MArchI

Year Chairs

Caroline Almond

Arjun Rajah

Our unique ‘Year of Education in Practice’ is spent predominantly in the workplace with three short courses at WSA. Modules connect practice and university to help students adapt and develop as professionals, whilst setting a foundation for explorations in MArch2.
As in previous years, MArch1 worked with a live brief and client to develop briefs, strategies and visions to adapt and reuse the impressive 1920’s Miners’ Welfare in the village of Resolven, Neath Port Talbot to support current and future communities. Originally funded by the wage packets of miners to house education and recreation, including an impressive Art Deco theatre, the Welfare has moved through periods of boom and bust as it attempted to respond to changing needs over a period of a hundred years. Now mostly disused, inaccessible and at risk from fire, it is struggling to be financially viable.
During the first semester, students were challenged with appraising the existing fabric and function in design teams comprising consultant roles to reflect the collaborative nature of architectural practice. Adapting to professional ways of working, teams produced a development strategy and Business Case to test new programmes and ways for the building to re-align itself within the village. Proposals had to be fully costed and sustainably justified to meet the needs of its future users without placing a financial strain on the client or a burden on the environment. Semester two offered scope for individual designers to progress their schematic proposition towards technically integrated designs; each groupwork design diverged into several discrete projects that reflected the interests and ambitions of their authors.
Beyond the pedagogic benefits of working together in new ways, with a live client on an adaptive-reuse brief, MArch1 students’s work has energised the Trustees and contributed tangible outputs. This work has already contributed to funding applications, brief-writing and informed feasibility studies to begin to realise their ambitions of updating the building to better serve the community.