The Summer Show is the highlight of the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture’s annual calendar. This diverse showcase is an opportunity to view the school’s best works of the past year at close range in the galleries of the UCL Slade School of Art.

Visitors should expect a a wide range of architectural visions. School Director Marcos Cruz describes the occasion as being “more like a fair than a curated exhibition”, reflecting the structure of the degree and diploma courses wherein students form ‘units’ with distinct interests and approaches. Each unit curates its own section of the show, allowing emphasis to shift rapidly from the scale of a mechanism to a masterplan, and for a diversity of drawings, models, objects, texts and films to coexist.

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If you’re like me, you might not instinctively give chemistry and architecture too large an overlap in your mental Venn Diagram of Everything. However, having just attended my first event at the Cheltenham Science Festival, I’m inclined to reconsider.

UCL chemists Andrea Sella (chair) and Dewi Lewis teamed up with visionary architect Magnus Larsson to discuss the interplay between these two fields.

In an almost science-fiction like presentation, Magnus illustrated how he’s using biological and chemical techniques to produce novel and useful architectural structures, or as he put it, “to design materials that don’t quite exist just yet”.

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Increasing availability of digital manufacturing is causing architects to ask serious questions of their profession. Where lies the craft in a project? Is it better to specialise or to co-ordinate others? And for new graduates, emerging into an uncertain market, is there opportunity to be both digital dreamers and hands-on makers?

These questions – and many more – were debated at Fabricate on 15–16 April reports David Shanks, a final-year student of the Graduate Diploma in Architecture at the UCL Bartlett in Unit 23, who was one of ten students who helped with the conference.

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