Live projects, neighbourhood and the city were the themes for this Brighton’s 2011 graduate show

This year, three tutors from Architecture and Interior Architecture and Urban Studies (Tony Roberts, Kate Cheyne, Glenn Longden-Thurgood) together with students and apprentices from Mears group undertook to design and build a bespoke pavilion – a live project – in order to display the student work but also to demonstrate the teaching of alternative technologies through making.

Another focus of this year’s BA students was ‘The Form of Housing’, a project led by Luis Diaz, Michael Howe, Anuschka Kutz and Amin Taha, was set in four low density and suburban sites in Brighton. The project was based on an essay of the same name by the architect Neave Brown published in 1967 in Architectural Design, interpreted as a call for a sober engagement with contemporary problems with regard to housing. The students have been asked to consider new housing forms for the 21st century that would deal with suburban sites in need of transforming, reinvention or rehabilitation. Students designed between 8-16 units including a ‘plus’ program devised by each student based on historical, cultural and social investigations of the sites.

As a counterpart to degree work Brighton’s MArch students focused on the heart of the city. They scoured the streets, back alleys and markets of Brixton to unearth all kinds of issues. Working in four different design groups – led by Kate Cheyne, Andre Viljoen/Christina Godiksen, Alex Warnock-Smith and Ivana Wingham – students invented their own, often-eccentric methods/techniques for investigating the city.

Ivana Wingham Architecture Academic Programme Leader

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