In PS1, we asked students to explore the global distribution of goods and the transit corridors that service distribution around Liverpool docks. With a focus on the people who live and work in and around these inevitably transient spaces, they designed residential environments to address the needs of one or more of these groups. Residential spaces were hybridised with other functions that addressed the local and international context of the nearby Port of Liverpool. In pairs, students designed 2 housing modules related to a ‘permanent’ and ‘temporary’ condition of the Port context - dock workers, lorry drivers, ships’ crew, migrant labour, social services providers, neighbourhood services, community actors, local businesses. In groups, they interrogated contemporary housing and social policy to elicit formal, material and detail responses to both conditions to highlight the qualitative outcomes informed by policy. They also considered the recent weakening of the planning system and how the status of temporary residence affects space and the basic provisions of light, air and heat. Students were asked to relate their ideas to a global context and to produce housing that is sustainable; environmentally, socially and economically. They considered the specifics of place but also reflected on how proposed typologies might be transferable to other contexts. The housing layouts all provided some form of socially productive / service provision space which exemplified residents’ interdependence with the site and wider systems.

PS2 asked the students to consider the re-use of a Grade II* Listed former sugar silo, designed by Tate and Lyle Engineering Department and constructed between 1955-57. The distinctive parabolic structure, which was state-of-the-art when built, has been out of use since 1981. In line with the atelier’s overarching questions of: Can an infrastructural architecture be productive in service of humans and the environment simultaneously?; Can the spaces of infrastructural architecture be socially productive? – students were asked to consider how this piece of industrial, former port infrastructure might be usefully re-imagined for a community use that is economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. They were tasked with addressing the full 26.5m height of the structure and to study legislation relevant to its preservation and any physical intervention they chose to make. Schemes as diverse as education centres, fuel manufacturing plants and space exploration hubs interrogated topics including community driven policy making, alternative fuel and food production methods, and strategic ways of positioning Liverpool as a global node at the forefront of Industry 4.0 in a post Brexit landscape.