The Winter School 2023
Visit the Winter School Gallery at the Virtual LSA
The Winter School, alternatively known as the Whole School Project, has a long history at Liverpool School of Architecture. It offers students from all year groups and courses the opportunity to meet and work together on one of a number of simultaneous workshops.
At the end of January 2023 the first post Pandemic Winter School was held, comprising of five workshops and attended by students from first year undergraduate to Masters.
The 2023 Workshops
Liverpool Biennial. Working with the curating team from this international arts festival the students explored the potential of presenting contemporary art in the historic context of the one of the most historical buildings of Liverpool’s Docks, framing their work in the context of the Biennials theme of UMoya, The Sacred Return of Last Things.
Wildly Wavering. Ex LSA student and award-winning architect Kirsty Badenoch and Dan Rea of Periscope Studio led this radical studio which took students on an adventure in representation. Working in both the School of Architecture and the Granby Winter Garden this workshop presented their output by encouraging visitors to take their shoes off and continue the experiment.
POV Students in this workshop reimagined often overlooked spaces in the School, creating a series of exciting and unforgettable interpretations. These were held in identical cardboard boxes, so the theatrical reconfigurations could only be seen if the box was lifted and the eye was put to a tiny hole, a reward for engagement and an appreciation from the first person perspective.
Performance Prestigious architectural practice, Austin-Smith:Lord joined the Winter School and took their students on a journey into the city on a quest to activate public spaces with imaginative performance spaces, mirroring the process that they would use in practice.
AppArchitecture Exploring the multiple subjective decisions in every act of translation, the workshop presented the group with a number of richly descriptive texts of contiguous architectural spaces. Each participant attempted to convert a text into an image and then a model form, at each stage their interpretation and symbolic imagination taking them to places that no one else could have discovered.
All the students who attended demonstrated an enthusiasm, creativity and commitment that was widely complemented by the visiting tutors. We hope that many of them may be able to join Winter School 2024, which is already being planned.
Sincere thanks for all those Liverpool staff across many departments who made this possible, and our gratitude to the students who made it so memorable.
