CONTINUITY IN ARCHITECTURE

The August issue of ‘Blueprint’ magazine features 50 of the Best UK Design Graduates, two of them, Sophie Corkhill and Matthew Duggan, being from the ‘Continuity in Architecture: The City, the Building, the Room’ group. The projects were intended to complement the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza in celebration of the quincentenary of Palladio’s birth. Sophie’s and Matthew’s work was selected by Nick Johnson who praised it in the following terms.

SOPHIE CORKHILL
A bold, brave plan wrapping inventively around the Palladio building. A ’stealth’ building - as much ‘this year’ as the barcode facade was last, and the sloping roofscape before it - seems to work and be an appropriate and articulate response. A believable and convincing plan with a bold yet sensitive rendering.

MATTHEW DUGGAN
In a world of architecture obsessed by itself and the veneer of stylistic appeal, this student started from a fundamentally different point of view, concentrating on the ‘feel’ of the space rather than the look. The light into, and the view out of, the space is fundamental. An antidote to so many students intent on stylistic rather than human responses to creating space.

Basilica Palladiana: Geometry studies by Sophie Corkhill, BArch student Manchester School of Architecture.

CiA Bachelor of Architecture 2007-2008. The final show.

The CiA Bachelor of Architecture Show will be in rooms 502, 503 & 504 (fifth floor!) of Manchester School of Architecture, Chatham Tower, Lower Ormond Street. The exhibition starts at Six on Friday, 13 June. We look forward to seeing you.

Faculty of Art & Design Degree Show 2008

Drawing by Alice Green

James Robertson, a Ph.D student at the Manchester School of Architecture, has been awarded a Rome Scholarship in Architecture at the British School at Rome for the 2008-09 academic year. James will be continuing his research intended to  illuminate and challenge the received wisdom about the Glasgow architect Jack Coia and the ecclesiastical work of his practice Gillespie, Kidd and Coia. James’s period in Italy will allow him to cover three particular aspects of his study in detail, namely the influence of Coia’s Italian heritage and his travels there from the 1920s onwards, the relationship between his Scottish Catholic clients and the liturgical changes promoted by the Vatican in the mid-twentieth century, and the relationship between architecture and contemporary artists between the 1920s and the 1960s. James’s studies are supervised by Eamonn Canniffe and Dr. Bill Brogden (Aberdeen University).

A virtual tour of the British School at Rome is available HERE.

A former student writes: “Loxford was a strange building in which to study architecture, its staggered brick residential tower sat above the 3 storey podium that contained the studios. There was never a connection between the students that lived in the tower and those that worked beneath. The stairwells were deliberately separated and the two groups would only meet in the latterly re-modified refectory; architecture students strung out from ‘all-nighters’, caning espressos to get them through the pending crit and 1st year sociology students arriving for breakfast at 9.55am, still sporting their pyjamas.

The studio space (pictured) holds one lasting memory, of the first day of my final year of undergraduate study. My peers had not seen each other for a year and there was the inevitable hubbub and babbling of one hundred conversations. Suddenly we were interrupted by a resonant bark of ’shut the **** up’, in an alien tone. Our new head of year was new to us and us to him, there was to be no messing about; his first utterance had seen to that. In the coming year we all got down to business.”

Anon. Former Student.

Beatrice Fasciato, Mixed-use Development, Barcelona. Mixed Media.

Ian Scullion, Detournement, Barcelona. Mixed Media

Please click here to see more of the student’s work.

De Carlo’s Il Magistero: a case study in continuity?

University of Manchester Ph. D candidate Hacer Basarir’s project concerns the conservation of walled cities and their key elements through reuse. Her research includes three case-studies, and she has just completed the fieldwork for one of them by organising a research trip to Urbino, Italy. She interviewed the relevant authorities in Urbino and carried out on-site investigations regarding the interventions by Giancarlo de Carlo, especially his famous project Il Magistero, the University of Urbino School of Education (1968-76).

Hacer’s graduate studies are supervised by Eamonn Canniffe (e.canniffe@mmu.ac.uk).

CiA students at Bachelor of Architecture Graduation 2007. Click here for more pictures.

Thomas Corrie, a recent graduate of the University of Sheffield school of Architecture has received a HIGH COMMENDATION in the President’s Medals 2006 (Link to President’s Medals site) for his dissertation ‘Treading in the Path of Others’ which was supervised by Eamonn Canniffe. Thomas, who was part of the M.Arch Studio 6 ‘In the footsteps of the Party of Beauty’ which Eamonn ran with Dominic Roberts and Robert Evans in the 2004-5 academic year designed a hotel for grand tourists on the Tiber Island in Rome and continued his interest in eighteenth century architecture with his dissertation study on Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire (pictured above), and the origins of its motifs in the ancient sites of the Roman world. Thomas’s study was funded by a travel scholarship from the West Yorkshire Society of Architects and the Sir Henry Stephenson Travel Scholarship of Sheffield University, enabling him to retrace Robert Adam’s Grand Tour in Italy and Croatia. The resulting dissertation was described by Tom Dyckhoff, the architecture critic at The Times and a member of the judging panel, as ‘a rattling good story’. Since graduation in the summer of 2006 Thomas Corrie has been working at Hopkins Architects on a project for Yale University.

The President’s Medals site includes a short movie about the dissertation, and footage of the well attended awards ceremony at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Click here for pictures of the CiA Year 5 study trip to Milan.

James Robertson has commenced doctoral research (supervised by Eamonn Canniffe) on the early architecture of Jack Coia (1898-1981) with particular reference to his churches. In this sketch of St. Peter in Chains, Ardrossan (1938) one can detect the influence of the Amsterdam School, as well as the almost expressionist work of the German architect Dominikus Bohm. Continuity in Architecture looks forward to James’s discoveries on Coia’s work and its relationship to the building programme of the Glasgow Archdiocese.

Information on the later work of the practice is available at C20 Society casework.