It is a pleasure to teach first year: we enjoy encouraging students to experiment, have fun and be creative. First year focusses on personal explorations and the development of individual design processes through a series of connected projects that seek to improve confidence in visual and verbal communication.
We start small – building on existing drawing and sketching skills by exploring Liverpool through sketching and recording, then surveying and drawing to architectural conventions.
This year, place making developed incrementally from the design of a simple meeting place, to shelter building at Formby Beach. Finishing Semester 1 with the design of a Sensational Space for an imagined client with self-selected job and characteristic at Liverpool dockside.
In Semester 2 the students were asked to design a Spiritual Space in the middle of Liverpool’s club land. Initially they were encouraged to reflect on what interested them and form their own personal architectural agenda. From this position, they designed from the inside – out which allowed them to develop an atmosphere and concept for a spiritual space from their position and placement of an object of importance to them (an artefact) in a room. Having longer on this project, allowed students to develop strong concepts and more complex spatial arrangements with a greater sense of materiality and structure.
Despite the difficulties experienced by the students of having to quickly set up temporary studio spaces in bedrooms, lofts and on dining tables, they have more than risen to the challenge. They showed themselves to be resilient, adaptable and capable; having developed new digital skills and successfully experimenting in new ways of communicating their design ideas.
We have been really impressed with the BA1 students and what they have accomplished this year. We look forward to seeing how they shape their ideas and skills further in the coming years. The BA1 team.
Year Lead
Lucretia Ray
Studio Tutors
Suliman Alla
Paul Bower
Monika Koeck
Yisi Liu
Jon Male
Niall O’Hare
David Raynor
Marcus Schofield
Junjie Xi
Guest Critics
Aikaterini Antonopoulou
Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
Fei Chen
Han-Mei Chen
Andrew Crompton
Ben Devereau
Richard Dod
Alex Dusterloh
Peter Farrell
Anna Gidman
Iain Jackson
Yat Shun Kei
Stephanie Koerner
Ranald Lawrence
Haniyeh Mohammadpourkarbasi
Jane Moscardini
Francesca Piazzoni
Torsten Schmiedeknecht
Nick Webb
Keith Webber
Special thanks
Martin Winchester
Nic Kerr