Dezeen School Shows: an aquamation centre that "reimagines death as ecological renewal" is among the projects from Norwich University of the Arts.

Also featured is a proposal for architectural interventions that prioritise endangered species and the wider ecosystem and a shopping centre with differing light and temperature to cater to its visitors.

Norwich University of the Arts

Institution: Norwich University of the Arts
Courses: BA (Hons) Architecture, BA (Hons) Interior Design and Master of Architecture (MArch)
Tutors: Ben Salter, Claudia Morgado, February Phillips, Gabriela Jimenez, Gaetano Drago, George Themistokleous, Iuliana Gavril, Jason Wiggin, Romanos Tsomos, Sarah de Villiers, Tony Clelford, William Burgess, William Hailiang Chen and Teresa Stoppani

School statement:

"The Norwich Architecture and Interior Design programme is committed to critical spatial practice in a time of social transformations and planetary fragility.

"Students are encouraged to define their role not only as designers, but also as citizens and activists with environmental responsibilities and agendas.

"From the shared first-year studio to the postgraduate projects, work is developed through transdisciplinary collaborations, experimental making and critical storytelling, to culminate in research-led, socially embedded design proposals.

"Grounded in East Anglia's coastal environments, heritage settings and agrotech transformation and globally oriented, the work responds to today's spatial urgencies with strategies of resistance, renewal and care."

Negentropic Fire: Rituals of Memory and Renewal by Joe Slack

"Drawing on WG Sebald's reflections on combustion in The Rings of Saturn and Luis Fernández-Galiano's Fire and Memory, the project interrogates fire not as destruction but as a cyclical, regenerative process.

"Set in Dunwich, it questions combustion's role in fossil fuel legacies and proposes reintegrations through forest stewardship, biochar production and community ritual.

"Anchored in the Anglo-Saxon 'need-fire' tradition, the design envisions fire as a tool for soil restoration and local material practice.

"Through pyrolysis, fire yields charcoal, feeding both land and craft.

"Scorched surfaces and seasonal gatherings embed combustion within ecological rhythms, reframing fire as ceremony, and the landscape as a living archive of renewal."

Student: Joe Slack
Course: BA (Hons) Architecture
Email: joeslack2003[at]gmail.com

Threads of Labour by Isabella Dawson

"In Dunwich, Suffolk, England, a coastline is shaped by erosion and disappearance, traces of once-thriving textile labour remain embedded in the landscape.

"The project reflects on the historical presence of silk routes and rope making, acknowledging how such crafts, once vital to the region, were often bound to gruelling, near-torturous conditions.

"Yet their revival offers renewed meaning. Through a demountable weaving space built from hemp and silk, the project honours endangered local materials and knowledge, while adapting to a shifting coastline.

"The structure's ability to be assembled and disassembled in response to erosion deterritorialises tradition, preserving the woven language and the autonomy of Dunwich craft as a form of cultural and ecological continuity."

Student: Isabella Dawson
Course: BA (Hons) Architecture
Email: dawsonisabella.m[at]gmail.com

Rhizomatic Decontamination by Jacob Spinks

"This speculative remediation scheme embraces complexity, contamination and abnormality as conditions for adaptive reuse, drawing on Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble.

"It proposes a network of phytomining pods that transform damaged ground into sites of purification, where human and non-human agents co-compose futures.

"Laboratory One, a former atomic weapons test cell, becomes a threshold for environmental care, initiating a new axis planted with hyperaccumulators along a modular grid.

"Set within the contaminated landscape of Orford Ness, in Suffolk, England, long scarred by bombing and erosion, the project resists purity and reimagines the site not as void, but as a terrain for long-term ecological entanglement and repair."

Student: Jacob Spinks
Course: BA (Hons) Architecture
Email: jspinks29[at]outlook.com

Edge of Anarchy: Temporary Collectives at the Coastal Threshold by Leo Coles

"Sited in the caravan park at Southwold Harbour, East Suffolk, England, the project explores mobility at the coastal edge where seasonal communities, travellers and transient workers converge.

"It interrogates the camp as a space of negotiation and shared living, shaped by Suffolk's shifting edges. At its core is a modular, reconfigurable kit of parts: lightweight, transportable elements designed for quick assembly and communal use.

"The system resists permanence, enabling adaptable infrastructures for collective life. Architecture is positioned as a social instrument, one that responds to flux rather than fixing place, offering new ways of living together on marginal land through collaboration, resilience and decentralised futures."

Student: Leo Coles
Course: BA (Hons) Architecture
Email: leocoles21[at]gmail.com

Navigational Learning by Marcelo Moerdyk

"Rooted in weather, history and care, this project takes a tectonic approach to architecture through the study of wind instruments and sails – tools of movement, resistance and adaptation.

"Set within the remains of Greyfriars friary in Dunwich, Suffolk, England, the design responds to shifting coastal winds and erosion with a structure that echoes the resilience of historic sailing ships.

"It references maritime heritage while offering a place of refuge for asylum seekers. Conceived to be realised through collective making and traditional craft, this architecture hosts and symbolises both past and future journeys: it is a vessel for healing and connection, grounded in seasonal rhythms and sensitive to the fragile coastal landscape."

Student: Marcelo Moerdyk
Course: BA (Hons) Architecture
Email: marceloped21[at]gmail.com

Constructing Sights in Post-military Landscapes by Hekla Aradóttir

"The Orford Ness Rotating Wireless Beacon in Orford Ness, Suffolk, England, known as the Black Beacon, is a former radio navigation system.

"This project repurposes the beacon as a visual installation, adapting it to highlight, distort and superimpose views of the surrounding landscape.

"It explores the unseen consequences of our actions through analogue projection, interactive mechanisms and visitor participation.

"Visitors arrive by boat, use analogue cameras to document the site, and later develop and display their images. Inside the beacon, a steel cone, surveillance slits and rotating projections guide perception.

"A camera obscura reveals how visitors disrupt the image with their presence. Drawings and photographs form a collective archive, capturing shifting perspectives and entangling vision with movement and memory."

Student: Hekla Aradóttir
Course: BA (Hons) Architecture
Email: heklaara[at]live.com

Forgotten Structures and Submerging Futures: Orford-Ness Adaptive Research Archipelago by James Mulgrove-Richards

"Set within the flood-prone terrain of Orford Ness, Suffolk, England, this project embraces submersion, impermanence and weathering as conditions for future inhabitation.

"A dispersed network of amphibious structures – some fixed above water, others partially submerging – is suspended from or grafted onto ruined military buildings.

"Drawing on theories of material agency, the design uses site-salvaged materials like rusted steel, rubber and concrete debris.

"It supports hands-on research in amphibious design and tidal infrastructure, offering a living lab for resilience.

"Rather than restore the past, it transforms a landscape of loss into a framework for adaptive continuity shaped by water, time and elemental change."

Student: James Mulgrove-Richards
Course: BA (Hons) Architecture
Email: jmulgrove[at]gmail.com

ReFabrication by Theodore Galvin

"This project reconsiders 'waste' not only as discarded material but as a system of neglected spaces, undervalued labour and overlooked communities.

"Rooted in the climatic, socio-economic and ideological consequences of Western overconsumption and colonial legacies, it centres on Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, where an influx of low-quality textile waste, mostly from the UK, disrupts local reuse economies.

"The scheme proposes a network of site-specific structures – including Urban Parasols, a collection and RePackaging Space, and a ReFabrication hub – that transform waste into building material while improving fire safety, provision of shade and water access.

"It supports self-ownership and economic mobility, learning from and supporting existing informal systems.

"Working within a complex study of material planetary flows, the project reframes textile waste as a cultural resource and positions architecture as a participatory, reparative act that nurtures circular economies and dignifies collective making."

Student: Theodore Galvin
Course: MArch
Email: theodoregalvin[at]gmail.com

Ritual Matters: Purification with Water and Ash in the Ganga by Rohan Ganesh

"This project explores the transformative thresholds between life and death at Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi, India, examining how ritual, ecology and temporality converge.

"At its core is the question: what does it mean to purify a body – of water, architecture, or person? Informed by Hindu death rites, personal experience and philosophical reflection, the proposal honours the roles of the cremated body, the Ganga River and the Dom community.

"Guided by Bhairava, deity of time and death, the architecture embraces cycles of grief, release and transformation.

"Material strategies echo bodily combustion and ecological cleansing. Ash becomes both remnant and resource: a trace of the human body and a substance to clean and build with.

"Spaces of ritual, reflection and ecological care inscribe memory into place, suggesting continuity between body, earth and water."

Student: Rohan Ganesh
Course: MArch
Email: rohan.ganesh9[at]gmail.com

Atem by Ilayda Oguz

"Atem: breath; the act of inhaling and exhaling air, essential to life, rhythm and presence. In an architectural context, Atem symbolises a space that breathes with its users, responding to motion, enabling exchange and connecting bodies, cultures and environments through spatial rhythm.

"Atem is a community hub envisioned as a breathing spatial organism that responds to motion, fosters exchange and creates new paths for cultural interaction. Located at the threshold of Marxloh, Duisburg, Germany and the adjacent public park, the project emerges as both a civic anchor and a connective corridor.

"In a district that is home to over 92 nationalities, culturally fragmented and socially isolated, ATEM offers an infrastructural heart.

"Drawing its logic from the physiology of the human heart, it facilitates circulation, access and encounter, echoing the movement of arteries and veins.

"Pedestrians descend through a sloped portal, while cyclists flow above through an elevated path that enters from the city and exits toward the park.

"These two circulatory speeds define the experience: fast, linear motion pulses through the structure, while slower, social movement unfolds around a central courtyard, a market hall and workshops.

"Motion binds the rhythmic programs, where production, exchange and gathering are sequenced."

Student: Ilayda Oguz
Course: BA (Hons) Interior Design
Email: ilaydike3[at]gmail.com

Hiatus by Jasmine Kirui

"Hiatus reimagines darkness not as a void, but as a vital pause, a retreat from the overstimulation of modern retail environments.

"The typical shopping mall experience of continuous brightness and commercial noise and intensity gives way to a peaceful environment for mental relaxation, sensory calmness and personal contemplation that exists within a large retail space but independently from shopping activities.

"The spatial intermission of Hiatus uses light modulation and shadow as emotional devices to challenge standard retail lighting practices.

"The project transforms lighting into an emotional care tool that resists consumer-oriented approaches, to offer visitors an experience of deep immersion through the gradual changes in temperature, light intensity and diffusion levels."

Student: Jasmine Kirui
Course: BA (Hons) Interior Design
Email: jazzie.ck[at]gmail.com

Form Follows Occupation: for a New Supercycle by Imogen Milroy

"The 'form follows occupation' design approach puts social requirements above fixed spatial layouts and establishes a process in which structures transform for a variety of uses and occupations.

"The adaptive reuse transforms the existing architecture into a responsive system that can adapt to meet new demographic and ecological requirements.

"The process starts with research-based inputs that include population trends, public health data and environmental pressures, to produce spatial outputs that address current and future needs

"Based in the Penallta Colliery Engine Hall and Fan House in Caerphilly, Wales, this intervention addresses the rise in the elderly population and caters to those affected by extended periods of illness by offering a sensory-based wellbeing facility that provides physical and emotional support.

"The design process incorporates ecological data, which shows how increasing carbon emissions affects public health.

"The project envisions a built environment which unites ecological requirements with social needs to develop adaptive, resilient spaces that serve the changing needs of future occupants."

Student: Imogen Milroy
Course: BA (Hons) Interior Design
Email: imogen.milroy[at]gmail.com

From Waste to Wall by Jess Moulson

"This project explores how to convert waste materials into new products that can transform pollution into a source of innovation.

"Redefining value through material innovation, the project challenges definitions of waste by exploring possibilities for discarded materials to be turned into viable resources for design. Ellen MacArthur's Circular Economy Theory informs hands-on experimentation with plastics, food waste, textiles and cardboard.

"The materials underwent transformation through melting and pressing and bonding techniques, to produce surface products that include plastic panels, tiles and composite textile sheets.

"Proposed as an exhibition, From Waste to Walls features interactive elements which allow visitors to experience the materials through touch and light.

"Sensors monitor visitors' movements to generate soft prompts which motivate people to consider their role in waste production and rethink value in an age of environmental urgency."

Student: Jess Moulson
Course: BA (Hons) Interior Design
Email: jessica.moulson[at]hotmail.com

From Body to Biotope: Entangled Landscapes Beyond Death by Jordan Jewell

"Set within the fragile, eroding landscape of Orford Ness, Suffolk, England, this project proposes a cyclical, water-based alternative to cremation that reimagines death as ecological renewal.

"The aquamation centre integrates human decomposition into a life-generating process, interlinking bodies, plants, water and land.

"Through symbolic spaces, living facades, and regenerative material strategies, the architecture allows bodily matter to nourish the environment.

"Drawing on ecological entanglement and decay, the project offers a radical approach to remediation – one that aligns built form with natural cycles and initiates a restorative dialogue with a contaminated and shifting terrain."

Student: Jordan Jewell
Course: BA (Hons) Architecture
Email: jordanjewell26[at]gmail.com

Blurring the Line Between Species by Maram Al-Rikabi

"Set within the fragile landscape of Orford Ness, Suffolk, England, this project proposes architectural interventions that reposition humans within a wider ecological web.

"Drawing on Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman, the design decentres human perspectives, advocating for architecture that places the needs of endangered bird species, mammals and the wider ecosystem first.

"Partially embedded into the earth, the structure uses excavated soil for insulation and is built from cob, hemp, limestone and reclaimed timber.

"Inspired by vernacular forms, it invites visitors to crawl and walk through spaces shaped by animal movement, encouraging cohabitation and attunement to a shared, multispecies world."

Student: Maram Al-Rikabi
Course: BA (Hons) Architecture
Email: maramalrikabi[at]gmail.com

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and Norwich University of the Arts. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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