Scotland +Venice: Fellowship Programme 2018

In 2018, five architecture students took part in the first Scotland + Venice Fellowship Programme. It was a chance for them to contribute to the prestigious International Architecture Exhibition (Biennale Architettura), and to Scotland’s critically acclaimed response: The Happenstance.

Each fellow developed their own critical thoughts about the exhibition’s 2018 theme of ‘freespace’, and responded through a range of exhibition mediums. Their work was shown in Glasgow and Edinburgh with The Happenstance exhibition.

On this page, you can read their responses. They cover:

• Theo Shack’s investigation into the rules of encounters at The Happenstance
• Iga Świercz’s collection of stories from people she met in Venice by chance
• Eilish Camplisson’s exploration of the routes people took through Venice before arriving at The Happenstance
• Lucia Medina Uriarte’s response to the question of the city’s essence and the spirit of place
• Robert Colvin’s research that aims to construct new tools for seeing and experiencing the relationship between architecture and place

The Art of the Unintended Encounter is an investigation into the rules of the encounters at The Happenstance in Venice. The research is divided into 11 subheadings that explore and critique the processes employed. It has a view to how this type of intervention can be replicated in other places away from the Biennale context.

Theo Shack, year 4 (2018), Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh

The research is a collection of stories from people the author met in Venice simply by chance. It is a catalogue of their memories. It is an attempt to describe a person through the transparency of the spaces associated with the conversations they had. Through this set of interviews, meetings and conversations, the most important moments of their lives are discovered.

Simultaneously abstract and analytical, the drawings and models detail the essence of subjective mental and physical experience of place.

Iga Świercz, year 2 (2018), Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde

Running threads through Venice, is a record and exploration of the routes people took through Venice before finding/arriving at The Happenstance in Palazzo Zenobio. It seeks to examine how the space created by The Happenstance team relates to or improves on the current free spaces in Venice.

Eilish Camplisson, year 4 (2018), Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Dundee

45.4088 N 2.3155 E: And vice versa

The two pieces of research look at the question of the city’s essence and the spirit of place: what is it that makes a location what it is? Constructed purely as documentation, they aim not to draw a definite conclusion. Rather they aim to evoke an impression upon the reader of what the city of Venice might mean.

‘An urban phenomenology’ distils a series of conversations into stories and memories narrated by the city’s long- and short-term visitors, becoming a catalogue of experiences.

‘The meeting place’ was put together as a reflection of our own position in Venice: a corner, or a point, where opposites met. Is the city, perhaps, not so much its components, but in the way they come together?

Lucia Medina Uriarte, year 3 (2018), Scott Sutherland School of Architecture and Built Environment, Robert Gordon University

Drawing the Intangible

The research aims to construct new tools for observing, recording and experiencing the relationship between architecture and place. Developing beyond a simplified representation of locale, this research seeks to examine the role of architecture and environment in the choreography of daily life.

Robert Colvin, Masters by conversion (2018), Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art  

The fellowship programme gave the students research and personal development opportunities during Scotland’s Year of Young People. They took part in a steward-research role while conducting their own self-led research.

The fellowship programme was a partnership between the Association of Scottish Schools of Architecture and Scotland + Venice.