The 2021 All School Project (asp2021) was a two-day, collaborative, mixed year, online, student-led project that fostered new student relationships and experiences across the MSA.

Asp2021 created temporary, mixed-year collectives from BA, MArch and MLA courses to engage with each other in full collaboration. The aim was to foster new connections, relationships, and experiences with fellow MSA students from across the school at the beginning of the academic year.

This year, asp2021 offered two sessions to students.

The first session, ‘journey/arrival’ asked students to consider how they arrived at the MSA. For many students, arriving at the MSA this academic year held so much more significance following the extraordinary events of 2020. Some students had already arrived, others were still arriving, whilst many still had their journey ahead of them. Yet their arrival represented a collective triumph that they were tasked with sharing and communicating with the rest of the MSA through the production of one experimental image with accompanying text.

The second session, ‘climate action/asp2021 x MSSA CAG’ was rooted in the MSA’s strong position on the climate and biodiversity emergency and hosted in collaboration with the Manchester Student Society of Architecture’s Climate Action Group (MSSA CAG). Students were asked to explore three critical questions as stimulus to creating a group statement with accompanying montages: how can we challenge the climate emergency? How can the built environment be made more sustainable? How can the built environment counteract the climate emergency?

The full collection of students outputs can be viewed on Instagram through the hashtag #msa_asp2021