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