ARCSOC

Thank you to every student who makes up ARCSOC. It has been a special year, truly.

Here are some pictures from the week building our exhibition together, and from our opening night.

‘Hello, House’ at Kettle’s Yard. 04.-07.07.24.

There is a magic to what ARCSOC does. It shows in the care and time and love that students will put into simply making things happen. Club nights, a radio show, weekly life-drawing, parties, football games. Pub trips. Lectures and panels. A garden that blooms and flowers. So many hugs and memories and friendships. All to return in October.

A last goodbye and thank you for the year. It has meant a lot.
ARCSOC love, always!

— Isabella Palliotto, arcsoc pres 2023-4

Pictures by the lovely and

Thank you to every student who makes up ARCSOC. It has been a special year, truly.

Here are some pictures from the week building our exhibition together, and from our opening night.

‘Hello, House’ at Kettle’s Yard. 04.-07.07.24.

There is a magic to what ARCSOC does. It shows in the care and time and love that students will put into making things happen. Club nights, a radio show, weekly life-drawing, parties, football games. Pub trips. Lectures and panels. A garden that blooms and flowers. So many hugs and memories and friendships. All to return in October.

A last goodbye and thank you for the year. It has meant a lot.
ARCSOC love, always!

— Isabella Palliotto, arcsoc pres 2023-4

Pictures by the lovely and

Thank you to everyone who came to the opening last night — so much arcsoc love!

Come join us for a tour of our exhibition at 3pm today, where you can meet some of the students who built and designed the show!

ARCSOC Exhibition is generously supported by , , , , the Cambridge University Land Society, , , The Townscape Consultancy, , and .

Come join us for a workshop with — our sponsors for our upcoming exhibition at . Come join for one of our many (fun and exciting!!) build-week events !

Come and join Heatherwick Studio’s Matt Bell for a provocative talk about the campaign. This will draw on recent advances in neuroscience to explore the public health impacts of boring buildings, the idea of emotion as a core function of design, and what we can do to change the quality of what gets built in this country.  

The Humanise Campaign is a 10 year global initiative to help make cities more joyful and engaging. It aims to tackle ‘a quiet global catastrophe of boring buildings that make people sick, stressed, and depressed while simultaneously destroying our planet’. 
The campaign has been sparked by a paperback book called ‘Humanise’ written by Thomas Heatherwick.

Join us for one of our last lectures of this term!

Born in Athens to Greek and British parents, Freddie Phillipson was educated at Cambridge and MIT. As Associate Director of Witherford Watson Mann Architects in London, Freddie was project architect for Astley Castle, winner of the 2013 Stirling Prize. Freddie’s own practice, based in the U.K. and founded in 2018, was selected as one of the Architects’ Journal’s 40 under 40 in 2020 and his work has been published in the Architecture Foundation’s survey of new practices founded in the last ten years, New Architects 4. Alongside practice, Freddie has taught and lectured widely and is currently a Design Fellow at the University of Cambridge. His published articles explore the relations between architectural drawing, design, and topographic thinking – the subject of his forthcoming book on architecture and the city through the work of James Joyce, a project which was exhibited at the Irish Architectural Archive in 2022.

Dimitris Pikionis (1887–1968) remains Greece’s most prominent modern architect, but little known internationally beyond his landscape project for the archaeological site in the heart of Athens, around the ancient Acropolis: a network of paths made of reclaimed and found fragments. Over seven years, across an area of eighty thousand square metres, Pikionis positioned each and every stone. The design has inspired both awe and confusion since its completion more than sixty years ago – indeed, in the century since the completion of his first building, Pikionis has been variously a mythic and a divisive figure whose work unsettles familiar definitions of architectural practice. The so-called weaknesses in Pikionis’s work may have now become its strength: a decentred, dispersed, low-tech architecture of largely unprocessed materials, delicately integrated into each site. Part drawn and part improvised, each of Pikionis’s projects is an experiment in what constitutes a place: how, and how much, can you ever make this?

We are incredibly excited to announce that ARCSOC, the University of Cambridge Architecture Society, will open its annual exhibition at Kettle’s Yard  from Thursday 4th to Sunday 7th of July.
 
The exhibition, ‘Hello, House’, will celebrate the students of Scroope Terrace - their models, drawings, and the mundane, but beautiful, moments of sharing a studio. We wish to celebrate the potential for student agency to impact the architectural discipline - and how exciting this can be. The work will take over the Clore Learning Studio, and the Ede Room.
 
‘Hello, House’ will present selected works from undergraduate and postgraduate students. The exhibition embodies the ethos of founders Jim and Helen Ede; creating an open space for visitors to explore, and encouraging students and young people to engage with the arts.
 
The show will open on the morning of the 4th of July, followed by a private view at 6p.m.
 
A talk will be held at the house on the 5th of July — keep an eye on our social media channels for more information!
 
ARCSOC Exhibition is generously supported by , , , the Cambridge University Land Society, , , The Townscape Consultancy, , and .

Help us in welcoming Marwa el Mubark today at 5! Marwa el Mubark is an architect, educator and writer working in London. Along with co-founder Nile Bridgeman, they set up Saqqra in 2022, an architecture studio interested in ecology and re-use as a basis for new material and cultural narratives to emerge.

As a practitioner, Marwa is interested in raising the cultural visibility and influence of design criticism through research, writing and built work. Recently accepted for an MSc with the Weald and Downland Living Museum, her writing on heritage, sustainability and cultural preservation has appeared in a range of print Journals and publications including The Architectural Review, Wallpaper*, and Storey, Building – Ireland’s first independent print publication - among others

VERNACULAR CLIMATE RESPONSES IN 14TH-CENTURY CENTRAL ASIA looks to indigenous models to learn how to sensitively respond to local landscape and ecology in contemporary architectural practice. As part of an ongoing effort to decolonise the architectural profession, it revisits practices of sustainability and heritage from a perspective outside the Western world.

A beautiful charrette thrown by our Exhibition Directors, Margaux and Defne!

The show is starting to come together — we hope you’re just as excited as we are. More exhibition announcements coming this week — keep your eyes peeled!

Better late than never…
Thank you to our amazing photographers
The photos are here! Link in Bio
All the love, Arcsoc Ents

Come join us for our second talk of this term and help us welcome EDIT Collective!

EDIT is a feminist collective working on design and research projects. Interested in the enduring biases and hierarchies embedded in the built environment, the collective has designed projects spanning from objects and film to exhibition design and public spaces.
EDIT’s research looks at architecture and its power to influence and maintain established gender roles within a capitalist system, and is interested in how traces of care and reproductive labour spill into the public realm, disrupting formal notions of public life and space. EDIT is formed of architects, project managers, set designers, tutors and researchers.

Open to all!

Join us in welcoming Gavin Henderson and Stephen Smith tomorrow for our first talk of term (our term card is coming very soon)! DESIGN METHODS & CRAFTS follows the journey of the architectural idea through storytelling, drawing, modelmaking, and collaborative practices to architectural craft. By exploring the processes through which architectural ideas are transformed, translated and projected from paper to space, this panel revisits our design methods in education and practice. See you tomorrow at 5pm in LR1!

We love you all, god or monster.

Find the link to all the photos in our insta bio soon xx

We want to see you in your best godly attire, your finest monstrous garments.

The monsters and gods are getting ready for saturday … BUY YOUR TICKETS! 🧌 (link is in bio!!!)

This Saturday at Junction. Don’t miss out — medusa might get sad🐍🐍

ARCSOC’S Cabaret is back.
Prepare for Gods to battle Monstrous foes.
With none other than  leading the charge.
Prepare for a night like no other.

GET YOUR TICKETS USING THE PROMO CODE STAIRWAY2HELL
GET YOUR TICKETS TO CABARET @ JUNCTION ON FIXR.CO (LINK IN BIO!!)

Join us in welcoming Huda Tayob on the 7th of March!
The Archive of Forgetfulness is a pan-African digital exhibition and podcast series which ran from September 2020 and December 2021. The project is a space for interrogating the archival gesture, from the bodily and spoken, to the written and performed. As a collection of work centered on the African continent, the various contributors raise questions on personal and political histories that emerge through borders and infrastructures, and resurface forgotten conversations. It interrogates how thinking through deep and recent histories across water or through the skies, might reveal alternative ways of living. It also ponders how dreams of other worlds that might have been possible continue to haunt our present and suggest possible futures. In these works, archival labour and memory-work are understood as deeply political, personal and speculative.

Huda Tayob is a South African architectural historian. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Manchester, and has previously taught at the University of Cape Town, the University of Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, centred on the African continent. She is co-curator of the open access curriculum Racespacearchitecture.org, and co-curator of the digital exhibition, Archive of Forgetfulness.

Unleash the beasts….
5pm TODAY!
Set your alarms and be the first to grab your tickets at 5PM sharp!

Ticket link in bio
Access statement on fixr

Gods & Monsters ( which will you be ? )

ARCSOC is holding a careers evening, ‘Entering Practice’ for third year architecture graduates this afternoon the 28th of February, at 4pm in Lecture Room One.

The evening is in collaboration with the Cambridge Association of Architects who have kindly reached out to their members to gather 10 speakers from 10 different architectural firms . The format of the evening will be short presentations from each firm about what they do, what they look for in a part one, and what being a part one looks like in their firm. After the presentations there will be drinks and snacks in the gallery, a chance to socialise, and ask any questions you may have about entering practice.

We are very excited to welcome the CAA to the department, and are looking forward to seeing everyone there!

The running order will be:
1. CAA Welcome Speech by Alice Hamlin & Susie Lober (5min)
2. David Adams from Graham Handley Architects
3. Alex Baker from Allies & Morrison
4. JJ Walters from LDA Design
5. Alice Hamlin from Mole Architects
6. February Phillips from 5th Studio
7. Beth Watson from Caroe Architects
8. Sarah Morrison from Historic England
9. Simon Redman from Cowper Griffith Architects
10. Anna Pamphilon from Pamphilon Architects
11. Toby O’Connor from Public Practice (Swansea Council)
12. Q&A Session! (20-30min)

ARCSOC exhibition design charrette tomorrow, 01.02.24, 6:30 - 8:30 PM!

We’ll be designing, sketching, making, and writing… all going towards transforming gallery spaces for the exhibition! We can’t wait to see all your faces, hear all your ideas, and have a wonderful ARCSOC time! We’ll provide food and BYOB.

Happy New Year from ARCSOC!

Here are some moments from last term — look forward to more life-drawing, more talks, more socials and more BIG nights this year. Termcards will be coming soon!

In the meantime we wish you all a relaxed holiday season filled with lots of rest and joy!! Xoxox ARCSOC

Welcome to the most twisted show in town, where laughter is painted in crimson and the ringmaster's voice whispers promises of forbidden delights.
Come one, come all, to the ARCSOC Circus, where the price of admission might just be your sanity.

ARCSOC’s got some outfit inspo for your escapade to the circus tomorrow.

TICKETS IN BIO!! GO GET THEM.

Arcsoc Circus Tickets out Now!! Link in Bio!

Access statement in Fixr Description xx

We’re back so you better be down to clown.
Mash - Sunday 19.11.23
Early bird tickets drop Friday @ 5pm.

Transpolar Futures anticipates and frames the next chapter of settlement and infrastructural development in the archipelago of Svalbard, Arctic Norway. Based on a literary, statistical, and representational analysis, this presentation looks ahead (today – 2050) and aspires to formulate a range of alternative settlement typologies and infrastructural futures for Svalbard. The foundational elements of such models include a transnational, participatory, and scenario-based design approach, as well as visions for a highly connected, inclusive, and adaptive settlement in a rapidly changing polar world.
Bert De Jonghe is a Belgian landscape architect, the founder of Transpolar Studio, a Lecturer at the Arctic University of Norway, and a Doctor of Design candidate at Harvard University. Bert’s recent publications include “Inventing Greenland - Designing an Arctic Nation” (Actar Publishers, 2022) and “The Opening of the Transpolar Sea Route: Logistical, Geopolitical, Environmental, and Socioeconomic Impacts” (Marine Policy Journal, 2020). Join us this Tuesday in Seminar Room 1 to hear more!

As part of Black History Month, On Race + Architecture seeks to open conversations on the impact of race in architectural education and practice. In conversation with architectural activists, educators, and researchers, the panel will frame the current conditions in architecture, and interrogate the value of alternative and future pathways.
Issi Nanabeyin is a multidisciplinary designer, researcher, and design tutor. His work examines narratives of liminality, migration and hybridity, drawing on adjacent fields of cultural, critical and race studies and their intersection with architecture.
Nana Biamah-Ofosu is an architect, educator, researcher, writer and director of London based YAA Projects. Her research interrogates African modernity, its architecture and urbanism, communality, domesticity, identity and geography.
Kudzai Matsvai is an architectural activist primarily interested in Black-British history and its underrepresentation in the architectural space. She actively engages community members in issues of equality, diversity and inclusion to open up conversations on diverse histories and equitable design.
Join us this Thursday in lecture room 1!

Forest of Folies - PHOTO DUMP (2/2)
(Please ensure you credit caspian.photos for their incredible work)

Forest of Folies - PHOTO DUMP (1/2)
(Please ensure you credit caspian.photos for their incredible work)

Your tormented temptations lain out in technicolour

See you for our next night 19.11.23

Photography by .photos

Did you find your sensuous sanctuary in our Forest of Folie?

We’ll see you on 19.11.23 for our next ARCSOC night🪩

Photography by .photos
(All photos available on ARCSOC Facebook)