Welcome to MORE 2021

MORE 2021 is the second time we have held our celebration of our postgraduate courses and our research in January – a necessity as most of our courses in the show started in January 2021, not September 2020 as originally planned. This delay was only one element in what has been a disorienting and difficult year. To begin with we worked online through the early 2021 lockdown, then in a hybrid of online and on-campus, and then fully back on-campus (thanks to the Marylebone house team led by Kow Abadoo, Chris Meloy and John Whitmore). It has meant continual adjustments, innovations, and no little toughness.

The work on show in MORE is testament to our students and staff’s tenacity and invention – a direct outcome of the diversity of backgrounds and practices with which they enrich the School. An elegantly edited exhibition that celebrates the creative cross-disciplinary work of our students in addressing Strategic Design, Place, Mobilities, Making, Territorial Transitions and Professional Practice – and how they can meet our great societal and planetary challenges. An exhibition that also reveals how we have taken advantage of the opportunities that ‘going digital’ created.

2021 saw the School make a highly successful submission to the research excellence framework, REF2021, a process led by Johan Woltjer who has now left to a new post in the Netherlands. Following on from this, the School has created a supportive new research structure under the direction of Lindsay Bremner, with 5 complementary research groups – transport and mobility, architectural humanities, planning territories, place and experience, architectural humanities. Lindsay has also led the creation of the School’s Climate Action Taskforce, ArCCAT, which is aligning our practices with a regenerative future.

Thanks are due to François Girardin, Nasser Golzari and Mirna Pedalo, as well as the Fabrication Laboratory staff for putting the show together, and to Clare Hamman who has designed and produced the catalogue. Above all, thank you to our remarkable students and the staff.

Please enjoy the show / webinar / publication.

Harry Charrington

Head of the School of Architecture + Cities
University of Westminster