Riichiro Yamamoto (Y2) | Phantoming Waves
Research Excerpts (WIP)
“Disasters return when we forget”. Drawing from the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, the project deals with the gap between Earth’s tectonic cycles and the fragile duration of human life. Within this temporal scale, the work attempts to listen to the voice of Earth, people, and objects through real-time seismic sensing, geological research interviews, and 3D Gaussian Splatting. The project investigates Kochi Prefecture, which faces the greatest danger of the Nankai Trough earthquake, feared as Japan’s most imminent near-future megathrust disaster. Through the conceptual frameworks of Phantom, Genius Loci, and Mi-Gareki, the project asks: how do we access the spirits of objects, landscapes, and people we know will one day be lost?
Maya Vahidi (Y2) | Bodies of Water: Finding Solace in the City
Research Excerpts (WIP)
This project investigates the cultural, ecological and spatial conditions of London’s urban waterways through the lens of wild swimming at a moment of profound environmental decline. Integral to the city’s collective life as places of
renewal and escape, urban bodies of water have been progressively contaminated and commodified by systems of governance, infrastructure and capital. As rising summer temperatures intensify our reliance on water for cooling, they expose stark inequalities in access, with under-represented and economically marginalised communities more likely to seek relief in polluted rivers for lack of safe, affordable alternatives. This project positions itself within this entangled hydrological landscape, exploring how architecture might intervene with polluted waters and speculate futures where design mediates the tension between sustaining ecosystems and sustaining the self.
The work ultimately traces the shifting relationship between people and polluted waters, proposing ways these sites might support ecological remediation, stewardship and public wellbeing in an age of environmental uncertainty.
Luca-Andrei Balan (Y2) | Marker Wadden: Where Dead Water Meets New Life
Research Excerpts (WIP)
This project explores the Marker Wadden islands, where humans and wildlife coexist in a carefully managed refuge for birds, plants, and aquatic life. As visitors move through the islands, they photograph and observe bird species. The proposal envisions a pavilion designed to meet nonhuman needs—providing nests, root-beds, and microhabitats—while enabling humans to document and track birds across the islands. Over time, the pavilion becomes a living archive, revealing patterns of presence, migration, and change. Beyond the gallery, the building itself provides habitat for insects and amphibians, balancing human engagement with ecological needs.
Leyang Ma (Y1) | The Shifting Voices Pavilion
Research Excerpts (WIP)
Happisburgh, on the Norfolk coast, is undergoing rapid erosion as fragile cliffs collapse under managed retreat policies. The coastline functions as a living archive, where land, memory and infrastructure are continually lost and reconfigured. This project proposes a mobile recording pavilion embedded within the eroding cliff: a spatial instrument that records and translates coastline change over time. Rather than defending or fixing the coast, it dwells with erosion—capturing sound, movement and absence as material. The architecture operates as both observation device and public interface, foregrounding climate grief as a collective condition, and reframing retreat not as failure, but as an ongoing process of attention and responsibility.
Joe Horgan (Y2) | DIY Forensics
Research Excerpts (WIP)
DIY Forensics is a project that responds to routine sewage discharges on the UK’s south coast, and explores how open-source tools and spatial infrastructures can support civic science - so that the local communities can turn lived experience into credible evidence, and advocate for the right to safe access to our coastal waters. The project asks: who gets to generate environmental truth, and what kinds of tools and spaces would make that truth legible, shared, and actionable? The research began through designing and building open source tools. Firstly, a horizontal water sampler built from off the shelf parts for £57. An industry standard version costs roughly £500–£750. Secondly, an aerial photography kite for geospatial mapping. This makes plume events legible and avoids the no-drone zones common along the south coast near harbours and shipping lanes. It’s also intentionally convivial: the hope is these tools facilitate rituals of monitoring and assembly - rather than being specialist operations.
Jingyi Feng (Y1) | Fawley’s Next Chapter: Test, Adapt, Repurpose
Research Excerpts (WIP)
This project imagines pre-planning the “afterlife” of Fawley Refinery before its eventual obsolescence by running a live, on-site experiment during its operation. A representative zone spanning industrial and ecological edges is selected, where phased, data-led bioremediation and transition can be tested—from baseline mapping and public monitoring (soil, water, vegetation, birds, contamination) to small, modular, reversible interventions such as saltmarsh restoration—culminating in long-term stewardship and public review. The outcome is a prototype site that aims to point to future re-use possibilities for the entire facility.
Jemal Sinclair (Y1) | Thresholds
Research Excerpts (WIP)
Thresholds investigates the consequences of agricultural contaminants within the Wash - a vital inlet/estuary system on the UK’s east coast. It proposes an observatory on the River Nene, which feeds into The Wash, where a laboratory continuously measures turbidity and nutrient signatures of agricultural run-off, translating contamination into an actionable warning system for downstream ecologies. Set between two lighthouses, this architectural intervention presents a juxtaposition of navigation and risk; reframing maritime safety with hydro-ecological care. Methodology: form follows resource; materials are gathered five miles from the site, thereby embedding a circular economy of procurement, craft, maintenance, and return. Thatch deployed as both façade and roof, a sculptural output, expressing weathering as a natural index of time.
Ifigeneia Poulaki (Y2) | Between Abandonment and Return
Research Extracts (WIP)
Rooted in a family farm on the Cycladic island of Kea, where buildings have endured through domestic care and agricultural life, this project rethinks architecture as an act of maintenance rather than construction. It examines a land at a critical moment of rupture, as long-held ways of living begin to break. Drawing from the disappearing culture of the Ksotarides, the project reads the land as a living archive, suspended between abandonment and extraction. As rural land shifts from farming to investment, the project asks how architecture can protect continuity without erasing what already exists.
Filip Piasecki (Y2) | Tracing Plastiglomerate: Accountability in the Anthropocene
Research Excerpts (WIP)
Tracing Plastiglomerate examines new geological markers along global coastlines: plastiglomerates, hybrids of molten plastic fused with stone. Rather than collectible Anthropocene artefacts, the project reframes them as forensic evidence through which accountability for environmental harm might be pursued. Situated in coastal “thin places,” threshold zones where impacts of global plastic consumption converge, plastiglomerates act as material traces and sensors of a vast petrochemical system. Using material analysis, cataloguing, visualisation, and speculative image-recognition, the project explores tracing plastic waste to sites of manufacture and disposal to inform future frameworks of environmental accountability governance.
Ella Yidan Jiang | Dream Laboratory
Research Excerpts (WIP)
Yumeshima, “Dream Island”, was built from 1977 onwards in the Osaka Bay, Japan. The reclaimed land contains significant levels of legacy waste - from using industrial pollutants, to landfill, to contaminated sediment, buried beneath Expo 2025’s spectacle. Now, the site is planned for commercial redevelopment, starting with a colossal integrated resort and casino. Dream Lab imagines an alternate development path for the island - starting with a bioremediation research station and public gallery that descends vertically through the island’s toxic strata, operating indefinitely as both archive and instrument. Forever under construction, it excavates contaminated soil, processes it through bacterial and fungal bioreactors, and returns treated material to the surface. The architecture embodies a commitment: to make invisible contamination visible, to take responsibility for buried mistakes, and to pursue patient, multi-generational healing; not as a solution, but as a choice.
Isabella Coco Swarzenski (Y1) | Between Salt and Soil: Negotiating Dynamic Ecologies
Research Excerpts (WIP)
This project explores the interplay between landscape, ecology, and human intervention using architectural strategies to investigate temporality, site specificity, and environmental responsiveness in a future shaped by climate change. Focusing on the Camargue region in the south of France, Europe’s largest wetland, the project investigates a diverse deltaic landscape rich with biodiversity and local tradition. As temperatures and sea levels rise, the site and its stakeholders face an ambiguous, entangled future, shaped by differing visions and forms of agency. This project proposes a space to discuss the past, monitor the present, and negotiate the future, enabling informed and situated dialogue between human and non-human stakeholders.
Carolina Bottazzi (Y1) | Toxic Waters
Research Excerpts (WIP)
The project proposes an ecological and social redevelopment of Southampton’s Eastern Docks, one of the most polluted ports in Europe. Historically a threshold between the city and the sea, this area has become an inaccessible infrastructure dominated by chemical and acoustic pollution, severely affecting ecosystems and residents’ quality of life. Through an in-depth analysis of its causes and of ongoing restoration initiatives in the Solent, the project responds with a public architectural path equipped with interactive environmental monitoring stations. These devices make normally invisible processes perceptible, transforming a degraded and fenced-off zone into a shared public space for awareness, research, and the reconnection of the city with its waterfront.
