GradFest 25
Norwich University of the Arts graduation exhibition
Norwich NR2 4SL
United Kingdom
Architecture and interior design involve many agents, who are multiple and diverse, human and non-human, globally affecting while acting locally. Architects and interior designers operate in collectives, aggregates, cooperatives and fluid multidisciplinary groups, with forms of plural agency that are heterogeneous, mutable and adaptive.
In a time of social transformations and planetary fragility the Norwich Architecture and Interior Design (A+I) Program is committed to forms of critical spatial practice in which designers are also citizens and activists with environmental responsibilities and agendas.
Norwich A+I is international in background and outlook, and locally engaged, working in a region that is at the forefront of the climate crisis and resource production, the legacy of heritage and its future transformations, and material research and experimentation. To address these issues, our work develops through experimental making and critical storytelling, and culminates in research-led, socially embedded design proposals. From the shared first-year studio to the postgraduate projects, we foster multidisciplinary collaborations and host transdisciplinary conversations.
Our public lectures, the A+I Studio Talks, take off from architecture and interior design, to enable conversations, provoke intersections, and germinate collaborations beyond disciplinary boundaries and across specialisms. This year’s events have also included the Architectural Humanities Research Association international conference Body Matters, the research project and symposium FibreBroads in collaboration with the Broads Authority, and the Spatial Ecologies summer school.
Our courses collaborate in ways that reflect today’s complex and ever changing professional and global scenarios; the diversity of our teams and collaborators mirrors the complexity required by today’s forms of environmental agency. We are grounded in East Anglia’s coastal environments, heritage settings and agrotech transformations, and we are globally oriented, as our work responds to today’s spatial urgencies with strategies of resistance, renewal, and care.
BA (Hons) Architecture final projects reimagined the Suffolk coast through the lens of W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (1995). Reinterpreting Sebald’s elliptical walks, students explored the entanglements between landscape and posthuman imaginaries. The shifting terrains of Dunwich, Orford Ness, and Southwold Harbour–with their dunes, marshes, eroding cliffs, fishing ports, built ruins, and a decommissioned military testing site–became points of departure for critical inquiry. Projects ranged from reinhabiting a former ballistic laboratory to speculative responses to the existential threats posed by rising sea-levels and unstable coastlines. Through large-scale site drawings and inhabitable pods, students mediated between literary fragments and lived experience. Informed by social theory and posthuman literature, the projects articulated the interdependencies between local ecological degradation and broader planetary concerns. The work interrogates the impact of climate breakdown, social inequality, and multispecies vulnerability, critically asking what forms of architecture might emerge in response. Embracing the Sebaldian non-linear, layered narrative mode, students wove together reality and speculation, critical theory and personal encounter. Their designs propose spaces of resistance and care, posing the question: how might architecture resist and reimagine systems of exclusion, erasure, and neglect?
Interior Design projects have explored how interior space can be reimagined to respond to both global and local challenges. Students have reused derelict industrial sites and neglected urban areas, transforming them into active spaces that address shifting demographics and foster social wellbeing. Building on their individual interests, the students have integrated the complexities of interiority, sustainability, and materiality into their designs, proposing responses that are materially sensitive, resource aware, socially embedded, and future-facing. The projects include proposals for education, retail, workshops, and rejuvenation spaces, with the aim to revive the latent potential of their chosen sites. Students explored adaptive lighting systems, responsive furniture, kinetic facades, and experiential technologies that used movement and interaction to transform the perception and habitation of the interior.
—Text by Teresa Stoppani, Sarah de Villiers, George Themistokleous, Jason Wiggin
Participating artists: Adam Krupa, Adelina Hadzhieva, Aimee Robinson, Amber O'Donoghue, Anya Williams, Asmita Chakraborty, Bethany Dolon, Bex Sutton, Charlotte Bennett, Ciara Preston, Emily Beard, Eva Shearwood, Faith Byrne, Felix Ford, Greta Marchenko, Harry Monument, Hekla Aradóttir, Ilayda Oguz, Imogen Milroy, Isaac Zipfel, Isabella Dawson, Ishika Shah, Jacob Spinks, James Mulgrove-Richards, Jasmine Chivers, Jasmine Kirui, Jess Moulson, Jessica Crocker, Jihanne Boujdi, Joe Slack, Jordan Jewell, Leo Coles, Leon Thornton, Lili Frost, Makenzie Hanslip, Maram Al-Rikabi, Marcelo Moerdyk, Natalie Perez Rodriguez, Neve Muggleton, Rhea Gathercole, Rhys Trotman, Ritchie Moore, Rohan Ganesh, Ruby Sawyer, Ryan Bonner, Ryder Fenlon, Shannon Willis, Silvana Ilie, Sophia Henley, Theodore Galvin, Tom Ashmore, Tracey Lin
