A plot of land can exist without an assigned use or classification, but a building rarely escapes one. Does architecture carry use? Might it even be shaped by it? 

In the UK, the use class system abstracts the way land is developed into policy, enforcing a relationship between use and form. While it does not dictate a specific building, it nonetheless anticipates one, compelling life into legal categories: to live, to work, to trade and so on. The conflicts inherent in proximity to other things are often neutralised by regulation and standardisation, but use – and the structures that support it – forms over time, created and undone through daily practice. What then can design do for the messiness, negotiations and hybridity of everyday life?

This year, Diploma 13 continues its investigation into the measured, often invisible rules that shape architecture – and the ways in which we use, misuse or subvert them. We return to the idea of thickness as a physical register of political intention. Walls, envelopes, boundaries, paths and thermal breaks are understood not only as technical elements, but as tangible spaces of negotiation, mediating proximities, exclusions and permissions that only exist as part of buildings.

In that spirit, our focus is on buildings, be they old, existing, adapted or new. From houses to halls, and from farms to factories, we will register through drawing and physical modelling the lived negotiations and frictions that have transformed spaces over time. Through an investigation into physical thickness and the pragmatic and imaginative potential of the architectural detail, we acknowledge the values that material assemblies hold, not only in construction, but also in culture, regulation and the politics of use. We will work at the scale of walls, rooms and immediate surroundings, but in doing so, we will bring forward proposals that consider the regional, global and planetary. We ask what it means to build otherwise; to work within systems while resisting their limits.

Our testing ground is the banal yet labyrinthine built environment of the UK, where building types and their uses have been exceptionalised, genericised or hollowed out. As more buildings are expected to accommodate any use, at any time, classification becomes less a tool of definition than the enactment of control. What then is the value of use or building typology when everything must be multipurpose? What might even become of architecture?

Our projects will propose bold, intentional architectures that confront these entanglements as a reflection of tangible possibility, material resistance and critical engagement with the systems we build within.