MArch Architecture at Norwich

Congratulations on your successful selection to the MArch course at Norwich University of the Arts. We, your course team, are looking forward to welcoming you in September as part of our 2024/2025 cohort

Welcome Week starts on Monday 16 September – we will meet you on campus, introduce the tutors and campus facilities, and you will have an opportunity to get to know other students in your programme. You may attend talks about the services and facilities the University offers, as well as explore the City of Norwich and the local landscape. The first taught day of your course is Monday 23 September, when we will talk you through the outline of the year structure, activities, and overall ambition.

See below a short holiday project. This is a quick test of your ability to follow a brief, think creatively and produce something of quality without spending either a huge amount of time or money.

Postcards

Crossing seas, deserts, borders and boundaries, postcards have crisscrossed the planet for nearly two hundred years. A simple communication device simultaneously defined by their geographical specificity and open-endedness, they have connected families, friends, colleagues and places.

You are tasked to make a postcard from your personal landscape – a mash-up of where you are, have been, and are yet to travel. As is the nature of postcards, yours is a fiction. It tells a story through image and, sometimes, writing. You may choose to draw, make, fold, write and/or photograph something, or a combination of the above. You are asked to bring your single double-sided card to your first week.

As you take a break over the summer, we ask that you reflect on what it is that you will bring to the course here at Norwich. Think of how you will apply your knowledge, experience and skills to transform not only yourselves, but also the course, because we believe our students are our equal partners in the transformative agenda of developing new knowledge.

In the meantime, some suggestions of things to watch and do before September:

Watch

Director Wim Wenders’ Oscar-nominated film Perfect Day (2023), an absorbing narrative of the daily life of a Tokyo toilet cleaner, showcasing the Tokyo Toilet project (https://tokyotoilet.jp/en/) a series of 17 public toilets in the city’s Shibuya district commissioned over the past six years to architects and designers including Tadao Ando and Kengo Kuma.

visit

If you are in the London area and have time, you can visit the Serpentine Pavilion, designed this year by Minsuk Cho/Mass Studies

• Archipelagic Void (8 June – 27 October 2024, free).

In Norfolk, at Holkham Hall you can visit the solo exhibitions of Magdalene Odundo and Antony Gormley, large-scale installations of sculptures and ceramics sited both inside the historical building and outside in the landscaped gardens.

• Antony Gormley, Time Horizon (21 April – 31 October 2024).
• Magdalene Odundo (12 May – 29 September 2024).