Hey, I’m Alex (he/they)

I’m a MArch 1 student in Continuity, an atelier I was drawn to due to its highly pragmatic, grounded and contextual approach to Architecture. I did my BArch at the University of Nottingham, where I particularly focused on inclusive education and housing, as well as adaptive design.

I did my Part 1 at WW+P Architects (formerly Weston Williamson), and continue to work there part time whilst I complete my degree. My work there on the Residential Mixed-Use team is predominantly focused on social housing and civic buildings, and I also get involved with education programmes like Open City’s Accelerate.

What If? particularly appealed to me as I have learnt the value of community is so important, particularly whilst working on social housing projects. What If? Is an exciting proposal to reuse a historically valuable local building and give it community value. It also ties into a bigger vision for the redevelopment of the region, promoting resilience for the existing and future communities.

A skill I bring to the team is my ability to quickly adapt to new situations and challenges, allowing me to get stuck into a short project, like in the upcoming Action Weeks.

Over the two weeks our main aim, alongside our ambitions, is to have fun and learn new skills.
We will not only visit the site and meet our collaborator, but we'll engage with the local community at a consultation event held at What If?'s community hub during the first week.
We're also hoping to visit a similar, highly successful, project in the heart of Manchester (more details to be confirmed) and see if we can apply any of this in Stockport.
We'll be analysing and critiquing existing proposals for the regeneration of the area and counter-mapping.
We'll be quickly getting to know the local, making sure that our final vision is ambitious, exciting, but most importantly hyper-local and for the community in which we are working.
At the end of the action weeks we'll have worked collaboratively to produce a vision for site and wider area. This will involve designing, debating, researching and ambitious thinking.

We met our students at 10am in our space, gave a quick introduction to the team, a brief plan for the 2 weeks and the project.

Before we started designing, we wanted to break the ice and get to know our team, their skills and interests through their favourite (or best) work. All the students bought in a piece of work and presented it to the group. There was a wide range of skills on show, from computer modelling in Revit, Rhino and Blender, hand sketching, painting, collaging and physical model making. Our students presented work from a range of projects, often routed in community and driving change, which is well aligned with our work over the next 2 weeks for our collaborator.

We also got to know the skills our team might like to learn; digital skills, presentation skills – even learning about skills for practice, including understanding the RIBA workstages.

We'll be intertwining learning new skills with producing our outputs over the next 2 weeks.

Meeting with the collaborator.

We had a meeting with Aoife from What If?, who introduced the demonstrator hub's ambitions and its home on Hardman Street to our team. Although she was not able to join us in person, we caught up with her over Teams. Online meetings are a key part of working in practice so this is a good skill to learn, to remain engaged despite not being in the same place.

In the meeting, Aoife discussed with us:
- her vision for What If?, its HQ and beyond
- some of the issues facing local communities around the site
- the key outputs she would like from us in these two Action Weeks

The meeting was valuable in providing the team with a solid understanding of what What If? is all about and how the MSA can help this vision come to life.

We can’t wait to visit What If?'s HQ on Wednesday 14th for a public design charrette!

Quick Thinking - Our initial responses

The fantastic work produced on Monday afternoon by our team.

Showing the impact of What If? across Edgeley in the next 10 years

A recap of a fantastic 2 weeks. We want to thank all the students who were engaged with the process and helped us deliver something special to our collaborators.