The Spring and Summer project moves forward from the micro-town-issues explored over the autumn, to a macro-issue that students address through the integration of landscape, public space and a building, all designed with detailed considerations of human experience, circulation, internal spaces, tectonics and materiality. The purpose of this project is to explore our relationship with water through architecture. In our daily urban experience, we have a utilitarian disregard for water, it pours out of the tap and drains away, always hidden in pipes. We take it for granted until we are left without it when infrastructure collapses or when it floods our built environments in mostly preventable natural disasters. In the midst of a global climate crisis, we must acknowledge that water is the origin of all life on earth, it connects all the cells in our human bodies and all bodies of living creatures on this planet to rivers, oceans, rain, glaciers, clouds, fog… we all are bodies of water. County Lock peninsula in Reading town centre is the ideal location to create a place for renewing our reverence and fascination for water as a human experience defined by a caretaker, which will inform the design of a new building and its surrounding landscape and public spaces.

Module convenor: Penélope Plaza

Design Studio Team: Amy Butt, Zoe Berman, Darren Bray, Juan Leiva, Vsevolod Kondratiev-Popov, Penélope Plaza, Graham Thompson

External Collaborators: Demian Erbar (Erbar Mattes), Fabrizio Matillana (ACG Architects), Agata Slusarek, (ACG Architects), Ashley Kendall (ACG Architects), Emily Yeung (AHMM), Yacira Blanco (BAM Design), Ceri Williams

Internal Collaborators: Sayan Skandarajah, John Harding, Carolina Vasilikou, Stephen Gage, Michelle Tomlinson