Studio BA 06

Studio 06 will continue our investigation this year in the urban context, exploring issues relating to the design and use of public space. We will be working in and around Valley Gardens, Brighton’s most significant public open space and will maintain the studio trajectory and lines of enquiry from previous years’ work in Pool Valley and Rottingdean.

Despite an evocative name, Valley Gardens is currently a diminished space located in the heart of the city, serving as little more than a chain of municipal traffic islands connecting the A23 corridor past the Royal Pavilion to Brighton’s seafront. Running approximately north-south through the centre of Brighton, Valley Gardens may be one of the last remaining stretches of what was once the common land over which the city was built. Its significance as ‘communal land’ through history means that Brighton’s ‘green mile’ has supported a multitude of uses relating to its former attributes both as undeveloped marshy commons and gentrified promenade.

Studio 06 will respond to Brighton and Hove City Council’s £18M regeneration project currently underway for the ‘green mile’, exploring ways in which infrastructural changes can provide a catalyst for re-imagining the design of public realm architecture in sensitive locations.

As a starting point, students will develop an understanding of place through investigatory drawings which reveal distinct local conditions of a chosen part of the site and lead to the design of a portable instrument which interfaces between its user and the landscape. Building on these investigations, they will conclude term 1 with a spatial proposition for a temporary ‘common’ room, as a competition entry for a live-build project in support of a funded research project into urban commons. Working this into a major design project in terms 2 and 3, students will expand their thinking to engage with wider concerns in relation to the nature and extent of the contemporary commons and its potential to exist as an expanded arena of community, operating beyond traditional, physical boundaries.

Studio tutors

2018 - 2019	Graham Perring	Cristian Olmos Herrera
2017 - 2018	Graham Perring	Sarah Stevens
2016 - 2017	Graham Perring	Andrew Paine
2015 - 2016	Graham Perring	Andrew Paine
2014 - 2015	Graham Perring	Andrew Paine
2013 - 2014	Kate Cheyne	Graham Perring
2012 - 2013	Kate Cheyne	Catrina Stewart
2011 - 2012	Carl Turner	Kate Cheyne
2019 - 2020	Graham Perring	Andrew Paine and Cristian Olmos Herrera