Design Yearbook 2016

2016 

School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape 

Newcastle University

Contents 

Welcome 3 

BA (Hons) Architecture 4 

Charrette 

Stage 1 

Stage 2 

Stage 3 

BA Dissertation 

Fieldwork and Site Visits 

4 

BA Architecture & Urban Planning (AUP) 80 

Stage 1 

Stage 2 

Stage 3 

MArch 90 

Stage 5 - Semester 1 

Thinking-Through-Making Week 

Stage 5 - Semester 2 

Stage 6 

MArch Dissertation 

Modern Turkey: State, Space and Ideology - Zeynep Kezer 

Linked Research 

90 

Research in Architecture 164 

Mountains & Megastructures 

A Mountain Near Thebes - Andrew Ballantyne 

Taught Masters Programmes 

PhD / PhD by Creative Practice 

Architecture Research Collaborative 

164

Welcome 

Professor Graham Farmer – Director of Architecture 

Welcome to this Yearbook which is a wonderful record of the hard work and achievements of staff 

and students during the past 12 months. The School has seen a number of positive changes this year 

and we have integrated new full and part-time colleagues, introduced numerous new teaching and 

research initiatives and integrated a wide range of new design projects and studios, each of which have 

delivered some outstanding work at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. 

I would like to take the opportunity to thank those colleagues who have taken up new teaching 

management roles this year; Sam Austin and Zeynep Kezer as BA and MArch Programme Directors 

respectively, and the new Stage coordination teams; Ed Wainwright and Claire Harper in Stage 2, 

Matthew Margetts, Matt Ozga-Lawn and Josep-Maria García-Fuentes in Stage 3, James Craig and 

Steve Parnell in Stage 5 and Adam Sharr in Stage 6. Each of them has brought innovation but also 

a concern for continuity to their new roles and this is represented by the work in this book which 

once again conveys the diversity, sense of invention, energy, enthusiasm and relevance that continue 

to characterise and define our teaching and research. This year we will also graduate the first cohort 

of students from our cross-disciplinary undergraduate degree programme in Architecture and Urban 

Planning (AUP) and a selection of their work is included in this book for the first time. Establishing 

a new programme has brought substantial challenges and has required a real commitment on behalf 

of staff to get to this point. I would particularly like to thank Armelle Tardiveau and Daniel Mallo for 

their invaluable contribution in this respect and also to wish the first graduates from the programme 

all the best as they move into the next stages of their education or future careers. 

The Architecture Research Collaborative continues to go from strength to strength under the 

Directorship of Katie Lloyd-Thomas and Martyn Dade-Robertson and this year has seen a number of 

exciting developments in the context of architectural research in the School. One highlight of this year 

was the Mountains and Megastructures event which brought together staff and students to exhibit 

and present a diverse range of creative practice, historical, cultural and geographic research into large, 

landscape-scale artifices – mountainous, real, fictitious and otherwise. The active participation of 

our students in this event is evidence of our ongoing commitment to developing and supporting 

a research-based culture within our taught programmes and this in turn helps to support design 

outputs of the very highest quality. During the past year the work of our students has been recognised 

in numerous competitions and particular mention goes to Assia Stefanova and Rob Arthur who 

were placed first and runner-up in the RIBA Hadrian Medal for Part 2 with Randi Karangizi also 

runner-up at Part 1. Stage 5 students Becky Wise, Katie Fisher and Noor Jan-Mohamed were also 

awarded first place in the North Pennines Community Observatory design competition which is 

now being built at Allenheads. Our success in design competitions has also been mirrored by the 

Newcastle University Architecture Society (NUAS) who were this year recognised by the Student’s 

Union as the University’s Best Departmental Society. I would like to take the opportunity to thank 

NUAS President Regen-James Gregg and all of his excellent team, who have made an invaluable 

contribution to the wider life of the School and who have been so important in helping to maintain 

the sense of identity and community that so defines the character of our School. 

Fifty years ago the School of Architecture moved into what we know as our current home – a 

newly refurbished Architecture Building and a brand new Building Science wing. Those building 

developments brought the staff and students of Architecture together for the first time in many years 

because for most of the 1960s the School had to function in scattered accommodation in various 

buildings on campus and for a while even in temporary huts. 

We are now undergoing the first major redevelopment of our estate since 1966 and during the next 

academic year we will move into our new workshop facilities and studio accommodation which 

will extend the existing Building Science wing and provide us with significantly enhanced facilities. 

The new building will certainly help support our pedagogical and research ambitions well into the 

future but it is also interesting to look back at the thoughts of our predecessors as they moved into 

their new home fifty years ago. In his speech to mark the opening of the new School of Architecture, 

Professor Jack Napper, (then Head of School) took the opportunity to outline the character of the 

architectural programmes at Newcastle, describing design pedagogy as a continual and uncertain 

experiment and suggesting that an ideal specification for a programme in Architecture would be one 

that could educate in the best and widest sense, that could develop the ability in students to apply 

their developing knowledge to new situations, and could propagate a strong sense of human values. 

As we reflect on another year of positive change and look forward to the next stage in our evolution 

it is reassuring to know that the educational values held by those who came before us are still both 

recognisable and relevant today. 

3

BA (Hons) Architecture 

Sam Austin 

Newcastle’s RIBA Part I accredited BA programme fosters an inclusive, research-led approach to 

architecture. Alongside a thorough grounding in all the skills required to become an imaginative, 

culturally informed, socially aware and technically competent design professional, it offers 

opportunities to engage in developments at the forefront of current research, from computation and 

material science to architectural history and theory. Emphasising collaboration as well as independent 

critical enquiry, we encourage students to draw on diverse methods and fields of knowledge, to follow 

their own interests and to develop their own design approach. 

We believe that to produce good architecture requires more than rounded abilities and knowledge; 

it requires judgements about what we value in the buildings and cities we inhabit, what to prioritise 

in the spaces and structures we propose and what contribution architecture can make. The course 

doesn’t claim to offer simple – or correct – responses to these challenges. Our diverse community 

of researchers and practitioners, each with their own interests and expertise, introduce students to 

a range of issues, ideas, traditions and techniques in architectural design and scholarship. We help 

students develop fine grained skills in interpreting spaces and texts, critical thinking to understand 

the implications of design decisions, and spatial and material imagination to stretch the boundaries of 

what architecture can achieve. Rather than teach a single way of working, we give students the tools 

to discover what kind of architect they want to be. 

A lively design studio is central to this learning process and to the life of the School. Design 

projects, taught by a mix of in-house tutors and practitioners from across the UK, account for 

half of all module credits. We promote design as thinking-through-making, an integrated process 

of researching and testing ideas in sketchbook, computer, workshop and on site, of responding to 

diverse issues and requirements all at once – spatial, material, functional, social, economic etc. This 

approach is reinforced by collaborative projects involving artists and engineers, and at the beginning 

of each year by week-long design charrettes where students from all stages of all design programmes 

work together to respond to diverse design challenges, through installations around the School and 

beyond. Lectures, seminars and assignments in other modules examine the theoretical, historical, 

cultural, practical and professional dimensions of architecture, and support students to embed these 

concerns in studio work. 

Stages 1 and 2 are structured to guide students through increasingly challenging scales, kinds and 

contexts of design projects, a breadth of related constructional and environmental principles and 

varied themes in architectural history and theory. Briefs invite experimentation with different 

architectural ideas and representational skills, first through projects set in Newcastle, then 

incorporating study trips to regional towns and cities. As work increases in depth and complexity 

– from room to house, community to city, simple enclosure to multi-storey building – students 

have more opportunities to develop and focus their own interests. A dissertation – an in-depth 

original study into any architecturally related topic – sets the scene for a year-long Stage 3 final 

design project. With a choice of diverse thematic studios, each with its own expert contributors and 

international study trip, students acquire specialist skills and knowledge, allowing them to craft their 

own distinctive portfolio. 

5

Charrette 

The academic year kicks off in style with a long, School-wide, intensive workshop known as Charrette Week. It is an extremely creative, explorative 

and thought-provoking week, allowing all years and courses to come together to experiment with a wide range of studio themes, which are delivered by 

guest artists, engineers and architects. This year’s broad theme of Spectacle/Material/Resistance, generated some fantastic outcomes for the exhibition 

at the end of the week, including an indoor beach, a baroque fashion show, mesmerising optical illusions, an immersive theatre production and allencompassing 

inflatable structures. 

Charrette 1: A Hole in One Week 

Holly Hendry 

Charrette 2: Aural Dynamics 

Gillian Peskett and Joseph Finlay 

Charrette 3: Framing Newcastle 

Yatwan Hui, Andrea Fox and Liz Leech 

Charrette 4: From Precarity to Permanence 

Charlotte Gregory and Julia Heslop 

Charrette 5: Illusion of Architecture 

Jennie Webb and Matt Lawes 

Charrette 6: Inflate! 

Michael Simpson and Cara Lund 

Charrette 7: Migratory Hides 

Matt Rowe 

Charrette 8: Nu Baroque 

Tom Randle and Matt Charlton 

Charrette 9: Play! Summer is Not Over 

Amara Roca Inglesias and Nicholas Henninger 

Charrette 10: Site Specfic Theatre 

Hanna Benihoud and Hannah Pierce 

Charrette 11: Spectacle, Ruin Value and the Ruination of Spectacle 

Gareth Hudson and Nathan Hudson 

Charrette 12: Tracing Echoes 

Andrew Walker and Kyveli Anastassiadi 

Charrette 13: Wonder & Success 

Hazel McGregor 

6

Stage 1 

Stage 1 is a varied introduction to architecture, characterised by numerous workshops, visits and hands-on 

activities, and students respond to it with great energy. For the first semester Stage 1 architecture students 

share their modules with students who are on the BA in Architecture and Urban Planning. 

In the first week of term students take part in a number of intense design charrettes with all students 

from across the School. First year begins with a number of skill-building exercises involving measuring, 

observation and photography in buildings in and around Newcastle, as well as life and object drawing. 

Their first design project explores the domestic interiors of Pieter de Hooch through model-making 

and drawing. Students are then asked to design a small community reading room on a suburban site 

in Newcastle, where site analysis skills and the ability to design at different scales are developed. Theory, 

history and technology are taught through lectures, seminars and group work, and are also integrated into 

the design teaching. 

In semester two, students start by studying a series of 20th and 21st century row house precedents before 

designing their own house for an artist on an inner-city site, where scale, function, materiality and 

construction of space are developed. A final semester two project focusses on unbuilt and lost architecture 

and asks students to convey architectural ideas through the use of digital media, before students bring 

together the great range of work they have undertaken for the portfolio. Finally, there is a whole-year 

history trip to Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. 

Year Coordinator 

Martin Beattie 

Project Leaders 

Armelle Tardiveau 

Carlos Calderon 

Jennie Webb 

Kati Blom 


Contributors 

Alex Borrell 

Becky Wise 

Cath Keay 

Charlotte Powell 

Chloe Gill 

Chris Beale 

Chris Elias 

Claire Harper 

Damien Wootten 

David Davies 

Di Leitch 

Elizabeth Gray 

Ewan Thomson 

Georgina Robinson 

Greg Murrell 

Henna Asikainen 

James Harrington 

James Longfield 

James Perry 

Jamie Morton 

Jennie Webb 

Joanna Hinchcliffe 

Joe Dent 

Justin Moorton 

Kati Blom 

Katie Fisher 

Katie Lloyd-Thomas 

Keri Townsend 

Kevin Vong 

Laurence Ashley 

Louise Squires 

Malcolm Pritchard 

Mariya Lapteva 


Matt Charlton 

Matt Wilcox 

Michael Chapman 

Mike Veitch 

Nedelina Atasanova 

Nik Ward 

Nikoletta Karastashi 

Nita Kidd 

Olga Gogoleva 

Patrick McMahon 

Peter St Julien 

Richard McDonald 

Rumen Dimov 

Ruth Sidey 

Sana Al-Naimi 

Sam Austin 

Smajo Beso 

Sneha Solanki 

Sophia Banou 

Stephen Brookes 

Steve Tomlinson 

Tara Stewart 

Tony Watson 

Tracey Tofield 

Vili-Valtteri Welroos 

Wallace Ho 

William Tavernor 

Xi Chen 

Students 

Aaron Swaffer 

Abigail May Smart 

Aleksandra Iachinskaia 

Alesia Berahavaya 

Alysia Lara Arnold 

Amna Ahmad I M Fakhro 

Anna Christian Moroney 

Arran James Noble 

Bahram Yaradanguliyev 

Benedict Thornton Wigmore 

Boris Larico Villagomez 

Brandon Athol Few 

Calum James Luke 

Charlie William Donaldson 

Cheng Wan Mak 

Ching Wah Hong 

Chloe McSweeney 

Chou Ee Ng 

Ciara Catherine McClelland 

Cooper Taylor 

Danielle Helena Berg 

Darcy Eleanor Arnold-Jones 

David Michael Gray 

David Richard Osorno G?z 

Dianne Kwene Aku Odede 

Dominica Ruby Bates 

Dora Mary Frances Farrelly 

Eleanor Waugh 

Elliot Matthew Dolphin 

Elliott James Crowe 

Eloise Aliza Coleman 

Emily Catherine Child 

Emily Reta Spencer 

Emma Elizabeth Kemp 

Emma Imogen Moxon 

Ethan John Archer 

Euan McGregor 

Eve Kindon 

Faith Mary Hamilton 

Finlay William Lohoar Self 

Fope Foluwa Olaleye 

Freya Jane Emerson 

Gemma Louise Duma 

Grace Charlotte Ward 

Hannah Emily McAvoy 

Harry Cameron Tindale 

Harry Robert Henderson 

Hattie Florence Reeve 

Hazel Ruth Cozens 

Helena Genevieve Taylor 

Henri Robert Cooney 

Henry James Cahill 

Ho Sze Jose Cheng 

Ibadullah Shigiwol 

Ioana Buzoianu 

Irvano Irvian 

Jack Adam Collins 

Jack Oscar Sweet 

Jake Andrew Holding 

Jake Williams-Deoraj 

James Gillis 

James Edward Bacon 

James Edward Knapp 

Jamie Schwarz 

Jay Antony Hallsworth 

Jemima Alice Smith 

Jerome Sripetchvandee 

Jhon Sebastian Cortes 

Joanne Lois May Cain 

Joel Pacini 

Jonathan Pilosof 

Jordan Middleton 

Jordan Paige Ince 

Jose Diogo Marques Figueira 

Joseph Henry Noah Elbourn 

Joshua Willem Jago Knight 

Junyi Chen 

Ka Chun Rico Chow 

Kai Lok Cheng 

Katie Ann Campbell 

Katrina Barritt-Cunningham 

Katy Rose Barnes 

Kieran Harrison 

Kieron Thomas Dawson 

Kiran Kaur Basi 

Kotryna Navickaite 

Levente Mate Borenich 

Liam Kieran Rogers 

Liam Michael Marcel Davi 

Lilian Winifred Davies 

Louis Windsor Page-Laycock 

Luc James Askew-Vajra 

Malgorzata Nicoll Szarnecka 

Man Cheong Gabriel Leung 

Mathilda Louise Durkin 

Matilda Marie Barratt 

Matthew Edward Harrison 

Matthew Oliver Ward 

Michalakis Georgiou 

Monica Said 

Myeongjin Suh 

Nadia Beatriss Young 

Nancy Margaret Marrs 

Nicholas James Morrison 

Nicholas Juan Tatang 

Nitichot Setachanadana 

Nophill Damaniya 

Olga Barkova 

Pablo Larrea Wheldon 

Phoebe Shepherd 

Polina Morova 

Qian Wang 

Rachael Helena Burleigh 

Rachel Spencer 

Rachel Marie Cummings 

Rebecca Charlotte Glancey 

Rebecca Jean Maw 

Reece Oliver Jay 

Robert Walker Ashworth 

Rowena Saffron Covarr 

Rufus Giles Wilkinson 

Sam Henry Carroll 

Samuel George Brooke 

Samuel James Hawkins 

Samuel Joseph Robinson 

Seyoung Han 

Simone Pausha Pearce 

Siriwardhanalage De Saram 

Siroun Elise Button 

Sophie Ogilvie-Graham 

Steven Gary Lennox 

Susanna Emily Jane Smith 

Tanya Naresh Haldipur 

Tian Hong Kevin Wong 

Tian Yee Lim 

Toghrul Mammadov 

Weihao Wang 

Wiktoria Sypnicka 

Wing Yung Janet Tam 

Yuan Xue 

Yuen Sum Tiffany Liu 

Yuze Tian 

8

Architectural Representation 

Kati Blom 

In the first three weeks of the first year, students undertake different analogical exercises such as life drawing, drawing in various places in the city and 

photographing and constructing multi-view drawings based on measurements. These exercises prepare them for the design projects. 

10 City Drawing Photos courtesy of Damien Wootten and Sneha Solanki

11

Beyond the Frame 


The project focusses on orderly domestic interiors depicted by Pieter de Hooch in Holland during the mid to late seventeenth century. We begin by 

observing, drawing and modelling the fragment of the house in the painting, before designing a new room beyond it. 

12 

Top - Xi Lin 

Bottom - Rachael Cummings

Top left to bottom right - Chou Ee Ng , Kotryna Navickaite, Joseph Elbourn, Chou Ee Ng, Jack Sweet, Jose Figueira, Nikshith Reddy, Xi Lin Ng, Jose Figueira 

13

Heaton Reading Room 

Jennie Webb 

Students were asked to design a small community reading room in the vibrant and culturally diverse suburb of Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne. The 

local area currently lacks library facilities of its own and so through the creation of a reading room, comes the opportunity to foster a love for reading, 

writing, storytelling and community mindfulness. The design for the reading room, run by a specially formed literary cooperative, needed to address 

the relatively tight urban site conditions and be multifunctional; capable of hosting reading and writing groups, book clubs and childrens’ storytelling 

sessions. 

14 

Top - Rebecca Glancey

RENDER 

Top - Bahram Yaradanguliyev 

Bottom - Choue Ee Ng 

15

Row House Typologies and Living 


Students are asked to design a modest 3-bedroom row house and studio for an artist and their family. The site, in the Ouseburn Valley, is an area close 

to Newcastle city centre with a rich industrial past. 

16 Jose Figueira

Top left to bottom right - Joseph Elbourn, Henry Cahill, Phoebe Shepherd, Jonathan Pilosof, 

17

Unbuilt Architecture 


Unbuilt Architecture is designed to introduce the use of digital media within the creative architectural design process. Digital communication tools 

are used to re-analyse and re-interpret three unbuilt and lost works of architecture: Cedric Price, Fun Palace; Louis Khan, US Consulate in Luanda; 

and John Dobson, Royal Arcade. 

18

19

Stage 2 

Economy forms the basis of our architectural investigations and design explorations in Stage 2 this year. 

How architecture is produced by, and productive of, the economies within which we live has been explored 

through analysis of urban environments and the imagination of their futures; the design of collective 

housing and communal spaces; projects crossing the boundaries between art, architecture and engineering; 

and the design of spatial experience. 

With projects set in Edinburgh’s historic port, Leith, and the Northumberland border town of Berwickupon-Tweed, 

and in the fictional realms of film, projects have moved between the scale of the dwelling to 

the scale of space; from the digital to the material and practices of making: always asking the question of 

architectures’ role and relation to the economies it is embedded in. 

A year of transition, Stage 2 seeks to encourage a growing sense of criticality towards design decisions, a 

developing autonomy of thought and action, and an understanding of architectures’ position in times of 

social, cultural and economic flux. 

Year Coordinators 

Ed Wainwright 

Claire Harper 

Jennie Webb 

Project Tutors 

Jamie Anderson 

Amy Butt 

Dan Kerr 

Nita Kidd 

Luke Rigg 

Christos Kakalis 

Gillian Peskett 

Hazel Cowie 

David McKenna 

Yasser Megahed 

Claire Harper 

Ed Wainwright 

Fine Art Tutors 

Alexia Mellor 

Holly Hendry 

Isabelle Southwood 

Gareth Hudson 

Julia Heslop 

Rosie Morris 

Isabel Lima 

Peter Sharp 

Contributors 

Adam Sharr 

Amara Roca Iglesias 

Amy Linford 

Andrew Ballantyne 


Corbin Wood 

Emily-Jane Harper 

Ewan Thomson 

Greta Varpucianskyte 

Hannah Pierce 

Imogen Holden 

Iona Howell 


James Perry 

Katie Lloyd Thomas 

Kieran Connolly 

Lam Nguyen Tran 


Martyn Dade Robertson 

Matt Lawes 

Matthew Margetts 

Patrick Devlin 

Peter Kellett 

Prue Chiles 

Richard Murphy 

Richard Talbot 

Rob Paton 

Rumen Dimov 

Sam Austin 

Sam Clark 

Sarah Tulloch 

Seva Karetnikov 

Simon Hacker 

Steve Dudek 

Tim Pitman 

Zeynep Kezer 

Students 

Aadil Abdul Rashid Toorawa 

Agatha Savage 

Aishath Rasheed 

Alena Pavlenko 

Alexander McCulloch 

Alexander Mackay 

Alexander Gardner 

Alice Reeves 

Alice Simpkins-Woods 

Amber Farrow 

Ameeta Ladwa 

Andreas Haliman 

Angus Campbell Brown 

Anna Vershinina 

April Glasby 

Ashleigh Usher 

Assem Nurymbayeva 

Benjamin Taylor 

Boram Kwon 

Chao Shen 

Charlotte Goodfellow 

Charlotte Armstrong 

Chi-Yao Lin 

Ciaran Horscraft 

Claudia Bannatyne 

Connor O’Neill 

Daniel Barrett 

Daniel Francis Hill 

David Stuart Jones 

Eliza Hague 

Elizabeth Rose Ridland 

Elle-May Simmonds 

Emily Georgina O’Hara 

Emma Kate Burles 

Esme Hallam 

Farrah Noelle Colilles 

Gabrielle Faith Beaumont 

George Oliver 

Grace de Rome 

Hannah Ysia Hiscock 

Hao Zhuang 

Harrison Jack Avery 

Hector Adam Laird 

Henry Orlando Valori 

Ho Yin Chung 

Huey Ee Yong 

Isabel Mills Lyle 

Jack David Ranby 

Jacob Alexander Smith 

James Kennedy 

Jennifer Betts 

Ji Chuen Ng 

Joe Thomas Dolby 

John Knight 

John Joseph O’Brien 

Jonathon McDonald 

Joseph William Firth Smith 

Juan Felipe Lopez Arbelaez 

Ka Chun Tsang 

Kate Francis Byrne 

Kate Helena Stephenson 

Katherina Weiwei Bruh 

Katherine Isabel Rhodes 

Katherine Mitchell 

Katie Hannah Longmore 

Laura Jane Cushnie 

Lawrence Loc Man Wong 

Liam Costain 

Lily Francis Street 

Lily Rebekah Travers 

Lucy Emily Heal 

Marina Ryzhkova 

Marisa Rachel Bamberg 

Mark Andrew Laverty 

Matthew Layford 

Matthew Lovat Hearn 

Matthew Patrick Rooney 

Melitini Athanasiou 

Men Hin Choi 

Muhammad Ahmed Asfand 

Natalie Mok 

Natasha Diyamanthi Trayner 

Nial Simran Parkash 

Nicholas Honey 

Nita Harieth Semgalawe 

Nurul ‘Aqilah Binti Ali 

Octorino Tjandra 

Pannawat Sermsuk 

Paul Mathew Johnson 

Philippa McLeod-Brown 

Philippa Jane Smith 

Pitaruthai Longyan 

Prajwal Limbu 

Pui Wing Clarins Chan 

Quynh Dang Le Tu 

Rebecca Rowland 

Regen James Gregg 

Rhiannon Jade Graham 

Richard Harry Mayhew 

Robert Thurtell 

Robert John Thackeray 

Rufaro Natalie Matanda 

Ryan Daniel Bemrose 

Ryoga Dipowikoro 

Sam McDonough 

Sam Welbourne 

Samuel Richards Nicholls 

Sean Martyn Hoisington 

Shien Min Gooi 

Shuyi Chen 

Sirawat Thepcharoen 

Thasnia Haque 

Timothy Seymour Lucas 

Tin Ho Lee 

Tristan Patrick C Searight 

Trung Hieu Tran 

Tung Son Cao 

Vincent MacDonald 

Wai Yip Tsang 

William Mansell 

Wing Kei So 

Wing Kin Wong 

Xueyang Bai 

Yanjie Song 

Yee Yuen Ku 

Yi Shu 

Ziyun Wang 

20 Opposite - Charlotte Armstrong Exploring Experience

At Home in the City 

Amy Butt & Dan Kerr; Nita Kidd & Luke Rigg; Christos Kakalis & Gillian Peskett; Hazel Cowie & David McKenna; Claire Harper & Ed Wainwright 

How housing is produced, where it is built and who it is for are essential questions, not only for architectural practitioners, but for society at large. 

Semester one’s main project, set in Leith, Edinburgh, explored the changing conditions of housing and collective living within a set of specific economic 

and social constraints. 

22 Leith Symposium

Top from left to right - Matthew Rooney, Marina Ryzhkova, Michael Choi, Agatha Savage, Daniel Barrett, Yee Yuen Ku, April Glasby 

23

Engineering Experience 

Amy Butt, Dan Kerr & Alexia Mellor; Nita Kidd, Luke Rigg & Rosie Morris ; Christos Kakalis, Gillian Peskett & Gareth Hudson; Hazel Cowie, 

David McKenna & Julia Heslop; Claire Harper, Ed Wainwright & Peter Sharp 

Through a collaborative project involving students, staff and practitioners from architecture, fine art and engineering, filmic environments were 

reimagined as a set of physical artworks to be moved into, through, over, under – experienced through human motion and the camera, and re-filmed 

to re-tell a specific experience from each film. 

24 

Top - Group D3 

Bottom - Group D4

Top from left to right - Groups C3, D4, B2, D3, B1 

25

Exploring Experience 

Amy Butt & Dan Kerr; Nita Kidd, Luke Rigg & Yasser Megahed; Christos Kakalis & Gillian Peskett; Hazel Cowie & Jamie Anderson; Claire Harper 

& Ed Wainwright 

How can architecture bring the body, the spatially experienced state of being, back into activities, practices & processes that are progressively moving 

online? How can those events, desires, acts and experiences be explored physically and in combination with digital technologies? This project, set 

in Berwick-upon-Tweed, explores how spatial design can embody the digital, and bring a sensual, haptic and material quality into an increasingly 

technologically mediated society. 

26 Top - Nicholas Honey Bottom - Mark Andrew Laverty

Top left to bottom right - Richard Mayhew, Agatha Savage, Robert Thackeray, Kate Stephenson, Panawat Semsuk, Timothy Lucas, Katie Longmore, Charlotte 

Armstrong, Bai Xuey, Mark Laverty, Liam Costain, Benjamin Taylor 

27

28 Top left to bottom right - Panamat Semsuk, Chi Yao Lin, Angus Brown, Ziyun Wan

Top - Matthew Rooney 

Bottom - Chao Shen 

29

Stage 3 

Stage 3 is coordinated into year-long design studios, with students entering immediately after the 

Charrette exercise. This year, we ran eight separate studios – our most ever in Stage 3. Over these pages, 

each studio is described in more detail, from experimental architecture to explorations of ‘The Long Now’. 

As part of these varied studios students undertake a field trip in the first semester, travelling to locations 

as diverse as Venice, Rome, Tenerife, Lisbon, Malmo, Copenhagen, London and Lindisfarne. Students’ 

design work is supported by three non-design modules: Architectural Technology, Professional Practice, 

and Principles and Theories. All three tie-in with the student’s evolving design thesis and culminate in an 

extensive design portfolio document. 

In all studios, the project kicks off with a short ‘Primer’ exercise, culminating in a year-wide event 

exhibiting and celebrating the diversity of the studios in Stage 3. The Primer, and the range of approaches 

it demonstrates, embodies our attitude as a School to design work at this level: that rather than asking 

students to convey what they’ve learnt so far, our third year is about taking those first steps into the 

unknown, the particular and the extraordinary, and so help them start to define whatever’s next for them 

in their endeavours in architecture. 


Josep-Maria García-Fuentes 


Matt Ozga-Lawn 


Aldric Rodriguez Iborra 

Amy Linford 



Carolina Figueroa 

Daniel Mallo 

David McKenna 



Kati Blom 

Libby Makinson 

Luis Hernandez 

Martyn Dade-Robertson 



Michael Simpson 

Sean Douglas 

Simon Hacker 

Tony Watson 

Contributors 

Alex Gordon 

Andrew Byrne 

Aurelie Guyet 

Austen Smith 

Cara Lund 

Colin Riches 

Colin Ross 


Darren Conboy 

David Bailey 

Declan McCaffertyand 

Javier Rodriguez Corral 

Jo McCafferty 

Kate Wilson 

Kevin Gray 


Libby Makinson 

Luciano Cardellicchio 

Marc Horn 

Mark Johnson 

Mark Johnson 

Nick Peters 

Nigel Bidwell 

Peter Brittain 

Peter Mouncey 

Peter Mouncey 

Rachel Currie 

Ray Verrall 

Sam Clark 

Sergi Garriga 

Sophia Banou 

Stephen Ibbotson 

Stephen Richardson 

Tim Mosedale 

Usue Ruiz Arana 

Valerio Morabito 

Yasser Megahead 

Students 

Abdul Rahim 

Adam Kamal Najia 

Adnan Ahmed Issa Qatan 

Aldrich Jun Lin Choy 

Alex Jusupov 

Alexander Jack Ferguson 

Alexander Leopold Borrell 

Alice Chilangwa Farmer 

Alice Jane Chilman 

Alicia Charlotte Beaumont 

Amy Louise Callaghan 

Anna Leilani Denker 

Anthony Roger Metelerkamp 

Antonis Kypridemos 

Antonius Tanady 

Ashok Jahan Mathur 

Becky Somerville 

Benjamin Joshua Risby 

Benjamin Michael Simpson 

Benjamin Patrick Martin 

Bethan Hannah Thomas 

Bethany Laura Elmer 

Bradley John Davidson 

Caitlin Latimer-Jones 

Cheuk Yan Debby Chung 

Chloe Alexandra Weston 

Christopher Gabe 

Clement Ting Yiung Tang 

Cristina Mercedes Perez Diaz 

Darragh O’Keeffe 

David Philip Winter 

Declan Joseph Wagstaff 

Edgar Yat-Fei Sin 

Eleanor Gwenllian Brent 

Elise Khoury 

Ellen Rita White Peirson 

Emily Sarah Rosie Hinchliffe 

Erica Alexis Mote Caballero 

Finian John Orme 

Finlay Giovanni McGregor 

Frances Grace Fen-Yi Lai 

Frederick Armitage 

Frederick Lewis 

Gaurav Hemant Kapoor 

George Parfitt 

George Edward Entwistle 

George William Marr 

Georgina Molly McEwan 

Hayley Lauren Graham 

Hiu Yan Lau 

Hoi Yuet Chau 

Holly Julia Tisson 

Hsin-Wei Lin 

Ioi Teng Tsang 

Iona Frances Haig 

Ivo Patrick Pery 

Jack Andrew Cross 

Jack Michael Ryan 

Jack Munro Glasspool 

Jack Peter Lewandowski 

Jade Angela Moore 

Jaimie Alexandra Claydon 

James George Clark 

Jenna Catherine Sheehy 

Jennifer Anne MacFadyen 

Jessica Katherine Wheeler 

Jie Loon Lee 

Jordi Ryano 

Josephine Margaret Foster 

Julian Job Besems 

Justyna Anna Jaroszewicz 

Ka Hei Surin Tong 

Kai Wing Phoebe Mo 

Kimberly Baker 

Kiran Alexander John Milton 

Lauren Ly 

Loretta Ming Wai So 

Lucy Hartley 

Luke Christopher Rossi 

Luke Victor James Dunlop 

Lydia Bronwyn Hyde 

Lydia Sarah Elizabeth Mills 

Man Chun Ip 

Marios Kypridemos 

Matthew Davies Smith 

Melissa Holly Wear 

Meshal Abdulrasool Hasan 

Michael Bautista-Trimming 

Michael Teasdale Wilkinson 

Mojan Kavosh 

Naomi Howell Sivosh 

Natasha Heyes 

Navneet Kaur Sihra 

Nicholas David Green 

Nicholas Peter Harmer 

Patrick Charles King 

Pui Ying Chu 

Rui Huang 

Sara Kelly 

Scott Matthew Doherty 

Shiyun Chen 

Sihyun Kim 

Simon Angus Quinton 

Sin Yi Wong 

Sun Yen Yee 

Tanatswa Lesley Borerwe 

Thomas Badger 

Thomas Adam Reeves 

Thomas George Ardron 

Tooka Taheri 

Tsz Wai Fung 

Tulsi Vikram Phadke 

Wan Yee Chong 

Wei Zhang 

Xavier Paul Alleyne Smales 

Yiwen Fu 

Yuet So 

Yuk Lun Chong 

Zhi Wei Chad Seah 

Zhuoran Li 

Zineb Khadri 

30 

Opposite - Allan Chong ‘Formless’ An Alternative Typology to Preservation

Studio 1 – Building on What is Already Built - 15th Lincoln’s Inn Fields 

Josep-Maria García-Fuentes & Aldric Rodriguez Iborra 

This studio explored architecture as preservation, as it understands they both are placed within a cultural continuum and are the outcome of a complex 

cultural, social and political struggle. It challenged students to design a major addition to an existing heritage building. This requires understanding the 

existing building in all of the ways its architecture and materials express the values it sought to represent and serve at the time, and in the ways that these 

meanings might or might not be extended, enriched or transformed and reshaped by the new addition. 

32 

Top - Alicia Beaumont An Extension to Sir John Soane’s Museum Middle - Ashok Mathur Soane Architecture School 

Bottom - Allan Chong ‘Formless’

Top - Ashok Mathur Soane Architecture School Bottom - Beth Thomas An Extension to Sir John Soane’s Museum 33

34 Top - Sara Kelly Institute of Integrative Pedagogical Design Bottom left - Jenna Sheehy Extending Sir John Soane’s vision of an ‘Academy of Arts’ 

Bottom right - Tom Ardron Institute of Interdisciplinary Exchange

Top left - Lucy Hartley Sir John Soane’s Architectural Association 

Bottom Left -Tom Ardron Institute of Interdisciplinary Exchange 

Right - Sara Kelly Institute of Integrative Pedagogical Design 

35

Studio 2 – Aperture 

Daniel Mallo & Armelle Tardiveau 

Aperture studio proposed an exploration of light and material quality, a journey through the craft of photography as a means to expose and render 

light vibrant. The design of a camera obscura, a room-sized observatory that records the passing of time and the urban landscape, becomes the starting 

point of an urban investigation of the Georgian Market Town of Richmond (North Yorkshire). This remarkable urban townscape with its characteristic 

pitched roofs and stone buildings is the setting for the graduation project, a photographic institute situated at the point where the town meets the soft 

rolling hills of Yorkshire. 

36 Top - Lydia Hyde Aperture Institute Bottom - Freddie Armitage The Light Institute

Top - Alice Chilman 

Middle and Bottom - Jennifer MacFadyen A New Cultural Centre for Richmond 

37

38 

Top - Frances Lai 

Middle left to bottom left - Jack Ryan, Amy Callaghan, Steven Lin, Jack Ryan, Jack Lewandowski

Top - Lauren Ly Aperture Bottom left - Erica Caballero Aperture Bottom right - Frances Lai The Aperture Institution 39

40 

Top left to Bottom right - Lydia Hyde, Nick Harmer, Christie Chu, Jenny MacFadyen, Lei Denker

Top left to bottom right - Tulsi Phadke, Lei Denker, Freddie Armitage, Jack Lewandowski, Nick Harmer, Lei Denker 

41

Studio 3 – Experimental Architecture 

Martyn Dade-Robertson, Luis Hernandez & Carolina Figueroa 

This year started by focusing on developing a new type of hydromorphic material based on the application of bacteria spores. Hygromorophic materials 

change their morphology in the presence of water, and bacteria based hygromorphs offer the potential for actuators that can mechanically respond 

to humidity, creating the possibility to design new types of responsive building skin. The studio embarked in a primer to design new systems and 

mechanisms, developing our hydromorphic technology both in the lab and the workshop. We then used a trip to Venice as the basis of the final project 

to create spaces for experimentation, including the integration of labs, workshops and public functions. 

42 

George Entwistle The City & The City

Top - Adam Najia - The Venice Cleanup 

Bottom, left to right - Bradley Davidson, Aldrich Choy, Iona Haig 

43

44 Top left to Bottom right - Michael Bautista, Julian Besems, Adnan Qatan, Julian Besems, Adam Najia

Top and Middle - Simon Quinton Eudoxia 

Bottom - Michael Bautista-Trimming Zaira 

45

Studio 4 – Infrastructures 

Matthew Margetts & Michael Simpson 

The Infrastructures studio explored the interface between the human scale ‘ritual’ and city scale infrastructure, responding to varied dynamic systems. 

The gaps left behind when infrastructures change can be physical, social or emotional; operating at a personal or collective level. 

The studio started at the individual scale, looking at very personal ‘rituals’ – articulated and exaggerated through ‘contraptions’. Through these we 

developed tactics for looking at systems and processes at a larger scale. 

We chose Brentford as our location for the studio as it contains in a relatively small area an intense confluence of infrastructures – both past and present. 

Students were challenged to think at different scales, and to identify a particular circumstance to explore an opportunistic, dynamic architecture, 

responsive to human needs. 

46 Top - Ellen Peirson An Agricultural Primary Education Bottom - George Parfitt Brentford Droneport

N E W E X H I B I T I O N 

r e c e p t i o n 

a theatrical entrance .... 

Top left - George Parfitt Brentford Droneport 

Top middle, Top left, Bottom - Ben Martin Kew A Santuary for Sensory Atmospheres 

47

48 Top left to bottom right - Chloe Weston, Cheuk Y D Chung, Yuet So, Cheuk Y D Chung, Chloe Weston, Ben Simpson. Cheuk Y D Chung

Top and Middle - Jordi Ryano The Brentford Ear 

Bottom - Yuet So Brentford Hub 

49

50 Rui Huang Unbalanced City

Top left to Bottom right - Ben Simpson, Rui Huang, Mishal Hasan, Jordi Ryano, Ellen Peirson, Mishal Hasan, Ivo Pery, Caitlin Latimer-Jones 

51

Studio 5 – Material Poetics 

James Longfield & Amy Linford 

Materials qualities are central to the production of architecture, technically, in terms of the pragmatics of construction, and through the social meanings, 

rituals and memories they embody. Our studio encouraged students to engage with material as the ‘stuff’ of architecture, real, rather than rendered, the 

thickness, thinness, density, weight of building elements, and the effect these qualities have on the sensory experience of occupation. 

Through the studio each student has explored a specific material through hands-on investigations, using the process of making as a way of thinking 

about building design and detailing; a thoughtful and critical process of material assembly which emerges out of the pragmatics and poetics of material. 

52 Holly Tisson

Top - Natasha Heyes Middle - Naomi Howell Sivosh Bottom - Hayley Graham 

53

54 Top - Chad Seah Bottom - Holly Tisson

Top - Chad Seah Middle- Naomi Howell Sivosh Bottom - Justyna Jaroszewicz 

55

Studio 6 – Ruskin and The Long Now 

Andrew Ballantyne & Libby Makinson 

John Ruskin said, ‘When we build, let us think that we build forever’. The Long Now Foundation was set up to promote long-term 

thinking, and is building a 10,000–year clock. When we start thinking about buildings with a long–term view in mind then we 

think about processes of adaptation, re–use and renewal, as well as erosion and decay. In the long term everything is dynamic. We 

are looking beyond the immediate function of the building to think about what happens when things change. Ruskin wrote about 

Venice, which is a model of precarious resilience: mud into magic. 

56 Chris Gabe Prospective Preservation for the Long Now

Top left - Melissa Wear Top right - Surin Tong Middle right -David Winter Bottom left - Kiran Milton Bottom right - Phoebe Mo 

57

58 Top - Kiran Milton The Timeless Architecture of Evolutionary Predisposition Bottom right - Surin Tong Building Happiness 

Bottom left - Phoebe Mo Building for Permanence and Sensibility through an Experience of Concrete

Jack Glasspool - Long Term Preservation of Short-term Industry 

59

Studio 7 – Trace 

Simon Hacker & Tony Watson 

The studio focused on man-made traces – the marks, indications and imprints that we make across a multitude of scales and their relationships to human 

experience. Whilst some of these marks are relatively permanent, many traces change or fade over time. 

The studio has considered various ways in which traces may be located, observed, researched and represented. These have then fed into considering 

strategies that can be employed to draw, form, copy, follow and imprint new and contemporary traces and changes within both urban and rural contexts. 

60 Alex Borrell The Sheep Counting Institute

Top - James Clark Long Term Preservation of Short-term Industry Middle - Declan Wagstaff Place of Experience Bottom - Jaimie Claydon 

61

62 Top - Declan Wagstaff Middle - Jess Wheeler Middle - Jack Cross Bottom - Tom Badger

Top left to bottom right - Becky Somerville, Emily Hinchliffe, Jack Cross, Freddie Lewis, Luke Dunlop, Ellie Brent, Luke Dunlop, Nick Green, Jess Wheeler, 

Tom Badger 

63

64 Top - Tom Badger Architecture and the Inevitable Bottom - Bethany Elmer Returning the Lindisfarne Gospels

Top left - Elise Khoury Top right - Josie Foster Bottom left - Declan Wagstaff Bottom right - Georgie McEwan 

65

Studio 8 – Variations 

Kati Blom, David McKenna & Sean Douglas 

Students developed a series of small scale prototypes in order to establish a design methodology and programme for a larger proposal, consisting of two 

buildings and an urban plan. 

In the first project, CHAMBER, we started with a small rehearsal space and a construction fragment. From these emerged a residential institute for a 

quartet of musicians. The larger project, SHOW & STORE, began with a pavilion to store and exhibit a single object, extrapolated to a building to 

house a larger compendium. 

66 Top - Alex Jusupov Alison & Peter Smithson Architectural Foundation Bottom - Alice Farmer

Top left to Bottom right - Antonius Tanady, Gaurav Kapoor, Cristina Diaz, Ben Risby, Antonius Tanady, Ben Risby, Rackel Chong, Loretta So, Lee Jieloon, 

Vance Zhang, Sean Kim 

67

MODERN NATURE 

FLUENCY DISORIENTATION RESISTANCE HISTORY 

Edit line 

68 Top - Ben Risby Middle - Sean Kim Middle - Shiyun Chen Bottom - Cristina Perez Diaz

Alex Jusupov Alison & Peter Smithson Architectural Foundation 

69

70 Top left - Tanatswa Borerwe Top right - Shiyun Chen Bottom left - Alice Farmer Bottom right - Rackel Chong

Top left - Edgar Sin Top right - Lee Jieloon Bottom left - Lee Jieloon Bottom right - Mojan Kavosh 

71

Highlighted Project –‘Formless,’ An Alternative Typology to Preservation 

Allan Chong 

This project takes a theoretical path in creating an alternative typology for preservation. It introduces a compromise between the desire for preservation and the cultural shift 

necessary for architectural expansion in the city’s future. ‘Formless does not mean the absence of form, for preservation certainly depends on pre-existing architectural forms. But while 

preservation aesthetics respond to the existing building’s form, they do not change it. Instead they supplement it with new interpretive frames altering the reception of its cultural meaning.’ 

Koolhaas, R., Otero, P. J. (2014) ‘Preservation is Overtaking Us’. 

Interpreting the concept of ‘formless’ in preservation means that architecture and heritage are no longer seen as permanent objects, but they keep transforming to re-frame their 

key spaces. The project becomes a series of processes and imagines an endless architectural development in terms of space, material and technology. The processes form a unique 

methodology – ‘Extraction’ & ‘Projection’, through which the extension completes a cycle. As it keeps changing over time, it gives rise to many cycles which each reframe the 

previous cycle, and each provide different functions to support the theme of preservation. At a certain point of growth, when people trace back to the beginning of the process, 

all of the cycles and spaces are hinged on the heritage, as the extended spaces are derived from the existing spaces. 

72

Highlighted Project – The Sheep Counting Institute 

Alex Borrell 

The Institute is a place for artists, writers, and inventors to dream up new alternatives to pressing issues. Along the way they research, gather and create 

new dream archetypes, absorbing traces of the collective unconscious but also paving the way for future development. These images are archived and 

later attached to sheep which, rescued from the sea, pass through the building on a conveyor belt. 

73


Experimenting with Informality: How can the hyper-complexity of informal growth be 

integrated into architectural design? 

Chris Gabe 

‘The process of creating a neointestine (tissue engineered intestine) involves the construction of a 

“scaffold matrix” that replicates the three-dimensional form of the existing tissue. This should allow 

the local cells to populate the structure and multiply, creating new tissue. It must replicate the dual 

function of the organic tissue acting as both an absorptive surface and a barrier against the external 

environment. It must also facilitate the development of a vascular network, allowing a functional 

blood supply into and out of the scaffold…’ 

‘…This is an example of encouraging growth by creating a biologically responsive scaffold matrix. 

This does not rely on mathematical principles designed to mimic the fundamental complexity of 

a prerequisite system, but rather nurtures the existing biological networks into growth and repair. 

This concept could be explored in the world of informal urbanism. An example of this system of 

framework driven growth can be found in the occupancy of Torre David…’ 

Postmodernity and Postmodernism: ‘A glance backwards is part of the way we go forwards’ 

Ellen Peirson 

Postmodernism’s first aim was always to end the ‘grand narrative’ and to dismiss the idea of working 

towards a prescribed single look or a style. However, in doing this, to the general public some of the 

ideas seemed so extreme that it created a recognisable aesthetic. The discussion on postmodernism 

has been recently opened up again with a revival of sorts a possibility. This revival is more concerned 

with the attitude of postmodernism as opposed to any connotations of a particular style or aesthetics. 

In AD’s ‘Radical Post-Modernism’, architects and thinkers polemicize on the possibility of this. From 

these discussions, the most resonant phrase seems to be: ‘sometimes history repeats itself better if 

the architects don’t know it’. A successful revival may rely on the misconceptions of the movement 

to be forgotten and for just the relevant values to be taken forward. The movement was expansive 

and unrestrained, and produced a wide range of architecture that cannot be compared stylistically. 

It offered many opportunities for reform and improvement which are still relevant today such as its 

user centred and site specific approach to design. However, as with movements that have gone before, 

it has been judged mainly on aesthetics. In truth, there can be no completely postmodern building. 

Therefore, for it to flourish, it may be better for it not to be considered a movement but more an 

approach or attitude to design. 

‘Depressingly Irrelevant’: 

Interrogating the Criticism of Speculative Design and Exploring the Value of Such Projects 

George Entwistle 

‘This is a period of slackening - I refer to the colour of times. From every direction we are being urged 

to put an end to experimentation, in the arts and elsewhere’ - Jean-François Lyotard 

With criticism from writers such as Patrik Schumacher being given such a prominent platform, in 

popular design journals such as The Architectural Review, speculative design has been left in a fragile 

state. There is a danger that designers will become reluctant to engage with speculative design for fear 

of being heavily criticised and that it might be phased out. There is perhaps already evidence of this 

beginning to take place as ‘there are already utterances of critical practice being little more than design 

for design’s sake, “design for designers” or perhaps more appropriately, design for critical designers’. 

Speculative design as a practice stands at a crossroads in how it deals with this criticism. One way 

is to continue on its current path, to retreat to within the community of the avant-garde, being 

‘overly self reflective and introverted’, hiding from critics outside of their ‘closed community’ such 

as Schumacher. Jean-François Lyotard describes this path: ‘Artists and writers must be brought back 

to the bosom of the community, or at least, if the latter is considered to be ill, they must be assigned 

the task of healing it’. 

The alternate path is explained by Dunne and Raby: ‘Speculative designs depend on dissemination 

and engagement with a public or expert audience; they are designed to circulate’. Dunne and Raby 

propose the opposite of what is described by Lyotard, calling for speculative design to be thrust onto 

a public stage, suggesting that by hiding the practice within a ‘closed community’, ‘its usefulness as 

part of a larger disciplinary project is undermined’. 

74

Spraying the City: An exploration of graffiti and street art as a democratic creative expression 

Georgina McEwan 

Graffiti and street art, as the voice of the unelected and disadvantaged, intends to regain possession 

of public space in a rebellion against authoritative dictations of the urban environment: to ‘reclaim 

the streets’. No urban space can be defined as neutral, with walls and street topography symbolic 

of boundaries for socially constructed zones and territories. Graffiti writers in 1970s New York 

considered urban developers and architects of the rapidly evolving city as callous decision makers, 

an attitude still reflected in the aggressive and territorial language of the graffiti community: ‘writing 

graffiti is “bombing”, a tag is a “hit” and advanced letter formations are “burners’’’. Instances of profitdriven 

architectural gentrification associated with the mundane metropolis lifestyle in developing 

cities have led to environments that are often constrained by limitations inhibiting liberated social 

action. Graffiti and street art, through transgressive artistic reclamation, highlights the importance 

of democratic creative free expression in its ability to drive and shape urgent issues in today’s culture. 

The Future of Concert Halls: A first exploration 

Julian Besems 

Whilst classical music is primarily performed in traditional concert halls without the use of 

amplification devices, a concern has been expressed that recording and reproduction quality has 

started to create an expectation of excellence that cannot be met in live performances. 

This evokes the question of how the advanced development of recording, reproduction and 

amplification devices will influence the need for and form of new and existing purpose built music 

venues in relation to classical music. 

This research question will be answered through a recording experiment and a public survey. 

Recordings of both live performances, and hi-fi reproductions of the same pieces of music are 

taken. These are played blind to respondents who express their preference. The samples are analysed 

through spectrograms. The public survey investigates the respondent’s primary reason to attend a live 

performance and how they listen to music. 

The overall results from the listening experiment show that there is no significant preference for live 

over hi-fi reproduced audio quality. There is however a significant preference for hi-fi reproduction 

quality for female voices, and live quality for male voices. The spectrogram analysis explains the 

preference difference: the reproduction samples have a higher high frequency incidence; the live 

samples have a higher low frequency density. The survey outcome states that people primarily visit 

classical performances for the audio quality. 

Lessons for the Tonlé Sap Lake: Can the living conditions of Kampong Khleang be improved 

by rural development? 

Sara Kelly 

The Tonlé Sap Lake is South-East Asia’s largest inland fishery. It passes through nine districts of 

Cambodia, including Kampong Khleang, which forms the focus of this dissertation. The Tonlé Sap 

Lake annually absorbs around 20% of the Mekong River’s flood capacity. As a result, the area around 

the lake becomes flooded and inhabits both floating and stilted communities. 

In contrast to modern approaches, where there is a reluctance to develop marginal land , the 

communities of this district have developed their own approach and are looking to consolidate this. 

Farming and fishing communities adapt to the local ecology and have managed a 10-meter water 

level rise. Communities such as Kampong Khleang have developed an innovative architectural 

morphology that permits them to live in these conditions, however imperfectly. 

This response is shaped by their environmental, social and political conditions. Neal Mongold 

explains this observation. He argued that architecture is the shaping of the physical environment and 

thus it is involved in the shaping of the economic, political, spiritual, and psychological environment. 

These communities offer a unique insight into this relationship between the development of social 

and physical form. One could argue that the prospect of uncertainty of global warming has stimulated 

the architectural field to radically change its relationship with water. 

75


Tokyo: The Urban Laboratory 

The birth, death and legacy of Metabolism, with a case study of the Capsule Tower as an 

emblematic microcosm. 

Caitlin Latimer-Jones 

Japan experienced devastating destruction through World War Two and multiple natural disasters. 

With financial and technical assistance from global superpowers, Tokyo experienced unprecedented 

urban growth and infrastructural and industrial progress. The capital became an urban laboratory for 

Metabolism’s utopian megastructures. The post war movement’s ideas stem from viewing the city as 

an adaptive entity and relied on advanced technology. However, megastructures never reached the 

intended global success, experiencing the same demise as the movement by the 1970s. This paper 

explores Tokyo’s mid-1900s landscape, what Metabolism was responding to and how the movement 

has enlightened contemporary urban design and planning. Contemporary designs should be led by 

concerns related to sustainability, green spaces, users’ interconnectivity and the existing city. The 

‘metabolic development’ of the world’s societies should continue to evolve, to ameliorate and surpass 

the 1960s utopian proposals. 

From an Era of Welfare to an Era of Consumption: Proposing a loss of ethic in the regeneration 

of Park Hill Estate 

Tom Ardron 

Park Hill Estate was granted Grade II* listing in 1998 amongst a selection of other post-war housing 

estates. In 2007, Manchester-based Urban Splash began work on regenerating the estate. This thesis 

traces the changes throughout the history of Park Hill from its original intentions to present day 

in order to propose a loss of the public-housing ethic ingrained in our understanding of the estate. 

Beginning with a chronological analysis from the design conception, I discuss the influence The New 

Brutalism had on the design of Park Hill and how devices in both architectural and urban design 

enhanced the ethic of social housing as architectural self-justification within the estate. Following this 

I evaluate the changes in public policy which played a major part in the decline of the estate from the 

1980s to its listing and how echoes of these policies could still be influencing both the redevelopment 

of Park Hill and housing markets in the UK today. 

The founding motives of both English Heritage and the developer Urban Splash within the 

regeneration initiate the second part of this study. This highlights factors such as financing and a 

contradiction in practice between the stakeholders as a possible directive to some changes. A shift 

from a social to a profit-orientated motive is proposed as one of the main transitions within the 

development. 

An Assessment of Exhibition as the Means of Appropriating Egyptian Style, with example of 

Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. 

Melissa Wear 

I have chosen to study the appropriation of Egyptian aesthetics because of its cyclic relationship 

with Western Europe. One of the earliest civilisations developed in Egypt. A specific movement 

of Egyptian architectural style into Greece, Rome, and then through to Western Europe creates an 

interesting cycle when considering the human desire of returning to one’s roots. It is useful to observe 

what is gained or lost in the translation of styles. Equally, in a growing era of continentalism, it is 

interesting to consider why people choose to retain identity using cultural divisions. As architecture 

is increasingly designed by international firms and away from local values, it is important to recognise 

why we choose to keep or lose certain elements of identity. It is most clear to study this subject using 

an age that has entirely passed. 

Britain’s interest in Egypt lasted roughly a century, most aptly bracketed by two London buildings: 

the 1812 Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly and the 1928 Carreras Cigarette Factory in Camden. However, 

a more general interest in Egypt can be traced back to the thirteenth century; historian James Curl 

predicts, ‘The inspiration of Egyptian art and architecture for the West is not yet dissipated’. 

Mass Egyptianising has led Egyptomania to become associated with garishness (of bright colours and 

secular ornamentation). This is perhaps linked to the method of exhibition in sharing the splendours 

of decoration associated with Egyptian style. 

76

AUP Creative Practice / Social Sciences Dissertation 

Tyne Deck in the 21st Century: How can architectural interventions be used to improve the 

relationship between Newcastle and Gateshead? 

Tom Wessely 

This Creative Practice Dissertation analyses how the infrastructure at Quayside has developed since 

the Roman period. It focuses on the key changes at Quayside such as the construction of the High 

Level Bridge, built in 1847. Following this, it critically examines in greater detail the structures 

built in the contemporary era, such as the Millennium Bridge and the Sage. The aim is to establish 

through a design proposal how the quayside area might help improve the relationship between 

Newcastle and Gateshead. Information obtained through interviews and focus groups influences the 

design proposal. Through a mapping exercise, I unpack the urban quality of Quayside and propose 

possible ways of improving the relationship at Quayside through architectural interventions. The 

proposal is influenced by the Tyne Deck, designed in 1969 by Gordon Ryder and Peter Yates (but 

never built) reflects on the controversial Garden Bridge by Thomas Heatherwick. In the conclusion, 

I discuss what impact such proposed infrastructure could have on local organisations such as the 

NewcastleGateshead Initiative and how it might improve the relationship between Newcastle and 

Gateshead. 

Public Spaces in Kibera 

Veenay Patel 

This dissertation looks to unfold the production and consumption of public spaces in Kibera. 

The research was conducted in the Gatwekera district of the informal settlement and focuses on 

six public spaces in the area. The information collected about each space is portrayed through six 

narratives, where I express conversed, observatory and researched findings. The intention is to try 

and understand the relationship between people and place within the settlement. Furthermore, the 

aim is to explore the possibilities that may enhance these spaces for the residents and enable them 

to effect change for a better future. 

The focus of this study is to look in particular at the production and use of public spaces within the 

settlement. Kibera is structured upon government owned land and therefore, in layman’s terms is all 

considered to be public space. However, this is not the case as the informal city works with the same 

notions of public and private as the formal city. For the purpose of this study, a public space can be 

defined as a social space that is generally open and accessible to the people. The characteristics of a 

public space in the formal city differ to those of the informal as the facets that define these spaces 

are dependent on the people that utilise them. This led to an exploration of ‘What defines a public 

space in Kibera?’ The insinuation being that the functional and symbolic value of a public space in 

an informal settlement like Kibera is based upon the foundation of what the residents require rather 

than being a simple space of leisure. Thus, this research aims to unravel some key concepts that can 

help us understand how public spaces work in Kibera and the bearing this has on the lives of the 

citizens that reside there. 

Identifying Inadequacies of Water and Sanitation Provision in the Slums of Mumbai and the 

Consequences of this for Female Access to Education and Employment. 

Rebecca Alexander 

Water and sanitation provision is a concern for many informal settlements in the cities of 

developing countries. Cultural norms in many countries mean that women from low-income urban 

communities find that their lives and opportunities are shaped by the inadequate provision of basic 

services. Mumbai is a city with one of the largest informal populations in the world. Understanding 

the nature of these informal settlements is necessary in order to intervene most effectively. This study 

examines the challenges of delivering adequate water and sanitation services to the slums of Mumbai. 

The inadequacies of both formal and informal systems were explored to identify the consequences of 

such shortfalls. The research found that many aspects of life within Mumbai slums were connected 

to water and sanitation related activities. Furthermore it was found that because women and girls 

bare the brunt of the burden of these activities their education and employment opportunities are 

negatively impacted by insufficiencies. 

77

Fieldwork & Site Visits 

BA (Hons) Architecture 

As part of Stage 3 the varied studios undertake a field trip in the first semester, travelling to locations as diverse as Venice, Rome, Tenerife, Lisbon, 

Malmo, Copenhagen, London and Lindisfarne. 

Studio 1: Building on what is already built 

Rome, Venice and Verona, Italy 

Studio 2: Aperture 

Tenrife 

Studio 3: Experimental Architecture 

Venice, Italy 

Studio 4: Infrastructures 

Brentford, United Kingdom 

Studio 5: Material Poetics 

Copenhagen, Denmark + Malmo and Stockholm, Sweden 

Studio 6: Ruskin and the Long Now 

Venice, Italy 

Studio 7: Trace 

Norway 

Studio 8: The Variations 

Portugal 

MArch Architecture 

Stage 5: Whole year 

Rotterdam, Netherlands 

Stage 6: Zazibar Studio 

Zanzibar, Tanzania 

MA Architecture and Urban Design 

Nantes, France 

78

BA Architecture & Urban Planning (AUP) 

The BA (Hons) Architecture and Urban Planning (AUP) is an evolving three year programme which 

began in September 2013 and is now reaching its first cycle of maturity. The degree programme is a 

broad one that seeks to unite academic themes and approaches from the architecture and urban planning 

programmes across the School. But whilst many joint degrees can sometimes simply mesh two existing 

programmes together, we wanted to do something different. The AUP degree carries its own intellectual 

and pedagogical themes that cannot be found on other programmes elsewhere in the School. There are 

four conceptual strands, which includes one major theme, ‘alternative practice’, and three minor themes: 

visual culture, urban design and social enterprise. 

The alternative practice strand responds to a critique of twentieth century architecture and planning as 

overly technocratic and individualised. Returning to these critiques, alternative practice intends to address 

these issues by a greater focus on social, cultural, political and environmental concerns in the design and 

construction of the built environment. Our course has drawn inspiration from a range of thinkers and 

practitioners concerned with the built environment (including philosophers, political activists, sociologists, 

geographers, architects and planners) that have sought to engage and include communities in design 

and building (sometimes self-build, sometimes co-production). 

The following section which contains images of design work from Stage 1, 2 and 3 of the programme 

effectively showcases much of the intellectual and practical academic content of the degree – particularly 

the degree’s internal themes – and should be of interest to all with a firm awareness of the connections 

between social, environmental and design issues and the built environment more specifically. We hope you 

will enjoy the work shown here and derive as much pleasure from these projects as we have in helping their 

creators to realise their own personal goals. 

Directors 

Andrew Law 




David McKenna 

Rutter Carroll 

Tim Townshend 

Contributors 

Adam Sharr 

Ali Madanipour 

Andrew Donaldson 

Andy M Law 


Cat Button 

Chris Beale 

Cristina Pallini 


Daniel Mallo 

Dave Webb 

Dhruv Sookhoo 

Geoff Vigar 

Georgia Giannopoulou 

Helen Robinson 

Ian McCaffery 

Irene Curulli 

Irene Mosley 


James Street 

Jane Midgely 

Joe Dent 

John Pendlebury 

Jules Brown 

Kati Blom 


Ken Hutchinson 

Loes Veldpaus 

Marion Talbot 

Mark Tewdwr-Jones 

Martin Beatie 

Martin Bonner 

Matt Ozga Lawn 

Matt Wilcox 

Montse Ferres 

Neil Powe 

Paola Gazzola 

Paul Crompton 

Peter Kellett 

Peter Mouncey 

Prue Chiles 

Raphael Selby 

Ray Verrall 

Roger Maier 

Rose Gilroy 


Scott Savin 

Steve Dudek 

Steve Graham 

Steve Parnell 

Stuart Cameron 

Su Ann Lim 

Sue Speak 

Teresa Strachan 

Tibo Labat 

Tim Mosedale 

Tim Townshend 


Stage 1 

Abbey JoForster 

AdilZeynalov 

AhmadNamazli 

Ahmet Halil Hayta 

Ben Edward Johnson 

Callum Robert 

Campbell 

Conrad Chi WahLi 

EmilyWhyman 

Fatma Beyza Celebi 

Flynn Christopher 

Linklater-Johnson 

Georgia AnneMiles 

HarryBloomfield 

Huiyu Zhou 

Jemima Anulika 

Manasoko Onugha 

Jiewen Tan 

Jieyang Zhou 

John-Kervin Marcos 

Joshua Edward Beattie 

Joshua Thomas Goodliffe 

Junqiang Chen 

Ka Hei Chan 

Ka Hei Wong 

Konstantins Briskins 

Marvin Shikanga Mbasu 

Max James Hardy 

Mehboob Chatur 

Michael John 

Rosciszewski Dodgson 

Minsub Lee 

Nikshith Reddy 

Nagaraja Reddy 

Photbarom Korworrakul 

Racheal Felicia 

Modupeayo Osinuga 

Richard George Gilliatt 

Ryan Patrick Thomas 

Sahir Thapar 

Shaoyun Wang 

Siddhant Agarwal 

Sonali Venkateswaran 

Stephen Johnston 

Sutong Yu 

Theodore Christian 

Robert VostBond 

Ting En Wu 

Vaios Tsoupos 

Van Abner Tabigue 

Consul 

Winnie Wing Yee 

Wong 

Xi LIN 

Xinyun Zhang 

Xuanzhi Huang 

Yasmine Khammo 

Yuan Xu 

Zeynab Bozorg 

Stage 2 

Alex Joseph Robson 

Ali Alshirawi 

Andrew John Laurence 

Blandford-Newson 

Chia-Yuan Chang 

Christopher Hau 

Eleanor Kate Chapman 

Filip Ferkovic 

George Jeavons-Fellows 

Hannah Rose Knott 

Henry Andrew Morgan 

Hiu Ying Sung 

Jieyu Xiong 

Jonas Wohni Grytnes 

Lok Hang L Leung 

Nadine Landes 

Phuong Anh Pham 

Runyu Zhang 

Seyed Masoumi Fard 

Sheryl Lee 

Simona Penkauskaite 

Sze Chai Anthony Choy 

Thomas Gibbons 

Yeqian Gao 

Yilan Zhang 

Stage 3 

Yuxiang Wang 

Adem Mehmet 

Altunkaya 

Blair Forrest Nimmo 

Charles Richard Moore 

Charlotte Harrison 

Fedelis Fernando 

Tosandi 

Harry George 

Treanor 

Jack William Burnett 

Jessica Lily Poyner 

Martin Kruczyk 

Po-Yen Chang 

Rebecca Mary 

Alexander 

Richard Keeling 

Rutheep Prabhakaran 

Ryan Thomas Conlon 

Safeer Shersad 

Shu Ting Tang 

Sophie Hannah Laverick 

Thomas Bartholomew 

Charles Wessely 

Veenay Patel 

Zheng Kit Leong 

80 

Opposite - First Graduating Year AUP

AUP Stage 1 – Measure 

David McKenna 

There are 14 boat houses belonging to various colleges, schools and amateur rowing clubs located along the Wear in Durham. The earliest date from 

the early 1800s and coincide with the founding of the university. Measure required the design of a 15th boat house and cafe that would form a gateway 

from the city centre to the university playing fields. 

82 

Top left - Konstantins Briskins Top right - Callum Campbell Middle - Callum Campbell Bottom left - yasmine khammo bottom left - Xi Lin

Top left to bottom right - Ka Chan, Xi Lin, Sutong Yu, Ka Chan, Yasmine Khammo, Winnie Wong, Sutong Yu 83

AUP Stage 2 – Theory and Form 


In semester two of Twentieth Century Architecture, students were asked to consider a Theory + Form approach to the submission of an essay and design 

project, through a strategy for the reuse/conversion/extension/adaptation of an existing post war building in the Tyneside area. 

Wallsend Central Library, a key building from the post war period in the region, was identified for study and analysis with respect to its reuse. Built in 

1967 as the main library in the town of Wallsend, and designed by local architects Faulkner Brown (formerly Williamson Faulkner Brown and Partners), 

the building allowed students to assess the design through a series of Theory + Form lectures, seminars, design analysis tutorials and exercises. 

84 Top - Wallsend Central Library, Williamson, Faulkner Brown and Partners, 1966 Bottom - Seyed Masoumi Fard, Yuxiang Wang, Jonas Grytnes

Group work: Jieyu Xiong, Lok Hang Leung, Chia-Yuan Chang, Seyed Masoumi Fard, Yuxiang Wang, Jonas Grytnes, Thomas Gibbons, Alex Robson, 

Christopher Hau, Henry Morgan, Yilan Zhang, Runyu Zhang, Sze Chai Anthony Choy, Hui Ying Sung 

85

AUP Stage 3 – A Home for All: Housing for Vulnerable Population 

Tim Townshend 

During the 2020s a point will be reached when 25% of the UK population will aged 65 and over. People are living more active lifestyles into older 

age and there is a huge challenge to meet the needs and aspirations of these ‘active third agers’. APL 3002 explored the complexities of providing 

a stimulating, safe, appropriate and desirable home for older persons in an existing setting, Armstrong House, a listed Arts-and-Crafts property in 

Bamburgh. Armstrong House Bamburgh is an independent charitable trust providing ‘independent living with support’ affiliated to the national 

Abbeyfield society. The students were charged with thinking holistically about the place of older persons’ housing in a settlement such as Bamburgh 

and how it might be more fully integrated into the everyday life of the community, by providing ‘places of encounter’ learning from Dutch experience. 

86

87

AUP Stage 3 – Alternative Practice: Co-producing Space 

Daniel Mallo & Armelle Tardiveau 

For Alternative Practice: Co-producing Space, students focused on a live project at Denton Burn Community Association which concerns the design 

of a community garden and a playful area for an unused derelict plot. The project included the mapping of the Network of Social and Environmental 

Initiatives in the neighbourhood and aimed to engage students with existing community-led initiatives. The project culminated with a series of design 

proposals and temporary installations on site, which allowed the community to experience the transformed space and trigger conversations about the 

potential of the place as well as learning together through the enactment of a temporary community space. 

88 Installation at Denton Burn

89

MArch 

Zeynep Kezer 

‘What can architecture do? Where might architectural thinking take us?’ Newcastle’s 

two-year MArch fosters a research-led approach – one that challenges students to stretch 

their architectural and critical imaginations, to think harder and more deeply about what 

architecture is and what it could be. Work is diverse, threaded by an interest in architecture 

as a collective, cultural endeavour. Projects interrogate architectural production in all its 

aspects, from material processes, to modes of design, representation and construction, to 

the ways that architecture shapes – and is shaped by – the society and culture in which 

it is situated. 

As an RIBA accredited Part II programme – the second of three steps towards qualification 

as a UK architect – MArch is geared to develop advanced skills in analysis, representation, 

design and technical resolution through projects of considerable scale and complexity. 

But it is also rooted in the belief that architectural training must go beyond professional 

competence. MArch draws on the diverse expertise of ARC, our School’s multidisciplinary 

research collaborative, to push explorative ways of working and thinking architecturally. 

Students are encouraged to undertake original investigations into issues and techniques at 

the forefront of contemporary developments in architecture and beyond – from synthetic 

biology to the space of the psyche – while at the same time grounding their work in 

a specific material, social, cultural and intellectual context. Cross-studio reviews and 

symposia support a lively exchange of ideas and challenge students to position their work 

in relation to trends in architectural production and discourse. 

Teaching in MArch cuts across common distinctions between design, technology and 

history and theory, promoting an integrated approach that treats all aspects of architecture 

as opportunities for critical creative enquiry. Studio modules play a central role, 

incorporating lectures, seminars, consultancies and workshops spanning the curriculum, 

as well as cross-year events such as Charrette and Thinking-Through-Making. Projects are 

undertaken in small design-research studios, each exploring particular issues or themes that 

resonate with the research interests of tutors. Briefs invite an open process of investigation 

between staff and students, encouraging the development of an independent approach and 

distinctive critical stance, all grounded in rigorous research. In Stage 5, two semester-long 

projects set in a major European city interrogate the complexities of architecture’s relation 

to context, from urban to detail-scale, allowing students to test new approaches, methods 

and ideas. With most of the prescribed curriculum covered, Stage 6 is freed up to focus on 

a specific interest or question, pursued in depth through a year-long thesis project. 

With a rich range of opportunities for specialisation, the MArch programme at Newcastle 

allows students to develop their own fields of expertise and to showcase these in a distinctive 

portfolio. Alongside the design studio, students can choose to pursue independent research 

through a dissertation, to join a linked research studio where they collaborate on a live 

research project led by a member of staff, or to take a tailored set of modules from one 

of our other specialist Masters programmes – such as Design and Emergence, or Urban 

Design – with the potential of accumulating credits towards a second postgraduate 

degree. Bridging between the two years of MArch, these activities spark ideas and develop 

skills that feed into thesis projects. The School also has a series of exchange agreements 

with leading schools of architecture in Europe and around the world, including KTH 

Stockholm, National University of Singapore, and The University of Sydney. MArch 

students can study abroad for one or two semesters of Stage 5, and the programme benefits 

from the diverse skills and experiences of students who join our projects. 

91

Stage 5 

Stage 5 is a year for in-depth experimentation: for exploring architecture in all its cultural, social, political, 

material and historical contexts, for testing new approaches to design, representation and technology. 

Briefs emphasize critical thinking and require students to engage with current debates in architecture 

and society at large. The year’s work focusses on a particular international city – this year Rotterdam 

– beginning with an intensive week-long study visit, including architectural tours, excursions, talks, 

group urban analysis and social events. Students undertake a critical reimagining of the city through two 

semester-long projects which challenge them to work at two radically different scales – first urban, then 

detail. Framing design as a rigorous, as well as speculative process, they foster design-research skills and 

interests in preparation for Stage 6. 

In semester one, Plan Rotterdam asked students to engage with the urban fabric of the city, its historical 

layers, cultural currents and social differences. The project was taught as five distinct studios that each took 

on a different urban area and issue. Common themes include the interplay of buildings, infrastructure, 

land and water in a city below sea level, architecture’s role in the production of images, experiences and 

lifestyles, and the politics of regeneration in a place renowned for visionary architectural and urban ideas. 

The project is paired with the Tools for Thinking about Architecture module, which introduces a range of 

critical approaches through lectures, workshops and seminars. 

Semester two’s Rematerializing Rotterdam switched focus to material and technical imagination, taking 

detail, construction and atmosphere as opportunities for creative and critical exploration. The brief 

asked students to interrogate a [g]host architecture – built or unbuilt, in Rotterdam or elsewhere – and 

to reimagine it in the contemporary city. A detail and environment lecture series, supported by expert 

consultancies, encouraged students to pursue a technical specialism that embodies the intentions of the 

project. 


James Craig 

Stephen Parnell 


Hanna Benihoud 

James Craig 

Laura Harty 

Matthew Ozga-Lawn 

Nathaniel Coleman 


Contributors 

Adam Sharr 

Aidan Hoggart 

Ben Bridgens 

Chantelle Stewart 

Claire Harper 

Daniel Mallo 

Dik Jarman 

Ed Wainwright 

Graham Farmer 

Jonnie McGill 



Leon Walsh 

Luis Hernan 

Mark Clarke 


Miguel Paredes 

Neveen Hamza 

Nita Kidd 

Sam Austin 

Sarah Jane Stewart 

Zeynep Kezer 

Students 

Adam Hampton-Matthews 

Alexander Baldwin-Cole 

Alexandra Paula Carausu 

Amit Chhaganbhai Patel 

Carl Matthew Reid 

Cleo Kyriacou 

Daniel Richard Duffield 

David Livingstone Boyd 

Deryan Teh 

Gavin Jia Chung Wu 

Hei Man Lau 

James Richard Street 

Jessica Raine Wilkie 

Joseph Wilson 

Joseph Philip Dent 

Justin William Moorton 

Kathleen Rebecca Jenkins 

Katie Anne Fisher 

Kayleigh Anne Creighton 

Kim Alicia Gault 

Laurence William Ashley 

Malcolm Greer Pritchard 

Mariya Lapteva 

Martin James Parsons 

Matthew Westgate 

Matthew Michael Wilcox 

Matthew Sharman-Hayles 

Michael James Southern 

Nedelina Atanasova 

Nicola Jane Blincow 

Nikolas Kirris Fennell Ward 

Noor Aliya Jan-Mohamed 

Raphael Tevel Selby 

Rebecca Elizabeth Daisy Wise 

Richard John Spilsbury 

Robert George Evans 

Rose Eleanor O’Halloran 

Ruochen Zhang 

Samuel Edward Halliday 

Shiu Tung Wallace Ho 

Sophie Cobley 

Stavroula Rousounidou 

Su Ann Lim 

Theodora Kyrtata 

Thomas James Saxton 

Thomas Richard Cowman 

Ulwin Paul Beetham 


Erasmus Students 

Camille Bourneuf 

Delia Heitmann 

Gustav Lundstrom 

Insa Thiel 

Stephanie Chiu 

92 Opposite - Joe Dent Metropolitan Imaginaries - Site Plan

Metropolitan Imaginaries 

James Craig 

Metropolitan Imaginaries asked students to map, analyse, and condense the myriad architectural elements that constitute Rotterdam’s metropolitan 

image. Using Ivan Leonidov’s social condenser as a key reference, each student set about creating an urban strip that would act as a vessel to contain 

architectural interpretations of Rotterdam’s metropolitan conditions. Each strip was articulated, combined, and placed in the Maashaven basin – a site 

that lies adjacent to Rotterdam’s prime metropolitan location: the Wilhelminapier. The proposed masterplan is a layered, multi-programmed terrain that 

highlights and exaggerates Rotterdam’s extant desire to be seen as a metropolitan city. 

94 

Kathleen Jenkins

A D A M H A M P T O N - M A T T H E W S 

Top from left to right - Joe Dent, James Street, Stavri Rousounidou, Adam Hampton-Matthews, Noor Jan-Mohamed, Justin Moorton 

95

Iterations & Intensities 


The studio looked with a close and critical eye at the design processes associated with two major Rotterdam-based practices, OMA and MVRDV. 

Students were asked to emulate and embody these practices, in order to gain an understanding of Rotterdam as the site that allows for and encourages 

these means of producing architecture. A mock competition was held between the two practices for the same masterplan site in Delfshaven, with large, 

group-produced masterplan models alongside individual explorations. 

96 

Top - MVRDV - Intensities Group Masterplan From Minecraft Blocks to a Building Masterplan

Top - Nik Ward Top Right - Stephanie Chiu Bottom Left - Jessica Wilkie Bottom Right - Carl Reid 

97

The City as a Platform 


This studio was based on the premise that it is the architecture of the underlying immaterial ‘platforms’ – the operating systems of the city – its rules, 

regulations, frameworks, social morals, systems, etiquette, traditions, networks, legislation, and so on, that is most influential on the design of the city. 

Students were asked, as a group, through mapping and desktop research, to come up with a definition of what a ‘platform’ is in the context of urban 

environment. They then had to individually design a building based upon that idea. The intention was to question the architect’s traditional role in 

society and investigate original models of ‘spatial agency’. 

98 Top - Michael Southern

Top - Rosie O’Halloran Middle - Malcolm Pritchard B ottom - Cleo Kyriacou 

99

Urban Hacker 


‘Operation Rotterdam’ was the mission that the students acting as special agents were deployed on. Their mission was to hack into the city unlocking the 

upcoming changes in society: Individualisation, Internationalisation, Informalisation, Intensification and Information as described by the Netherlands 

Institute for Social Research. Each target area had an affiliated person of interest (P.O.I) who engaged with the agents to inform their hack. Hacking 

into a city meant that a sophisticated method of mapping was needed to understand the rules that govern it. The urban hacks then transformed into 

architectural interventions which continued to engage their P.O.I and transformed their target area. 

100 Top - Wallace Ho Bottom - Insa Thiel

Left to right, from top - Katie Fisher, Tom Cowman, Wallace Ho, Matthew Wilcox, Joe Wilson, Matthew Westgate 

101

What Makes a City Vital? 


Students in this studio engaged in analyses of urban conditions that are deeper and broader than the self-congratulatory language architects, developers, 

and civic boosters tend to use to describe supposed success in cities. Relative to this, analyses based on use rather than exchange were encouraged, while 

writings on cities by Lefebvre and Rykwert provided some of the main textual sources for the students’ work. In particular, students were encouraged to 

consider those aspects of cities that make them vital but are non-commodifiable, related more to civic virtues and dreaming than to exchange. As part 

of their research, students developed a series of strategies for re-urbanising OMA/Koolhaas’ De Rotterdam complex, the quarter it sits in (and ostensibly 

establishes), and Rotterdam more generally. 

102 What Makes a City Vital? Suspended Symposium Group Model 

ARB CRITERIA COVERED:

Marketing Collage 

Ulwin Beetham 

“The success of a city therefore cannot be measured in terms of 

financial growth and of a share in those markets it may have managed to capture, 

or even of its place in the process of globalization which is the inescapable 

phenomenon of our time- but depends on the inherent strength of the fabric 

and its availability to the social forces that mold the life of its inhabitants.” 

Joseph rykwert, The Seduction Of Place 

When examining the image of rotterdam and its architecture and 

what it wants it to convey through the slick and seductive imagery of brochures 

and city guides, a strong identity emerges that underpins both what it believes 

it is and the perceived power it holds over shaping its own future. Critically 

dissecting this imagery and information reveals one of the many inevitabilities 

of the sale: The reality never meets the expectation. 

Truly the International City, gradually stripped bare of any localised 

context rotterdam is both anywhere and nowhere simultaneously. As neoliberal 

policies drive the agenda of 21st century discourse, the unique circumstance 

afforded rotterdam have led it to become debased to a carousel of skyscrapers 

housing infinite quantifiable commodities, the program. The model of success 

based on a series of overreaching potentials rather than realities that form a 

city for tomorrow but not for today. 

After the Luftwaffe bombing in 1940, Rotterdam became a target 

for a wave of policy-making and urban renewal, systematically restructuring 

the city to a post-modernist utopian vision. This included the significant 

redevelopment of areas such as Kop Van Zuid to become a ‘Manhattan on the 

Maas’, constructing monoliths of economic power, an illusion of achievement, 

attempting to compete within the growing capitalist market. 

A dominant environment was created, operating on the control and 

subordination of a significantly (49%) non-dutch population. The majority of 

developments on Kop Van Zuid have been privately financed office buildings & 

commercial exploits, however despite this ‘working image’, unemployment is at 

8.5%, twice that of the national average. The area is significantly unpopulated 

and desolate, an ‘isolated and unnatural urban space’. 

I argue that the cultural, and hence economic, failures of Rotterdam 

are a direct result of the Masculinist approach to urban design, gentrifying and 

excluding those not valued by traditional white ‘Masculinism’: women, ethnic 

minorities (majorities), and alternative sexualities. To establish social cohesion 

and equal representation, difference of the ‘other’ to the existing ‘Masculinity’ 

must be embodied in the urban environment. 

The BroChUre 

THE MYTH OF MASCULINITY 

Left to right, from top - Vili Welroos, Ulwin Beetham, Gavin Wu, Mariya Lapteva, Deryan Teh, Daniel Duffield, Becky Wise 

103

Thinking-Through-Making Week 

Thinking-Through-Making continues our theme of collaborations with artists, engineers, architects, musicians, thinkers and makers. This is for final 

year BA and MArch students in the second semester of the year. With a focus on material and making, this week-long series of lectures and workshops 

asks students to approach architecture through the process of making and drawing at large-scales, bringing material back to the core of architecture’s 

exploration. 

Articulated Structures 

Holly Hendry 

Articulated Structures 

Sebastian Kite and Benjamin Custance 

Chemical droplet workshop 

Professor Rachel Armstrong 

The Golden Journey 

Matt Rowe 

Dis-Connect to Re-Combine 

Dr Luciano Cardellicchio 

Illigraphy 

Russ Coleman 

Jesmonite 

Matt Rowe 

Lino cut with embossing 

Northern Print 

Material Processes 

Amy Linford 

Sculpted Polystyrene Spaces 

Magnus Casselbrant and Jesper Henriksson 

Spatial Possibilities 

Dr Rachel Cruise 

Stitch 

Helen Pailing 

Stonemasonry 

David France 

Temporary liquid 

Russ Coleman 

The Golden Journey 

Matt Rowe 

Your ideal multi-dimensional growing edible building 

Henry Amos 

104 

https://thinkingthroughmaking.org/workshops/

Another Architecture [Brutal] 


This studio looked at the much polarised movement of Brutalism and the issue of what to do with a large listed Brutalist building. Brutalist architecture 

is coming to an age where questions about what to do with them are being asked – should they be conserved, restored, renovated, refurbished, reused, 

or demolished? What is Brutalism anyway and what does it mean for 21st century architecture? Students were asked to consider these questions while 

re-programming the Meelfabriek Latenstein (flour factory) on the Rijnhaven basin in Rotterdam. 

106 Top - Joe Wilson Bottom - Kayleigh Creighton

Left to right, from top - Raphael Selby, Matthew Sharman-Hayles, Katie Fisher, Justin Moorton, Robbie Evans, Insa Thiel, Stavri Rousonidou 

Right - Robbie Evans 

107

De-Tale 


This studio is inspired by the discussion in ‘The Tell-The-Tale Detail’, where Marco Frascari explains the architectural ‘joint’ which creates a transition 

from one element to another. The relationship may not occur between just one material and another, or a traditional wall and floor, but between the 

transition of light and dark space, between volumes, temperatures, thresholds, solids and voids or any other transitional moment within a building. Each 

student chose a material to become obsessed with and used that to explore the idea of a ‘joint’. Building 1:1 ‘joints’ reconnected the draftsman and the 

craftsman and designing details first created a narrative that informed their architectural language for the entire scheme. 

108 

Noor Jan-Mohamed

Top Left - Rebecca Wise Top Right - Gavin Wu Bottom - Deryan Teh 

109

In Praise of Folly 

Laura Harty 

In this studio, we drew on the 1509 essay ‘In Praise of Folly’, in which Erasmus of Rotterdam uses Folly, neutered feminine, to manipulate and disguise 

his fundamental critique of the overarching powers of the day. In cloaking his critique in Folly, he allows otherwise stark and punishable observations to 

be accepted as trite amusements. His satire permits superficial reading, while allowing room for oppositional and reformative propositions. As Erasmus 

engages Folly as vehicle and decoy, so too each student adopted an attendant persona to drive a material investigation, interrogate an attendant brief 

and deliver an inquisitive proposal. 

110 Daniel Duffield

Top Left - Ulwin Beetham Top Right - Adam Hampton-Matthews Bottom Left to Right - Ulwin Beetham, Nicola Blincow, Angie Lau 

111

Hybrid Objects 

James Craig 

Hybrid Objects asked students to create an architectural response to the complex space that exists between viewers and objects. This space, a foggy 

territory where myriad meanings can be made, is the zone where projected meanings collide to create a space of betweenness. The result is a hybrid 

object; constituted from entangled meanings that exist between observers and objects. Through the selection and unpacking of an object from the 

permanent collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, each student developed their own art depository in the Museumpark area of Rotterdam. 

112 Laurence Ashley

Top Wallace Ho 

Bottom from left to Right - Laurence Ashley, Delia Heitmann, Vili Welroos 

Middle from left to Right - Ruochen Zhang, Kim Gault, Ruochen Zhang 

113

Spectres of Utopia and Modernity 


Students in this studio investigated the ghosts of modernity by charting its traces in selected surviving examples of heroic modern architecture from 

the 1920s and 1930s, and in projects from the post-World War II period of its greatest orthodoxy, 1945-1960. In developing their individual projects, 

students were challenged to consider how their study building harbours both the ghosts of modernity and the spectre of Utopia that has struck fear 

into the hearts of architects (and others) since at least the 1950s. Through their investigation of the core topics of modernity and Utopia, students were 

encouraged to confront their own Utopia-Anxiety as directly as they could by proposing a new, ‘alien’ structure correlated with their study building. 

114 

Left / Top - Malcolm Pritchard 

Right - Sam Halliday

Left - Joe Dent Top Right - Nik Ward Bottom Right - Sam Halliday 

115

Stage 6 

In Stage 6 students undertake a year-long thesis project with a self-generated brief, within a theoretical 

framework established by their chosen studio. This year, five studios were on offer: 

Border Territories: Adam Sharr and Sam Austin 

Experimental Architecture: Rachel Armstrong and Paul Rigby 

Landscapes of Human Endeavour: James Craig and Matthew Ozga-Lawn 

Matter: Graham Farmer and Paul Rigby 

Zanzibar: Prue Chiles 

These studios offer a comparable level of complexity as graduation projects, but they cover a broad range 

of issues and geographies leading to a diverse variety of outcomes. They showcase the interactions between 

studio leaders’ research expertise and the evolving interests and specialisms of Stage 6 students. To achieve 

this, every year, students’ individual thesis projects are developed within each studio’s theme, balancing 

their individual learning objectives and interests against those already covered in Stage 5. 

As in previous years, the thesis projects were located in a variety of strategically selected urban or wilderness 

landscapes, in sites from Zanzibar to Whitley Bay to Orlando. They tackled issues from the master plan 

to the molecular scale and with temporal ambitions stretching into millennia. Students have built upon 

experience gained from previous years’ representational techniques and experimentation. 

This is the fifth year Newcastle has run a studio-based thesis model with cross-year/cross-studio interactions 

that keep students aware of the work undertaken by their peers in other parts of the school. This year, in 

addition to the Technical Review, Thinking-Through-Making Week and an expansion of the Academic 

Portfolio, we also inaugurated a vertical exhibition in the 6-7th week of the first semester, showcasing in a 

cascading manner the preliminary work of Stages 2-6. 

This has been a successful and stimulating year academically, and we would like to express our gratitude to 

all the various contributors throughout the year. 


Zeynep Kezer 

Adam Sharr 


Adam Sharr 

James Craig 


Graham Farmer 

Paul Ribgy 

Prue Chiles 

Rachel Armstrong 

Sam Austin 

Contributors 

Alistair Robinson 


Andrew Carr 

Andrew English 

Claire Harper 

Ed Wainwright 

Emma Cheatle 

Gary Caldwell 

Howard Evans 


Katie Lloyd-Thomas 


Maurice Mitchell 

Mhairi McVicar 

Nat Chard 

Neil Armstrong 

Nick Heyward 

Patrick Devlin 

Pete Brittain 

Peter Hoare 

Peter Kellett 

Philip Beesley 

Steve Parnell 

Students 

Alanah Marie Honey 

Alexander Glen Burnie 

Alyssia Katherine Booth 

Anna Elizabeth Cumberland 

Carrie Yee 

Christopher James Bulmer 

Corbin Wood 

Emily Daisy Page 

Emily-Jayne Harper 

Ewan George Thomson 

Gregory David Walton 

Greta Varpucianskyte 

Imogen Alexandra Holden 

Jack Roberto Scaffardi 

Joshua Long 

Katherine Grace Gomm 

Kevin Vong 

Lee Daniel Whitelock 

Matas Belevicius 

Matthew Joe Mouncey 

Matthew Clubbs Coldron 

Matthew Robert Jackson 

Megan Meleri Jones 

Mundumuko Sinvula 

Robert Philip Paton 

Roubini Hadjicosti 

Rumen Rumenov Dimov 

Ruth Eleanor Sidey 

Simon David Baker 

Thierry Guy Neu 

Thomas Henderson Schwartz 

Vlasios Sokos 

Vsevolod Karetnikov 

Wei Sheng Kwan 

116 

Opposite - Greg Walton After Happily Ever After: An Architectural Fairy Tale of Walt Disney

Studio 1 – Border Territories 

Adam Sharr & Sam Austin 

This studio is about border conditions. Borders produce spatial conditions, from dividing walls (think of Berlin, Belfast or San Diego-Tijana) to lines 

which exist on a map but not on the ground; from enclaves of one jurisdiction within another (embassies, airports) to distinctive economic and political 

effects. Borders can be psychological and cultural as much as physical. Students have chosen their own border conditions to work with including: the 

green line of Nicosia, Cyprus; Campione d’Italia (an Italian exclave in Switzerland); Newcastle Airport; the ‘interzone’ of post-War Tangiers; the border 

transgressions of shortwave radio; and the psychological border between risk, fear and pleasure. 

118 

Jack Scaffardi Freeport Municipale

Rumen Dimov Lost in Transmission 119

120 Ewan Thomson The Airside City

Thierry Neu Unravelling Risk 

121

122 Megan Jones Literary Constructs of an Interzone

Roubini Hadjicosti Palimpsest of Memories 

123

Studio 2 – Experimental Architecture 


Experimental Architecture establishes an organic platform for thinking and practice through iterative experiments that engage directly with the natural 

realm. It seeks to explore the complexity of the natural world without reducing it into a series of soluble problems but also opens up the practice to poetic 

and artistic engagement. For example, experimental architecture asks: can we grow an artificial reef around the city of Venice to save it and connect 

human populations with the marine environment? Can we grow a new island for Venice using the pollutants in the lagoon (algae and plastics) and reinvest 

in future generations through the production of ‘functional’ earths, or can we design ‘super’ soils to support life on other planets and bring new 

kinds of flourishing to extreme environments? 

124 

Seva Karetnikov Please don’t tap on the glass

Imogen Holden The Opera of Shalott 

125

126 Matthew Mouncey Of Death and Decomposition

Kevin Vong Experimental Junk 

127

128 Corbin Wood The Delormer’s Creed

Carrie Yee Resurrecting Memories: Sustainable Crematory Landscape 

129

Studio 3 – Landscapes of Human Endeavour 

James Craig & Matthew Ozga-Lawn 

Human endeavour has long been associated with expansive and unknowable landscapes, from George Mallory’s first attempt to ‘conquer’ the summit of 

Mount Everest in 1924 through to Felix Baumgartner’s recent skydive from a helium balloon 24 miles above the Earth’s surface. These varied projects 

are concerned with representing architectures sited between the psyche of a chosen endeavour and the landscape (in the broadest sense of the word) that 

they are engaged with. They include an interpretation of Walt Disney’s delirious deathbed fantasy of E.P.C.O.T., a secular retreat based on C.S. Lewis’s 

notion of Epicurean Life, and a garden of mechanical computation derived from the life of Ada Lovelace. 

130 

Greg Walton After Happily Ever After: An Architectural Fairy Tale of Walt Disney

Greg Walton After Happily Ever After: An Architectural Fairy Tale of Walt Disney 

131

132 Alexander Burnie Z

Chris Bulmer Magical Realism 

133

134 Greta Varpucianskyte Scripted Spaces: Biographical Landscapes of Ada Lovelace

Robert Paton The Nuclear Family 

135

136 Lee Whitelock At Home with War

Emily Page The Archive of Destroyed Monuments 

137

138 Emily-Jayne Harper Between Subject and Object: Landscape Beyond Reach

Joshua Long Epicurean Life 

139

Studio 4 – Matter 

Graham Farmer 

The studio celebrates the ‘liveliness’ of matter and encourages design processes founded on a dialogic and emergent understanding of architectural 

materiality. In doing so the studio challenges any notion of buildings as static assemblies of inert or neutral products and instead seeks concrete material 

practices in which technology is always both performative and contextual. Students have selected their own matter to collaborate with and have explored 

new understandings of conventional construction materials like sand, brick and timber or experimented with new materialities. Themes of making, 

manufacture, entropy, sensuality, transformation and environmental renewal have all surfaced as key themes in the work of the studio. 

140 

Matas Belevicius St. Anthony’s Mycelium Works

Matas Belevicius St. Anthony’s Mycelium Works 

141

142 Mundu Sinvula Sensory Deprivation

Alyssia Booth Weather Architecture 

143

144 Matthew Jackson Modular Imagination

Vlasios Sokos Research Centre for the Development of Prototype Materials and Building Components 

145

146 Simon Baker Shifting Sands

Ruth Sidey Beauty in Precision? 

147

Studio 5 – Zanzibar 

Prue Chiles 

Zanzibar has a romantic multi-cultural history; spices, gold, ivory and slaves have travelled between the East African Swahili Coast, the Arabian 

Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent for 20,000 years on dhow boats. Today, the archipelago’s population of 1.3 million is growing rapidly. This 

semi-autonomous archipelago off the coast of Tanzania urgently needs to address its future growth. Zanzibar’s challenges are a microcosm of the most 

critical global development issues. The studio is working with a new architecture and planning department in Zanzibar, who have ambitions to create the 

most sustainable island in East Africa, physically, socially, and environmentally. Scenario planning and mapping have formed a basis to understand the 

whole island scale, coupled with ethnographic field research, including interviewing local people and a small-scale building project with a local school. 

Linked Research students (Stage 5) have joined the team to develop a foundation for a major research project. The team has developed a critical position 

on the colonial past and the new development plans for the future of the island. Stage 6 thesis proposals form a ’chain’ across the buffer zone of the World 

Heritage Site capital of Zanzibar, Stone Town, and move out across the island. All projects support key development aims of the island; firstly to retain 

the historic core of a rapidly developing city as a place to live and work. Secondly, to develop successful, well connected neighbourhoods with innovative 

ideas for more ecological and mixed development. Lastly, to find sustainable ways of developing coastal villages and island agriculture. 

148 

Matt Clubbs Caldron Zanzibar Central Bus Terminal and Urban Forum

Alanah Honey Zanzibar Institute for Design 

149

150 Anna Cumberland From the Ground Up: An Agricultural Future for Chwaka

Thomas Henderson Schwartz Catching the Winds of Trade 

151

152 Wei Kwan Guerrilla Aqueduct

Katherine Gomm Mnazi Tatu (Three Coconuts) Maternity Hospital and Women’s Health Centre 

153

Highlighted Project – Freeport Municipale 

Jack Scaffardi 

This project is set in the Italian exclave of Campione d’Italia – a tax haven with a rich artistic history and home to Europe’s largest casino. This thesis aims to serve as a critique of art 

as a commodity, taking the form of a cemetery of objects. 

154 

Jack Scaffardi Freeport Municipale

Highlighted Project – After Happily Ever After: An Architectural Fairy Tale of Walt Disney 

Greg Walton 

This story tells of an old man so devoted to the idea of creating and preserving a legacy that he dedicated his entire life to it. For four decades the man had gone from success to 

success, infecting modern culture in a way no one else ever had, with barely anything eluding him. The man had two sides; the public benevolent figure that the world adored, the 

other is what he thought of himself, his psyche tormented. Rather curiously, he was inherently unknowable. He was a myth, an invention, a character in a storybook, meticulously 

designed by the master storyteller himself. This story begins at the end, as the man finally comes face to face with his own mortality; in a hospital bed awake, motionless and staring 

at the ceiling. 

Greg Walton After Happily Ever After: An Architectural Fairy Tale of Walt Disney 

155

MArch Dissertations 

The 10,000 word MArch dissertation offers students the opportunity to undertake a sustained enquiry into a topic of particular interest to them and to 

develop their own modes of writing and presentation. Where appropriate the timing of the dissertation allows for topics explored to inform their final 

thesis design project. The research has a growing profile in the School, with two public presentations taking place in October and February, and the 

dissertation is now a feature of the Degree Shows in Newcastle and London. 

Lost in the Wild: 

An Exploration into Spatial Dislocation within Survivalist Landscapes 

Matthew Mouncey 

McCandless’s Alaskan Odyssey struck a chord with a large portion of society when it was first covered 

by the media; his tragic tale gained notoriety for the social angst it accentuated within people in the 

Western World. But more so than that, it highlighted glaring shortcomings in civilization as we 

understand it. Within this dissertation I unpack the story of McCandless, such that it highlights the 

driving factors behind spatial dislocation within survivalist landscapes. 

These notions of longing for the unknown set the context for a deep-seated social angst that comes 

to explain why characters like McCandless flee. Their actions are reactionary to their perceived 

view of civilization, which I unpack throughout the course of the text. Both the spatial necessaries 

and implications of their actions are explored such that they pinpoint and question the core issues 

associated with spatial dislocation. The description of architecture as a metaphor for the power and 

authority that orchestrates this social neurosis calls into sharp relief the power and influence of the 

built environment around us. The removal of the body into heterotopic survivalist landscapes implies 

the basic re-ignition of fundamental human mechanisms that have been repressed. The architectural 

condition we’re facing is one of power and authority; by exploring subversive courses of action it may 

be possible to reconcile the problematic areas of civilization through a discussion with survivalist 

landscapes. 

The System of Houses 

Jack Scaffardi 

This piece is an investigation into how housing operates as commodity within capitalist society, 

one that is designed to maximise what Karl Marx termed exchange-value at the expense of its usevalue 

– use-value being the usefulness of a thing and exchange value being its monetary relation. 

Neil Brenner states: ‘the commodification of housing is the handling of housing not as one of 

life’s necessities, something that provides shelter, protection, privacy, space for personal and family 

activities, but rather as something that is bought and sold and used to make money’. This study 

investigates how housing’s operation as a consumer good manifests in the domestic environment. 

What Does the Commission of the CCTV Headquarters, and Rem Koolhaas’ Winning Design, 

Say about the Current Political, Economic and Architectural Climate of Beijing and China? 

Emily Page 

Commissioned in 2002 by the People’s Republic of China, the CCTV Headquarters is widely 

regarded as political propaganda and an ‘institute of censorship’, intended to project China onto the 

world stage and showcase its ascendency. The focus for my MArch dissertation was to understand 

the interrelationships between the building and China’s economic growth, branding strategies and 

soft power initiatives. 

The dissertation discusses China’s use of starchitect Koolhaas and the use of a highly recognisable 

logo form as a branding tool for both building and country. China is pursuing a strategy of greater 

international engagement to increase its influence on the world stage. The thesis examines China’s 

attempts to improve its worldwide branding and perception, considering strategies such as the 2006 

‘Ten Mile Brand Strategy’ that attempted to establish brand promotional systems. It also studies the 

impact the CCTV building has on China’s soft power initiatives, both in aiding and abetting soft 

power strategies. 

156

Rebuilding to Remember: How the ruins of war have been used in urban reconstruction 

Alyssia K. Booth 

‘To be sure a cityscape is not made of flesh. Still, sheared-off buildings are almost as eloquent as body 

parts… Look, the photographs say, this is what it’s like. This is what war does. War tears, war rends, 

war rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.’ – (Virginia Woolfe) 

Architectural heritage is often attacked in times of conflict, and post-war reconstruction presents a 

number of potential challenges: limited economic funding; the necessity to rebuild; the difficulties of 

clearing huge areas of rubble. However, over the past few decades, advances in modern architecture 

have allowed many ruins of war to be rebuilt in some capacity, owing to recognition of their 

associations with collective memory, the identity and history of places, and of the educational 

importance of commemorating the darker periods of human history as well as successes. Although 

undeniably a time of great trauma, the aftermath of war can also be seen as a political opportunity 

for rebuilding, creating potential for ‘radical’ architectural speculations within the reconstruction. 

This paper is a study of the ways in which people engaged with the destroyed architecture of 

WWII, the choices of different methods of rebuilding with the ruins; replica, retention, integration, 

(including the impacts of these choices) and how integrating ruins alongside modern architecture can 

help restore the collective memory, identity or culture of a war-torn city, playing an important role 

in the future of post-war reconstruction. The study aims to reveal that the post-war reconstruction of 

cultural heritage is not only important to the successful moving on of societies, but also a significant 

political tool to manipulate communities and the remembrance of history in a post-war environment, 

giving cause to question the current lack of architects involvement in the reconstruction of war ruins. 

Prefabricated Masonry and its Place within the UK House Building Industry: 

Can we normalise prefabrication and make it desirable through the use of brick; whilst 

increasing the efficiency and sustainability of new homes? 

Katherine Gomm 

Brick has long been a staple component of British architecture, used for palaces, factories and 

homes and our preference for the material is still strong. However, with growing pressures on the 

government to increase the number of houses built, can we adapt the use of the humble brick to 

increase the efficiency and sustainability of new homes in the UK? Prefabricated brick cavity wall 

panels have the ability to meet these demands, but is it possible to remove the stigmatism associated 

with prefabrication and embrace this new technology? Can we normalise the notion of prefabrication 

and increase its desirability through the reinvention of the familiar brick in order to build better 

homes for the future? 

The results of my survey of the British public conducted to understand their needs and desires show 

that in general people do not want a prefabricated house. However, in studying the UK’s first and 

only private dwelling built using prefabricated brick cavity walls, it is clear that this new system has 

favourable benefits when compared to traditional construction methods. It merits further research, 

development and consideration as a valid new building technology. 

Mankind’s Box 

Christopher James Bulmer 

Rabbits have hutches, hamsters have cages and mankind has an architecture of Manspace. Manspace 

began with the agricultural revolution, it is the turning point in which mankind departed from its 

intimate symbiosis with nature, and began laboriously carving out an artificial human island out of 

the surrounding wilds. Manspace was born, and at the centre of this island of Manspace peasants 

lived their lives in a wood, stone, brick or mud structure consisting of foundations, walls and roof– 

the house. The house remains the centre of this Manspace, and like flowers being fed in a glass 

vase mankind desperately tries to supplement his own needs within his own enclosure. Continually 

seeking to instil the idea that the house is in fact full of life rather than void of it. This lack of life is 

all around the house, in the fresh cut flowers with their promise to die, in the pests which mankind 

exterminates, in the stuffed animals real or otherwise and in the images of landscapes on multiple 

forms of media. Through all these elements mankind attempts to fulfil his biophilic needs and repress 

his ecological boredom; he tries to feel alive. However these efforts are in vain for mankind is not 

truly alive in the house, yet nor is he dead; mankind is merely existing within his box. 

157

Is Essex the Only Way? 

Tracing echoes of Essex in regional housing development 

Imogen A E Holden 

This dissertation seeks to untangle the suggestive frameworks put forward by the inaugural Essex 

Design Guide. In exploring its shaping of new housing developments and identifying moments of 

Essex-ness, this research aims to prove that the Guide is a document of distinction and worthy of 

research in its own right. Whilst on the surface the Guide reflects the standardised planning policy 

document, in exploring the richness of the document’s cultural, historical and theoretical contexts, 

it becomes increasingly difficult to categorise. An eclectic combination of social commentary, policy 

checklist, design sketchbook and materiality mood-board, the Guide slides across category boundaries 

raising broader questions relating to assumed knowledge, sense of place and the Local. In exploring 

moments of inner logic and assumed understanding, occurring both within the Guide and in its 

connections to external factors, the relationship between the Local and locality will be challenged in 

reference to the Essex-ification of new UK development. 

Building Normalities 

Ewan Thomson 

One in four people in the UK will experience a mental illness in any given year. However, public 

perceptions of mental illness do not reflect this, with stigma still rife. Stigmatisation of the mentally ill 

is an issue architecture cannot shy away from, as it’s already played a major part in it. Take Oakwood 

hospital, Barming Heath. A former Victorian mental hospital, it has since been turned into flats. The 

slogan they used to sell them was ‘with prices like these, you’d be barmy not to buy!’ 

The inpatient facility is a specialised building typology with important architectural ordering, and 

a complex set of power relationships. This study seeks to understand if and how architecture can 

help normalise spaces of mental illness, both in the public eye and for people using mental health 

buildings. 

Don’t Just Hope for a Better Life. Buy Into One. 

Ruth Sidey 

This dissertation, through an analysis of Nigella Lawson’s latest kitchen, highlights the conflicts that 

arise between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ in the domestic sphere. Idealised constructions of the domestic 

have been utilised since the dichotomy between the home and the place of work was established. 

These curated environments have been used variously to promote consumption, national identity 

and most recently to provide an aspirational ‘lifestyle’ model. Nigella’s performance of a ‘perfect’ 

lifestyle, in the wake of her widely publicised divorce, is dissected and placed in historical, social 

and political contexts. The author concludes that Nigella willingly places herself within traditional 

domestic ideals and stereotypical gender roles, presenting an ultimately pleasing femininity. Her 

image, through a form of retrospective imagining, conjures up images of an era that promised a 

‘better life’ through social mobility. In the neoliberal context of today, however, this nostalgic image 

serves to mask an uncomfortable truth; that achieving our aspirations is now, in many ways, blocked. 

The gap between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ is in fact a glass wall which can never be penetrated, and the 

‘perfect’ remains in the idealised, unachievable realm. 

Designing and Building With / For / Around / About a Community? 

Reflections from a Live Project in Borneo 

Thomas Henderson Schwartz 

The dissertation examines the role of western architects, designers and students working in developing 

countries through the lens of a personal experience of the design and build of a community centre in 

Kampung Buayan, Sabah, Borneo, 2013-14. It is structured as a semi-chronological theorised diary, 

borrowing ideas from post-colonial theory, sociology and contemporary understandings of space. 

The opening of the dissertation situates the stakeholders of the project and explains how each came 

to be involved. The second part deconstructs motivations and responsibilities of the stakeholders 

and critiques the idea that ‘local is good’. The third part analyses the design process within the 

framework of Bhabha’s understanding of post-colonial translation and hybridity. Next, the fourth 

part investigates to what extent one can integrate into a community and the cultural and ethical 

considerations of such an integration. The fifth part examines the role of authorship and ownership 

of a piece of architecture. Here the motivations of the architect are re-examined and the success and 

failures of the project are elaborated. The final part examines the role of recognising the naivety and 

ambivalence of an architect working in a similar context and how that recognition is productive. 

158

Building Modern Turkey: State, Space and Ideology 

Zeynep Kezer 

BUILDING 

MODERN TURKEY 

STATE, SPACE, 

AND IDEOLOGY IN 

THE EARLY REPUBLIC 

Zeynep Kezer 

Zeynep Kezer’s book, Building Modern Turkey: State, Space and Ideology was published in 

December 2015 by the University of Pittsburgh Press as part of its Politics, Culture and 

the Built Environment Series. The book provides a critical account of how space and spatial 

practices mediated Turkey’s transition from an empire into a modern nation-state. Kezer 

deliberately juxtaposes the making of new types of spaces to accommodate the demands of 

this new politico-cultural formation with the dismantling of ethnic and religious enclaves and 

the practices they engendered, exposing the inextricable relationship between the creative and 

destructive forces deployed in the nation-state building process. Building Modern Turkey surveys 

a broad terrain of state activities – from achieving internal pacification to gaining international 

recognition – and how these played out in sites prominent, ordinary, and marginal. In so 

doing, she demonstrates how, as an indisputably spatial process, state formation necessarily 

operates at multiple and interdependent scales from that of the individual body to that of 

regional geopolitics. 

The nationalists’ bid to reinvent Turkey as a modern nation-state following the Ottoman 

Empire’s collapse at the end of WWI was a formidable challenge. On the home front, the 

move meant not only importing wholesale an alien form of government with its laws and 

institutions, but repudiating an indigenous legacy that had shaped this land and its people for 

over six centuries. This entailed tearing down communitarian structures that had historically 

constituted the social fabric of the empire and instituting a centralized legal and institutional 

network enabling state penetration into ever-expanding areas of people’s everyday lives. On 

the international front, Turkey’s nation-statehood depended on gaining recognition as a peer 

within the Westphalian system of states. 

Nowhere were these tensions played out more dramatically than in the built environment 

where a feverish drive to create the spaces (governmental and institutional buildings, 

monuments, public works, etc) to accommodate this new order was coupled with an equally 

intense determination to obliterate Turkey’s ethnic and religious landscapes, the persistence 

of which – claimed the nationalists – obstructed national unification and secularization. 

Meanwhile, the construction of embassies in the new capital Ankara, and, by implication, 

Turkey’s international recognition as a peer state, hinged on regional geopolitical rivalries and 

unsettled scores from WWI. So did the question of which foreign experts and whose credit 

would shape Turkish modernization. 

The first book to provide a spatial account of the making of the modern Turkish state, this 

volume addresses important omissions in architectural history and, more generally in Turkish 

historiography, regarding the costs and consequences of imposing an imported concept 

of ‘the modern’ on a multicultural, complex indigenous society and destroying the built 

environment which underpinned it. The broad range of spatial scales considered in this study 

exposes previously overlooked interrelations and tensions between local, national and regional 

productions of space. Interdisciplinary in approach, this book seeks to explain the complex 

factors that inform the physical and ideological shaping of the modern world of the unified 

nation state. 

159

Linked Research 

The 40 credit Linked Research module is unique to the Newcastle curriculum and it spans the two years of 

the MArch enabling year-long collaborative research projects between staf and students. Linked Research 

encourages approaches that extend beyond the conventional studio design project or ‘lone researcher’ 

dissertation model allowing space for multiple and speculative forms of research. Projects are often openended 

and collaborative and, because they are long term and involve groups working together, they can 

enable participatory projects and large-scale production with a wide range or partners inside and outside 

the university. 

Coordinator 

Graham Farmer 

2015-16 Projects 

Testing Ground 

Graham Farmer 

2016-17 Projects 

Architecture Default 



Graham Farmer 

Alexander Burnie 

Rumen Dimov 

Megan Jones 

Joshua Long 

Mundu Sinvula 

Corbin Wood 

Simon Baker 

Atlas of Artificial 

Mountains 


Matas Belevicius 

Seva Karetnikov 

Noor Jan-Mohamed 

James Street 

Brutalism 

Steve Parnell 

Raphael Selby 

Insa Thiel 

Joe Wilson 

Building Adaptability 

John Kamara 

Gustav Lundstrom 

Empty Pool 


Rona Lee 

Theodora Kyrtata 

Stavri Rousonidou 

Martin Parsons 

Laurence Ashley 

Alex Baldwin-Cole 

Ulwin Beetham 

Sophie Cobley 

Robert Evans 

Katie Fisher 

Sam Halliday 

Kathleen Jenkins 

Matthew Westgate 

Newcastle After Dark 

Ed Wainwright 

Sam Austin 

Delia Heitmann 

Tom Saxton 

Matt Sharman Hayles 

Rosie O’Halloran 

Zanzibar 

Prue Chiles 

Nicola Blincow 

Malcolm Pritchard 

Alexandra Carausu 

Matt Wilcox 

Beyond Representation 

James Craig 


David Boyd 

Joseph Dent 

Nick Ward 

Ruochen Zhang 

Learning Spaces 


Tom Cowman 

Kayleigh Creighton 

Carl Reid 

Jessica Wilkie 

Gavin Wu 

160 Opposite - Testing Ground 2015-16 The Rochester Roundhouse


Graham Farmer 

The Testing Ground Project is now in its third year and it provides the opportunity for students to collaborate with other disciplines in a wide range of 

‘live’ situations with the aim of creating public facing architecture and related activities. The main project this year has been the design and construction 

of The Rochester Roundhouse, Northumberland. The project included extensive community consultation and has responded to residents’ wishes to 

reuse the dilapidated Brigantium roundhouse to create a community resource. The students involved have had to design and construct the project as 

well as navigating complex statutory processes and managing time and cost. The regenerated site provides an open air amphitheatre and contemporary 

timber pavilion which will be used for stargazing, musical performances and a range of community workshops. The roof of the existing stone circle 

has been removed to turn it into an open-air space and local craftsmen have worked with students to carry out repairs to the dry stone wall, before the 

addition of new seating and flooring. The larch-clad timber pavilion is located next to the stone circle and includes a sedum green roof. The pavilion 

and associated landscaped outdoor spaces will provide a multifunctional, bookable facility that will be managed by the community. It will also become 

a key performance venue for the annual Redefest folk music festival. 

162

163

Research in Architecture 

Research in the School is flourishing and we’ve seen some very exciting developments this year. These 

include new collaborative projects, internal and external recognition of our work and significant funding 

success, all of which are enabling growth in the numbers of PhD and post-doctoral researchers in 

architecture, and the development of research-led teaching at all levels of the degrees we offer. 

Colleagues have had considerable success winning grants this year that firmly establish us as a leading centre 

for interdisciplinary architectural research in the UK and will bring early career researchers to the School. 

External high profile grants include Computational Colloids (EPSRC, Dr Martyn Dade-Robertson – 

£158k), LIAR – Living Architecture – (EC, Professor Rachel Armstrong – £175k), Imaginaries of the 

Future (Leverhulme International Research Network, Dr Nathaniel Coleman – £109k) and eVis (EPSRC, 

Dr Neveen Hamza – £128k). Martyn Dade-Robertson and Rachel Armstrong have also been awarded 

a share of a substantial University internal Research Investment Fund (RIF) grant for their joint APL 

research project ‘Ageing City’. 

In terms of growth as a research centre, Dr Emma Cheatle joined us at the start of the year, having 

won the highly competitive Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute three year postdoctoral 

fellowship, to pursue her project ‘Tales of Confinement’, an investigation into the role of architectural 

spaces and buildings in the history of maternity, and Dr Tom Brigden has just embarked on his three 

year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. We are currently recruiting a third post-doctoral researcher in 

Design-led Architectural Research to start in September 2016 and will be advertising a fourth post for 

2017. At the same time as becoming the home, to our knowledge, of the largest body of post-doctoral 

researchers in a UK architectural school, we are also seeing our research strengths informing teaching at 

all levels. Curriculum changes in the BA are enabling research-led teaching in history and theory, and 

in design, and our unique ‘Linked Research’ offering in the MArch which involves students working 

together with colleagues’ own projects has expanded, including projects as different as lab-based research 

and building for communities. Some of this work was presented at the Association of Architectural 

Educators annual conference at UCL in April, and linked research students joined colleagues and visiting 

speakers to present their own projects at our very successful Mountains and Megastructures symposium 

and exhibition in March. 

We continue to provide PhD studentships with Aldric Rodriguez Iborra taking up the Design Office 

position, and we had PhD completions from Abdelatif El-Allous, Mohamed Elnabawy Mahgoub, 

Mabrouk Alsheliby, Yohannes Firzal, Amira Hasanein, Antonius Karel Muktiwibowo, Tugce Sanli and 

Deva Swasto. Notable achievements from our PhD cohort include the award to Catalina Mejia Moreno 

of an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in ‘Architecture and/for Photography’ at the Canadian Centre for 

Architecture and Sana Al-Naimi’s participation in the Vice Chancellor’s ‘Celebrating Success in the 

University’ for her contribution to the ‘Extraordinary Gertrude Bell Exhibition’ at the Great North 

Museum. Congratulations to all! 

Cultures and Transition 


Ian Thompson 

Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes 


Peter Kellett 

Sam Austin 

Zeynep Keyzer 

Futures, Values and 

Imaginaries 

Adam Sharr 


Graham Farmer 

Ian Thompson 

Kati Blom 



Neveen Hamza 

Steven Dudek 

Mediated Environments 


John Kamara 



Neveen Hamza 


Sam Austin 

Steven Dudek 

Research by Design 

Adam Sharr 


Daniel Mallo 

Graham Farmer 




Prue Chiles 


Social Justice, 

Well-being and Renewal 



Daniel Mallo 

Kati Blom 


Peter Kellett 

Prue Chiles 

Specifications, 

Prescriptions and 

Translations 

John Kamara 



Simon Hacker 

Zeynep Kezer 

Visiting Professors, 

PhD examiners and 

contributors: 

Professor Dana Arnold 

Sebastian Aedo Jury 

Sophia Banou 

Dr Camillo Boano 

James Craig 

Professor Mark Dorrian 

Professor Paul Emmons 

Professor Katja Grillner 

Professor Katherine Gough 

Dr Amin Kamete 

Thomas Kern 

Astrid Lund 

Professor Julia Morgan 

Professor Dejan Mumovic 

Charlie Sutherland 

Professor Robert Tavernor 

Ed Wainwright 

Tony Watson 

PhD students 

Abdelatif El-Allous 

Antonius Muktiwibowo 

Artem Holstov 

Ashley Mason 

Catalina Moreno 

Charles Makun 

Chen-Yu Hung 

Deva Swasto 

Dhruv Sookhoo 


Javier Urquizo 

Jose Hernandez 

Katriina Blom 

Khalid Setaih 


Mabrouk Alsheliby 

Macarena Rodriguez 

Maimuna Saleh-Bala 


Mohamed Elnabawi 

Mohammed Mohammed 

Najla Mansour 

Ni Ketut Agusintadewi 

Oluwafemi Olajide 

Oluwatoyin Akin 

Paola Figueroa 

Pattamon Selanon 

Rand Agha 

Sam Clark 

Sana Salman Dawood 

Al-Naimi 

Sarah Cahyadini 

Stephen Grinsell 

Thomas Kern 

Tijana Stevanovic 

Tugce Sanli 

Ulviye Kalli 

Usue Arana 

Wido Tyas 

Xi (Frances) Ye 

Xi Chen 


Yohannes Firzal 

Yun Dai 

164 Opposite - STASUS Everest Death Zone: Mallory

Mountains and Megastructures 

The Mountains & Megastructures symposium took place on the 16th and 17th of March in the Architecture Building. The symposium was organised 

by ARC (Architecture Research Collaborative) at Newcastle University, and is intended as the first in a series of events addressing particular themes 

emerging through our collective research. We were joined by two keynote speakers, Stéphane Degoutin, an artist and writer whose paper ‘Fake Mountain 

Metaphysics’ demonstrated the range of ways artificial mountains can be imagined and realised, and Jonathan Hill, Professor of Architecture and Visual 

Theory at the Bartlett, whose talk ‘A Landscape of Architecture, History and Fiction’ discussed the ‘shock of the old’ as alternative to the ‘shock of the 

new’. Speakers from the School included Professors Rachel Armstrong, Andrew Ballantyne, Graham Farmer, Stephen Graham, Prue Chiles and Adam 

Sharr among many others, including Linked Research students Seva Karetnikov and Matas Belevicius. 

The talks and discussion were accompanied by an exhibition of work on the joint theme, including projects from STASUS (James A. Craig & Matt 

Ozga-Lawn), Amy Butt, Ray Verrall and Christos Kakalis. Images of the event are opposite, and following is Andrew Ballantyne’s paper from the event. 

166

Mountains and Megastructures Symposium 

167

A Mountain Near Thebes 


It was Deleuze and Guattari who said we should make deserts of ourselves. We can make 

ourselves receptive to being settled by nomadic ideas that live in us for a while and then 

move on. ‘The desert, experimentation on oneself, is our only identity, our single chance 

for all the combinations which inhabit us’. The concepts that inhabit us shape who we are 

and how we interact, so they are part of us even if they move on from us, and they have 

a political dimension to them. Deleuze and Guattari make this image of thought seem 

like a personal discipline, something we can encourage in ourselves and in our attitudes 

to dealing with the world. As an image it seems benign and welcoming, and it has much 

in common with Foucault’s sense of the self and the ideas that operate through it; but 

where Deleuze and Guattari’s desert is a temporary home for ideas that seem more-or-less 

welcome, Foucault’s is rather different. It is a place where the tribes of ideas might set up 

camp rather forcibly. Their presence might not be welcome and they might not move on. 

With Deleuze and Guattari the sense of the self is fluid and constantly engaged with the 

surrounding milieu, and Foucault shares that sense of engagement but with him the self 

often seems not so much fluid as malleable. It adapts and can be reshaped in any number 

of ways, but it is hammered into shape. Nietzsche’s thought lies behind all of them as a 

formative influence, and Deleuze remade Nietzsche in his own way, but Foucault carries 

more-evident traces of philosophising with a hammer. He wrote about the prison, the 

psychiatric hospital and the school: institutions in which people are remade for the sake 

of society. These institutions take in people who have a will of their own that may be 

as-yet unformed, or be actively antisocial, and they are knocked into shape, learning and 

internalising attitudes and patterns of behaviour that allow them to lead productive wellregulated 

lives in the social world. 

Foucault coined the term ‘heterotopia’ for such spaces that are apart from the 

commonplace world where a society’s dominant values freely operate. In a heterotopia 

they are suspended to a degree and maybe one is held in it until one can show a suitable 

degree of conformity to the norms. The conditions may be coercive and brutalising, or 

might offer greater-than-usual freedoms for transgression, but they are set apart from the 

places where normal polite behaviour is in play, and where routine transactions are made. 

There are some identifiable places where such conditions apply, but the heterotopia is 

a heterotopia not because it is a particular spot, but because the range of concepts and 

power-relations there are outside the societal norm. It can be institutionalised, as in a 

prison, a school, or a honeymoon hotel, but equally it can be more personal than that – a 

interior space withdrawn from social conformity – such as a room of one’s own, or the 

desert. 

Saint Anthony lived in Egypt in the third century AD – one of the church’s ‘desert 

fathers’. Foucault wrote a commentary not on Anthony himself, but on La tentation 

de Saint Antoine, a novel by Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) which takes the persona of the 

saint as a vehicle to explore a range of ideas. The place in which the action unfolds – if 

it can be called ‘action’ – is heterotopic. The place is specified by Flaubert as the summit 

of a mountain near Thebes in Upper Egypt. There is some historical reason for this, as 

early monasteries, including some associated with Anthony, were in deliberately remote 

places, and mountains were seen as deserted, set apart from society. It is this remoteness 

that makes the place heterotopic and appropriate as a place of retreat when there is a 

need to distance oneself from society’s established normative thought. In cities the forms 

of behaviour are required by convention and it is one’s mastery of the convention that 

demonstrates effective participation in society, whether that be as a productive machinelike 

worker, or as a participant in a Proustian salon. Anthony’s isolation is in many ways 

like that of a prisoner, except that he has chosen to be shut away with his thoughts: it is 

the place’s remoteness that is its crucial characteristic. The external world does not figure 

at all. The subject-matter is internal to Anthony – his states of mind, his reading of the 

Bible, his hallucinations – made apparent in the text on the page. 

Flaubert re-visited and re-wrote The Temptation of Saint Anthony over many years, 

eventually publishing it in 1874. It is less like a novel than a screenplay. It uses the format 

of a work for the theatre, but the ‘stage directions’ include elaborate special effects that 

cry out for computer-generated images: apparitions of literary characters, fabulous beasts, 

deadly sins and heresiarchs. It opens with Saint Anthony involved with his reading of the 

Bible and the visitations – apparitions or hallucinations – prompted by it. The desert is a 

168 

Martin Schongauer - The Torment of Saint Anthony

heterotopia, and in it the saint remakes himself. The process of transformation is effected 

by meeting and disputing with the apparitions, building up to an ecstatic culmination 

with a vision of the face of Christ in the disc of the sun at dawn, as Anthony deliriously 

declaims. 

O joy! O bliss! I have beheld the birth of life. I have seen the beginning of motion! My 

pulses throb even to the point of bursting. I long to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to 

howl. Would that I had wings, a carapace, a shell, – that I could breathe out smoke, 

weird a trunk, – make my body writhe, – divide myself everywhere, – be in everything, 

– emanate with all the odours, – develop myself like the plants, – flow like water, 

– vibrate like sounds, – shine like light, – assume all forms – penetrate each atom – 

descend to the very bottom of matter, – be matter itself! 

Anthony is shedding his human conceptions and becoming part of nature – in Biblical 

terms, recapturing the state of affairs before the fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion 

from the Garden of Eden. He is becoming instinctual and matter-like, responding to 

stimuli without the mediation of intellectual processes. Foucault articulates this as the 

‘relationship between sainthood and stupidity’. Saint Anthony, he says, ‘wished to be a 

saint through a total deadening of his senses, intelligence, and emotions’. 

If Saint Anthony is becoming matter, the matter is not inert but formative – vibrant and 

pulsating. We are moving away from a position where ‘man’ gives form to matter that is 

seen as characterless substance, to one where the matter has an innate form-generating 

role, but the matter’s idea of form might be very different from man’s. This brings us into 

the realm of the posthuman, which developed after Foucault’s death but in his wake. It 

is a world in which matter and things have a role, and (all things being equal) sometimes 

have a say. This was taken up by Jane Bennett in her discussion of ‘thing-power’. Her 

‘vibrant matter’ is clearly recognisable as a relative of Anthony’s. 

There is liveliness in matter before there is organic life, such as the interactions in chemical 

processes that are in effect highly localised decisions that bring about results that are 

statistically predictable but at the level of individual molecules they are events that 

can resolve one way or another, depending on the proximity of another molecule, the 

pressure, the temperature and so on. The sedimentations and turbulences of geological 

formation leave traces in the strata of a bed of limestone, or the whorls in a slab of marble. 

The characteristic shapes of mountain ranges or drifts of sand dunes are determined not 

by a designer working out the form from outside, but by the materials deciding the form 

from within, interacting with the circumstances. The hylomorphic model of design – a 

term taken up from Gilbert Simondon by Deleuze and Guattari – resolves form from 

outside, and has ways of measuring and determining the form that involve delineation of 

geometric shapes. There has been significant development of thinking about this issue in 

recent years, and the idea of form being generated from within – or seeing the human 

agents as part of a material formation – takes forward the thinking that Foucault set in 

play. 

Anthony’s mountain is a heterotopia not of social coercion – like the prisons, madhouses 

and schools – but a heterotopia of liberation, where the self can open up to experiment, 

rewilded, inhabited by the rocks and wind, miraculated by sunbeams. On such a plateau 

of immanence the self can lose its outline and be washed away by lapping waves, or 

dispersed like the morning vapours as the sun rises and shines on Saint Anthony. 

Master of the Osservanza - The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul 

169

MA in Urban Design (MA_UD) 

Daniel Mallo, Georgia Giannopoulou, Tim Townshend 

Contributors: Ali Madanipour, Tim Townshend, Colin Haylock, Suzanne Speak, Prue Chiles, Jules Brown, Michael Crilly, Daniel Mallo, Richard Smith, 

Aidan Oswell, Montse Ferres, Martin Bonner, Armelle Tardiveau, Dhruv Sookhoo, Georgia Giannopoulou, Roger Meier, Roger Higgins, Victoria Keen 

The MA in Urban Design is a well-established interdisciplinary programme at Newcastle University that draws on expertise from the disciplines 

represented in the School, namely Architecture, Planning and Landscape. The programme brings to the foreground a strong agenda of social and 

ecological engagement together with a relational approach to the built environment and public life. Three distinct design projects punctuate the year 

and are supported by theory courses and critical debate around the practice of Urban Design. The projects introduce students to contemporary and 

topical themes including Urban Agriculture which allows us to rethink urban regeneration through the lenses of grass-roots processes whilst engaging 

with the strategic thinking of a large territory. The European field trip to Nantes (France) aims to introduce alternative approaches to Urban Design 

including landscape and tactical urbanism. The project is sited in an abandoned quarry at the heart of the city and provides the opportunity to rethink 

design as a process over time. Finally, Housing Alternatives examines new models of neighbourhood design in the context of the housing crisis and 

housing needs; the project explores concepts of affordability, sustainable living and community led-models, centred around the increasingly popular in 

the UK cohousing model. The year concludes with the Urban Design Thesis, a major research-led design project. The course offers many opportunities 

for visiting places within the UK and in Europe in the context of the projects. 

B 

A 

Platform 

B 

A 

Lunar 

Tree 

Green 

Roof 

PPER PARK 

QUARRY CLIFF 

CREATIVE AREA 

CENTRAL AREA 

AND LEISURE AREA 

PUBLIC SERVICE FACILITIES 

(repurposing of abandoned 

buildings on site) 

cycle path 

main road 

divider + planters 

main road 

cycle path 

REGENERATION OF CAP44 

(maintaining the primary structure as 

framework for future intervention) 

NEW MARKET 

PIER 

SECTION A-A’ 

Ramp 

170 

Group - Cities and Cultures - Su Ann Lim, Guan Wang, Bo Li

Laurence Farshid Bonner, Guan Wang, Bo Li, Yixi Lu, Qingyi Du, Daniel Viana Santos 

171

MA in Architecture, Planning and Landscape – Design 


Contributors: Nathaniel Coleman, Astrid Lund, Tony Watson 

The Master of Architecture, Planning and Landscape-Design (MAAPL-D) course encourages students to develop a deeper understanding of varieties 

of identity in cities. Students conduct detailed studies of particular urban communities, concentrating on determining strategies of appropriate 

development for specific urban sites. In each of the three semesters of the course, developing projects presuppose devising community based urban 

design frameworks for selected sites that broadly consider the surrounding context. In each semester, holistic design frameworks articulating the 

potential character and quality of the environment initiated by the proposed project support reasonably complex building designs. 

Semester one is divided proportionally between group explorations of the city and individual project work, augmented by developing research into 

the history, theory and design of cultural buildings in an urban context. The second semester project explores ideas of meaning and identity in the 

urban environment and the role that public space and buildings play in articulating notions of citizenship and community. Students produce three 

architectural/urban design schemes of increasing scale and complexity for a specific urban location. Architecture as a civic element is emphasised, 

including concentration on the relation between exterior and interior spaces. 

The problematic of public space within an increasingly privatised built environment; the degree to which theory can be verified by the design; and the 

support of both by close readings of set theoretical texts that consider architecture and the city from a range of perspectives are central to the course; as 

is a developing understanding of architecture within the expanded field of an urban context in relation to notions of identity, community, and culture 

more generally. No matter their scale, projects are construed as complex public buildings with key interior and exterior public spaces specific to their 

location and purpose. Thesis projects developed during the third semester provide students with opportunities for elaborating on many of the themes 

introduced earlier in the course. The thesis is a major design project framed by individual students that they largely produce independently. 

The MAAPL-D course challenges students’ preconceived notions of architecture, planning, urban design and the city, as well as their ingrained habits 

of architectural conceptualization and representation. In the course, individual buildings are considered as component parts of cities, rather than as 

isolated objects within it. As such, tendencies to overemphasise buildings as spectacular image, interesting form, or virtuosic technological novelty are 

counterbalanced by the urban, social, and tectonic qualities of projects. Within the expanded field of the city, urban buildings are emphasised as sociocultural 

elements rather than primarily as abstract objects of aesthetic (or visual) appreciation. 

172 Ling Shuang Yue

Da Yu 

173

MSc in Sustainable Buildings and Environments 

Neveen Hamza 

Contributors: Andrew Arnold, Dr. Alan J Murphy, Barry Rankin, Clive Gerrar, Dan Jestico, Halla Huws, Dr. Hassan Hemida, Jess Tindal, Liam Haggarty, 

Richard Allenby, Dr. Samuel Austin, Stuart Franklin, Dr. Wael Nabih 

Students on the Sustainable Buildings and Environments MSc use building and urban performance simulation tools and a deeper understanding of building 

physics to underpin their architectural design approaches. This academic year we were joined by students from the MArch and MAPL-D route in projects. 

The students worked on three live projects with their estates departments and Newcastle City Council. They engaged with a number of well-established 

professionals in the field. 

Engineering Excellence Quarter (Newcastle University): we were asked by the University to start looking at massing ideas for projects to maximize capturing 

sustainability aspects of the site. Students looked into environmental impacts (such as wind speed and shadowing studies) on pedestrians and how different 

massing ideas could lead to a unified campus, where pedestrian movement is facilitated and the natural environment is moderated. 

Sunderland Royal Hospital: we worked closely with the estate department to improve the 1960s building. Occupants complain about drafts in winter and 

overheating and less effective natural ventilation in the wards all year round. The project addressed possibilities of aesthetic improvements, and insertions of 

social interaction spaces, while moderating the indoor climate using building performance simulations. Students also expanded their explorations to look at 

climate change scenarios and environmental architectural concepts which can prevent the need for cooling. 

Fisherman’s Lodge in Jesmond Dene: the students presented design proposals for the public consultation that was managed by English Heritage and Newcastle 

City Council. The Fisherman’s Lodge has been derelict for over ten years and ideas for its revival and extensions into various possible functions were 

introduced to the council to help them build ideas for potential usage. Building and urban performance simulation were used to maximize the sustainability 

potential of the projects and underpin design decisions in such a dark and historic valley. 

174 

Top - Zhengkai Lu 

Bottom - Group Student Analysis

Top - Groupwork Engineering Excellence Quarter 

Bottom - Rosy Rivera Lara Fishermans Lodge - Perspectives 

175

PhD and PhD by Creative Practice Students 

Towards a Synthetic Morphogenesis for Architecture 

Paola Carolina Ramirez Figueroa 

p.c.ramirez-figueroa@newcastle.ac.uk 

www.syntheticmorphologies.com 

Synthetic Morphologies is a design exploration project that emerges from a growing 

design discourse on the possibilities afforded by Synthetic Biology. The 21st century 

is poised to be the era of biology, very much like the 20th has been the age of digital 

information. The notion comes from recent advances from Synthetic Biology in 

manipulating and creating new living organisms that exhibit unprecedented traits 

in nature. Design, as many other fields, has felt the influence of such a paradigmatic 

shift. In architecture, for instance, a growing body of speculative work imagines a 

future material reality enacted by hybrids of machine and living organisms, whereby 

building are grown rather than constructed. 

Yet, Synthetic Morphologies poses the possibility that, in fact, Synthetic Biology 

presents design with a more profound challenge – one that stirs the restating of the 

discipline of design itself. To think, for instance, of buildings which are grown out 

of pre-programmed living organisms is, in effect, to continue the classic paradigm 

of design wherein the designer is an almighty giver of form. I propose an alternative 

approach – an organicist-inspired material practice for synthetic biology. 

I believe the intersection of design and synthetic biology invites us to think 

of design as a negotiation between different actors, some of which include the 

chemical environment, mechanical conditions, designers and living organisms 

themselves. Throughout my doctoral research I’ve engaged in different projects 

which characterise and trace the evolution of the speculative discourse initiated by 

synthetic biology, and which eventually leads to the notion of a biologically-oriented 

material practice: a technique to engage with the processes of designing through and 

with living organisms. 

Architecture By Default 


k.i.connolly@newcastle.ac.uk 

Rem Koolhaas’s polemical essay ‘Junkspace’, written at the turn of the millennium, 

recalls a contemporary landscape of generic sameness, latent with subliminal 

and ideological messages. The text rejects traditional ideas of architectural space, 

dissolving ideas of order, type and hierarchy into a chaotic amalgam that is 

apparently ordered and bound together by its globalised ubiquity. Junkspace, as 

Koolhaas describes it, is the space of material human waste that has become a 

measure of modernity. Fourteen years after the publication of this seminal essay, this 

research began by examining a Junkspace par excellence – the suspended ceiling. 

Organised on a standard grid of 600mm x 600mm, set-out using aluminium 

sections, supporting lightweight tiles, it repeats, room after room in what can be 

seen as an almost limitless horizontal expansion. The suspended ceiling has become 

a seemingly ubiquitous feature in twenty-first century architecture, as recently 

demonstrated by Koolhaas himself at the 2014 Venice Biennale. 

Using Koolhaas’s observations as a starting point, the research has focused on the 

relationship between the repetitive organisational qualities of the aforementioned 

grid and the void spaces it conceals above – known as the Plenum. These spaces not 

only deal with ventilation, but also hold an ever-increasing network of services that 

give comfort and ‘power’ to the inhabited spaces below. 

Through a series of investigations, often recalling the evocative imagery and 

representation techniques of the radical Italian design collective Superstudio, this 

relationship has been explored in order to expose our growing reliance on ‘serviced’ 

space. As such, the thesis examines these forgotten, hidden but vitally important 

environments of Junkspace, in order to explore a much broader question – how 

reliant are we becoming on these concealed service spaces? And what impact does 

this have on the field of architecture? 

176 Top, Middle - Paola Carolina Ramirez Figueroa Bottom - Kieran Connolly

The Contemporary Role and Transformation of Civic Public Architecture: The 

Case of Tripoli’s Central Municipal Building, Libya 

Abdelatif El-Allous 

abdelatif.el-allous@newcastle.ac.uk 

Space Thickening and the Digital Ethereal: 

Production of Architecture in the Digital Age 

Jose-Luis Hernandez-Hernandez 

j.l.hernandez-hernandez@newcastle.ac.uk 

www.digitalethereal.com 

Digital Ethereal came about as a design discourse on digital technologies, and the 

invisible infrastructure underpinning it. I believe our interaction with this landscape 

of electromagnetic signals, described by Antony Dunne as Hertzian Space, can be 

characterised in the same terms as that with ghosts and spectra. They both are 

paradoxical entities, whose untypical substance allows them to be an invisible 

presence. In the same way, they undergo a process of gradual substantiation to 

become temporarily available to perception. Finally, they both haunt us: ghosts, as 

Derrida would have it, with the secrets of past generations; Hertzian space, with the 

frustration of interference and slowness. 

But it is these same traits of Hertzian Space that affords the potential for a spatially 

rich interaction with information systems, one that more closely resembles the 

interaction with real architecture. The challenge however lies in how to design with 

systems that are fundamentally invisible. They can be ‘translated’ – changing their 

modality into one which is tangible. This modality change is however always laced 

with cultural charges, which changes the nature of Hertzian Space. 

In order to take advantage of hertzian space, I advocate for a creative practice aimed 

at creating new objects, indexed to hertzian space, but which also captures the 

cultural and social complexity imbued in the use of such technologies. I call this new 

series of objects the digital ethereal. The design work created throughout this project 

blends together disciplines and techniques such as performance, photography, 

design, programming and electronics. 

Shared Identity: Buildings, Memories, and Meanings 

Stephen Grinsell 

s.j.grinsell@newcastle.ac.uk 

News stories about either the decision to save or demolish many buildings of the 

1960s and early 1970s regularly use the noun monstrosity, usually prefaced by the 

word concrete. However, not all concrete buildings create animosity. The recently 

demolished Birmingham Central Library, whilst derided by Prince Charles as 

looking like ‘a place where books are incinerated, not kept’ (Birmingham Mail, 

2014) is also commonly and affectionately called the ‘Ziggurat’, a reference to the 

stepped terraces of ancient temples. David Parker and Paul Long in their article 

‘“The Mistakes of the Past”? Visual Narratives of Urban Decline and Regeneration’ 

write ‘For all their faults, the buildings of the 1960s and 1970s currently being 

destroyed supplied Birmingham with an identity’ (Parker and Long, 2004 p.18). 

Buildings are given their identity and meaning, or more accurately, given a 

multiplicity of meanings, by those who gaze upon them and allow the building 

to impact upon them. This impact, or the experience as a result of that gaze, stirs 

emotions and evokes memories, memories that heighten a sense of identity. This 

identity then becomes a shared identity as people share their memories, and what 

the building means to them. 

Parker, D., & Long, P. (2004). ‘“The Mistakes of the Past”? Visual Narratives of 

Urban Decline and Regeneration’. Visual Culture in Britain, 5(1), 37-58. 

Natural Ventilation: An Evaluation of Strategies for Improving Indoor Air 

Quality in Hospitals of Semi-Arid Climates 

Mohamed Mahgoub Elnabawi 

m.elnabawi-mahgoub@newcastle.ac.uk 

Learning from Vernacular Natural Ventilated Residential Houses in 

Mediterranean Climate Zone of Lebanon; and Developing its Application 

Methods in Designing Contemporary Housing in Beirut 

Najla Mansour 

n.mansour@newcastle.ac.uk 

Top, Middle - Jose-Luis Hernandez-Hernandez 

Bottom - Stephen Grinsell 

177

A Coincidental Plot, For Architecture 

Ashley Mason 

ashley.mason@newcastle.ac.uk 

Practiceopolis: The City of Architectural Practice 


yasser.megahed@newcastle.ac.uk 

This Research sets out to interrogate a dominant stance towards technology that 

prioritises a narrow approach to architectural production, which I have identified 

as Techno‐rational practice. The imaginary city of Practiceopolis is introduced as 

a site for the critical reading of diverse contemporary architectural practices. This 

reading draws from the philosopher Andrew Feenberg’s classification of varying 

stances towards technology. 

Practiceopolis is a city built on diagrammatic relations between nine theoretical 

modes of practice covering a wide spectrum of the contemporary architectural 

world. Its morphology is set out according to the influence of technology and 

technical knowledge in shaping different modes of architectural practice. It 

highlights tensions between what Feenberg might call Determinist/Instrumentalist 

approaches on the one hand, and Critical Theory/Substantivist approaches on the 

other. Practiceopolis has two dimensions; the first sets out a parallel world created 

as a tool for mapping the multiplicity of modes of architectural practice, of which 

Techno‐rational approach is only one. The second maps architectural practices 

critically from a dedicated map library in the city of Practiceopolis, located at an 

intermediate place between the Instrumentalist and Critical-Theory stances of 

technology. 

On Repetition: Photograhpy in/as Architectural Criticism - Working through 

the Archives of Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s German Pavilion and the 

North American Concrete Grain Elevators 

Catalina Mejia-Moreno 

c.mejia-moreno@newcastle.ac.uk 

www.travesiafoundation.org 

‘Many of us, maybe all of us, look at some images repeatedly, but it seems that we do not 

write about that repetition, or think it, once written, worth reading by others’. 

T.J.Clark. The Sight of Death. An experiment in Art Writing. (New Haven and 

London: Yale University Press, 2006) pp. 9. 

In the photo-archives of two of the most recognised British architectural historians of 

the late twentieth century - Robin Evans and Reyner Banham - two iconic buildings 

come across repeatedly, almost compulsively. In Evans’, the Barcelona Pavilion (1929- 

reconstructed 1986) and in Banham’s, the Buffalo Grain Elevators (late nineteenth 

Century). While these slide sets can be understood as the result of the empiricist 

English tradition and the relevance of direct experience for the buildings’ histories 

and criticisms, they are also evidence of a wider phenomenon in architectural 

history: the drive to re-visit, the compulsion to re-photograph and the instinct 

to repeat. In this context, my PhD project questions photography as the inherent 

means of repetition in architectural history, while arguing that the photograph as 

material object and object of representation also performs as the criticism itself. 

By studying two important moments in time for the photographic dissemination 

of the two aforementioned buildings, and by understanding the material history 

of photographs as commodities and objects of transaction, I critically examine the 

relationship between architectural history, architectural criticism, and photographic 

and ideological techniques of (re)production. 

Natural Ventilation: An Evaluation of Strategies for Improving Indoor Air 

Quality in Hospitals of Semi-Arid Climates 

Mohammed Mohammed 

m.mohammed@newcastle.ac.uk 

Architecture for All in the megacity: Spatially Integrated Settlements in 

Istanbul Dominated by Desirable Affordable Housing that Values More than 

the Total Cost of Construction and Land Values 

Ulviye Nergis Kalli 

u.n.kalli@newcastle.ac.uk 

178 Top - Yasser Megahed Middle, Bottom - Catalina Mejia-Moreno

Impact of Community Participation on Peri-Urban Development Projects in 

Akure, Nigeria 

Oluwatoyin Akim 

o.t.akin@ncl.ac.uk 

Cities, People, Nature: An Exploration 


u.ruiz-arana@newcastle.ac.uk 

mynaturehood.tumblr.com 

With more than half of the world’s population now living in cities, it is the nature 

within the city that has the potential to enhance people’s lives on a daily basis. The 

city-people-nature trinomial raises a number of questions that form the basis of this 

research. My first installation coincided with the ‘Landscape, Wilderness and the 

Wild’ conference and explored two initial questions: 

Is there a boundary between the natural and cultural in the city? 

The relation between nature and culture is complex. The classical notion of nature is 

the world devoid of human interaction or activity; and urbanization, the antithesis 

of nature. At the other end of the spectrum there is the notion of nature as a social 

constructed phenomenon, and the idea that nature as the untouched doesn’t exist 

anymore, as human activity has affected the whole world. What is evident is that 

cities depend on nature to survive and vice versa, and it is therefore difficult to see 

where one ends and the other starts. 

Could the expectation of nature in the city be challenged and what could we tolerate 

within the urban? 

Within the city we tend to arrest the progression of nature in order to maintain 

landscapes and spaces looking a certain way, and avoid the chaos or fear that might 

result from a ‘wild’ nature. ‘Wilderness’ is found on abandoned sites, on former 

industrial sites, in the cracks of the pavements, in the joints of the walls, reclaimed 

by nature whilst waiting to be developed or cleared out. Are looks the reason why we 

arrest nature, and how is nature experienced through the other senses? 

Revealing Design: A Dialogic Approach 


matthew.ozga-lawn@newcastle.ac.uk 

www.ncl.ac.uk/apl/staff/profile/matthew.ozga-lawn 

My research project attempts to reveal hidden or overlooked agencies within the 

studio space and the representational modes therein, which is normally conceived 

of as a neutral zone through which designs are simply ‘transmitted’. In my study, 

the studio is conflated with a rifle range. The studio, in adopting the characteristics 

and agencies of the military space, opens architectural representation onto codes 

and phenomena normally considered to be outside its remit. These phenomena are 

drawn into the project through historical and theoretical links established by the 

rifle range space. 

My research blurs the agencies of the military and studio spaces, revealing coded 

agencies that we as designers often take for granted in how we relate and engage with 

representational artefacts in the studio. 

Usage of Thermally Comfortable Outdoor Space through the Lens of Adaptive 

Microclimate 

Khalid Setaih 

k.m.setaih@newcastle.ac.uk 

Becoming Planners and Architects: the Formation of Perspectives on 

Residential Design Quality 

Dhruv Sookhoo 

d.a.sookhoo@newcastle.ac.uk 

After the Blueprint: Questions around the Unfinished in New Belgrade 

Tijana Stevanović 

t.stevanovic@newcastle.ac.uk 

Modelling the Effects of Household Practices on Heating Energy 

Consumption in Social Housing. A Case Study in Newcastle upon Tyne 

Macarena Beltan Rodriguez 

m.rodriguez@newcastle.ac.uk 

Top - Usue Ruiz Arana 

Middle, Bottom - Matthew Ozga-Lawn 

179

The Impacts of Owners’ Participation on ‘Sense of Place’, 

the Case of Tehran, Iran 

Goran Erfani 

g.erfani@newcastle.ac.uk 

A key aspect for urban designers and managers concerns how urban transformation 

arising from regeneration of inner-city areas is associated with ‘sense of place’. 

Although much academic work tracks individual sense of place, little interrogates 

the community aspect and its link with urban renewal. This study investigated how 

the urban renewal schemes in Tehran, Iran have attempted to adopt the owners’ 

participation into their planning and implementation. It concentrated especially on 

diverse ways that different stakeholders perceived the methods of these schemes and 

the significance for community sense of place. 

The study examined the urban renewal projects conducted by the municipality 

of Tehran which concerns these areas as deprived neighbourhoods with various 

physical, social and environmental problems. Two cases were studied, namely the 

Oudlajan bazar and the Takhti neighbourhood, which both are located in the inner 

city (district 12). Despite similarities, they are distinctive cases. Oudlajan, which 

has outstanding heritage value to the city, is a commercial public space. The Takhti 

project was about the residential private space. In addition, each case had diverse 

socio-cultural and physical transformation. The selecting of the distinctive cases 

shaped a better picture of urban transformation in Tehran. 

The techniques applied seek to represent different types of participants, by means 

of local observation and semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders 

in these schemes. Additionally, to elicit what constitutes the interrelationships 

between people and place, Photo Elicitation Interview (PEI) was carried out. The 

photos captured by the residents were discussed with them to reveal the potential 

impact of urban renewal projects on place-based community attachment, identity 

and satisfaction in the eyes of individuals. Concurrently, planners, managers 

and developers were interviewed. To signify the intersubjectivity, the results and 

evidence from the previous phases were separately discussed with other participant 

and non-participant residents in the renewal schemes. Furthermore, the study 

considered the potential and limitations for sense of place associated with the urban 

regeneration schemes. 

Making Byker: The Situated Practices of the Citizen Architect 


j.d.longfield@newcastle.ac.uk 

My work draws from the site-based architectural approaches employed in Byker by 

Ralph Erskine and Vernon Gracie, to explore a mode of practice where the skills and 

expertise of the professional overlap with the personal commitment of the citizen to 

the social and political context of their location of residence. 

Through a series of projects, drawings, made pieces and activism, within the 

Byker area, where I now live, my thesis traces the nature of a situated approach to 

architectural practice, reflecting on convergences with conventional practice, as well 

as identifying key points of divergence where my work steps beyond professional 

boundaries to engage in a directly personal way. 

The trajectory of these actions are observed and recorded in order to describe an 

alternative approach to producing and appropriating the built environment, before 

finally questioning whether architectural practice, in its professionally bound form, 

is capable of delivering a social architecture. 

Quality Control and Quality Assurance in Construction – Case of Tower 

Buildings in Libya 

Salem Tarhuni 

The Conservation of Twentieth Century Architecture in China 

Yun Dai 

y.dai@newcastle.ac.uk 

180 Top - Goran Erfani Middle, Bottom, Opposite - James Longfield

Comprehensive Intelligence in Sustainable Courtyard House Architecture 

Rand Agha 

r.h.m.agha@ncl.ac.uk 

A Spatial Carbon Analysis Model for Retrofitting the Guayaquil’s Residential 

Sector – GURCC as a Case Study 

Javier Urquizo 

j.urquizo@newcastle.ac.uk 

Crisis of Traditional Identity in Built Environment of the Saudi Cities. A Case 

Study: The Old City of Tabuk 

Mabrouk Alsheliby 

m.alsheliby@ncl.ac.uk 

Looking Towards Retirement: Alternative Design Approaches to Third-Ager 

Housing 

Sam Clark 

s.clark4@newcastle.ac.uk 

UK society was first categorised ‘aged’ during the 1970s, and is currently heading 

towards ‘super-aged’ status, whereby 20 per cent of the population will be aged 

sixty-five and over by the year 2025. Indeed scientific evidence indicates linear 

increases in life expectancy since 1840, such that UK population ‘pyramids’ are now 

looking more like ‘columns’, with fewer younger people at the base and increasing 

numbers and proportions of older people at the top. There are 10,000 centenarians 

living in the UK today, with demographers anticipating a five-fold increase by 2030. 

Half of all babies born this year can expect to live one hundred years. 

Housing plays a significant role in sustaining a good quality of life, and there is 

growing opinion that moving to specialist or more age-appropriate housing has 

a positive impact on the wellbeing of older people, as well as potential benefits 

to the property market as a whole. Recent design research includes a competition 

commissioned by McCarthy & Stone to ‘re-imagine ageing’, and an RIBA report 

illustrating future scenarios in which ‘Active Third-Agers’ have made a huge impact 

on UK towns and cities. Both initiatives were predicated on the idea that today’s 

older population (colloquially known as the ‘baby-boomers’) have alternative and 

more demanding lifestyle expectations that are likely to drive a step-change in 

housing choice for older people. 

Sam is working in collaboration with national house builder, Churchill Retirement 

Living, to further explore the needs and aspirations of those entering retirement. In 

this instance a PhD by Creative Practice is being used as a vehicle for applied design 

research that will contribute to contemporary visions for retirement living. 

181

ARC – Architecture Research Collaborative 

With a threefold increase in research income this year since the Architectural Research Collaborative (ARC) launched in 2012, thanks to a number of successful 

funding bids by colleagues, new collaborative ventures and two postdoctoral fellows starting their research in architecture with us in 2015-16 and two more posts 

to come in September 2016 and 2017, ARC is firmly establishing itself as a major centre for research in architecture. Our remit is to promote and investigate 

high quality architectural research as a necessarily interdisciplinary activity, which produces knowledge through multiple methodologies and practices including 

creative practice, history and theory, and building, engineering and social sciences. ARC is therefore structured by key themes cutting across the various disciplines 

constituting architectural research, with a view to facilitating collaborative projects involving Newcastle researchers and partners at other institutions. Themes 

such as ‘Industries and Technologies of Architecture’ and ‘Experimental Architecture’ are responsive to topical issues and to change in ARC membership and are 

updated as new themes emerge. Through a programme of small-scale responsive funding we actively support collaborations between colleagues and early career 

and doctoral research. 

Our commitment to interdisciplinary research has an international presence through the Cambridge University Press journal arq – Architectural Review Quarterly 

– whose managing editor, Professor Adam Sharr, and the majority of the editorial team are based in ARC. This year saw the publication of a special issue of arq 

on the subject of design-led research put together by the speculative design practice STASUS – comprising ARC members James Craig and Matt Ozga-Lawn, and 

two publications from the conference Industries of Architecture held here in 2014; a book of the same name (Routledge, 2015) and special issue of the journal 

Architecture and Culture entitled ‘Into the Hidden Abode: Architecture and Production’, edited by Katie Lloyd Thomas and Adam Sharr (with Tilo Amhoff, 

University of Brighton, and Nick Beech, Queen Mary’s University, London). ARC members continue to publish widely and have presented their research across 

the UK, Europe, in Canada, the USA, and in the Middle East, and also engage in co-production projects. They are also active in engagement and design research 

with local communities, such as Fenham Pocket Park, a local project whose stakeholders include Sustrans, Newcastle City Council, Fenham Community Pool, 

Your Homes Newcastle, Fenham Library and Fenham Model Allotment. A successful bid by Armelle Tardiveau and Daniel Mallo to the Department of Communities 

and Local Government funding led to the creation of a new piece of public space, and enabled a co-production process amongst stakeholders equally 

meaningful as the space itself. 

This year’s ARC Special Theme event Mountains & Megastructures (16th – 17th March) was a great success, involving linked research students, colleagues and 

invited speakers, artist Stéphane Degoutin and Professor Jonathan Hill, UCL. The exhibition and symposium explored topics ranging from early endeavours 

to ‘conquer’ the Everest to Alphand’s picturesque artificial hills in Paris, and their literal and figurative constructions and reconstructions at different scales from 

miniature megastructures such as the Apollo Pavilion to the concrete megastructures of the north-east, from the vertical megastructures of science fiction to the 

complex of megadams on the Tigris and Euphrates. We are currently preparing a book proposal from the event to showcase ARC’s form of interdisciplinary 

architectural research, and have put forward a follow-up public event ‘Scaling the Heights’ to the AHRC Being Human Festival (November, 2016) to be housed 

in the north tower of the Tyne Bridge. 

CURE: Creative Upcycled Resource 

Graham Farmer 


This cross-disciplinary research project brings together architecture, engineering, 

social sciences, and business. It explores the technical, social, economic and design 

related barriers to material upcycling, and seeks to propose solutions to enable 

widespread, creative re-use of designed products and packaging. 

U-TEC Cafe 

Collaborators: CeG - Newcastle University, Newcastle Business School 

Replicas 

Adam Sharr, Zeynep Kezer 

Futures, Values and Imaginaries 

Replica architectures employ selective ideas of the past to construct the image of 

states, cultures, organizations or powerful individuals in the present, often operating 

in service of radically conservative ideologies. Promoted through the rhetoric of 

reconstruction, replica projects are seldom ‘literal’ reconstructions. Rather, they 

involve the tendentious reclamation of historic architectural or urban forms to 

reinforce particular national or cultural identity narratives, however counterfactual 

their historical veracity. The idea of Replicas was the subject of a session at the SAH 

conference in Chicago in 2015 and this material will form an edited book. 

Collaborators: Society of Architectural Historians Conference, Chicago, 2015 

182

Utopias and Architecture 



Utopian thought, though commonly characterized as projecting a future without 

a past, depends on golden models for re-invention of what is. This general theme 

encompasses a range of projects examining the social and formal dimensions of 

architecture through the concept of utopia and integrating architectural thinking 

into Utopian Studies. The projects and outputs range from the interdisciplinary 

Utopography workshop to a special issue of Utopian Studies as well as Lefebvre for 

Architects, recently published by Routledge, and papers for journals including the 

‘Journal of Architectural Education’, ‘Architectural Research Quarterly’, and the 

‘Journal or Architecture’. 

Coleman N. ‘Architecture and Dissidence: Utopia as Method’, Architecture and 

Culture, 2014, 2(1), pp. 45-60. 

Energy, Society and Cities 



These projects involve understanding, modelling and designing for new energy 

futures. Themes include the effects of household practices on heating energy 

consumption, smart energy technologies, decentralised energy, energy systems 

to reduce fuel poverty and developing new ways of planning for spatial energy 

infrastructure in cities. This work is supported by contributions from Your Homes 

Newcastle, Newcastle City Council and Newcastle Science City and involves 

collaborations across fields of architecture, engineering and planning. 

Collaborators: Newcastle City Council, Your Homes Newcastle, Newcastle Science City, 

Cambridge Architectural Research 

Byker Hobby Rooms 

James Longfield, Adam Sharr 


This project was investigated as part of Linked Research with Stage 5 and 6 students 

on the MArch degree program. The project investigated the unique phenomena of 

the hobby rooms in the Byker redevelopment which are currently under-occupied. 

By investigating their intentions and mapping the spaces of current hobby activity 

the project developed speculative proposals for alternative hobby spaces that offered 

greater flexibility and specificity. The project concluded with the construction of key 

items of furniture which imagined the hobby rooms as specific mobile spaces, able to 

support a process of redevelopment. 

http://makingbyker.wordpress.com 

Collaborators: The Byker Lives Project 

Bacilla Vitruvius 

Martyn Dade-Robertson, Carolina Figueroa 


Vitruvius suggested in his texts On Architecture that ‘architecture is an imitation of 

nature’ (Vitruvius, 2009) but what happens when architecture becomes nature and 

we begin, through the design of biological systems, to become architects of nature? 

This project explores the relationship between architecture and the emerging field of 

Synthetic Biology. The project explores both the applications of Synthetic Biology for 

new types of building material and the implications of architectural design practice 

on the development of Synthetic Biology. 

Collaborators: Northumbria University, The Centre for Synthetic Biology and 

Bioexploitation 

183

Architecture’s Unconscious 

Kati Blom, Nathaniel Coleman, Andrew Ballantyne, 

Katie Lloyd Thomas, Sam Austin 

Social Justice, Wellbeing and Renewal 

This project is built around a series of informal meetings including architects, artists, 

philosophers and scholars of cognitive science and psychoanalysis. The project aims 

to uncover the processes of environmental perception – with particular emphasis 

on stories of unexpected, non-verbal encounters which are born of a pre-linguistic 

sensation of space. These incidental sensuous encounters with place – whether 

labelled as unconscious or not - are vital when discovering the qualities of spaces. 

Collaborators: Isis Brook (Writtle University), Lorens Holm (University of Dundee), 

Wolfram Bergande (Bauhaus- University Weimar) 

Re-interpreting Sustainable Architecture 

Graham Farmer 


This research aims to bring together recent debates in philosophy and social / 

cultural theory to the study and practice of sustainable architecture and urbanism. In 

adopting a critical, comparative and interdisciplinary perspective and by theorising 

sustainability, my aim is to bring the discussion of a sustainable built environment 

centrally into the social sciences and humanities. 

G. Farmer (2013) ‘Re-contextualising Design: Three ways of Practicing Sustainable 

Architecture’, Architectural Research Quarterly, 17(2). 

G. Farmer & S. Guy (2010) ‘Making Morality: Sustainable Architecture and the 

Pragmatic Imagination’, Building Research and Information, 38(4), 368-378. 

S.Guy & G.Farmer (2001), ‘Re-interpreting Sustainable Architecture: The place of 

Technology’, Journal of Architectural Education, 54(3) Feb. pp140-148. 

Demolishing Whitehall 

Adam Sharr 


In 1965, the architect Leslie Martin submitted to Harold Wilson’s Labour 

government a plan to rebuild London’s government district, Whitehall. Presented 

to an administration which had been elected on the promise of remaking Britain 

in the ‘white heat’ of technology, the plan’s architecture embodied the 1960s idea 

of an imminent jet age that seemed not just possible but imminent. Our co-written 

book, Demolishing Whitehall, tells the story of the Whitehall plan and investigates its 

inherent tensions between ideas of technology and history, science and art, socialism 

and elitism. 

Collaborators: Stephen Thornton, Politics, Cardiff University 

Industries of Architecture 

Katie Lloyd Thomas, Adam Sharr 

Specifications, Prescriptions and Translations 

Developing out of research and an earlier symposium on architecture’s technical 

literatures ‘Further Reading Required’ (The Bartlett, 2011) this international 

conference took place at Newcastle in November 2014. IOA invited architectural 

theorists, historians, designers and others to explore the industrial, technical and 

socio-economic contexts in which building is constituted that are all too often 

sidelined within the architectural humanities. IOA also hosted a number of openstructured 

debate-oriented workshops with the aim of bringing into the discussion 

those working in building, technology, law, practice management, construction or in 

industry together with researchers in the architectural humanities. 

Collaborators: Tilo Amhoff (University of Brighton), Nicholas Beech (Oxford Brookes 

University), ProBE (University of Westminster), John Gelder (NBS), Sofie Pelsmakers 

(UCL Energy Institute), Rob Imrie (Sociology, Goldsmiths), Emma Street (Real Estate & 

Planning, University of Reading), Liam Ross (ESALA). 

184

Visualising Energy 

Neveen Hamza 


http://www.eviz.org.uk/ 

This project is based on the EPSRC funded Eviz (Energy Visualisation for Carbon 

Reduction) project. The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of engineers 

and designers to develop applications which close the gap between abstract, invisible 

energy flows and people’s desire to understand their energy use and become more 

energy efficient. The key idea is to increase understanding of energy dynamics as 

a function of occupant behaviour and building characteristics and to allow experts 

to make better predictions of energy efficiency and design buildings around human 

behaviour. 

Collaborators: Plymouth University, University of Birmingham, University of Bath 

Landscape Visions 

Ian Thompson 


This project, led by a landscape architect/photographer in collaboration with 

landscape archaeologists, an oral historian and a specialist in heritage interpretation, 

considers the legacy of land reclamation within the Great Northern Coalfield, 

following the closure of the last deep mines. We aim to understand the reclamation 

process, not just the social, political and economic drivers, but also the visions which 

shaped the reclaimed landscape. How did these arise? What was not valued and what 

has been lost? 

Collaborators: Dr Arieti Galani (heritage studies), Professor Sam Turner, Dr Oscar 

Aldred (archaeology), Sue Bradley (oral history), McCord Centre for Historic and Cultural 

Landscapes, Durham County Record Office, Woodhorn Museum Northumberland 

Design Pedagogy as Material Practice 

Graham Farmer 


This research explores the role of material practice as a means to connect design, 

pedagogy, research and social engagement. This work provides the opportunity for 

‘live’ experimentation with materials, performance and varying modes of design 

practice. 

Stonehaugh Stargazing Pavilion 

G. Farmer (2013) ‘Re-contextualising Design: Three ways of Practicing Sustainable 

Architecture’, Architectural Research Quarterly, 17(2). 

G. Farmer & M. Stacey (2012) ‘In the Making: Pedagogies from MARS’, Architectural 

Research Quarterly, 16(4), 301-312. 

Rethinking Heritage 

Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes 


http://valuablereside.upc.edu/ 

This project examines the modern conceptualization of heritage and its associated 

preservation and conservation techniques and policies. The research takes an 

interdisciplinary approach and includes anthropologists, geographers, political 

scientists and scholars in tourism. It deals with both theory and particular case 

studies, and is currently funded through several competitive grants in Spain and 

Chile, with collaborators in the US, UK, Italy, Chile and Spain. The project relates 

research to professional practice and teaching – like the international workshop 

‘Valuable-RESIDE’, funded by the EU. 

Collaborators: School of Architecture of Barcelona-Valles, UPC-BarcelonaTECH 

(Spain); Universidad de Concepción (Chile); Politecnico di Torino (Italy); West Chester 

University of Pennsylvania (US). FIC Barcelona Architects. 

185

Architecture and the Machinic Unconscious 



Our responses to architecture have a cultural dimension, but our cultures are ways 

of dealing with our instincts – inherited from millions of years of evolution. Modern 

humans have been around for tens of thousands of years, identifiable buildings for 

only about 10,000 years, since the global warming that brought the Ice Age to an end. 

This project draws together some insights from the recent literature of evolutionary 

psychology and the schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari in trying to understand 

how we unconsciously interact with one another in and through buildings. Most of 

what we do, we do unconsciously. What can we learn from our animal-becomings? 

-- from burrowing, nest-building, the construction work of ants and beavers, and the 

territorializing effects of music. 

Beyond Representation 

Matt Ozga-Lawn, James Craig 


This project seeks to better understand architectural representation through an 

interrogation of its limits; the vastness of landscape, and the internalised space of 

consciousness. The research stems from an investigation into landscapes of human 

endeavour – in which both limits are potentially at their most extreme – with a 

project examining the bodies of ‘failed’ attempts to conquer Mount Everest. The 

research is developing in conjunction with an MArch studio exploring these themes. 

Craig J, Ozga-Lawn M. ‘Everest Death Zone’. Paper for Emerging Architectural 

Research 2014, 1(5). 

Curating APL 

Matthew Ozga-Lawn, James Craig 


Curating Architecture, Planning and Landscape is ongoing research into the 

dissemination of the School’s outputs and identity, including the annual yearbook 

and exhibitions, online materials and publications and conference materials. The 

work includes wide-ranging research into these forms of communication, including 

analysing materials from Schools across the UK and further afield. The aim is to 

generate key understandings of how APL could present and curate its identity. 

Newcastle University School of Architecture Planning and Landscape Yearbook 2014 

Collaborators: Thomas Kendall, Simon Bumstead, Richard Taylor, Ed Wainwright 

The Edge of State 

Zeynep Kezer 


In my current project, I examine the Turkish government’s efforts to modernize 

Eastern Anatolia and consolidate its authority over the region’s ethnically and 

religiously mixed population over the last century. I am especially interested in the 

expansion of the state apparatus – through the build up of institutional structures, 

military installations, transport & communications infrastructure, and resource 

extraction – and the resistance it encountered, with a view toward understanding the 

limits of state capacity and official ideology. 

‘Spatializing Difference: The Making of an Internal Border in Early Republican 

Elazıg, Turkey’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 

186

A Participatory-Design Study for Cobalt Business Park 

Armelle Tardiveau, Daniel Mallow 

Social Justice, Wellbeing and Renewal 

Cobalt Office Park is the largest of its kind in the UK with 12000 workers. Located 

in North Tyneside, this edge city environment is neither urban in the traditional 

sense, nor a greenfield science or technology park yet constitutes a highly significant, 

and under-researched, type of place in people’s daily lives. Greater or lesser ecological 

sustainability can be enacted and take root in such spaces; for this the project seeks 

to engage Cobalt workers, particularly in optimising their work-life balance as well 

as engaging local residents in extending existing sustainable practices in such ‘nonplaces’ 

bordering their residential areas. 

Collaborators: Prof Geoff Vigar (PI) Dr Abigail Schoneboom (urban sociologist) 

Building Lifecycle Integration 

John Kamara 

Specifications, Prescriptions and Translations 

This research explores the hypothesis that effective integration of the different 

interfaces (e.g. information/knowledge, organisations) over the lifecycle of a building 

will enhance its performance (with respect to how it supports the immediate and 

changing business needs of clients/users and other actors that interact with it, and 

how its impact on society and the environment is optimised). Current work is 

focused on the interface between clients and the design/construction industry at both 

the development and handover stages of a project. 

Kamara, J. M. (2013) ‘Exploring the Client-AEC Interface in Building Lifecycle 

Integration’, Buildings 3(3), 462-48. 

Building the Nation State 

Zeynep Kezer 


In Building Modern Turkey: State, Space and Ideology, I examine how space and spatial 

practices mediated Turkey’s transition from empire to nation-state. By juxtaposing the 

making of new spaces, responding to the demands of a new politico-cultural order, 

with the obliteration of ethnic and religious enclaves characterizing the Ottoman 

way of life, I expose the interdependence between the creative and destructive forces 

in this process. My survey of broad ranging spatial transformations demonstrates 

how state formation operates at multiple and interdependent scales from that of the 

individual body to that of regional geopolitics. 

Building Modern Turkey: State, Space and Ideology (University of Pittsburgh Press for 

the Politics, Culture and the Built Environment Series, 2015). 

Problems of Translation 



This research aims to understand the processes by which different cultures meet in the 

context of avant-garde architecture, art and literature. In particular the project maps 

and compares the linkages and spread of modernism between European and Indian 

avant-gardes, through its art and architecture of the 1920s. Specific case studies 

include analysis of the Bengali artist Gaganendranath Tagore along with the Bauhaus 

painter Lyonel Feininger and the collaboration between Rabindranath Tagore, the 

Bengali poet, novelist, and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and Sir Patrick 

Geddes, the Scottish town planner at Santiniketan. 

‘Problems of Translation: Lyonel Feininger and Gaganendranath Tagore’ at the 

Fourteenth Annual Indian Society of Oriental Art Exhibition, Kolkata, India. 

Collaborators: Association of Art Historians 

187

188

Newcastle University School of 

Architecture, Planning and Landscape 

Yearbook ‘16 

Editorial Team 

Sam Austin 


Matthew Wilcox 

Special Thanks 

Graham Farmer 


James Craig 

Anne Fry 

Rumen Dimov 

& Linked Research Group 

“Curating APL” 2014-15 

Printing & Binding 

Statex Colour Print 

www.statex.co.uk 

Typography 

Adobe Garamond Pro 

Paper 

GF Smith 

Colourplan, Turquoise, 350gsm 

First published in June 2016 by: 

The School of Architecture 

Planning and Landscape, 

Newcastle University 

Newcastle upon Tyne. 

NE1 7RU 

United Kingdom 

w: www.ncl.ac.uk/apl/ 

t: +44 (0) 191 222 5831 

e: apl@newcastle.ac.uk 

ISBN 978-0-7017-0256-4

ISBN 9780701702564 

90000 > 

£10 

9 

780701 

702564

Design Yearbook 2016

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