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The end-of-year exhibition of students’ works for the year 2009-10 gathers the results of the workshop organized in partnership with ESUA, the European School of Architecture and Urbanism, and held at Strathclyde in March 2010. Details on the Workshop are also posted here. It will suffice here to highlight that the objective of the workshop was to test as architect the effectiveness and limits of the methodology applied to the definition of Masterplan and Local Urban Code (LUC). In short, students tried to produce projects for buildings and open spaces at the architectural scale starting from blocks, plots and norms already set in their Masterplan and LUC.
The experiment was therefore intended to begin from a state of completion of Masterplan and LUC, which in fact was not fully achieved at the opening of the workshop. That caused a shift of the attention to the deeper definition of both Masterplan and LUC rather than their testing against the needs of architectural design, which could not really be undertaken before the last day of the session. Next year we will revise the course calendar in order initiate the workshop at a later stage.
However, thanks to the great enthusiasm and commitment of guest professors George Saumarez Smith, Gordon Murray and Niall Murphy as well as that of students, a good deal of depth has been reached in the comprehension of architectural implication of blocks and norms design, which will soon turn out to have been fundamental to the successive phase and the completion of the project.