I was looking forward to this project with great excitement as I have never previously had any form of direct insight into the industry. I have never been to an architecture practice, I was only dreaming to have my own one day while day after day walking past Associated Architects’ office in the Mailbox in Birmingham while I was living in the neighbourhood, a beautiful, huge office and everything looked so sophisticated. The project started by the introduction of architecture from Bethany Wells. She made me realise, just how wide the term architecture is. Bethany made a structure out of plastic bags and stuck it onto an exhaust fan on side of her university building and called it architecture. This such realisation is what’s happening throughout the year of architecture course, while we have projects based on old objects. Nothing to do with buildings, although in a strange way, it is shaping and developing our design skills, so with time I got to love it. Bethany is from 00:// Architecture, although she didn’t speak much of the practice. She introduced her own favourite projects. The same afternoon we visited WHAT Architecture. The practice was very small, about fifth of my college classroom. The director of the company along with two-three of his colleagues introduced us to the structure of the company, and how they do things. At many points I was surprised by the size of projects such a small team carries out, but thinking it over I realised that this misconception was caused by my lack of knowledge of the industry at this point. A few people can form such a productive team as well and even on massive scale project, there is only a small number of architects work on the design. A bigger group of designers means more diversity of tastes, which causes disagreement. I now started to realise that three-four people in a group is the most ideal. At WHAT, they have a very close group, with their computers lined up in two rows facing each other. When they get a new project, everyone gets briefed on it, everyone knows what’s going on, so it’s easy for the directors to place people from one project to an other. In my opinion it is a brilliant way of working for this size of a practice, however it would get very messy if it was used in a size of practice such as Fosters+Partners. They have about 15 projects running at the same time, each at different stages. It is not hard to work on several projects at the same time, as after the design stage, the proposal usually goes through a long process of planning permissions and submitting hundreds of pages of documents. We got to know in detail a few of their favourite/most interesting projects.  The project for Cowley St Lawrence Primary School was truly made for children, with a children’s way of design, using LEGO to make up the design of the facade, which i have never seen before anywhere. The way they have got the users involved in the design stage is a method all architects can learn from. For a project like this, it is so important how the children feel about the environment being created. Thinking about the bigger picture, getting the users involved with the design and the construction stage will make them feel more as if it’s theirs. Even thought they don’t own the building, they are the users, so it’s so much more important to satisfy them with the final product. Architects at WHAT had this ideology in mind so they set up workshops in the schools among the children, the staff and the parents to see what they would create, and from this they got their idea to build a school with a big communal area, and to cover the facade looking onto the outdoors with LEGO, making it a playful building. I like the way the building has been designed. It is a small school and the spaces have been arranged in a very clever way and it is like a play house. I would have loved to go to a school like this one when I was a child. Beneficiaries of the school will directly be the children, the staff and to some extent the parents of the children as they would benefit from an amazing school to spend years after years in. Indirectly the city and our community will be beneficiaries of smarter minds which a more vibrant, comfortable and challenging environment would probably create. The building is very modern, made with the newest technology, making sure it will serve its’ purpose for a long period of time. Has it had an impact? Of course! The news of the design spread across the architecture world, being the first of its’ kind. It had an impact on the borough, and the industry with its’ unique and original way of thinking of the design and actually taking this idea from the modelling board onto the actual site. This was the most influential project of WHAT, which was presented to us in detail. There were other projects that I won’t go into detail about, but there’s lessons to be learnt from them. For instance the project they are currently carrying out in Sierra Leone, considered one of the most dangerous places in the world, for a very difficult client. The proposal is for four identical residential houses on a slope of a hill side. They didn’t had the opportunity to go on site, which would have been so crucial for the design process. As a designer, I believe the best way to get a feel of a space is to actually be there. It’s not the same to work from photographs and from Google Maps, which is what designers had to do at WHAT. On one hand it shows just how much is possible through technology which is great, but as a designer I know how difficult it was for them. Although they went through with it, and the house is in the stage of being build, which is amazing.

For my research on the Medium practices I was relying on the help of Google as I wasn’t able to attend that day. It was quite hard to find a lot of information about  Cottrell&Vermeulen Architecture, but form their website I managed to engage into what they are about briefly.  They carry out very modern and innovative projects including school buildings, which as I see they have been very involved in the past few years. Some smaller projects were the first of it’s kind, for example the first european cardboard building, which is a brave choice. To build with cardboard in England makes me question what can be learnt from this project. I’m sure if I look into the building techniques, I can gain a lot. For this project, we had the programme broken down into three sections, small, medium and large. I slowly realised that I had such a misconception about these borderlines. There are no borderlines relating to the size of the project and the size of the practice. In my opinion it is very important that larger practices don’t dismiss smaller proposals. For example Cottrell&Vermeulen Architecture’s project of the cardboard building and the exhibition in the Tate is what I would consider smaller projects, but they are small projects with big importance.While considering the impact comparison to the scale of the project, I realise that an exhibition space might be a small scale project, but it had an impact on all the millions of visitors of the Tate.

Presentation by Giuseppe Messina on John McAslan+Partners were impressive. It stunned me to know how much effort and care they have put into their designs. Mr Messina have gone into much detail on their current project of the Bond Street Station and I am looking forward to see the final product, as I walk past the site every day on my way to work. However one of their recent projects, the King’s Cross Station is what amazed me the most and that is what I’d like to reflect on. The station has very high importance in transportation of the UK and it’s connection to Europe. While designing a station, considering it’s functionality comes to a higher praise than aesthetics, is what I notices while looking at the design of the New Bond Street Station, however for the King’s Cross Station, the design is such an engineering beauty, it amazes me. The huge space the roof covers is the Western Concourse of the station. The best view of it is birds-eye viewing, which is a shame, as majority of the users rush through the station in their every day hurry, not truly seeing what they are walking past. As a practice John McAslan and Partners are truly leading in the industry, and it took me by surprise, as they are nowhere near as well know as for example Fosters+Partner, although they have similar importance to our time’s architecture.