Figures

Interiors Buildings Cities focuses on buildings and interiors that accommodate the different scales and gradations of public life within the city, from the street to the public interior. It addresses the ways in which these can be situated in relation to place, time and material culture.

Thinking beyond individual students and courses, the Chair considers its educational programme as a collective and reflective space of study and discourse: an attitude that is intended to encompass the work of both students and staff. The Chair engages in common questions concerning the public interior, questions of interiority, and their relations with the social and physical fabric of the city as a whole.

Figures

The Figures of this elective project refer to the constellation of formal, spatial, typological and material conditions through which architecture has been composed and physicalised across its history. This has often been expressed in terms of difference and change: as movements, styles and ideas that succeed or compete with one another. An alternative history might address what connects things: the elements that relate or repeat between architectures made in very different times and places.

This course explores these architectural continuities. An ongoing research project for the chair, each year a particular concern or condition is chosen to research through a series of precedents, chosen to represent context that might encompass but go beyond the orthodoxies of Western architectural history.

Each addresses the architectural interior, questions of interiority and the boundaries that define these, in relation to the wider context of the city or the landscape. Investigations will encompass not only the physical condition but also the social and cultural contexts that underpin it.

Case studies are collated, represented and analysed in respect to one another, through media which might include drawings, models and descriptive texts; constructing a body of knowledge that will grow into an archive for publication and exhibition.