Critical and Contextual Studies

Overall Winner, Best Dissertation

‘There are events in history for which humans are forced to interrupt their activity. In the present moment, an event is affecting humanity as whole forcing it to reconsider the very ability on which man has based its entire existence: movement. A virulent and invisible agent is forcing humans to stillness, making them behave almost like vegetal beings. That is to say, living, communicating and observing within the dimension of the invisible. Unexpectedly, the rather abstract notion of latency becomes a tangible physical condition. Through this experience, to look at the plants is to see potential actors of latent images. Avoiding any botanical interpretation of the subject, latency is photographically framed to the simple and humble form of a blade of grass. The one that grows both in an open field or through the cracks of the asphalt, both in freedom or in confinement.’

Winner, Best Dissertation, Architecture

‘Gino said it numerous times, ‘there is not a necessity to obscure our work with nothing that is unknown to nature. The less you do, the happier your herd would beʼ. … How can the currently opaque splendour of pastoral prophecy survive the threshold of indifference between the modern industrial production — a sphere demanding for a quick quantitative approach — and an immemorial mass of skills and techniques?’

Does this government want to create individuals who learn in a robot like form in order to pass exams with little to no experience of the outside world? Or should schools be producing well rounded individuals? Whom have basic life skills and are well equipped for adult life?"

‘… When experiencing loss, things are the exact measure of what we are left with of someone we loved. Things however, doesn’t sum up the complexities these objects carries. Clothes in particular, are dense with the physical tactile intimate trace of those who owned them. Their history and the moments in which it crossed our paths, are witnessed by clothes. The construction of memories and a cohesive, although evolving, identity, sees objects and textiles as central protagonists, companions of our everyday. When intersected with loss and mourning, the consumption of these fashion identities slows down and becomes more aware of the importance of hyper-valuing what might not look updated or trendy, but that carries a real emotional value, far more powerful than the “next new thing” …’

Twelve miles north of Glasgow city centre, set in the heart of the Camspie Fells, is a small town called Lennoxtown. If you walk east from Lennoxtown for thirty minutes, through the forest, past a suspicious ‘Logging – Do Not Cross’ sign and along a grand overgrown road, you will find it: Lennox Castle Hospital’s ruin.

The dichotomy of the home as a private and public space presents a challenge. Its resolution does not lie in the restoration of pre-digital traditions and connections, but rather a comprehensive deconstruction of past practices to conquer enduring attachments to dated dwelling rituals.

In Latin the word integer, from which integration comes from, means ‘immaculate, unblemished, unspoilt, unbridle and passionless’. Rutar argued the concept of integration and he affirmed that ‘The idea is stale because it presumes that the society is a flourishing, virginal, unselfish, and flagrant meadow in which integration is necessary because of some civilisational blunders which were unfortunately incurred by certain groups of people. Through integration, we return to the previous uncurtailed and undamaged state; that is why all the maudlin and melancholic images of beautiful youth, unspoilt paradise, genuine nature, etc. are attached to it.’

… accused of having failed in its form, due to the disappearance of open public spaces within the urban configuration of metropolis and in its function, due to the advent of machine control over human motion, the Twentieth Century architecture seems to be technologically improved only and exclusively for the sake of the economy. It fulfils the demands of capitalism while failing into explain how individuals and populations will be distributed through this new system of privatisation of public spaces. Going against most of the principles and values on which this discipline is founded, the multi-faced nature of this modern discipline seem to have become too materialist, clearly stating the predominance of the economic sector over social factors. In so doing, the human is alienated from the city centre, leaving no room for the community.