Designing Environ-mental Future-Pasts

BSc Design Studio (second year)

Salford Laboratory of Architecture, UK 2023

DS2A Lecture Slide; image: “Exploration Journey” Old Sarum, Salisbury, UK (David Casino, 2017, p. 46)

As a lecturer at the University of Salford, I convened and led the second-year BSc Design Studio in 22-23 and 23-24: DS2A—Designing Environmental Future-Pasts and DS2B—Cosmopolitical Design & Site-specific Practices. The interdisciplinary L5 studio brings students of the Architecture (ARB/RIBA), Architectural Engineering (CABE), and Interior Architecture courses together to engage with critical questions about how design practice disturbs the environment (Easterling, 1999, 2016; Murphy, 2006a, 2006b) and reassembles spatial and material “architectural associations” (Latour & Yaneva, 2008; Yaneva, 2010, 2017) among users, inhabitants, and environments.

The Studio introduces second-year design students to systems thinking, network mapping, and spatial aesthetics. It is co-tutored with a group of creative, experienced, and award-winning architects: Vijay Taheem (ex-partner at Design Studio-North), Remi Phillips-Hood (designer at Heatherwick Studio), and David Connor (Founder of David Connor Design). Below are examples from the latest iteration in 23-24.

Rationale

The DS2A brief explores design as a practice of moving materials (Hutton, 2020) and reassembling (Latour, 2005) along a continuum of environmental histories and futures. You will engage with a moderate complexity project to design for a multispecies ecology, including humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans.

We will critically think about architecture-environment questions and propose design resolutions by approaching architectural design as a practice of disturbing ecologies and accelerating de/stabilisations. When we act to design, we change the world around us – locally and across the planet – be it through extracting, procuring, and manufacturing materials or digging up sites and reassembling constructions.

We will learn how to investigate the historical impacts and speculate about the futures of such disturbances by documenting and analysing the dynamic landscape, instead of the static conventional site analysis. We will learn – from architects, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, engineers, and scientists – to think about networks and flows, represent making space and microclimates, and produce drawings of such complexity. Also, we will learn how this thinking and practice fits within Stages 0, 1, and 2 of the 2020 RIBA Plan of Work and reducing Carbon emissions as described in the 2021 Built for the Environment report.

Download >>> DS2A Syllabus: Designing Environmental Future-Pasts: Chat Moss EdViCe

Featured student work: Ali Qamar, Araba Esuon, Bethan Anderson, Devam Kachiwala, Grace Share, Harriett Boyle, Jamie McCay, Mohamed Kassab (Arch); Aaya Abdulridha, Amna Saeed, Hasna Abdo (Arch Eng); Xavier Catalla (Interior Arch).

DS2A Sample Student Work 23-24

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Project Partners

University of Salford