The spring semester 2016 interior architecture students had the opportunity to attend a workshop led by Anthony Engi Meacock, Visiting Professor, member of Assemble. Assemble is a collective based in London who work across the fields of art, architecture and design. Assemble’s working practice seeks to address the typical disconnection between the public and the process by which places are made. Assemble champion a working practice that is interdependent and collaborative, seeking to actively involve the public as both participant and collaborator in the on-going realization of the work. In December 2015, Assemble won the prestigious Turner Prize: it is the first architectural firm to have achieved this goal.

Anthony Engi Meacock led the students in the heart of the Assembly process, asking them to explore the concept of home, questioning what is the role and form of the home in the changing city. Students examined alternatives to traditional forms of home-ownership: they questioned our current model towards developing more socially responsive, shared and collective ways of inhabiting space. They seek to develop new forms of domestic space, neglected by conventional forms of urban development.  As the domestic interior is intrinsically linked to the architecture of the city, students use the domestic to explore the wider questions of the city by moving from room to block, to city.  At the end of the semester, each student has imagined an alternative residential model, inserted into a specific site they choose in Geneva. They developed the interior and the exterior, as well as the business model to fund their project, from start to finish.