Design Studio 5: Interim Review
Packed day at BCU with enthusiastic students tackling their interim review with great work — well done, all!
This studio is centred around plasticity—not just in the material sense, but as an operative concept that captures the city’s inherent ability to reshape, reorganise, and reconfigure itself in response to evolving demands and constraints.
The studio asks: What if urban form was truly adaptive? How can we conceptualise a city that transforms as dynamically as the societies it hosts?
The core proposition is an exploration of new urban morphologies—spatial and infrastructural frameworks that are neither static nor rigid, but rather highly responsive to the complex network of systems defining contemporary urban life. The challenge is to design a cityscape that embraces change as a fundamental condition, rather than resisting it. This means working across multiple scales, from the micro-adjustments of architectural components to the macro-structuring of urban systems.
At this stage, students have been engaging deeply with mapping as a design process, treating it not as a passive documentation tool but as an active generator of form and strategy. Through graphic, physical, and time-based registers, they are visualising urban flux—mapping movements, densities, social interactions, infrastructural shifts, and environmental forces to identify emerging patterns and vulnerabilities. The act of mapping becomes a speculative tool, helping to uncover latent potentials within the city fabric.
The Interim Review is an opportunity to test and refine these investigations, critically evaluating how mapping translates into architectural interventions. How does the data-driven analysis of urban systems translate into a tangible design proposal? How can plasticity be embedded into the architectural and urban fabric—through materiality, spatial configurations, or programmatic adaptability?
As the studio progresses, the focus will shift from analysis to synthesis, pushing students to propose and prototype speculative urban transformations.
This studio is an open-ended laboratory for rethinking architecture’s role within the fluid dynamics of the city, embracing plasticity not as a metaphor but as a fundamental operational strategy.
