The Royal College of Art has always been committed to providing a platform for multiple actors to express themselves, relate one another and build creative connections. How are these kinships made, manifested and performed daily within its laboratories of teaching and learning in London?
Last year, the RCA participated in The Convivial Laboratory ↗, developed in collaboration with Architectural Design Studio 7 – led by Lemonot – understanding the agency of conviviality ↗ as an active construct not only related to the collaboration between humans, but also the interdependencies between humans, other-than-humans, media and material objects.
This year’s exhibition will expand on specific convivial dynamics and the construction of kinships inside some of RCA’s different departments. A curated selection of students’ work will highlight the intersections between design and research practices within the nuanced ecosystems of the College – identifying genealogies and trajectories at multiple scales: the planet, the city, the architecture, the object and the body.
Media Studies
Situated in the Royal College of Art School of Architecture and welcoming a student cohort from across multiple spatial design disciplines, Media Studies provides a rigorous and granular examination of historical and contemporary methodologies of media research and practice. Together, we create projects that sit between, outside, or in opposition to disciplines, focusing on media as a primary site and material of and for experimentation. We investigate the emancipatory possibilities of media. We acknowledge media’s complicity in processes of oppression, colonisation, and imperialism, and we work to challenge and contest these realities.
Interior Design
The MA in Interior Design explores emergent ideas and issues concerning research and practice that explores the diversity of human occupation in numerous environments, extending in scale from the room to the city. We encourage the view that the interior is an interface between its occupants and the built environment, and it supports the notion that the interior is an agent for social change. Interior design values speculation, analysis and rigor and challenges participants to formulate their own rigorous and critically independent responses to these fundamental concerns. This is undertaken via the three superplatforms; superREUSE, superMATTER, superFUTURES. All prioritise the reworking of existing structures, involve the construction and communication of particular spatial identities and emphasise speculative thinking with regards to space, objects, materials and people.
City Design
The MA in City design is more than just designing physical structures. It’s about how we live, work, and move together. It’s about life as it unfolds, in relation. Conviviality cannot be separated from active and material solidarity if it is to truly cross borders and bodies. We must push, host and rehearse a liberated future to make kin beyond blood or circumstance. Above all, it is about the responsibility, that at a time of multiple crises, we need to design not just practical responses or resistance but to imagine the social spatial contracts, support systems that make emancipation possible.
Our studios, entitled Border Environments and Underground Palestine, work to evidence and materialise the fundamental, intertwined spatial injustices of our time: colonialism, dispossession, extraction, and enclosure. Working closely with activist organisations and radical institutions on the ground across Palestinian lands and along migrant passageways of Europe, every encounter and every project is rooted in solidarity and collective liberation, be this through infrastructural, cultural, geological, and/or speculative interventions. This is anchored by our integrated theory module on Embodied Knowledge and Urban Struggle, which explores the ways in which disciplinary precision, political praxis and methodological rigour can orient design towards realistic but emancipatory ends, mindful that ‘radical is always relative to a context’.
The material shown here – from audio essays to seed-banks, digital archives, unreal engine alternate worlds, to navigational devices, consider the urban landscapes as a site of investigation, contestation, and potential that is both limited and expansive.
Environmental Architecture
The MA in Environmental Architecture explores the intersection of architecture, ecology, and radical politics. The program critically examines the ethical and political potentials of environmental architecture, particularly in relation to land, resource extraction and climate justice. Working in collaboration with organisations in the frontlines of environmental struggles our studios explore modes of coexistence between humans and the environment in a damaged planet, considering relations of kinship with soils, plants, animals and bacteria but also with more-than human entities, ranging from mountains to rivers, ancestors and spirits.
Design Practice
Students and staff of the MArch Design Practice face head on the reality that the construction industry is the largest single contributor to climate catastrophe. This has radicalised us, demanding an urgent and imaginative pedagogy to nurture spatial practices of just transition; the very serious work of designing alternative forms of relation, acts of kinship with the lives and places on our planet exploited by building processes. We refuse to be driven to despair.
Through interrogating materials, their conditions of extraction and opportunities for restitution and reuse, and analysing carbon’s hold on our economies, and the forms of social and spatial organisation we have inherited as a result, we build knowledge of how post-carbon futures can be collectively made. By forensically analysing catastrophe, we unpack the structural dimensions of inequality, identifying policy as a site of progressive spatial practice in dialogue with climate justice movements. We find inspiration in capital’s shadow, where inconvenient, discarded matter, people and places refuse to be rendered as waste, and instead craft alternative relations of repair. By imagining, giving form, legitimacy and legibility to life after carbon, informed by those already forging those ruptures today, we work to build flourishing worlds for all.