WELCOME This review celebrates the outputs and activities of the Architecture students and staff here at the Liverpool School of Art & Design. Last year we validated new versions of our programmes, restructuring modes of delivery to encourage integrated holistic teaching within two stage design modules that imbed historical, theoretical, technical and environmental support studies within enquiry-based projects. At undergraduate level, predominantly, the city of Liverpool is still used as a contextual laboratory to test concepts that have a local flavour with global implications. The postgraduate studios offer opportunities for explorations further afield. In all cases, programmatic ambitions emanate from a thorough analysis of, and intuitive response to, place. The over-arching ambition of our programmes is to create graduates with artistic flair who engage in divergent, creative and critical thought processes that are also technically skilled and grounded in the demands of the professional role of the architect. This year, we seek revalidation of our programmes from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and the Malaysian Board of Architects (LAM). We received full unconditional four-year prescription from the Architects Registration Board (ARB) in May and have visiting boards from the RIBA & LAM in June. We have continued to run a rich a varied schedule of events some of which are summarised below. In September, we hosted the second in a series of international ‘Housing Futures’ conferences titled ‘Government and Housing in a Time of Crisis: Policy, Planning, Design and Delivery’. MArch Year One studio outputs explore many of the issues discussed over those two days. In October we ran workshops abroad in Paris & Genoa, the latter forming the basis of many of the MArch Urban Design outputs this year. In January three of our BA Year 3 students won prizes in a competition to design a temporary school building for disaster relief scenarios as part of The International Finsa Award for Students of Architecture & Design. Also in January we staged our annual Architectural Symposium, this year on the theme of; ‘The Display, Exhibition & Propagation of Architecture’, with a day of presentations and debate. Later in January, we showed the outputs from the Master of Architecture studio; ‘Infrastructures’ – an exhibition of urban design ideas for Genoa and Runcorn, which will be followed with a related publication later this year. It has been a successful year for many of our staff in terms of published research, and we have included a brief summary herein. For studio teaching, our staff develop speculative work that addresses real world issues, informed by their own research but also by our associations with cultural, professional and civic institutions in this city and beyond. Such collaborations nourish the thematically focussed activities of our students. I would like to thank our student Architecture Society, for continuing to organise such a rich variety of social events, including this year’s ‘Making’ guest lecture series and a university sponsored two-day trip to Edinburgh for its members. I would also thank the guest tutors and critics that play such a vital role in enriching our studio culture. Thank you, also to our catalogue sponsors, we take pride in our links with them and their support. Finally congratulations to all our graduating students, whose work you will find within these pages, we wish them well for their own futures. It is never possible to capture within so few pages the full vibrancy of the School but I hope the contents of this document provide a taste of its creative energy. Ian Wroot, Architecture & Urban Design Programmes Leader May 2017 Liverpool John Moores University - Architecture 2017
1