Vicky Jolley - Motorway / Waterway

Motorway/Waterway is a conceptual project to design an installation to facilitate and promote access to the river at Northenden Riverside Park. There will be an emphasis on context analysis, and students will develop and express their proposals through physical models. Final schemes will be presented as an exhibition.

Students have started to analyses the site so that their ideas on how to link motorway to waterway can be realised.

Ric Frankland - Ugly House

Do we know what a house should look like?

This event seeks the good, bad and just plain ugly architecture. This group seek to break the stereotypes of what “good” architecture is by looking at examples in Alain de Botton documentary “The Perfect Home” and Len Grant’s film “I’m moving in...!”. They have also looked at Fat architects and made small presentations showing their opinions on the good, bad and ugly.

Their final output, inspired by the book “Typen: Good, Bad and Ugly Houses” by Oda Pälmke, will be to build a house form in concrete at 1:50 scale, and their work will be judged to be either “good”, “bad” or “ugly” at a public event in Manchester.

Pandoras Box - Follies Of Unsustainable Sins and Sustainable Virtues

In Helen Aston’s event, 14 students who have an attitude towards consumption and sustainable consumption are creating structures that will inhabit three consumer driven spaces around Manchester. These follies will be themed on the seven unsustainable sins and the sustainable virtues which have been released from Pandora’s Box.

The students have so far created collages both 2D and 3D by looking at the consumer driven catalogues and magazines for inspiration. They have had to see the city through critical eye to create transportable, trans-locatable and transformable follies to march, perform and demonstrate throughout the city centre.

Fresh Breath of Foul Air – Programming the city

Do we live in a double city? Rick Dargavel’s workshop explores the forgotten side of the city of Manchester – its alleyways and backstreets. Through photography film and sketches the group are documenting the territory of the city’s ‘dispossessed’ and analysing its role in the life and vitality of the city. What programmes exist in these run down streets and how long can they continue to exist as buildings get bigger and the alleyways become edited out of the city?
Participants have begun to capture the ambience of the areas they explore. Messages and graffiti create an urban narrative, while discarded objects leave clues of passing drunks or the fag breaks of the kitchen hands.
The programme will continue to develop as the group further explore the programmes which exist or could exist in the alleyways of Manchester and begin to make interventions as they find a physical space for them.

Look Up

Look Up. Many of us are guilty of following the same path through the city day after day without taking enough notice of our surroundings. Be it the student passage along Oxford Road, the work commute through Piccadilly Station to the office or the weekly shopping trip on Market Street, do we really know that much about the architecture of Manchester?
Look Up is a student movement, part of the Manchester school of Architecture, which aims to spread awareness of architecture and the architectural community in Manchester. Over the next month, a series of events, workshops and walks will be taking place and we want you to get involved.
Students will be making a series of interventions across the city and surrounding area including a series of sculptures in the centre of the city exploring the sins of consumerism, an architectural solution for the asylum seekers of Manchester and a mural in the area of Barrow-in-Furness. There are 24 groups of students, each exploring a different aspect of architecture, which will all come together in an exhibition on the 22nd May in the EASA HQ.
We are currently in the middle of the Manchester Art and Design Festival (MADF), which brings together architects, the creative industries, Manchester students and the public. Lectures from well-known and emerging architects such as FAT Architects will be taking place every Wednesday until the 20th May. The MSA awards exhibition celebrates new architecture in Manchester, while Futuresonic will be holding a series of mass participatory projects which encourage the public to discover the urban climate of Manchester in new and unexpected ways. The results of this can be seen in an exhibition in the CUBE gallery from the 13th May.

Poster