Triple honours for MDX at end-of-year Interior Architecture and Design awards

Students’ reimagining of a town hall and the M&S Marble Arch flagship, and collaborative project with dancers win over the judges

Middlesex University Interiors students at different stages of their academic journey have won a series of prestigious awards for projects that demonstrate their commitment to bold innovation and creative flair.

Abeen Sami, who has just graduated in BA Interior Architecture, received the Social Justice Award from higher education ideas and best practice forum Interior Educators, for her reimagining of a town hall to boost and champion civic involvement. At the same ceremony, Year 1 Interior Architecture and Interior Design students collectively won the Collaboration & Interdisciplinary Practice Award for creating a series of interactive sculptures – ‘Objects of Rhythm’ - for Dance students to use in choreography.

Meanwhile Masters student Qassandra Ng won in the MA Interior Design category at the Architects for Health Student Design awards for her concept to turn the M&S flagship store in Marble Arch into a micro-village and urban living room, centred around tea-drinking.

Year 2 BA Interior Architecture students were commended at the Interior Educators’ awards for their work on Kilburn Museum Lab, and Qassandra’s coursemate Daniela Chavez Zavala earned a commendation at the Architects for Health awards.

Qassandra’s Architects for Health award entry was her main project for her MA, and focused around addressing loneliness, which she’d experienced herself when she first came to London to study from Malaysia.

“It’s hard for people to connect to the city at first,” Qassandra says. “I was thinking what I could do to make it easier in the transition period.” Her urban village plans, aimed mainly at young people, include co-working but are chiefly about inserting domestic space into public space to make it feel more intimate. Out of the complex of three M&S buildings, she chose Art Deco Orchard House at the junction with Oxford Street to have the highest visibility, and to accentuate the contrast between the safe space inside and the busyness of the street.

Qassandra picked tea-drinking “as a medium for people to know each other, so they feel like they belong”. Her ‘living room’ would offer different programmes including a herb garden, workshops about tea selection, and turning tea leaves and herbs into products, embracing teas to satisfy all tastes.

Participants were set a brief to design a building or spaces responding to the increasing awareness of the need for a healthy environment, the importance of exercise, sunlight, good nutrition, contact with nature and social bonds, and the shift of the concept of prosperity from being about GDP to a holistic wellbeing economy. Qassandra and the other winners were presented with their awards at a ceremony at the King’s Fund in the West End on 6^th July.

Abeen’s idea for the Disrupted Town Hall in Coal Drops Yard was inspired by walking around the wider Kings Cross area, and thinking about the sharp divide between Somers Town as a residential neighbourhood, and the “hub of capitalism” in the redevelopment close to the station. The controversy around the demolition of a school in a listed building, and Abeen’s engagement with designer and community activist Diana Foster, founder of the People’s Museum in Somers Town, gave her further insights. “People are just as smart as the council – they are doing their own thing, making their own plans,” Abeen reflected. “The Town Hall should be working with them.”

Abeen studied the plans and sections of town halls in London, Hertfordshire, Manchester and Scotland, with a “strategy to disrupt”. Noting in her research how different departments like town planning and education are neatly delineated, in her reimagining she dispersed local authority functions right across the building, with creative facilities for local residents placed in between including collage and drawing, screen printing and recording studios, a unit for printing stories and newspapers and a Debate Forum in the centre of the building.

She also made a huge split in the structure of her Town Hall visible from afar, so people can see what’s going on in a slice of the building, boosting transparency.

Abeen is a second time winner at the Interior Educators Awards, having won the Craft & Making (progressing student) Award in 2023 for a project to transform Cricklewood Library. A science and maths student at high school in Karachi before she decided to switch to Interior Architecture, she describes herself as a “quiet designer” and wasn’t exercised about issues of democracy and representation before starting work on the Disrupted Town Hall. “I just responded to the site, I was responding to the problem,” she says. “But after this, I got very interested in politics.” She hopes to go and work for a firm that is closely involved in building better communities and with sustainability.

For Objects of Rhythm, a collaborative project which the Interiors department has run for a number of years, the end goal is a dynamic performance where dance students interact with eclectic stage pieces Interiors students have designed and built to 1:1 (life-size) scale. This year, music students were involved too, writing and performing an original composition to go with the dance, and students from the Film programme recorded the whole process.

Senior Lecturer in Interiors and programme lead for Year One Ben Sinclair-Macdonald says groups of eight to nine students worked together in groups, initially building models and doing lots of prototyping with MDX technical tutors.

“They’re very good with the students – they won't say yes or no to things; they will say, see what happens, see if it falls over,” Ben says.

“Part of the project is learning to work professionally and deal with other people's opinions. The students are constantly talking to their clients, the dancers.”

The objects are made out of rudimentary materials such as ready-available softwood and Correx sheeting, with an eye on sustainability. “The objects themselves are all quite different, surprisingly so,” says Ben. “If anything, it gets positively competitive as the groups of students are trying to out-design each other”.

At the 2023 Interior Educators Awards MDX won the same prize jointly with another university, so it was a surprise and “a lovely moment, fantastic” to win outright a year on, Ben says.

Yeemon Aung – who previously earned a construction and built environment civil engineering diploma in Myanmar, where she grew up – describes developing the object as a process of “gradual improvement,” requiring “great attention to detail, to create a comfortable and inspiring model for the dancers. The biggest challenge was reaching a shared vision”. By the final performance, movement and object came together and it was like “a playground for the dancers. They knew how to interact with our design very well”.

Yeemon says: “I love collaborating, I hope we do more in the future.” And she’s also interested to see how future cohorts of first year students fare with the project.

Technical tutor Sam Wibberley says he and colleagues find that if first year students do the Objects of Rhythm project, “they really get on well with practical outcomes and mechanical thinking within their second and third year of study. I see it as integral to their learning, and it's one of the only opportunities they get to manufacture something in 1:1.”

First year Dance student Grace Levin said: “Especially in contemporary dance… we see a lot of these crazy structures. It's not often as a student that you get to work with that sort of thing.

“It was very much a collaboration between us and them - I feel like we've got such input with the structures, so it's given us leeway to have creative control a bit more.”