OLIVER HOUCHELL

Masters in Engineering & Architectural Design MEng

Design | Make | Live - Studio 4: Extraordinary Bodies

Studio 4 teaches integrated design in Year 1 of UCL’s Masters in Engineering & Architectural Design Programme, an innovative new interdisciplinary 4-year integrated masters delivered by The Bartlett School of Architecture (BSA) in partnership with the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering (CEGE) and the UCL Institute of Environmental Design Engineering (IEDE). The studio’s distinct pedagogy explores ideas about making through the related trans-disciplinary fields of art, theatre, film and performance.

Studio 4’s award-winning work is concerned with the space between things, invisible structures, objects with agency, and the effects that performative actions have on our experience of familiar environments. Over the past 5 years Studio 4 has explored the interstitial layers between our skin and the environment beyond it; the spaces, objects and rituals through which we define our activities and perform our everyday lives, our site the unseen space between our bodies and the material world around us.  The anthropocentric investigations that have characterised the studio’s research to date have used the non-places of super-modernity such as rail and underground infrastructure, shopping malls and airports to reveal new, nuanced possibilities for architectural experience which have placed people first and foremost in our imaginations.