Tutors: Era Savvides, Alessandro Ayuso, Jake Parkin & Sylwia Poltorak
Era Savvides is founding director of creative collective Urban Radicals. Her design philosophy centres around a materially-driven, crafted approach to digital design and the creative use of robotic fabrication within the built environment.
Alessandro Ayuso is Senior Lecturer whose studio-based practice and research focus on the intersection of representation, architecture and the body.
Jake Parkin is a designer and tutor based in London. Alongside teaching, his work focuses on exhibition, set and architectural design.
Sylwia Poltorak is a set and installation designer. Her creative practice is driven by cheerfulness, vitality and longevity to investigate atypical design methods for well-being.
Culture, Alteration, Material and Detail
This year, our year 2 students looked for the materially sensuous and the impeccably crafted. Our studio focused on poetic, transformational spaces and interiors that have the potential to become catalysts for change. The year unfolded into two inter-related semesters, aiming to engage students with material experimentation and craft as drivers for sustainable design thinking. This allowed students to explore how small-scale processes can influence large-scale spaces and helped develop a deeper understanding of environmentally-conscious material and crafted modes of operating within interior architecture.
In the first semester, we ventured across London in search of material and immaterial observations of ‘time’. Through a series of rigorous and playful design processes, the students tested themselves as architectural flâneurs, gathering information directly from the urban realm and applying this to the design of meaningful spatial proposals, responding of the South Bank mooring community.
The second semester was an opportunity to interact with real clients, focus on constructing spatial experiences and designing atmospheres for flagship concept stores in the retail sector.Through a series of process-driven material experimentation workshops, students were given the opportunity to develop a personal understanding of a set of seemingly incompatible materials. Using this, they were tasked to construct innovative material applications and assemblages that would inform the production of immersive, atmospheric spatial proposals, responding to the creative agendas of four emerging fashion brands establishing shops in New Bond Street.
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