Year Coordinator: Mark Dorrian
Lead Tutor: Adrian Hawker

Based on Warsaw, Poland, and taking “the postsocialist city and its material prehistories” as its theme, this 2-year study involves us in thinking about the current urban condition within the former Eastern bloc.  More specifically we are particularly interested in engaging with issues related to the ‘material’ of the city, whether geological, architectural, technological or organic.  We are concerned with questions raised by the problematic endurance and disappearance of material objects; in attempts to operatively and symbolically recalibrate existing material assemblages in the postsocialist city; in the material strategies and technologies of everyday life; and in the circulation and transmigration of things. During their 2 years of study, students enrolled on the programme will develop sophisticated and theoretically-informed projects that traverse and engage the full range of architectural scales from the city to the detail.  Work in the studio is supported both by regular tutorials and reviews – attended by eminent international guests as well as the academic staff on the programme. Contributors during the 2007-2008 year have included Iñaki Abalos, Gordon Benson, Paul Carter, Catherine Ingraham, and Peter Salter.

During its first year, the study has engaged with a series of agencies and institutions in Poland including Tchorek-Bentall Foundation, WAPW (the Warsaw School of Architecture), and the National Gallery of Modern Art (the Zacheta Gallery).  The Zacheta staged a series of 3 seminars related to the programme: at the first, in November 2007, our approach to the city was discussed, while in the second and third (May/June 2008) students presented and debated their work with a public audience.  Projects from every student in the group were subsequently shown in the Zacheta exhibition ‘Another City/Another Life’ (facilitated by a British Council ‘Creative Cities’ award).  In 2009 a book of the students’ images and texts about Warsaw will be published.