This project involved six16/17 year old students (Post 16) from Manchester College of Arts and Technology (MANCAT)

This project assisted delivery of GNVQ Unit 7 – Working to a set design brief.

The Centre for the Understanding of the Built Environment acted as client for this project and gave the students a brief to design an exhibition for the Young Persons Gallery. They were to work alongside the staff of Education @ CUBE in creating an exhibition that ‘tells the story’ of how buildings and places in cities change their uses over time and how they accommodate their new use(s) in the original structure whilst retaining some of the original detail and character.

The project began with the students being given a brief introduction on how the built environment of towns and cities evolves. In exploring the built environment of a locality, as the students would be required to do, change becomes apparent in the individual buildings in the same way as when we look at maps and observe how the pattern of the roads has changed. The students were encouraged to think of such change in a creative context with the parts of a built environment coming together at different scales to form a collage made up from layers and locations enriched by cultural and social change.

It was stressed to the students that in designing the exhibition they should encourage the visitors to share in the creative process they had gone through. The visitor should see the starting point of the student’s creative response and the process of development and design. For this reason the exhibition had to include examples of research, site investigation, sketch books, etc.

The location chosen for the project was a group of buildings in Cheetham Hill, Manchester . The original uses of these buildings had been a co-operative store, a church, a billiard hall and a cinema and now there uses include a gymnasium, a supermarket, a vegetable market and a travel agent. The church is the only use that has not changed, although the building has deteriorated and the congregation decreased.

Unlike the outreach projects involving younger children this project ran continuously over a four-week period and the project artists visited the students in their studio twice a week. During these sessions the artists gave constructive criticism and advice on materials, techniques and professional approach. An important aspect of these individual and group meetings was advice from the artists and exhibition designer on how to select work for further development and what material to reject.

The initial sessions with the students were on site carrying out research and obtaining source material. Towards the end of the project period the artists and students worked together to construct the exhibition and write the explanatory text/captions.