Diploma 15 explores type, form and innovative ways of life in the UK countryside. Rejecting both current commercial schemes and modernist alternatives, we develop housing typologies with a sense of shared purpose. This year, we will look for value and inspiration in medieval forms, from the monastery to the farmstead, developing an understanding of the ways they shaped daily life. By exploring the architectural potential of accumulation, aggregation and displacement, we will generate new types of collective form that embrace collisions and are incremental in nature.

In Term 1, we will work through plan, diagram and physical model to generate ideas rooted in tectonics and the culture of collective life. Through a cumulative series of short, nested briefs, we will develop designs with their own scales, materials and structures. As we move from cell to territory through a conglomeration of spaces that daisy-chain, respond and adjust, we will trace the complex trajectory of the home from single hall to matrix to neighbourhood. Our compositions will be messy and contradictory, landed in sites that can harness multiple contrasting geographic or social conditions.

In Term 2, we will work in reverse. Moving from landscape and infrastructure to material building blocks, we will define the logic, patterns and construction techniques of our designs. Through iterative studies, we will distil the grammar of our architecture, explore exceptions and consider how a foreign object can alter its surroundings. The edges of our proposals will fray and connect, questioning the distinction between building and landscape. We will investigate the role of abstraction to clarify ideas and selectively obscure reality, as well as to develop archetypal forms and singular representation techniques. In Term 3, we will explore temporalities, supply chains and implementation strategies to identify a single point of change that challenges the existing, disrupts systems and transforms rural life.