Architecture Level 4

Experiencing Architecture
When our first year students arrive at Brighton, they bring a personal history; a wealth of experience; of being in buildings, of having lived amongst other peoples’ architectural decisions. Positive or negative these experiences have informed their understanding of the urban world, and their expectations of the built environment, and the way they will think about designing the world anew and although students’ lives have been spent amongst the constructed world it is rare for a new student to have recognised and critically considered the value of their own experience through the lens of architecture.

This is where we start, in the first term, isolating spatial experience; this year in the new room that each student occupies. Each student constructs a 1:1 installation, with a view to shift the perception of their new surroundings, to change and challenge the embodied experience of living in the space.  This project offers an introduction to design as an explorative and iterative process, we adopt a ‘fail better’ strategy – making and making again, adjusting, altering, sometimes with a specific aim, often with serendipitous discovery along the way. This ‘Experiencing Architecture’ module marks the beginning of controlling the experience available to the occupant, choreographing their movement around their room and manipulating the record of that experience. Students are challenged through the medium of film to transport the viewer to another place some of which you can see in the Work In Progress exhibition