The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings
About the Department of Architecture
Location Cambridge • Courses BA (Hons) Architecture, MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (To be replaced by MArch in October 2022), MSt Architect Apprenticeship (Level 7) • Head of school James Campbell • Full-time tutors 14 • Part-time tutors 28 • Students 292 • Staff to student ratio 1:7
Undergraduate
James Harrison
Course BA (Hons) Architecture
Studio/unit brief Spare Parts (Studio 2)
Project title Archipelago
Project description Isle of Portland, Dorset, has a disjointed topography. Easton, its central settlement, exemplifies this and quarries to the west of the town are transiting from industry to landscape, becoming fragmented. The project presents new possibilities. Instead of expanding the town, the proposal looks to inhabit the landscape with a housing development with a school and playparks extending from the main road into the disused Tout Quarry. Both school and playgrounds are founded on platforms created by re-interpreting existing stone retaining walls. On these sit delicate columns supporting a roof whose irregular grid of beams is concealed above a ply soffit.
Tutor citation At a time when so much about architecture is in question, this project endeavours to get to the heart of what a building could be, by understanding architecture as the making of a topography: a constellation of places for inhabitation, open as to use and with the potential to evolve through time. Freddie Phillipson
Postgraduate
Yousuf Khalil
Course MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design
Studio/unit brief N/A
Project title Urban Canopies
Project description This project investigates the intersections between British colonialism, bureaucracy and poverty in Pakistan’s railway communities. Inherited colonial bureaucracy and its impact on land management and resources is presented as a persistent factor in consigning working-class communities to live in squalor. A series of interventions is proposed to counter this in Lahore, with stringent zoning to allow the revival of the land. The former British locomotive repair facility Mughalpura Workshops are reimagined, embracing the informality of everyday life and creating the fabric to connect communities.
Tutor citation Yousuf’s project proposes a series of simply constructed steel structures placed across a vast former railway site in central Lahore, Pakistan. The scheme deftly uses architecture to navigate the politics and bureaucracy of this post-colonial site in a way that releases its potential to support local communities. Aram Mooradian