Ateliers.
Each year, our final year architecture designers join a specific atelier in support of their interests and ambitions. The below explanations discuss the 2025 atelier options, and the ways that they have been explored.
Atelier 01:
SITOPIA: Feeding our future
Introduction:
Sitopia, derived from the Greek sitos (food) and topos (place), describes the yet often overlooked ways in which food structures human life, shaping bodies, homes, cities, cultures, economies, values, and emotional worlds. Conceived by architect and researcher Carolyn Steel, the concept recognises food as a central organising force in society rather than a background commodity. Steel argues that while a perfect “utopia” is unattainable, Sitopian thinking offers a realistic pathway towards a more just, healthy, and sustainable world by using food as a guiding principle. Contemporary food crises, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and geopolitical conflict, reveal how deeply food systems are entangled with social, environmental, political, and economic conditions. Within Atelier 01, food is explored as a spatial, social, and ethical agent: shaping places from the kitchen table to the city, fostering community and belonging, influencing health and wellbeing, and informing architectural practice through locally grounded design.
Studio Tutors:
Annie Duquemin
Jack Whitehead
The Project:
Beginning with a selected item of food produce, this project undertakes a detailed investigation of its full lifecycle, from cultivation and harvest through processing, distribution, culinary use, consumption, and waste management. Food produce is understood here as fresh, largely unprocessed, plant-based products, such as fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, herbs, nuts, seeds, and honey. This research will be documented through analytical drawings, diagrams, and models, which will directly inform the development of an architectural concept, programme, and site strategy. Using Sitopian ideals as a framework, the project challenges students to design a civic “food-place” for the future of Newark-on-Trent, in which food and place are central organising principles. The proposed building must clearly articulate its operational processes from growing to eating, and from public to back-of-house while integrating appropriate spatial arrangements, materials, and environmental strategies. The outcome may combine multiple food-related and non-food-related functions to address issues such as food production, health, culture, or sustainability.
Atelier 02:
Urban Monastery:
A Sanctuary of Reflection
Introduction:
Rapid global population growth and accelerating urbanisation present critical challenges for architectural and urban design. United Nations projections indicate that by 2050 nearly 68% of the world’s population will reside in urban areas, intensifying pressures on the built environment and the quality of urban life. In this context, architects bear increasing responsibility for shaping spaces that balance the vitality of cities with opportunities for rest, reflection, and belonging. Contemporary urban conditions, characterised by constant mobility and uncertainty described by Bauman as “liquid modernity”, often erode stable social structures and collective identity. Against this backdrop, the Urban Monastery is proposed as a contemporary architectural response that reinterprets historical monastic principles of congregation, reflection, craftsmanship, knowledge, and spirituality. Traditionally, monasteries functioned as centres of learning, health, production, and spiritual belonging within self-sufficient architectural complexes. Reimagined for the twenty-first century, the Urban Monastery offers a spatial framework for slowing the pace of urban life, fostering contemplation, cultivating community, and integrating nature, craftsmanship, and spiritual inquiry into the contemporary city.
Studio Tutors:
Gabor Gallov
Ben Harris-Hutton
The Project:
In this project, students designed an URBAN MONASTERY for Newark, that served as a sanctuary of reflection. They challenged the traditional notion of a monastery as a religious building and thought about it as a place for congregation, with a particular focus on reflection, knowledge, craftsmanship or spirituality. The brief was flexible, allowing students to develop their own interests, but projects had to include key monastic elements, be sustainable, and use both indoor and outdoor spaces.
Atelier 03:
Resonant Memories: Echoes of the Past, Harmonics of Renewal
Introduction:
Music is widely understood as a universal form of expression that predates spoken language, emerging through rhythm, tone, and melody as a means of communication, social bonding, and emotional regulation. As a structured interplay of pattern, expectation, and surprise, music sharpens cognitive capacities such as memory and timing, while simultaneously dissolving boundaries between the individual and the collective. Architecture shares these qualities as a spatial art form, surrounding the body and shaping atmosphere through sensory engagement to elicit emotional responses. Both music and architecture have the capacity to communicate where words fall short, evoking memory, identity, and shared experience. Research demonstrates music’s powerful role in triggering memories, particularly among individuals affected by dementia, highlighting its therapeutic potential. Similarly, buildings accumulate layers of memory over time, connecting past and present through adaptive reuse. This atelier explores the symbiotic relationship between music, architecture, and place, investigating how sound, heritage, and sustainable reuse can reinvigorate Newark’s identity and wellbeing.
Studio Tutors:
Marisela Mendoza
James Foskett
The Project:
This project begins with the selection of a piece of music that holds personal significance and is closely connected to the author’s sense of identity. Through research into its genre, cultural context, instrumentation, and, where applicable, compositional structure, the music becomes both an analytical and emotional point of departure. Personal responses to the music are explored through conceptual drawings, models, installations, or creative sound-based outputs, culminating in a single “Archi-Music” image that synthesises musical structure and emotional resonance. This investigation is situated within the wider musical heritage of Newark, including its history of musical instrument making, live performance venues, and contemporary musical culture. Informed by this layered research, the project proposes a building for music, memory, and healing that engages with adaptive reuse and the existing urban fabric. The architecture is conceived as a multisensory environment where music mediates memory, wellbeing, and collective experience, integrating spatial, environmental, and programmatic considerations derived from both personal and contextual narratives.