Design Studio 12 Master of Architecture (MArch RIBA Part 2)

Ben Stringer & Peter Barber

Ben Stringer teaches design and cultural context studies at the University of Westminster. Recently he has been editing books and writing articles about architecture and rurality. 

Peter Barber has an architecture practice noted for its social housing and urban design projects, mostly around London. He also teaches design studio at the University of Westminster.

DS12: HS2 / Upper Heyford

Yr1: Tom Boulton, Dan Kanabahita, Giulia Mombello, Olly Roffe

Yr2: Nishanth Anandan, Iman bin Abdul Halim, Alice Dean, Rahul Desai, Sarah Gardner, Gbemi Osinaike, Elina Gleed, Lottie Greenwood, Natalia Petrova, Jonathan Raffray, Mrigesh Rane, Michelle Tang, Freya Wiltshire

DS12’s year began with a reimagining of the beleaguered HS2 railway as a linear series of productive villages between the edges of London and Birmingham. This was partly inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Villages and Gillian Darley’s book Villages of Vision about historic examples of planned villages in the UK. 

Following this, we transferred some of the ideas from our HS2 work to the former RAF/USAF bomber base at Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire, which we visited in November. Some buildings on this historic site are currently rented out as business premises, but most of the base’s 500 or so hectares of land are abandoned; weeds squeeze between the vast runway’s concrete slabs and many of the remarkable concrete hangars, bomb stores and control rooms remain empty and unused. Could this site become a ‘Zone of Rural Modernity’ where new kinds of farms, factories and homes could be created with the most sustainable energy sources and materials? 

Colin Ward argued that former airbases should be used as places for alternative settlements and communities. In a similar spirit, we argue that such sites should be used to explore ways of addressing some of the critical issues that we currently face. Where should our food, water, energy and building materials come from? What kind of land ownership systems would work best for a more ecologically-minded society? What might a rural community look like in the future? 

We asked everyone in the studio to develop distinct agriculture, industry and housing programmes for a part of the base within a group masterplan. While everyone’s individual projects is different, relations between them and with the existing neighbourhood are co-ordinated, together forming a hybrid cluster of interacting projects within a group plan. 

In January, we went to western Germany via Brussels. Highlights from the trip included the Landschaftspark in Duisburg, Bohm’s Pilgrimage church at Velbert, Schwarz’s St Anne’s in Düren and St Fronleichnam in Aachen, Hambach open cast mine, and the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal.

Guest Critics: Pierre d’Avoine, April Glasby, Jane McAllister, Luz Navarro, Rachel Stevenson, Tashia Tucker

Special thanks: Upper Heyford Heritage Centre for a great airbase tour. 

Archive of DS12’s work from previous years:

MArch DS12 2016-2017

MArch DS12 2017-2018

MArch DS12 2018-2019

MArch DS12 2019-2020

MArch DS12 2020-2021

MArch DS12 2021-2022

MArch DS12 2022-2023

MArch DS12 2023-2024

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