27 July 2022 · By Jon Astbury

Jon Astbury reviews the University of Cambridge’s end-of-year student show. Images supplied by ArcSoc

Work in the ArcSoc (University of Cambridge architecture society) Cambridge Show has always had an affinity for bringing new life to neglected and abandoned sites, with its location – once again this year London South Bank’s decaying Barge House – being a case in point. Visiting on the Friday after the private view there was a morning-after feel to proceedings, enlivened by a backdrop of the in-progress demolition of the opposite building, a fate that most of this work reinforced as one of the worst possible imaginable.

Assessing the often-bleak realities of several post-Covid landscapes across the UK, almost every project on display tackled an ageing shopping centre, new town, spent quarry, or otherwise utterly exhausted urban landscape. Figures such as Patrick Keiller, who has historically had a close association with the school, loomed large, with much talk of modern life’s banal, mundane, and dysfunctional spaces and how they might be better used or repurposed.

It all had an ambition captured by a quote from Situationist Raoul Vaneigem (later quoted in Keiller’s Robinson in Space): ‘I can always see how beautiful anything could be if only I could change it.’

There was, thankfully, also some acknowledgement of the second, more pessimistic half of this quote: ‘In practically every case there is nothing I can really do.’ But, at what is consistently one of the country’s best architecture schools, they’ll certainly take a good run at it.

With work organised in reverse chronological order across three floors, Year 3 Studio 1 – Build Nothing – was an apt introduction to these themes. With a focus on how we can make what already exists ‘work better for us’ through ‘adaptation, optimisation and responsiveness’, responses included Fern Acheson’s The Playrooms of Venice, which proposed piggybacking existing walls in the tourism-besieged city with wooden balcony structures accommodating events and theatrical residencies.

In Studio 2 – Spare Parts – the urban was swapped for the scarred Isle of Portland, with projects considering how this landscape, shaped by industry, could be home to new forms of inhabitation. Projects based on in-depth topographical analysis – with some particularly outstanding models – considered architecture at the scale of a geographical conception of deep time rather than the day-to-day, including considerations, such as in Andrew Hynes’ ‘Inhabiting Earth’, for the life of animals and plants.

The continuity between this Year 3 work and the work of Year 2 was remarkable, with less structural or material resolution but just as much exploration of vast, knotty questions and sites.

Studio 4 – Modern Life is Rubbish – considered alternatives to the imminent redevelopment of The Grafton, a 1980s shopping centre in Cambridge. Cody Knight’s proposal was one of architecturally facilitated political resistance, using the fact that protest has not been criminalised in vacant buildings to create a ‘platform of resistance’, while Shailaja Maheetharan’s project presented the transformation of the centre into a ‘homelessness intervention hub’.

Another shopping centre, this time the former John Lewis store in Sheffield, closed due to the Covid pandemic, was the focus of Year 2, Studio 2’s From Now On theme. With three phases of Occupy, Overlay and Transform, students first worked at the scale of a single public event activating the vacant building before considering its wholesale transformation.

Studio 1 headed to Bermondsey to ‘revel in the small, human-scale, everyday exchanges which hold the Southwark District’s communities together’, using these observations to develop their own briefs.

In the Year 1 section on the top floor things are a little more difficult to intuit, with a series of pavilions made during the final term exhibiting the work of the previous two, which involved considerations of architectural space in film and the design of environmental and agricultural centres that is somewhat lost among a cluster of small wooden structures.

The past two years may have seen focus shift towards the local and small-scale, but the aspirations here for what architecture can do are no less world-changing. It would be too easy to be cynical and call this ‘solutionism’, but it nonetheless raises some of the usual issues. In the precious little space offered by a graduate show, the hugely complex political and social contexts many of these projects are grappling with was frequently absent, in favour of some designed ‘thing’ itself (save for a room devoted to the Master’s in Architecture and Urban Design thesis projects as well as a few walls of dissertation abstracts).

While often rendered beautifully and realistically, it is perhaps worth considering that if the role of the architect is to be reassessed in the many ways proposed here, how might we also change the way in which we communicate and document the results to be a little rougher around the edges, open to the mess of discussion and process?

Jon Astbury is assistant curator in architecture and design at the Barbican Centre

Tags Student shows 2022 University of Cambridge

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