The Cass Projects Office was delighted to receive thirty entries to the Aldgate Experiments street furniture competition.
Date: 14 February 2014
“This competition is a great opportunity for the City of London and the Cass to work together and involve the local community in the enhancement of Aldgate's public realm. The wide range of entries submitted allowed the judging panel to review really interesting and innovative designs, proof of the outstanding quality of the students from the Cass school.”
Victor Callister, Assistant Director for Environmental Enhancement, City of London.
The Cass Projects Office was delighted to receive thirty entries to the Aldgate Experiments street furniture competition. Students from across the School of Art, Architecture and Design were invited to submit concept ideas for street furniture to be situated on a number of sites around Aldgate.
This competition is being run in collaboration with the City of London. Ahead of major reworking to the urban area of Aldgate, the City of London Corporation is organising a number of temporary interventions throughout Aldgate’s public spaces in 2013 and into 2014.
As part of this series, the Projects Office is working with the City of London Corporation, offering students the opportunity to design seating installations to be located in the public realm. Working with the City’s appointed project designer of A Et Cetera, The Cass Projects Office developed a brief for students to design engaging, playful pieces of street furniture. The winning piece will be fabricated in The Cass workshops and located on site in the Spring.
Submissions were received in early January from across the School, and from students at all levels. From these the judges were asked to select a shortlist of four proposals. Each of these will be awarded £500, and asked to develop their design in further detail.
The next stage will see the shortlist working towards Round 2, when a second panel of judges will select one or possibly two winning pieces that will be professionally fabricated and located in public realm sites in Aldgate East.
The judges reviewed all of the entries anonymously, and considered each submission for design originality, functionality and appropriateness for site. This elicited a diverse discussion about the importance of design proposals responding to place and the identity of Aldgate.
The four judges were Victor Callister - City of London: Assistant Director Environmental Enhancement, Aidan Walker - Design and architecture curator and writer, Rob Oakley – City of London’s Head of Access and Robert Mull – The Dean of The Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design.
We are very pleased to announce the short list of four, selected to develop further their pieces. These are:
- Charles Mugish, BA Furniture and Product Design
- Juliano Cordano, MA furniture Design
- Group project ‘Body Grid’: Haidar Al Har, Niralee Casson, Mehrdad Mishra, Maria Perezagua, Viktorija Podkolzina and Anil Thapa (Year 1 Architecture BA)
- ‘Thing-I’: Jonny Cravan, Kevin Faure, Onour Impram, Pandu Mars, Cinthya Lana (Year 1 Architecture BA)
Two projects were noted by the judges for their potential for a cross-disciplinary response to the Aldgate public realm. The propositions contextualised the ethos of how The Cass, as a creative and cross-disciplinary school, sits within Aldgate. These two installation projects were:
- Adam Aspinall (Year 2 Architecture BA)
- Group project ‘Knitting Aldgate’ – Charles Mayes, Martin Kiedrowski, Emilia Paval and Ruslan Stoyanov (Year 1 Architecture BA)
Congratulations to all of the students.
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