Interior Architecture Year 2 Interior Architecture BA (Hons)
TUTORS: Conor Clarke [year lead], Liz Ellston, Jake Parkin & Aoi Yamashita Phillips
In Year 2, students explore the concept of intervention, emphasising free experimentation and rigorous study. Through understanding of a site, a client and finding their voice in material- and mark-making techniques, they feel out what it might mean to declare oneself a designer.
The year’s investigations centred on Tobacco Dock Car Park in Wapping, explored as a relic of automobility and testing ground for new forms of ritual and dwelling. Students explored Docklands, examining the car park in situ, before developing projects rooted in a personal obsession and an invented subculture. These informed sacred spaces within the car park, exploring how architectures of parking choreograph thresholds, bodies and collective rituals, bolstered by a talk from Simon Henley on his work ‘The Architecture of Parking’.
Across two semesters, students moved from experimental interventions and body‑scale artefacts to full proposals for a future almshouse for older residents. They investigated how interiors can support collective flourishing in a damaged ecological context, drawing carefully on indigenous building practices, material experimentation and questions of care, access and ageing. The studio emphasised process, making and iterative development across scales, from performance‑oriented spaces to multi‑storey schemes embedded in a host structure that is both monumental and banal.
A one‑week ‘Westmonster Puppet’ Project brought students from Years One and Two together to invent chimeric monsters, with support from Spradling. Over five days, 120 students worked in mixed‑year groups with live willow and pleather to build large‑scale puppets, informed in part by a field trip to see My Neighbour Totoro – an opportunity to study staging, spatial narrative and puppetry. The week concluded with performances, films, publications and a small set of prizes, while new ‘soft crits’ and paired crits throughout the year reinforced a culture of generosity, dialogue and shared authorship.
Archive of Year 2’s work from previous years:
Interior Architecture Year 2 2016-2017
Interior Architecture Year 2 2017-2018
Interior Architecture Year 2 2018-2019
Interior Architecture Year 2 2019-2020
Interior Architecture Year 2 2020-2021
Interior Architecture Year 2 2021-2022
Interior Architecture Year 2 2022-2023
Interior Architecture Year 2 2023-2024
Interior Architecture Year 2 2024-2025
