The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings
About the Kent School of Architecture and Planning
Location Canterbury • Courses BA (Hons) Architecture, MArch • Head of school Gerry Adler • Full-time tutors 18 • Part-time tutors 26 • Students 480 • Staff to student ratio 1:12
Undergraduate
Izem Celick
Course BA (Hons) Architecture
Module AR558 Architectural Design
Project Routes to Root
Project description This proposal is designed for Kent Refugee Action Network, an independent charity which provides support to asylum-seekers and refugees, including minors. The project, on the site of the bus station in the heart of Canterbury, consists of 1,000m2 of blocks along the town’s 14th-century historic wall, accommodating lecture halls, classrooms and workshops to offer diverse activities for people of all ages and backgrounds. This arrangement reflects the lengthy and difficult journeys (routes) that many refugees have had to go through to reach a place where they can settle down and take ‘root’.
Tutor citation The proposal is unpretentious yet brave and sophisticated in using qualities of lightness, transparency and adaptability to organise the complex and dense programme and in exposing the characteristic wall as a design feature. These qualities are reflected throughout the graphic representation of the design. Hooman Talebi
Postgraduate
James Hatton
Course MArch
Unit 1: Extra-terrestrial – Dungeness Headland, Kent; and Rye, East Sussex
Project Hawhurst Inc.
Project description The focus of Hawhurst Inc. was to question the future of heritage preservation against advances in building technology and to form a compromise. The scheme acts as a facility on the border of Rye’s preservation area to restore its buildings while updating their carbon efficiency. A metaphor derived from the town’s historical smuggling activities is used – parts being replaced are ‘smuggled’ out as architectural salvage. The outcome is actually two buildings: one updated and functional on the original site and one recreated off-site as an artefact from the original parts. The outcome questions whether there can still be heritage when modern technology is incorporated into an existing building.
Tutor citation James’s eponymous thesis project draws its name from the infamous smuggling gang that established a court at the Mermaid Inn, perhaps Rye’s most historic building, certainly its most haunted, which controlled illicit import/export from this ancient town in the Middle Ages. Its premise is that there is an increasing tension between architectural history/heritage, and the future imperative for a net zero carbon built environment. A ballet of manufacture and distribution finds a postmodern reciprocation in the illicit and secretive sale to offshore customers of the salvaged architectural heritage that results. Michael Richards, Manolo Guerci, Philip Baston and Ben Godber
