Head of Programme, Architecture (MA) - Beth Hughes

We started the year agitated and uneasy with the swirling mess of the world, a student cohort that urgently wanted to do better and for architecture to mean more. We then abruptly abandoned our studio, scattered across the globe and retreated to our homes, as something akin to a science-fiction plot consumed our lives. Out of this urgency something extraordinary emerged.

We have cared for one another as never before, inviting each other into our homes, inadvertently meeting family/friends/lovers/brothers/sisters and pets. This is an end-of-year unlike any other before, or perhaps, even ever again.

Out of this communal space of care – with all of us mourning the studio and each other’s company – an astonishing body of work has materialised; passionate and tender, blazing and saturated in brilliance, scorching the retina, inerasable and brave.

I feel an indescribable sense of pride and solidarity with this community, 13 ADS, over 80 staff and 176 students across first and second year. I have immense respect for the tenacity and compassion of these young graduates, and Iook forward to the world that they will shape. They are impatiently hungry to create change, knowing that it is uncertain and that the only certainty is that architecture, as we knew it, is deeply inadequate to face the challenges we have made. They know that it falls to them to reimagine and reinvent it for themselves and I have every confidence they will.

Watch-out whoever stands in their way!

For further reading, see the new online repository of graduating work: Folios from MA Architecture.

Programme Team

Beth Hughes, Mark Campbell & Thandi Loewenson, Maria Giudici, Manja van de Worp and David Burns