ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of socially engaged live projects within the undergraduate design studio at The Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University, bridging boundaries between academia, practice and the city.
As deadlines of live projects with real collaborators and partners are not defined by the academic calendar, the studio involves different student cohorts over several years during different phases of a project, ultimately enabling an ongoing live and adapting engagement with a place and its community.
Participation in these projects, both for tutors and students, suggests an alternative method to more established models of architectural education based on hypothetical cases and constructed in the classroom, where students look at social and political conditions from a distance and only take a speculative angle without real engagement with the city and its inhabitants. In contrast, the new architecture studio at The Cass focuses on real projects, which are of a public nature and often located in deprived areas with non-paying communities as their ‘clients’.
