Welcome to this year’s exhibition of WSA’s Postgraduate Taught (PGT) Programmes’ work.

It is always a great privilege to preface the work of our postgraduate taught students, but this one is a truly unique cohort. For many of our current students this has been the first ‘normal’ academic year, as their undergraduate studies were substantially affected by the pandemic since early 2019. This year’s exhibition celebrates not only their accomplishments but also their ongoing commitment to achieve and excel, despite these unprecedented circumstances and the uncertainty surrounding them.

As we are approaching the end of this academic year, we observe the journey they followed to develop specialist skills. This journey is the amalgamation of the various processes through which complex information is collected, evaluated and synthesised to shape robust arguments for how design needs to be or what it needs to deliver. For postgraduate students in particular the skillset of developing sound and evidence-based judgements is fundamental to their careers and their potential to make an impact to society. Developing such skills is in fact a shared aim for all our specialist programmes, but it is in the type of evidence produced and used for framing those arguments that our programmes differ from each other. The variety of approaches presented here provide an interesting insight into the multi-faceted significance of architecture; in setting out the agenda for preserving our heritage, for sustainable and ethical development at all scales and for developing innovative design solutions via a discourse with design itself or via employing advance computational methods.

Please join me in congratulating them for staying committed to their goals and in doing so, inspiring us all.

Dr Eleni Ampatzi, Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes