2nd Year Projects

The purpose of Design Studio B is to broaden the student focus from ‘Identity’ to ‘Community’; to offer insights into how architecture engages with facilitates, respects and sometimes frustrates the disparate voices, needs and expectations of different communities. The year concludes with the project Exclusion / Inclusion in the City where students are asked to explore how architecture can create opportunities for a more civic, self-regulating and community asset-based approach, to create space with a focus on continuous learning and independent growth.

The brief asks students to interrogate the library building typology and reinvent its physical space in order to support and empower the community as a place of ‘connection’ rather than just ‘collection’, to facilitate diverse interactions and acceptance of inclusion through spatial, physical and cultural layers of activity. Students are invited to speculate on the future role of the library as an ex-exclusive institution and a neo-inclusive hub, re-imagining it as a space for exchange, a generator of thoughts and ideologies. The students have a choice of sites in Liverpool and should include an enterprise and public realm element as part of their propositions.