MSA Live 26

15/5/26

SESSION 12: INTENSIVE WEEK DAY 5

Friday was the day. Our group presentation was scheduled for 10:45 A.M. at the Geoffrey Manton Building, marking the final stage of our MSA Live Action Week. After intensive MSA live sessions of site visits, community engagement, design development, modelling, rendering and publication work, we came together to present the final outcome of Grounds of Healing.
The presentation was delivered by Taecho, Zareen, Nick and Omolade, who explained the project journey from understanding the existing café and community spaces to developing the final proposal. The presentation showed how we responded to the key issues identified during the week, including limited circulation, lack of storage, the need for flexible furniture, and the opportunity to create a warmer and more inclusive environment for the Counselling & Family Centre.
The final proposal brought together the café, community room, outdoor seating, serving counter and modular furniture strategy. Through the floor plan, renders and spatial strategy, we showed how small design interventions could make the space more flexible, welcoming and useful for different users and activities.
One of the most meaningful parts of the day was our conversation with our collaborator, Mark, about the outcomes and proposal. He was happy with the results, which made the work feel valuable beyond just the academic submission. Friday marked the end of our MSA Live journey and reminded us that good design begins with listening, collaboration and responding to real people and places.

Hi! I’m Amanda and I’m a BA1 Architecture student. I’m really interested in model-making and working with different materials in B15. I enjoy testing ideas physically and seeing how a design can change and develop through the making process.

I’m excited to be part of the MSA Live project with the Sale Festival because it’s a good chance to work with people from different year groups while getting involved in a real community project. I’m looking forward to sharing ideas, developing them as a group, and seeing how design can help bring people together.

Intensive Week Day 5
15/05/2026
IT'S A WRAP!!
We had our final project presentation and received positive feedback all around! This project has been a unique learning experience and opened us up to the world of planning, challenging the architect as a sole author. We can't wait to see what the future holds for Thornton Manor!

Overall Mood(s): Fulfilled, Grateful

15/5/26

Our Group team presented 'Where Stillness Lives' as part of our MSA LIVE 26 final presentation, marking the completion of our collective months of collaboration, discussion, and evolved design development.

Standing together and presenting the project publicly felt both rewarding and meaningful, particularly seeing how early conversations and evolving ideas had developed into a resolved architectural proposal centred around stillness, care, and community refuge.

We contributed different perspectives and responsibilities, which strengthened the overall presentation and reflected the collective nature of the work itself. While our experience naturally carried challenges, it reinforced our belief that architecture is rarely produced through individual authorship alone, but through communication and shared responsibility.

Presenting together ultimately felt less like a formal assessment and more like a moment of collective achievement and reflection.

Ctrl+S and Into the Room
/Intensive Week Day 5/

It’s officially presentation day. After a week of drawing, modelling, layout debates, and general collective grind, today is about getting the work out of our hands and into the room. Yesterday was all about polishing and packaging, so today is about delivery. And hopefully, Euan has finally stopped nudging the axon drawing by 0.1mm on repeat.

We gathered in the morning for a last run-through, tightening the flow, sorting who says what, and doing the headcount of who’s around, who’s running late, and who’s most likely to be a no-show.

Then it was off to the lecture hall. Nerves kicked in for about five minutes, and then it was just… presenting. We walked through our (slightly missing-in-action) collaborator, the negotiated brief, what we learned through site and engagement, and the final proposal. Honestly, it went well. The story held together, the visuals did their job, and it felt good seeing everything we’ve been building all week land in one clear sequence.

It was also really good seeing how other groups framed their projects. Different collaborators, totally different approaches, and so many ways of translating community benefit into design. It made our own work feel more grounded, and it was a reminder that the “output” isn’t just the final drawings, it’s also the method and the teamwork that got you there.

Big thanks to everyone in the team. Getting a project like this over the line takes a lot of coordination, especially across different years and cohorts, but it genuinely felt like a proper collaboration. We pulled together something we’re proud of, and we somehow kept the energy (and the group chat) alive through it all.

15 May 2026 @ Geoffrey Manton Building

/ Final Presentation
Presentation day !

Presentation Day

Presentation Day was the day when we shared the work we had developed throughout the semester and the outcomes we gained during Action Week. No new material was produced on this day; instead, we presented our process, research, engagement activities, and final proposal through the publication, presentation, and project materials that had already been prepared.

The presentation took place in the Geoffrey Manton Building, and our collaborator was also present during the session. The project was presented through a shared narration by three members of the group. This allowed us to explain the research process, observations around the school, conversations with students, parents, teachers, and Manchester City Council representatives, the activities carried out with the children, and the design proposal in a more organised way.

During the presentation, we particularly explained how the project related to the School Streets programme and how the closed street could be reimagined not only as a space for movement, but also as a social, safe, and play-focused public space for children, families, and the school community. The drawings, games, and feedback collected from the site during the engagement activities were also presented as an important part of the project narrative.

After the presentation, we had the opportunity to speak with our collaborator. They said that they liked the proposal and mentioned that the documents we had prepared could be used for their own work and future discussions. This feedback was important because it showed that the project was not only an academic output, but also a useful and meaningful document for a real stakeholder.

15/05
The day was finally here! Our presentation was scheduled at 11.15am in the GM building LT.1. We all went in from 10:00am and attentively listened to all the previous groups while they were presenting their projects. Fortunately, we were lucky enough to have ‘Lisa’ one of our collaborators joining us today. When our turn came, we presented our project and since the slides weren’t that many in relation to the number of people in our group, we collectively decided on who would present. After presenting, we could all feel from our collaborator’s positive reaction that she was quite fond of how we developed the idea and how it has evolved. She said “I love how you’ve developed the concept in a way that bridges the community of life leisure and the community of the school nextdoor.” Our collaborater also stated that she wishes that they could actually adapt this idea and execute it in life leisure. After listening to all the other groups present, we went out for pizza as a group for a well deserved celebration. Overall, MSA live was a pleasure as it gave us the chance to get to know each other and work on this project together throughout this semester. The end of MSA live is bittersweet but thank you group 16 for making this an enjoyable experience.

Session 13: The Final Presentation

After weeks of meetings, surveys, revisions, publication edits, and more layout changes than any of us would like to admit, today was finally presentation day.

The session began with final checks, rehearsals, and making sure everyone knew their sections before presenting our finished proposal to tutors, peers, and collaborators. Although our own collaborator unfortunately couldn’t attend in person, we had been in contact beforehand and received really positive feedback, which reassured us that the scheme successfully responded to the brief and the needs of the space.

The presentation itself felt like a strong way to wrap up the project. It was rewarding to finally share the work after seeing how much it had developed from the early brainstorming sessions into a resolved proposal backed by community feedback, site analysis, and collaborative design decisions.

We also received encouraging commentary from tutors, particularly around the value of reflecting honestly on the collaborative process throughout the project. Looking back, the project became about much more than just the final design outcome. It was also a lesson in communication, adaptability, compromise, and learning how to work through challenges as a team.

A slightly surreal end to a very busy few weeks, but a satisfying one. Definitely earned the post-presentation food and coffee afterwards.

Final day of MSA Live
15/5/2026

Morning rehearsals, final timing checks, and one last run-through before the 3pm presentation in the lecture theatre. We closed the day with pizzas, coffees, and drinks, using our remaining budget to sit together one last time. A small celebration marking the end of the journey, and everything that came with it.

Action Week Day 4
Presentation finalisation!

The session was spent on adding the final touch-ups to our presentation slides. We then proceeded to go through the running order and important talking points for the presentation. We spoiled ourselves with sweet treats, for all our dedication and efforts.

Final run through! Thank you for everyone’s hard work guys! Today is the day of the final presentation and we are all pumped up, prepared and ready to go!

14/05/2026

We took today to run through and practice our presentation and finalise our publication as a team. We did this to practice our timing and execution to ensure that we were all feeling confident for the real presentation tomorrow. After some time informing Jake that his section couldn’t last the whole ten minutes, we were able to sort out timings for each section and perform several run throughs. We worked hastily today at the thought of sitting in a pub garden for a hard-earned pint and pizza as a group.

How was our budget was spent?
On the penultimate day of our action week, we used our completely untouched budget, as our model was made of mainly scraps, which allowed us to buy some food to power on with the rest of the work!

Engagement Workshop - 21/03/26

After the presentation, we organised an engagement workshop with both the client and members of the church community, with the aim of gathering their opinions, experiences, and feedback.

Prior to the workshop, we developed a series of questions designed to help us better understand the users’ perspectives. These included questions about what they value most about the church, how the space makes them feel and what improvements they would like to see in our scheme. These prompts formed the basis for open discussions with the users and the client, allowing us to gain a better understanding of their experiences, interpretations and ideas for the space.

To encourage participation, we wrote the questions on multiple sheets of A1 paper so that participants could easily note down their thoughts and ideas. We also provided printed floor plans alongside images of the different rooms and hallways, helping users to navigate the spaces more clearly and annotate specific areas with comments and suggestions.
Following the workshop, we were able to collate and analyse the responses, using them as a foundation for our ongoing design development. This process ensured that our proposals responded directly to the outcomes of the collaboration and reflected the needs and aspirations of the community.

Today marked our final rehearsal before the presentation, making it one of the most important sessions of the project so far. As a group, we worked collaboratively on the final touches to both the presentation and the publication, ensuring that everything was polished, well-structured, and completed to a high standard. We carefully reviewed each slide, checked that the information flowed clearly, and made sure the overall design looked professional and engaging.

We also spent time delegating speaking roles for the presentation so that each member of the team knew exactly what they would be responsible for. To help us feel more prepared and confident, we created and finalised presentation scripts, allowing everyone presenting to understand what they would be saying and which slides they would be covering. This rehearsal gave us the opportunity to practise our timing, improve the flow of the presentation, and make any final adjustments before the real event.

As this was our final MSA Live meeting, the session also felt like a celebration of all the hard work and effort we had put into the project over the past weeks. After such an intensive yet incredibly valuable learning journey, we decided to congratulate and reward ourselves by using the remaining project budget to order Subway together. It was a nice way to end the experience as a team and reflect on everything we had achieved throughout the project.

14/05/26

Action week day 4:

With our final day of action week and presentation looming near, it was time for the highly anticipated pizza party - a well deserved reward for all the hard work this year.

With bellies full and motivation high, the rest of the day was spent working on the presentation, choosing which of us were speaking and the accompanying visuals for the slides. A dry run of the presentation took us to the end of the day where we concluded, as ever, with a round-up of our outputs.

General consensus: Group 31 are feeling ready for the presentation tomorrow!

Our final intensive week session before the presentation required our team to work together efficiently and patiently. Today, we finalised our publication document and presentation for hand-in. We spent the day identifying gaps in the documents and adding final edits to our designs agreed by the whole team. The day ended with a final run through of our presentation, with notes taken and scripts prepared. Finally, we took a team photograph on one of the CyanLines projects next to Symphony Park as a project wrap-up memory.

Presentation preparation

Today we pulled together our publication and ran through our presentation in preparation for tomorrow afternoon. We ensured that our best and most relevant work was visible and easy to follow for our collaborator, tutors and MSA peers to understand.

After we finished adjusting the model to our proposal, we brought the model to our group to discuss our next steps.
We then made some final adjustments to the model with the suggestion from our group so before taking some final pictures of both a floor plan view as well as some perspective views of the model.

We did a pre-submission run-through presentation; we put it on the big screen to go through it as a group and let the speaker practice what they wanted to say. The whole thing is cohesive and looking really good; we are all super proud of how our work has come together; it's an honest, thought-out reflection of exactly what our collaborator asked us for back in January. We are basically done and ready for tomorrow!

14/05/2026

Today marked our final working day of action week, at the beginning of the day we reviewed what we had left to do and began adding finishing touches to our final outputs, presentation and publication. We then spent time reviewing our work, making sure we were prepared for the presentation the next day, we chose who was going to present and began practicing what we would say during the presentation.

14/05/26

MSA Live Week - Day 4

As we were now onto the last day before the presentation, we decided to use this day to do a final review on presentation and check for any mistakes or overlaps. We finalised the structure and content of our project and discussed the key points we wanted to verbally cover as well as assigning speaking roles to various team members.

brainstorming and research session for publication

Action Week day 03 - 13/05/26

In today’s session, we were only two days away from the final presentation, so the team focused on refining and completing the remaining detailed aspects of the project.
For both the physical and digital modelling work, the focus was on refining and developing the remaining details of the project. The physical model involved laser cutting the final building massing pieces and adding more structural detail. At the same time, the 3D model was mostly complete in terms of the site amenities, including the main pitch, landscaping, car park, and surrounding facilities, with the remaining work focused on refining the building model itself and producing the final rendered visuals. The architectural floor plans were also nearly complete, requiring only minor adjustments and final detailing.
In terms of documentation, the presentation had been completed, allowing the team to continue work on organising the publication content. By the end of the session, many of the foundational and technical aspects of the project had been resolved, bringing us significantly closer to the final output.

11/5/26 Seventh Meeting
For our first meeting of the intensive week, we assigned roles for making a scale model of Design 1, a 1:10 model of Design 2, creating an instruction manual, drawing 3D perspectives, and putting together a presentation for the Friday deadline. As the final designs had already been made, all we had left to do then was choose a final layout to propose to our clients and cleared up any final enquiries about the schedule.

30/04/26
Today was our last workshop with the Loreto students. first they showed us what they had been working on the week before and we discussed that with them. then we gave them foam blocks representing classrooms chapel etc. we helped them explore the space and scale. they experimented with different pathways and orientations. this helped us lights around to set up the master plan.

12/05/26

This week, we started to analyse the outcomes of our community engagement task in depth. By reviewing where people had placed pins on the map indicating where they thought could be improved, we began to notice a clear trend emerging across the site. Although several different areas were highlighted, we were particularly drawn to the idea of creating a journey through the space. We began asking ourselves key questions: Where would people begin? What would attract them to the site? And how would they move through it?

This led us to consider a series of pop-up spaces and temporary interventions throughout the area. We explored what kinds of arts, crafts, and cultural activities could be introduced into these locations, drawing directly from the responses written by the public on the feedback board. We looked closely at which suggestions appeared repeatedly, what had been written two, three, or even four times, to identify the ideas that resonated most strongly with residents.

Once we had narrowed these responses down to the most popular themes, we began combining the findings by placing these ideas within the areas of the site that the public felt were most in need of improvement. This allowed us to create a proposal that responded directly to community feedback while encouraging movement, interaction, and engagement throughout the site.

Intensive Week Day 3: 13/05/26
We began the day by finishing the renders of the church proposal. Once these were complete, some of us started sketching directly onto the renders to visualise how the spaces could be used, adding elements such as a basketball court, food pantry, and social areas to make the project feel more realistic and engaging.

At the same time, others completed the physical models in B15. The simplified church model was designed so that the children’s mural designs from the workshop could be inserted into the structure, helping connect the community activities back into the architectural proposal.

Throughout the day, we also continued developing the final presentation by organising images, sketches, renders, and resources gathered throughout the project so far. Towards the end of the day, we held a trial presentation session where we planned who would speak during different sections for both the primary school workshop on Thursday and the final presentation on Friday. We wrote and practised scripts to help improve the flow and confidence of the presentations.

Before finishing for the day, we printed and prepared all of the materials needed for Thursday morning’s trip back to Wigan, ensuring the worksheets, presentations, and activity resources were organised and ready to use with the children.

Action Week D1
11 May 2026

Welcome to Day 1 of our MSA Live Intensive Week! We kicked off this Monday morning by reviewing our core objectives and mapping out the remaining tasks. With the final presentation coming up this Friday, we knew we needed a highly structured approach.

After a productive group discussion in the studio, we officially distributed the workload. Some team members are focusing on finalizing the site plan and 3D modeling, others are crafting detailed architectural sketches on the iPad, and the rest are structuring our final publication in InDesign. The studio is buzzing with energy and focus. It feels incredibly rewarding to see everyone collaborating so effectively. It’s a busy and intense start, but we are fully geared up for the challenge ahead!

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT!

To continue developing our concept designs, we took our ideas for the “Dens of Discovery” project out into the public in Chelford, where our site is located.
We set up at the local café, Tatton Perk, and spoke with members of the public about our proposal. This gave us valuable insight into how the project is perceived by the community and allowed us to gather genuine feedback on both the design and intended purpose of the dens. We also went to discuss to the community about companies that produce waste that could possibly recycled to help build these Dens.

Overall, the response was very positive. Many people expressed strong support for the idea of creating dens that promote recycling and sustainability. They all liked the unique concept designs and thought that it worked well for the area of Chelford. They also highlighted how the activities planned within the spaces could benefit a wide range of users, including children and people with disabilities.
A key takeaway from these conversations was the idea of inclusivity and accessibility is a really important theme for this close community.

21/04/2026

Workshop day! We went to the school and split up between 3 classrooms to lead the day long workshops. Our first workshop was to design your own playground, where the students had to place stickers and draw anything they feel they would want and need in a playground. This was to strengthen their abilities to organise a space. Our second workshop was for them to create their own 3d model playground item, like a swing, slide, or anything else they had in mind. We gave them straws and clay and let their creativity run wild. For the last and final workshop, they designed buildings of a city out of recycled items and the whole class came together and placed all their creations onto a map, creating a combined city. It was a successful day and they all enjoyed and were more cooperative than we expected.

Day 5 - Development

We’ve now finalized our core design ideas and started moving them from concept to paper and into detailed renderings. After the Easter break, each team member shared their individual progress. Through a round of peer feedback, we were able to collaboratively refine our approaches before moving into the next phase of development.

Group 13: Meeting Oskar "with a K"

Alongside the tote-spraying workshop, the Withington Walls x Mandem Meetup event also featured a live mural created by Oskar “with a K.” Taking a short break from painting to pose for a photo, he spoke with Macie and Cian about his work after hearing about the MSA Live 2026 project. Oskar spoke warmly about the Baths and the surrounding community, reminiscing on his role in organising the 2024 Paint Jam held at the site.

Having already spent time admiring the murals in the external courtyard, it was especially valuable to hear the story behind them. The Paint Jam, he explained, was organised to celebrate and promote street art culture across Manchester.

The conversation also highlighted the Baths’ wider cultural and social significance. Inspired by the site's continued association to activism, the group reflected on the Bath's impact, from advancing gender integrated bathing, to the community protests from 2013-2015 to save the Baths.