Loughborough University Architecture (LU-Arc) is always delighted to share the creativity and originality of our students through our End of Year Show. But we are particularly excited this year as the students have taken the lead to curate the show according to their own vision.
Studying architecture is a challenging endeavour, as indeed is teaching and practising it, especially when the profession continues to reinvent itself in response to changing social and environmental needs. We believe that this dynamism and challenge – as well as this spirit of invention – is captured admirably in the show.
The show offers an insight into student work at all levels of scale and complexity, focusing on their main design projects but supplemented with supporting work. The Pt. A cohort focuses on the theme of ‘Identity’ with the Home project, which requires the students to design an integrated home/workshop for a fictional individual of their own invention. Scaling up in Pt. B, the theme of ‘Community’ is explored via the Inclusion/Exclusion in the City project, in which students design a library for the city of Liverpool with the aim of galvanising social engagement.
The theme for Pt. C students is ‘Diversity’, and here the students are given the freedom to explore projects that matter to them under the umbrella of research-informed design labs with their own distinctive agendas and approaches. This year the labs are themed to:
While the theme of ‘Architect Maker’ percolates all through our BArch undergraduate degree, our MArch finalists focus on the theme of ‘Architect Entrepreneur’ to try to curate a new species of architectural practice. Here students critically examine the ethical and cultural role of the architect, for example by leveraging their expertise to intervene on matters of social justice or to disrupt unsustainable patterns of consumption. A commitment to explore the ‘circulatory’ of energy, economies and materials runs through the final design work of this studio, which this year responded to sites in Bucharest, Romania.
We hope you will join us to celebrate the richness and diversity of our students’ work and help us mark this step in their aspiration to design a fairer and better world.