Interior Design Students Imagine Future Cities at Fab Fest 2017
Fab Fest: International Fabrication Festival is a week-long celebration of design and making, featuring over 50 pavilions built by students of architecture from across the UK and around the world. A team of Royal College of Art MA Interior Design students entered this year with the support and mentorship of Visiting Lecturer Steve Jensen. The team’s design was awarded second place in both the Architectural Prize and the Professorial Prize.
‘I am a practitioner of 25 years experience and the buzz is never diminished standing in front of a completed project, signed off, keys handed over,’ Steve explained. ‘It's the same thrill the students experience at Fab Fest, probably for the first time in their careers.’
Participants were given three months to design a self-supporting structure made predominantly from cardboard, which they then had to construct and install in Ambika P3 over the course of a week, before the exhibited pavilions were open to the public for the weekend. The theme of the event was Pop-up City and participants were asked to consider how architects and designers might shape future cities. The result was a collaborative imagining of the future of the built environment through a one week, transient Pop-up City.
The RCA team were Pennie Dawes, Stefanie Misch, Patricia Ntagoma, Julia Samplawska, Devan Skuban and James Watts, who are all entering their final year of study at the RCA, and Tzu-Yuan Chen who is starting at the College in the autumn. They created a hanging pavilion with a space that visitors could walk underneath. Its gradually reducing height forced visitors to bend down or crouch in the centre, before straightening back up on their way out. This height restriction referenced the にぎり口 (Nijiri-guchi), the crawl-through entrance of the Japanese tea house, which makes everyone adopt a humble posture when entering. The team hoped their pavilion would create a range of responses, making visitors feel something through this extreme posture from bowing or ducking, to more playful reactions.
‘We wanted visitors to feel the moment of passing through and transition,’ explained James. ‘The transition of the city of today into the city of tomorrow is not obvious, so we’re not always aware of what our role as designers might be in that process. We wanted our pavilion to make that moment of progressing or crossing a threshold more tangible.’
As part of the competition the team had access to cutting-edge digital fabrication facilities of the fABE Fabrication Lab, including CNC knives, routers, lasers and robot arms, and a member of Lab staff to help them get the most from the CNC machines.
‘Fab Fest is an excellent introduction to understand a complete design process, from the conceptual birth, development, detailing, costing and finally to construction’ explained Steve. ‘It's fast and furious, requires thinking which challenges decision making. The creative process goes far beyond CAD renderings, it requires thinking applied to every material choice and junction made, it's reality.’
‘There is something quite beautiful about a room full of pavilions constructed from re-cycled materials which live for a short but fabulous life, celebrated and occupied, then to be pulled apart, re-cycled or donated to good causes’ he continued. ‘It really is a microcosm for the profession of an Interior Designer, fast, agile, elegant, inhabited then pulled apart and re-imagined.’
The work of graduating and first year MA Interior Design students was on display at the Interior Educators Show 2017 as part of Free Range at the Truman Brewery, 13–15 July.
Find out more about Interior Design and how to Apply.