Bath Summer Studio

Trip photos, projects and final presentation

Video encapsulation

Project gallery

The principal objective of this special summer studio was to familiarize the academic team with the architecture of the city of Bath in England, particularly its impressive 18th century fabric and the urban developments that it subsequently inspired, and to extract models from these for contemporary adaptation. While becoming familiar with the city’s unique architectural character, students were challenged to further develop the local urban and building types in the design of a masterplan for a central area along the River Avon.

Recent proposals around Bath have faced public opposition in part because of their grounding in post-War industrial ideology and their espousal of a reductivist ‘machine aesthetic’. While developing inventive, individualized design solutions (especially with regard to public buildings), the Notre Dame team chose instead to keep closely to the established local vocabulary of forms, urban and building types, range of building expressions, degree of articulation, and constructional techniques that make Bath unique and deserving of its World Heritage status.

The Georgian terrace house, more familiarly known as a row house in America, was chosen as the basic residential unit (with semi-basements where permitted by flooding considerations), both for its elegant simplicity and because it allows maximum unit sub-divisions in response to changing socio-economic circumstances. 

The Bath Summer Studio concluded with a public exhibition of the work at the Bath Society Hall, in Green Park Station.