20 INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE SETS a balancing act between place-making and experience design. Ranging from the scale of the building to that of the room, and the interiorities of the urban context of London within which we operate, the course encourages students to study and design spaces from a user’s perspective, challenging them to reimagine existing buildings and relate them back to the community in creative and critical ways. Following two years of the pandemic, we dynamically re-joined our studio, celebrated our return to the city with group visits and extracurricular activities, and studied how the past years affected the ways we live and inhabit space. We explored a range of themes from retail to exhibition design, craft, making, upcycling, and investigated how complex interior environments can be reimagined, reinhabited and sustainably adapted. We reflected on the wellbeing of our communities, explored new types of spaces required to suppor t emerging life patterns, and experimented by drawing out atmospheres and designing new experiences deploying both traditional and multidisciplinary methods. The course has set up strong links to practice that suppor t the students in different ways including the inaugural ‘Interior Matters/Practices’ lecture series delivered by invited guest speakers, as esteemed critics at student reviews, and the realisation of our subject-specific employability events such as a week-long intensive set of workshops that coach and suppor t students to bridge the gap between academia and professional practice. All the above were made possible through contributions from numerous international and London-based design practices including Perkins + Will , TB Bennetts, Architype, Foster + Partners, Heatherwick Studio, AECOM, Amos Goldreich Architects, Studio Sutton, Hassell Studio, Emil Eve Architects, Nicolas Pople Architects, Pardon Chamber Architects, and Gensler. Cross-disciplinary in its outlook, the course par ticipated for the second year in the ‘Co-Production Workshop: Mental Health, Design and Wellbeing’, held with medical students from Imperial College both remotely and in our Marylebone studios. With guidance from practitioners, clinicians, exper ts and patient advocates, our group considered how design affects health, and how conditions of the mind and body can inform the ways we perceive and redesign existing NHS interior environments. A ‘live-project’ and transformative learning experience enabled our students to reflect on their own practice by highlighting the impor tance of listening and working collaboratively in order to meaningfully contribute to real-world issues. Diony Kypraiou Course Leader
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