have for the course – that architecture can not be one without the other, that here you will be allowed to express your creativity but you will also be taught from our technical experts in structures and building science. You will learn how to harness both sides of your brain and allow for a technical creativity to flourish. 6
lu _ arc // small_cohorts STUDENT to STAFF ratios Year 1: 4 to 1 Year 4 (full capacity) : 10 to 1 Average intake for arch in UK? Our intake? Small cohorts…this spend a moment on this. Here’s our group in the green, approximately 40 students; in the blue, we have 120 students which is the conventional size of an architecture cohort in the UK…… 40 to 120 (1 year) 200 to 600 (5 years – BArch + MArch) 200 to 900 (Nottingham) Ratio: Year 1: 8 staff + 2 design tutors for 40 students. 1:4 Year 2: 9 staff + 4 design tutors for 100 students. 1:7.5 Year 3: 10 staff + 5 design tutors for 160 students. 10.5 Year 4: 10 staff + 6 design tutors for 180 students. 1:11 The School is 1:13.5 Civils 80-100 Others 30-40 (AEDM, CMQS, CEM, Transport) 7
better access to facilities lu _ arc superior resources materials more opportunities better quality assurance wacom tablet EVEN PLAYING FIELD FROM DAY 1 What does that allow for… Better access to facilities. Better resources More opportunities 8
// assets lu _ arc SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT WALK. CYCLE. GREEN. SPORT. CONVENIENCE. SAFE This is an aerial photograph of this side of campus. We’re here. 9
// the studio lu _ arc DEDICATED SPACE FROM DAY 1 10
// staff offices lu _ arc NOWHERE TO HIDE! 11
// the factory lu _ arc MAKE & BREAK 12
// active culture Film Night, National Women Day Lego Workshop & Design Challenge Art, Migration and Cosmopolitanism East Midlands Design Charrette Other activities: Visionary Migration, Andreas Vogler Pizza Night LRSA Pub Quiz 13
Will Jones w.jones-18@student.lboro.ac.uk 14
// international opportunities 15
// international_projects Design an apple store? 16
ARCHITECT - MAKERS / a’arkitekt - máykǝr / n . collaborative design-leaders re-negotiating the construction process in/as communities 17
// module_structure lu _ arc how many contact hours a week? how many design studio sessions? I just want to touch on an aspect which makes architectural education different from other courses. And that is the 50/50 breakdown of traditional lecture modules and 50% of learning which occurs in the design studio environment. The lecture modules and the studio modules often work together to apply and integrate principles learned. 18
• Guest lectures • Workshops • Events • Evening seminars 25 WEEKS = 25 or 75 meetings? Timetable + Active culture to engage with 19
STUDIO A IDENTITY 20
OBJECT LINKING DESIGN & MAKING 21
INVESTIGATE A PROBLEM ‘To create, one must first question everything.’ Eileen Gray, Irish Architect So where do we start….this might seem like a subtle difference to some of you, but it’s incredibly important…we don’t start with a fixed brief we start with a question and investigate a problem. The students were asked to first explore how they use their tablets, to examine scenarios and relationships between different variables – their body, the tablet and different uses. 22
DOCUMENT YOUR PROCESS Small blocks. 23
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Phil Newsom Dovetail detail Hidden cog; locking mechanism 25
ELEMENT LINKING DESIGN & MAKING permeability shape weight scale 26
Phil’s element was a cone along with a series of plugs that could be moved around to change the level of privacy and viewing tunnels. On the day of the review, we had 6 guest architects come in and they chose Phil’s design as the one that we would come together as a cohort and build. 27
// live_projects perspective 28
// live_projects seed bomb 29
space: identity and speculation 30
home: identity and architecture 31
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STUDIO B COMMUNITY 33
// desertification // wildfires extinction rebellion 34
// sea level rise // disease 35
animal shelters // 24 hour design competition 36
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Vive la resistance! a platform for public engagement Orsi Kacso 39
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Debatable lands a visitor centre at the Anglo-Scottish border 42
Inclusion / Exclusion in the city a place to develop, store and trade knowledge 43
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// live_projects Discover Zone – Outdoor Classroom 45
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at the end of your journey… 1. Confident, creative, individual designers; 2. Critical thinkers and culturally curious; 3. Professional and prepared for practice. PERSONALISED JOURNEY At the end of this journey, I will feel like we will have done our job…if you have confidence in yourself and your design process, to be able to understand how you go about defining and responding to your generation’s local and global challenges. 47
// offers lu _ arc (UN)CONDITIONAL OFFERS Your A-level grades stick with you beyond just getting into University; It puts a lot of pressure unfairly on students to make decisions they don’t necessarily want to; Why do you think Universities do this? Numbers, poorer quality; That we want the best for you; that we want you to work hard and be successful; 48
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