29 July 2022 · By Rob Wilson

Rob Wilson visits the University of Plymouth’s end-of-year show and finds research, collaboration, communication, social engagement and interaction all feeding into design development

‘It’s our first physical show in three years,’ says Bob Brown, Professor of Architecture and MArch leader, as we walk around the work on the sixth floor of the Roland Levinsky building. The nine-storey building houses the Art and Humanities Faculty at Plymouth University and is sited in an area that sees a cluster of other arts-related buildings – including the Arts University Plymouth and the Box, Plymouth’s Museum and Art Gallery – that nicely form a kind of new art quarter in the city.

Large platforms are filled with a riot of models, while partition walls are covered with a dense display of relatively small-format 2D print-outs of projects. It feels more like a collation and summation of work achieved during the year, rather than an exhibition edit per se.

Andy Humphreys, programme lead for the BA (Hons) confirms this sense: ‘It was very much a hybrid display this year – laid out also for portfolio-marking.’

It’s a result, too, he says of the past two years of varying levels of lockdown: ‘The students didn’t really know what an end-of-year show was.’

Certainly without guidance it would be difficult to navigate your way clearly through the sequence of projects and profusion of work, given a relative lack of explanatory labels. That said, the sense of the energy and creative ferment of the work produced over the past year is clearly evident.

What stands out in particular is the notable engagement with physical models – from rough cardboard sketches to more delicate 3D-printed maquettes. ‘We try to get them into the studio asap making things,’ confirms Humphreys. He’s referring specifically to the first-year BA students, but it’s something which is evident across all the years’ work.

Encouraging students to get into studios making stuff is supported, says Brown, by the shared cross-departmental facilities they can tap into, in particular the digital fabrication lab. ‘It’s the architecture students who are the main users.’ he laughs. There’s a real sense of the strengths this department enjoys in sharing a building with so many other creative disciplines, akin to the RCA’s original set-up on Kensington Gore.

The engagement with physical making exemplified by the display of models reflects more generally the importance of ‘the real’, as Brown terms it, to the course as a whole: ‘It’s about developing an understanding of architecture as “real”,’ he says. Projects are often set based on current live projects on actual sites, with students encouraged to establish dialogue and engagement with local communities. ‘It’s important to get students to question and understand what is a project’s agency with real people,’ says Brown.

Due, in part, to earlier pandemic-related restrictions, many projects in BA and MArch focus on sites around Plymouth itself. It’s an engagement with the surrounding city that’s nicely emphasised by panoramic views over it offered up on all sides of the exhibition space, in which the architecture studios are normally based.

BA: structure of outdoor classroom

The local focus and emphasis on making and construction is exemplified from the off in the first-year BA1, with a project to design an outside teaching space for a Plymouth school. Students worked in groups developing ideas, which were then whittled down to one design realised as a 1:1 structure using scrap pallets. An important part of project was talking to the school’s pupils as the clients. ‘We focus on reproducible skill sets,’ says Humphreys, ‘A key thing they learn is the importance of knowing your client.’

What’s noticeable, too, is the value placed on group working at Plymouth – seen across all years of the BA and MArch. ‘Students learn the value of collaboration, interaction and sharing knowledge,’ adds Humphreys.

Thus in the BA 2nd and 3rd years, the main Semester 2 project sees students working initially together in groups, this time on an urban scale, developing a masterplan for two decommissioned gasholder sites in the west of Plymouth and looking in particular at how to connect these back into the city.

‘The idea was that students learn about dealing with context and complex external conditions,’ says Humphreys. The conditions they are asked to consider in developing their ideas aren’t just physical, either, but also ecological and planning frameworks, such as RIBA Sustainable Development Outcomes and the Plymouth Plan 2014-2034.

The project addresses healthcare and wellbeing post-Covid and there’s a rich series of proposals and ideas for putting in place community infrastructure that are then developed into building proposals for new housing and social projects within the masterplan.

Students are encouraged to think about the consequential relationship to each other’s proposals. One highlight here is a group of lovely stair study models which dive right into detail design and show the different scales of operation across which students are expected to be thinking.

BA: structure of outdoor classroom

In the MArch, meanwhile, where projects again are developed at a strategic urban level before drilling down later in the year to a specific building proposal, what is clear is the intense level of preparatory research that projects are propositionally grounded in. These start with an initial conceptual mapping and kicking-around of ideas and points of reference for projects. Then at the next stage these ideas are often translated and communicated through a film or video, before finally being formulated as building propositions.

Brown says the aim is always to make students ‘rethink preconceptions and test ideas conceptually before they progress to real projects and sites’. This, he says, allows for a ‘space for different voices’ and means that, unlike in some architecture schools, there is ‘no identifiable house style’. Certainly, the work on display shows a healthily eclectic mix of media in its representation and communication.

Sustainability – not just materially but over time – comes particularly into focus here. ‘Soil and ecological agency has always been important on the course,’ says Brown and students are encouraged to think how their projects might develop over at least 10 years.

This can be seen in MArch Year 1 work, which given its site focus at Stonehouse near the old Naval Dockyards of Devonport, grapples with issues such as the sea-level rise between 2050 and 2100, as seen in Tomas Trott’s thoughtful project or that by Kyle Stone and Jacob Shaw, which imagines an existing parking garage as a future site of aquaculture, urban agriculture and the production of ‘seaweed-crete’, 80 years from now.

Left: MArch work, right: BA work

MArch Year 2 students, again working in teams of two or three, have a choice between a site in Plymouth or Damietta, a port city on the River Nile estuary in Egypt – the latter reflecting the link the School has with the Arab Academy in Cairo, whose students in turn work on Plymouth-focused projects.

The two sites were both chosen as examples of liminal urban edge conditions, the one in Plymouth being post-industrial while that in Damietta is associated with the furniture-making industry. Again, issues around tidal conditions and the ecosystem of the land/water edge are key here – exemplified in an exceptional video produced by Roberta Vasnic and Sarah Paxton as part of their Nile Delta Bio-campus project, predicated on an interesting combination of temporary and permanent structures that progressively decay or weather over time.

Other impressive work includes Chris Trigg, Aaron Walkley and Joshua Earl’s project Choreographing a Landscape Performance, which looks at strategies and structures to mitigate the effects of climate change in the Nile Delta, as well as Sarah Dawes and Shana Linwood-Mclaughlin’s impressively-researched design project The Egyptian Gender Gap: A Vision of A Balanced Future, with its proposal for building types developed around culturally sensitive layering of public and private space.

The scales and bandwidth of thinking about architecture seen here, beyond slick presentation or the beat of the eco-drum seen in many architecture schools – from research, to collaboration, to communication, to social engagement and interaction, all feeding into the design development – is what impresses and is the key take-away from the Plymouth show.

Tags Student shows 2022 University of Plymouth

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