Today marks our first meeting at the MTC! Firstly, the group decided that from today on, we are ‘The Mobeelity Hubs’, combining the bee-like movements and connection of Manchester’s transportation, mascot and the brief. To warm up our brains, we started with completing our group contract and signing it together before sharing our ideas on our poster design draft, presenting our own interpretations of the brief. Seeing each other’s poster design will inspire the final product, elevating the poster with new and combined perspectives. Moving on to the core of our project, we discussed the relevance and key points of each person’s suggested precedent studies, reflecting each one against the brief. After getting into the design headspace, we started to discuss the advantages and disadvantages and decided to bring our focus to Oldham road as our site amongst other potential corridor locations.
With this, the first official meeting ended and we all set of to individually research the site to then merge our knowledge together next meeting.

Starting the day with the lecture, we were briefed on risk assessments, budget plans, project timelines and the ethics application. We then had a lunch break and gathered to have a meeting. We first discussed our deadlines and recap the lecture. After completing a draft of the budget plan, we moved on to exploring our individual research conducted from last meeting. Since last meeting, the client has sent us specified sites, so we decided to discuss that further before creating 3 different groups for site visits in a week’s time. Despite narrowing our site during last meeting, we still want to explore the different sites and keep our research wide-ranged. With the dates for the site visits set for 1st of March as the kickstart, we have created a programme for the rest of the project, compromising and respecting each person’s deadlines as promised in our contract, where we also completed the ethics application and the risk assessments.

Yesterday was our long awaited site visits! We divided ourselves into three groups to visit three sites: Minstrelsy Parade (Wythenshawe), Oxford Road Corridoor and Abraham Moss (Oldham). We walked at the site, around the site and towards some interesting highlights of the site. After taking photos and videos, we each upload out individual overview of the place in Miro, for example: design ideas, what we find interesting, advantages, disadvantages, etc. Now, we are onto focusing on the next client meeting!

Hello, my name is Natasha and I am a first year student in architecture. As I am new to the course, I am still exploring the possibilities and types of projects I would prefer in the future. This project is my exploration or larger, communal designs and I am very excited to take another step in my journey of self discovery.