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
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Emma Jurczynski
My initial line of inquiry was about dance. Recently I had taken a break from dancing after fifteen years. I explored the idea of something being very personal to me. Through a series of different experiments, I investigated key features of dance, the body and balance. I explored ways that I could distort the body by manually manipulating images but also through offsetting the balance of the body. The idea of balance was an interesting concept because I focused on what it is like to lose your balance, it was the opposite of having to find my balance and hold it for long periods of time which I was taught to do during my dance training.
I moved away from the body and began observing the space that it occupies. I had a stained glass window as an object to provoke thought for one of my projects. I cleaned it and held the dirt/history of the window on a t-shirt. I labeled the spots of dirt that correspond to the window panes that the dirt came from. I combined the the ideas of a window as being an observatory place and documenting the past. This lead me to investigate different ways to record space. I introduced a linear narrative to the space that I was observing which would immediately become something that happened in the past. The narrative remained documenting observations and dialogue that had previously existed in a space.