Mitchell Harvey

Architecture MArch (Hons)

Exploring how the reassessment of managerialism within the university institution could develop better growth of knowledge and create a World University.

About

Harvey Mitchell

In a society that orbits the quantitative, rank defines everything. We are bombarded daily, demanding us to rank our experiences in a worldwide phenomenon where the concept of ‘rank’ is a constant. The contemporary university is no exception. It has become obsessed with its place, brand, and status. It has become an enterprise, striving to draw in consumers for monetary gain. This can drive the university toward prioritising image over substance and student experience over student pursuit of knowledge.

The university creates an environment where the students are now considered customers, the degree is the product and the professors and lecturers double up as salespeople, using the logic of quantitative metrics and rank to extract often suspect differentiation from their competitors. The student experience is an essential metric contributing to the branding of the university, which relies heavily on its place within the city.

This thesis and associated proposition will question the importance of place in the university, asking if geographic re-assessment can create alternate operating conditions. Can these spaces host an alternate form of academia, connected more to infrastructure and less to place? It is within these hinterlands that the planetary stoic would exist as a nomad on a pilgrimage between nodes of enlightenment and dissemination within a new continuous landscape, where the assimilation of knowledge might create a world university.

Proposition Masterplan

Masterplan of proposal showing the project sitting within the landscape with interior spaces labelled.

Masterplan of proposal showing the project sitting within the landscape with interior spaces labelled.

Development Model

a physical model of interlocking silver lattice like structures with black mass inset between them.

A close up of the interlocking nature of the steel Vierendeel truss structure with the mass element of the proposal in black between

Academic Arrival

image looking through a train window as it arrives at the platform

A visual portraying the view as the Academic arrives on train

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