Strange Places

This studio offers an opportunity for students to investigate a strange, distinctive, unique place of their choosing – somewhere so particular that architecture made there could never be like architecture made somewhere else. The choice of place is global, and there are many possibilities. However, each strange place must be somewhere that is not only spatially distinctive but which also has cultural resonances – literary, historical, filmic, material, artistic, environmental, or photographic, for example – and political resonances – including palpable inequalities or strange relationships – which can serve as prompts for design. While the places explored by the studio have been diverse, methods are shared: how to depict the strange qualities of a strange place; how to measure its particularities; how to pursue that unique and particular architecture which could only happen there. We have worked collaboratively, through conversation, debate and thoughtful drawing, sharing ideas and methods. Sites of investigation range from Baba Island in Karachi, to Clough Williams Ellis’s fantasy village of Portmeirion in Wales, to Yorkshire’s rapidly eroding Holderness Coast, to Newcastle’s imaginative geographies, to inner thought-worlds of depression.  

Studo tutor: Professor Adam Sharr