Norwich NR2 4SL
United Kingdom
The Norwich Architecture and Interior Design (A+I) Programme recently presented its annual exhibition at Boardman House, Norwich, from June 11–25, 2026. Now read in retrospect, the work brings into focus a year of site-based enquiry, material testing, and collective production. Drawings, models, films, and prototypes registered decisions, reversals, and negotiations shaped by specific spatial and environmental conditions.
The projects took shape through ongoing exchanges with local industries, organisations, and sites, across East Anglia’s coastal territories, agricultural systems, and heritage contexts. These were approached as active counterparts, with their own temporalities, constraints, and material logics. Design here developed through processes of alignment between situated knowledge, lived conditions, and wider environmental pressures.
Across the programme, collaboration functioned as both structure and proposition, with work developed through shared enquiries, external partnerships, and forms of practice that exceed disciplinary habit. Experimental making and narrative construction remained central, as ways of thinking through matter, sequence, and consequence.
BA (Hons) Architecture projects focused on the Suffolk coast, including Orfordness, Southwold Harbour, and Lowestoft Inner Harbour. Drawing on W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, students examined these sites through overlapping registers of erosion, memory, and environmental exposure. Fieldwork, device-making, and iterative model production informed proposals that engaged more-than-human conditions, with attention to instability and change over time.
BA (Hons) Interior Design projects investigated the interior as a condition that leaks, extends, and gathers, shaped by environmental and social forces. Working with derelict industrial sites and underused urban spaces in Norwich and along the Norfolk coast, students employed mapping, filming, drawing, and material experimentation to explore atmosphere, occupation, and change over time. The projects positioned interiors as sites where public life is rehearsed and reconfigured, supporting forms of shared use within existing structures.
MArch Architecture worked on Strange Islands, drawing on Édouard Glissant’s writings on relation and uncertainty. The studio examined infrastructures and territories shaped by movement, exchange, and displacement. Beginning with work at Stansted Airport in collaboration with Pascal + Watson Architects, students analysed the spatial and environmental implications of contemporary logistics. Each student then developed an ‘island’, defined through specific material, cultural, and political conditions, and articulated through an independent architectural proposal. These islands operated as testing grounds for relation, dependency, and dislocation.
Seen together, the work points to a programme that continues to privilege plurality and sustained enquiry. Attention is given to how spatial questions are framed, who and what participates in their formation, and how material practices carry cultural and environmental consequences. The projects engage the present through ongoing investigation and careful negotiation.
—Text by Sarah de Villiers, Claudia Morgado, Teresa Stoppani, George Themistokleous, Jason Wiggin.
Participants: Alice Gagola, Amber Dewey, Asya Milenko, Beatrice Rajah, Ben Ludlam, Bence Halasi, Brandon Lee, Çağla Doğan, Caitlin Goodwin, Chloe Mouatt, Daisy Nutley, Edward Vasiliadi, Ella Barnett, Ella Newstead, Ellie Whitcombe, Emma Johansen, Etienne Bridge, Evan Cagle, Eve Holmes, Evin Uras, Faith Braddock, George Gill-Hammond, Grace Apps, Harrison Kennedy, Hassan Solomon, Heidi Tank, Henry Kena, Ibifubara Ifie Sekibo, Isabelle Baker, Izabela Wesolowska, Jack Ketchen, Jack Lee, Jade Luxwolda, Jakob Rode-Christoffersen, Jamie Chaplin, Janina Rundberg, Jessica Crocker, Juleigha Addinall, Katie Gardiner, Keira Mombito Masiala, Lauren Kahn, Louie Paterson Dean, Madison Tveit, Maria Houlden Fernandez, Mariana Ferreira Fernandes, Martine Qvernstrøm, Maya Race, Megi Muslia, Mya Frost, Nika Zhuchenko, Olivia Palfrey, Olivia Stribbling, Omar West, Orlane Mboukou-Etoney, Phoebe Hines, Robyn Holmes, Sam Joy, Sam Smith, Shannon Willis, Summer Bailey, Tamsin Hills, Tom Whitmore, Valerija Sivacova, Vlada Averina, Will Mower.
