‘In Transition’ Speech for WSA Exhibition 2024 by Juliet Davis, Head of School

Welcome to this year’s show.

It is wonderful to see you all here. The theme for the show is ‘in transition’. As in past years, this was chosen by the students themselves, seeing it as a concept that creates a bridge across the diversity of the school’s output as well as that captures what they are doing themselves through learning on their courses and preparing for the next stage in their career journeys. It isn’t necessarily what all of the courses or design studios have been about explicitly, but it’s been seen as vehicle for gathering and organising work, as for interpreting what the school is about.

I will say more about that in a moment, but I just want to start by commending them for the amazing work they have done - from all the work months ago to design the logo, to liaising with sponsors and raising funds, to publicising the event, to designing and laying out the year book, to the carefully orchestrated curation of the show, the organisation of prizes, the rehearsals of the bandand producing the  digital twin of the show which will be hosted on our website.

So, I’d like to say thank you to all 55 members of the team, but especially the exhibition chairs Zsófi Veres (Overall Chair), Justyna Matuszewska (Digital Exhibition Lead, Co-chair) and Cameron Jones (Physical Exhibition Lead, Co-chair). Your dedication and generosity towards your colleagues and the whole school have bowled me over, truly. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you over the past year.

A massive shout out from me too to colleagues – so many have been involved as an exhibition is a school-wide effort, but I’d like to particularly mention Kate Nash, Sam Johnson, Dan Tilbury, Beth Forrest, Justin Trakins and Shibu Raman – your constant support has been utterly awesome too.

Having said that ‘transition’ hasn’t necessarily been the direct focus of all our studios, actually, architectural research and design are always, inevitably, concerned with it, and we are engaged in transition through teaching, scholarship and research in multiple ways.

Transition is actually at the heart our vision statement – our aim is to ‘make a substantial contribution to the transition to and making of a sustainable built environment that can enhance the wellbeing of present and future generations and care for the planet.’

Realising that transition through the making of a low-carbon built environment is a longstanding theme in the school. It runs through our programmes and is the focus of our ‘Low Carbon Built environment’ research centre.

In some areas of work in the school, we explore the impacts of transitions related to the political economy on cities and landscapes, urban fabrics and communities – from the ways in which notions of modernity reshaped cities, to transitions brought about by post-industrialisation and the rise of global financial cities, to changes related to rapid and accelerating growth in cities of the global south, to constant transitions related to the precarities of the informal economy, to fraught neighbourhood-level transition processes.

We explore transition in social ways – from how design might attune to the transitioning capabilities of people across the lifecourse to how the built environment supports the learning journeys that school children and higher education learners undergo, to how it can support the journey and the waiting game that is recovery from illness, to how women experience change in ex-mining communities, to how transitions related to transport and energy are experienced and felt.

Transition is a concern for heritage studies as social, economic and environmental change makes buildings and infrastructure and landscapes of historic significance more fragile, but also as historic buildings offer lessons for understanding of contemporary sustainable design. And, in design theory and practice, we cannot but be concerned with the tools and conceptual frameworks that enable transition to be charted – from ways of knowing the future, to ways of framing objectives and intentions, to ways of envisioning bold scenarios, to ways of designing processes, forms of engagement and co-production, adaptability, understandings of lifecycle, circularity, and reuse.

Transition has been a focus for pedagogy and scholarship in the last three years. We’ve been redesigning courses fit for the future, fit for students working across more complex social, digital, global, connected and changing worlds. This work has involved bringing pressing agendas to the foreground of architectural education - an emphasis on global challenges, on decolonisation, on the relevance of architecture to debates on equality relating to gender, sexuality, culture and race.

To share a bit from my own experience, when I was a student, I was taught by some amazing women, but I think it’s fair to say that most of the architects I learnt about were white, male or both; and the western canon in architecture was the focus of cultural studies. When I went into practice in 1995, there was one other female architect at my office. As a young gay woman, navigating different expectations, stereotypes, preconceptions, professional working styles, dress codes and sensitivities while also trying to figure myself out and operate effectively as an architect in London took a significant amount of effort, challenge, and energy.

We have transitioned as a profession and in academia a great deal in recognising diverse people and communities since then, but across so many areas, there is still change to make not just to adequately see, but to articulate and leverage the benefits of, diversity and difference for the quality of the built environment in the present and future.

Just as we are trying to foreground this in education, I hope you, our students, will be empowered to help lead ongoing transition into an inclusive future, and a workplace in which all can thrive.

This brings me on to a few final words for those will be graduating from the school this summer. Obviously, I hope you’ve learnt about some interesting things and leave armed with all sorts of knowledge that you are glad to now have at your fingertips.

But, more than things you know, I hope that you are taking some important ways of thinking and doing with you – ways of knowing rather than just knowledge itself, of questioning received wisdoms, of using your senses, your imagination, your insight, your capacity for empathy, your sense of fun; ways of taking a position, of arguing and persuading, but also reflecting and being flexible; ways of recognising risk and taking it when it can take you somewhere exciting and potentially transformative.

And I also hope that you take with you some sense of the range of moral questions that surround and concern architecture, a sense of our discipline as ethical terrain concerned with the conditions of life and wellbeing - personal, social, planetary - and of our practices of drawing and designing as involving constant day to day ethical acts of attention to people and place.

What you take are seeds of course. Your education here over the last year and more is really just beginning. I wish you all the very best for the next stage in the journey.

And I hope that, as you continue to transition, a sense of connection to the school, which is bound up with our hopes and pride in you, will go with you.