Online exhibition showcases top work in progress from architecture and design students

The digital exhibition features both undergraduate and postgraduate creations, and the range of work encompasses film, model and prototype making, collage, installation, digital fabrication, photography, and both digital and hand drawing. Many students have responded to environmental, diversity and pandemic related issues to produce everything from 1:1 drawings on bedroom walls to wearable gadgets.

With lockdown making in-person physical shows impossible, this digital exhibition enables students to share work with both their peers and the vast online audience – as well as revealing how architecture and design students have responded to the changes brought about by the pandemic in terms of architectural/design practice and the wider world around.

'1:1 Perspective section tape drawing on my bedroom wall' by Edmund Morgan

“Our new Integrated Foundation Year course has produced some amazing work in the short time they have been with us,” said Sarah Lord, Project Manager in the school. “But innovation across all the courses, in the face of adversity, cannot be kept at bay!”

In addition to the broader showcasing of work, several awards were handed out to individual students in recognition of outstanding work in specific categories.

The award for Best Photograph went to Architecture BA(Hons) student Edmund Morgan for '1:1 Perspective section tape drawing on my bedroom wall'. Category judge Claire Hoskin (Photography Technical Demonstrator) said: “Morgan’s photograph playfully and wittily records his project and is a self-portrait of its maker. Despite the scale and ambition of the drawing itself the image has a faintly surreal quality caused by the exterior appearing within the interior. The presence of the contrastingly bemused and relaxed subjects in the foreground adds to this and the humour of the image.”

The Best Model award went to Interior Architecture BA(Hons) student Eojin Jo. In a nod to our increasingly digital times, judge Pete Marsh picked out the video element of her submission for the way it “makes you feel and understand the seemingly contradictory sensations of ‘being seen’, ‘not being seen’, and ‘transparency’. The illusion of people watching you, always walking away as you move through the model, adds to the intended narrative of surveillance.”

The work of Undine Evalde - Architecture BA(Hons) level 4 – impressed several judges in winning the Best Installation Award for a paper-based work that sought to defy gravity in interesting ways, while the Best Environmentally Conscious Project went to Mungo Chambers, studying Product Design BSc/BA(Hons). The Best Drawing Award, meanwhile, went to Enzo Falzone, whose work was praised by judge Ted Randall for its “wonderful sense of human perspective over vast industrial hardscape.”