Year one is a special year for all students of architecture and creative studies. It is the year that cultural and historical, socio-political and environmental, ethical, and aesthetic considerations of design reveal themselves. And by doing so, they establish a complex yet essential scaffolding of references that intuition, criticality, and creativity use to grow. Year 1 does not only reveal how deeply embedded and complex design knowledges are, it also introduces students to responsible and informed risk-taking. To facilitate these initial and often troublesome encounters, we devote more time to experimentation and reflection on the design process than finalising design products. In year one, we learn from experiencing, creatively interpreting, and critically reviewing our designed and non-designed contexts during site visits and study trips.

By exploring how bodies (individual and collective, canonical and a-canonical, constrained and augmented) orchestrate and transform places, the design of small, in-scale, simple programmes can be understood.

By studying and implementing material, structural, technological, environmental knowledges, in modelling and making exercises, we can plant the seeds of dialogical yet critical argumentation, during peer reviews, design critiques and weekly tutorials.

In year one of architectural studies, creative learning is frequently experienced as a state of alterity, the unpredictable exploration of a foreign country. In WSA, we embark on these creative expeditions together and cover new grounds under the guidance of our senior students and skilful tutors.

Dimitra Ntzani, Year One Chair & Design Leader