Hi! I’m Gita (Brygida) and I’m excited to work on this project because of my interest in working and collaborating with people, being conscious of cultural contexts that I’m working on. I’m always excited about exploring different ways of implementing safe and sustainable designs to tackle issues within communities. Being in my first year at MSA, I look forward to working in a multidisciplinary team and building new skills in a professional work environment!

03/02/26 Today we all met for the first time. We started with some icebreakers, including
‘rose, bud, thorn’, in which we all said one skill we thought we would bring to the
team, one thing about the project that we were excited for and one skill we wanted
to improve through the project.
Next, we discussed how we would work together as a group, including how often we
would meet and who would take on different roles within the project.
We read through the project brief together and each spoke about what we thought
the project outputs could be. We created a list of questions that we had for our
collaborator, Laura, about the project.
Over the next couple of weeks, we have been set the task of creating a poster for our
project. We decided that it would also be useful for us to do some research into the
context of the project in order for us to gain a deeper understanding of the brief. We
created a list of different research topics and assigned one to each member of the group.

03/02/2026
Following our initial group session, we met with collaborators Laura and Ian to discuss
the project brief and our first steps. Laura is a practising architect and educator, while
Ian is leader of the Sixth form at Loreto College Manchester.
The two gave us a brief description of the history of the Loreto Colleges, which were
founded using the guiding principles of Mary Ward, a Catholic nun and pioneer of
women’s education in the 17th century. Loreto College Hulme was the first of these,
founded in 1851. Today, there are 150 Loreto schools worldwide. This includes one in
Rumbek, South Sudan, which was founded in 2008. The civil war in Sudan meant that
the country’s infrastructure and education system had largely collapsed.
We have been tasked with creating a design concept for a girls’ school located in Aweil,
a town around 200 miles from the existing school in Rumbek. This is to be done in
collaboration with students in Loreto College Hulme’s Architecture Society through a
series of workshops, organised and coordinated by us. We’ve also been put in contact
with James, an architecture student who is working in South Sudan at present.
Questions were raised on whether we’d be able to communicate with students at the
school in Rumbek, as we all agreed that this would be important in informing our design
approach; however, we aren’t yet sure whether this would be possible.
Overall, today was a promising start to this exciting project. We look forward to meeting
the students in the Architecture Society and making our first design moves…

07/02/26 Sethika and Aidira had the pleasure of meeting a friend from North Sudan over coffee to discuss the cultural, political, and historical context of South Sudan. This is what they had to say: Her name is Walaa, she is North Sudanese, grew up in Saudi Arabia, and feels deeply for
the people in South Sudan. We learned about:
The civil war between North and South Sudan and how the latter became independent
How South Sudanese are victims of classism. She told a personal anecdote about a
relative adopting a little girl from South Sudan and how
How South Sudan is agriculturally rich and full of natural resources, but they remain a poor
country
Their dire economic state
How South Sudanese may move to North Sudan for better career prospects and still live in
poor conditions.
How the older generation of South Sudanese may bear resentment towards North Sudan
and how this perpetuates the social divide.
The way children are not encouraged to go to school and to start working from a very young
age.
After the discussion, we supplemented these takeaways with real statistics to support our
research. We also plan to watch the film Goodbye Julia, as per her recommendation, to aid
our understanding of systemic racism against South Sudan and the events leading up to
their independence in 2011. It was interesting to learn about the cultural differences as
well as movements like SPLM and conflicts between two different ethnic groups.
Reflection: We were engaging in more than just research. It felt like a cultural exchange as
we also identified shared struggles with our own cultures (Cambodia and Kazakhstan). This
prompted us to reflect on how we can utilize our education to heal our respective
countries, even throwing out little ideas about how we can do so.
Because our site is in Aweil, Sudan, we’re mostly limited to desktop research which I
anticipate may make us feel somewhat far removed from the project. However, having this
face-to-face interaction helped us feel closer to the project, to really feel for the
beneficiaries of Loreto College.

10/02/26
We began with a brief discussion about the areas that we had covered in our
research (more to come on this next week!). A common theme that came up
throughout the research was sustainable agriculture and the part that this plays in
the curriculum of South Sudan.
We spoke again about how we could define the brief for the project. Through
communication with Laura, we think that our brief should focus on collecting
information about the future users of the school and their needs to create design
principles for the project. We will then use these principles to create concepts for
aspects of the new school.
We brought together a few different ideas for a name for the project and decided
that ‘Learning with Loreto’ described the key themes of learning, collaboration and
the Loreto schools.
Laura sent us a list of dates on which we could run workshops with the students at
Loreto Manchester and we decided on three that we thought would be at key times
throughout the project.

10/02/26
During this week our group began to form poster ideas, some of which we discussed over this weeks Teams meeting. We created a poll to get everyone’s ideas over WhatsApp on the posters, provided feedback and finalised the poster!

10/02/26
Following Sethika and Aidira’s meeting with Walaa, our group decided to take Walaa’s advice to further educate ourselves about South Sudan by watching „Goodbye Julie”. We then discussed our experiences watching the film in our following meeting.

17/02/26
Today, we generated ideas for the upcoming Loreto College workshops. For example, we looked at collage methods to help students on understand spaces as well as starting to put together the research that would influence their architectural decisions for the conceptual design of the school.

17/03/26
We discussed what we did over the break as well as solidified our plans for the workshop scheduled on the 26th of March. We discussed site analysis as well as more information that Libby shared from Laura our collaborator when she had a meeting with her over the break. We discussed the best plan of action for the workshop aiming to get as many ideas out of the students as well as helping them think architecturally. We discussed ways to collaborate with the students most efficiently on the project by thinking of tasks like asking them what they like most about their school, drawing it and considering how it would change depending on where it is and its context. More tasks include cutting out basic site maps which they could work on and visualise their ideas. We decided the best way to do this was splitting groups into different zones and working by having two of us for every five or so groups of students. Having discussed these with Lindsay Bush we felt confident in our selected tasks for the workshop. We also gave each other tasks for the next week including printing out the site plan which would pick up a part of our budget analysis looking at precedence putting together the presentation and research booklet.

24/03/26
Today, we held a teams meeting to make sure we were prepared for our workshop later this week. We checked if the site maps were printed out, we discussed the precedents, site analysis we used for our presentations and went through any last minute checks and errors to make sure everything can go smoothly. We went over who will be present at the workshop and discussed our roles e.g who will be presenting, what groups we will get into as well as final checks about lanyards and ethical assessments.

Final workshop booklet!

26/03/26
Today we held our first workshop of the students. It was great to meet who we will be collaborating with and get loads of new ideas for the design. It was interesting to see how different students had different ideas for what they like about their school and they had lots of different ideas and takes on how that would change depending on the context. In the second part of the workshop, we were able to visualise their ideas by working on the printed site maps which went really well. Some groups worked by cutting out the shapes using scale bars seeing how everything fits on site, some drew their ideas whereas some groups also worked in 3-D by creating models that they placed on the site. This way they were able to work with levels and overall it was interesting to see what they prioritised which helps us a lot further down the line when we finalise a brief for the school.

23/04/26
Today we came back from the Easter holidays and we were able to catch up on the first workshop we did with the students. We discussed the key takeaways from the previous workshop which included what the students valued within the site such as chapel, court yards to socialise, gardens to grow food… As this week Laura will be leading the workshop and we won’t be there, we thought of an exercise for the students to do this week which we sent to Laura which is zooming into a specific space in the school and doing research about it and representing that in any way they want e.g. collage drawings floorplan. This way this would lead us well into the next workshop next week where we could take in the research and use it our final design concept. Therefore we discussed what we will do in the next session which included making a modular model from foam cardboard and putting their spaces into 1:200 scale.