Teaching Overview
Both partners have taught as design tutors and critics at UK Schools of Architecture. These academic environments provide opportunities for reflection and intellectual rigour, which in turn informs our practice.
We currently run an undergraduate studio at Kingston University Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. Timothy has previously taught at London Metropolitan University and Jonathan at Edinburgh College of Art.
Studio 2.4 11/12
Legacy
Classicism is far from a straightforward set of rules. We will unravel the design of existing Classical buildings, learning about solid and void, proportion, materiality, but above all about contained space. A key starting point for our approach is that genius does not rely on originality, and that copying/sampling/reinterpreting the forms and arrangements of good buildings of the recent and distant past is a creative act in itself - an issue with which the other arts have no dilemma.
We will begin the year by looking intensively at the London churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor. In Semester 1 we will design an intense little building- a building which is constructed to serve the legacy presented to the living but to house the dead - a mausoleum.
The legacy of the architecture of antiquity has moved in and out of architectural favour, but through the last 2000 years the Classical language has been adapted to suit climates, functions, tectonics, and political and religious requirements with great ingenuity. We will visit Rome, where we will look at how Classical buildings respond to particular physical and historical circumstances.
Judgement is often more evident in a Classical design, but it is no more or less important than in a design of any style. We hope to give students confidence in their own judgement, rather than rules, and to understand that even in Classicism there is no wrong or right – only more or less successful spaces.
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