The Foundation course is a one-year introduction to an art- and design-based education. It allows students to develop their conceptual ideas through a wide range of media and creative disciplines. Students are taught in an intimate, studio-based environment and work on both individual and group projects. By drawing upon a number of pedagogical practices, experienced tutors and visiting practitioners, the Foundation offers a unique cross-disciplinary education within the context of an architectural school.
Point, Line, Plane, Terrain… Domain
We are the points. We introduced ourselves through our first image, using the personal to suggest the abstract and mark our start. We fictionalised our identities through text and represented ourselves as memories of cities fused or as scientists conducting experiments. We then sought out objects in flea markets in order to document, dissect, reproduce, dissolve and reconstruct them in a process that re-imagined their functions and altered their uses. We toured Rome and drew lines of documented experience that cross-referenced history, politics and art movements – describing sunrise at the Ponte Sisto by tracking the starlings that burst from the trees to flood the morning sky, or steeping ourselves in the baroque by playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor inside Santa Maria della Vittoria during the late afternoon. We examined our bodies and their movements and constructed garments that acted as the primary interface with our surroundings. We gathered our thoughts to create a one-minute vignette of moving images, which we projected against a plane in the AA to tell a small fragment of a much larger narrative. Finally, we experimented at 1:1 in the forest of Hooke Park, where we indentified our individual domains and marked out the territories for our last series of experiments that concluded our year and introduced us to our future.
Foundation Director
Saskia Lewis
Studio Master
Takako Hasegawa
Tutors
Umberto Bellardi Ricci
Taneli Mansikkamaki
Critics and Consultants
Leith Adjina
Vasiliki Antonopoulou
Sue Barr
Andre Baugh
Pascale Berthier
Mitch Birne
Shumi Bose
Mark Campbell
Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange
Kleopatra Chelmi
Fenella Collingridge
Charlie Corry Wright
Georgie Corry Wright
Alison Crawshaw
Corinna Dean
Henderson Downing
Trevor Flynn
Raluca Grada
Juliet Haysom
Bettina John
Romina Karaminea
Alexander Laing
Antoni Malinowski
Clare McDonald
Flora McLean
Sara Muzio
Joel Newman
Cher Potter
Brian Sayers
Alex Schwader
Trys Smith
Natasha Staples
Brett Steele
Sylvie Taher
Manijeh Verghese
Antonin Hautefort
Throughout the year, we acquired new skills regarding how to combine different media from photography to film making, model making ... We have looked at the body to make a garment, we were invited to look at the relationship between city and nature at Hooke Park or at the lay out of a city itself at Rome.
For the last two months, I have tried to stream all these new skills into my own project. Initially on the work on light and shadows that I tried to experiment playing around camouflage. This led me to the idea of illusion on texture and optical illusions. I then realised that curves can be created using tangents. Starting from a drawing I transposed the idea using thread into a model. I then experimented the concept first within a site in a forrest, finally within a site in London.
One of the main interest in this last piece of work was the relationship between a building and his direct environment. In other words, how the shape of a structure can be specific to his environment. Using the specificities of my site in London, I decided to create a space for remembrance, contemplation, escape. The threads became partitions, a bench made out of threads allows people to sit as if they were sitting on a tree branch.