Bartlett Designs: Speculating with Architecture

The Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL is one of the world’s leading places at which to study and teach architecture. Every year it attracts hundreds of students from around to world to come and participate in its highly experimental and rigorous range of architecture programmes. Its graduates have won an extraordinary range of prizes on the international stage, and are highly sought after by architectural practices globally.

Bartlett Designs: Speculating With Architecture is a collection of the very best of this student work from the last decade. Through a detailed presentation of over 170 student projects, each succinctly explained by the individual tutors concerned, the book shows how architectural designs and ideas can creatively address some of the world’s most pressing urban and social problems through buildings and other forms of architectural invention. The wide range of projects on show deal inventively with such important issues as cultural identity, housing, climate change, health and public space, as well as architectural concerns with the imagination of exciting forms and aesthetic languages.

Complementing the student projects is a series of short and provocative essays written by tutors at the school. Ranging from landscape to buildings, from urbanism to interaction, from making to advanced technology, these essays postulate a series of manifestoes and agendas – and so both create a conceptual framework around the incredible variety of student work on display, and suggest some of the most current and pertinent agendas for architecture today