Tutor: Cith Skelcher

Initially Studio Invisible Cities, this MArch design studio run by Cith Skelcher began in 2019 with the intention of revealing and disrupting the hidden inequalities and power dynamics that programme our environments. 

The studio has evolved each year through engagement with different locations, research and collaborators, both within and beyond the school. In 2022 it became Studio Feminist Ecologies, exploring architecture as part of a broader ecology, inspired by Hélène Frichot’s ‘Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture’ (Bloomsbury 2018).  

Wrestling with architecture’s complicity in the colonial project and its legacy of exploitative and extractivist practices, the studio works to imagine new or repaired infrastructures and architectures that can connect us to the earth, being mindful of its precarity and instability. 

The studio space as a situated and engaged learning environment is key. Underpinned by an ethics of care, the students are encouraged to take ownership of their studio, through which they can rehearse the social production of space; build a collective culture of endeavour and support each other to develop individually as social, critical and creative practitioners. 

Each year the studio provides a rich, complex and diverse set of responses to thematic and place based challenges. The students are empowered to draw on their own interests and lived experience, to pursue rigorous research through a range of methods and to translate their ideas into authentic, distinctive and richly communicated projects.

Featured Project: Ourcadia, Hebden Bridge, 2023/24, Lauryn Thomson and Thomas Rogan.