‘One size doesn’t fit all’: Kent School of Architecture Student Show 2022

There are many different ways of being an architect, communicates the Kent School of Architecture and Planning (KSAP) summer show – and many qualities that might enrich built environments of the future. The hook in to architecture might be thinking, drawing, writing or modelling. It might be digital, material, social purpose, climate change or talent for communication and collaboration. KSAP presents itself as a culture designed to invest students with the confidence to find out what it is that they can bring to the table.

School head Gerald Adler talks through a curriculum rooted in the humanities and designed around the warp and weft of art and science. The campus-based School is aligned with the Arts and Humanities division at the University and is rated highly for research intensity and qualit. Graphic Design, Spatial and Interior Design and Planning programmes have recently been added to the faculty.

An exhibit from Graphic Design students in fact forms a sort of gateway to the show, including a study of US illustrator Christophe Niemann – a timely reminder that incisive visual communication is critical in architecture, too. On display from first-year students are the results of a ‘Folio’ module run by artist Tim Meacham, where new students get to grips with the art of communicating architectural ideas. Folios are presented alongside an exercise on scale and an introductory group activity to construct wearable shelters – a musing, of course, on architecture’s fundamental function. Under the guidance of Rebecca Hobbs, meanwhile, second years have been focusing on housing for a Canterbury site through the specific lenses of productive landscapes and collective living.

In the school’s elongated crit space, a highly engaging showing from a third year co-ordinated by Ambrose Gillick explores the social purpose of architecture at one Ramsgate town-centre site. In consultation with community sector charities, students have invented and designed new combinations of civic amenity to animate an existing multistorey car park structure – a combination of retrofit and new build designed to spark social, cultural, ecological and economic life.

It’s a sign of the times that looming large in the students’ proposals are food banks, hostels and fragile emotional wellbeing, with some creative and clever solutions around these, as well as urban farming and townscape greening. The standout projects are ambitious in their urbanism and social enterprise as well as at building level, with evidence of sophisticated understandings of the art of moving people through space and how architecture might signal civic purpose.

MArch at KCAP presents rigorously researched propositions in an assured flow of colour-coded displays on the ground floor of the school’s formal yet human-scaled 1960s building. Reflecting the nuances of four vertical units, curation of the postgraduate show also successfully conveys a sense of collective endeavour and overlapping preoccupations. Common threads are location-specific challenges of post-industrial Britain and architecture as an agent of social value.

Strong links with the realities of how architecture actually happens are very much in evidence. The Michael Richards and Chloe Street Tabbard-led Unit 1, for example, saw students working with Medway Council and a team from HTA on a live English Heritage project to regenerate Chatham INTRA’s high street community arts venue and maker space, informing the development of wider regeneration policy and planning guidance. There’s plenty of evidence, too, of lively and original thinking developed into serious urban propositions. A regional stance was also taken by Chris Jones’ Unit 5, whose students focused on a coastal study zone stretching from the Hoo Peninsula to Thanet, taking in post-gentrified Whitstable as well as struggling Herne Bay. Several of the schemes are notable for intelligent propositions around the blue (marine) economy.

Looking further afield to the capital, a unit led by Michael Holms Coats exploring values in architecture generated a range of thoughtful and interrogative schemes for City of London sites, including a proposal to retrofit Powell and Moya’s Museum of London, currently slated for demolition. Yorgos Loizos’ Unit 4, meanwhile, with its themes of resilience and transformation, investigated architecture and place over time, producing context and heritage sensitive, socially sustainable schemes for two districts in Hackney.

One size clearly doesn’t fit all at KSAP, and students at BA and MArch level are offered the option of a ‘research through practice’ investigation in place of traditional dissertations, with some excellent results on show. At MArch level, KSAP is unique in the UK in offering a pedagogy module, which also borrows from the North American teaching assistant model.

Overall, it’s great to see a school taking an intelligent stance against the notorious limitations – and ‘iconic’ buildings – of architecture’s self-inflicted star system.