Through attending Manchester School of Architecture, I have begun to realise that creativity stems from the ability to view places and experiences as an art form, as something of beauty that has been crafted in some way or another.
Therefore, my inspiration stems from anywhere and everywhere. I try to visit as many places and pieces of architecture as possible both in Manchester and abroad, visit lots of art exhibitions, lectures and design events organised by MSA.
Manchester is an amazing city in which to do this, with quirky streets, people and events around every corner.
In a sense architecture becomes an outlet for me, with it being a very personal way of visualising my perception of the world. An ideology which I aim to abide by in my practice is to place interior spatial experience as a starting point for design and something that is pivotal throughout the design process. I think there is a contemporary obsession with judging a building my its exterior view and forms rather than actually inhabiting its spaces.
Therefore, I design not through viewing the building as one single entity or mass, but as many individual experiences compiled together to generate an event with the architecture acting almost as a stage for human involvement.
When designing, I have always tried to push my ideas to the height of their potential. In first year, I designed a mobile home where every household object could transform into a music instrument, and in second year, I designed a house with a public fruit and veg market on the roof.
The philosophy of Manchester School of Architecture allows you to explore unique concepts, but still make them tangible and relatable to the real world. I think my practice has benefited immensely from this with my designs becoming much more refined and sophisticated but retaining a sense of innovation and novelty.
In my final year, I felt like the brief perfectly catered to my interests and really helped me to focus my design ambitions. The aim was to create a piece of architecture that allows nature to thrive as well as promoting humanistic experience. I designed an eco-friendly cemetery where bodies are decomposed and turned into biogas, which is used to power and heat the building. The by-product of the process is also used to fertilise the land of the site. The procedure has been proven to succeed, but there are currently no cemeteries which offer it.
It was been extremely exciting to design an entirely new building typology and to invent my own set of criteria for the building program. My main priority has been to combine the functional, industrial aspect of a cemetery with the immensely emotional experience faced during a bereavement and querying how those two elements can be more closely intertwined to generate restoration.