Living architecture

November 7, 2025

Programme Leader Dr Carl Meddings shares a selection of our M.Arch Sustainable Architecture students’ final design projects showcasing regenerative design in a changing world.

Architecture matters. The ways we design, construct and adapt our homes, public spaces and infrastructure have deep environmental, social and cultural impacts. They shape lives, ecologies, landscapes and futures.

More than a qualification

The M.Arch Sustainable Architecture course at CAT is a challenge to the business-as-usual model of architectural practice. As an ARB-accredited Part 2 programme, it is a key step towards becoming a registered architect in the UK. But unlike conventional courses, it places the climate emergency, biodiversity loss and regenerative futures at its core. Our students learn not only how to build, but how to care, question and lead.

To build sustainably is not simply to reduce harm, but to actively do good; to repair, restore and regenerate. Students arrive with difficult, often radical, questions and leave with proposals that push boundaries. There is no token ‘eco-wash’ here; each project critically examines how humans (and more-thanhumans) can co-exist in inclusive and transformative ways.

We ask:

What does it mean to design for uncertain futures?
How do we retrofit not just buildings but mindsets?
How can architecture support community, resilience, biodiversity and beauty?
Who are we designing for?

The responses are ambitious: from low-impact, community-led retrofit to speculative visions of architecture as a catalyst for resilience. Students work with natural materials, circular economies, local craft and global systems thinking. Designs are rooted in place, culture and climate, yet speak to a world in need of repair.

Exploring how we must live, build and thrive

Each month, we gather at our spiritual home in the hills above Machynlleth for an immersive week of collaborative study. Students, staff and visiting tutors share a rhythm of inquiry, discussion, creativity and mutual support. We eat, build and learn together; from each other and from the place. CAT becomes, for that week, a microcosm of the types of communities we hope to inspire. The setting is both retreat and testing ground.

The dramatic landscape and shifting weather create a backdrop for exploration and shared purpose. In a world dominated by digital and dispersed learning, our time together is essential, giving texture to ideas and humanity to projects.

This year’s cohort has shown passion, intelligence and generosity. Their work is rigorous, imaginative and hopeful, rooted in research and sustained by solidarity. Architecture is inherently collaborative, and the students have demonstrated that community and care are vital tools of the profession.

In these projects, you will find technical skill, innovation and critical reflection, but also an ethic of care, a drive for justice, and a vision for a more balanced way of living. This is not an ending but a beginning, a contribution to the urgent conversation about how we must live, build and thrive in a time of profound ecological and societal challenge.

Student projects

Amelia Maddox – West Shore Kelp Desk, Llandudno, UK

The West Shore Kelp Desk is a coastal regeneration project in Llandudno, North Wales, combining seaweed cultivation with public education and environmental stewardship. Spanning two sites along the West Shore promenade, the scheme connects them through ecologically sensitive landscape interventions.

Central to the project is the cultivation of kelp and seagrass, species vital for biodiversity, carbon capture and coastal resilience, which are made visible and accessible as tools for climate education. Architecturally, it blends adaptive reuse with new-build structures. The West Shore Kelp Desk serves as a blueprint for sustainable coastal development.

Timeline of Amelia Maddox's design process

Hannah Maxey – Holbeck Small Press Library, Leeds, UK

The Holbeck Small Press Library is a community-focused project situated between Holbeck and Holbeck Urban Village, just south of Leeds city centre. The project responds to the area’s poverty, poor living conditions and disconnection from the more affluent city centre by reimagining a disused library building as a grassroots cultural hub.

Rather than mirroring the British Library’s nearby expansion, which is geared toward research and business, the Small Press Library proposes a space centred on self-publishing, creativity and community participation. By questioning who regeneration truly serves, the Holbeck Small Press Library positions itself as a site of resistance, imagination and hope in the face of exclusion, inequality and environmental crisis.

Callum Lawlor – Acle Bridge Visitor Centre, Norfolk, UK

Located in the Norfolk Broads National Park, this project proposes a visitor and research centre that directly responds to the area’s pressing ecological challenges, including nutrient pollution, peatland degradation and biodiversity loss.

The centre supports habitat restoration, nutrient neutrality and public awareness of the Broads’ unique ecological and cultural value. The building is sensitively integrated into the landscape and ecological features are woven into the architecture, encouraging wildlife through nesting habitats and biodiverse planting schemes.

Functionally, the centre combines public education with scientific research, acting as a hub for learning, collaboration and long-term ecological care rooted in local knowledge and holistic systems thinking.

Millie Bush – Dowr Kernow, Water, Wellness and Knowledge, Cornwall, UK

Dowr Kernow (meaning ‘Water Cornwall’) is a project that reimagines our relationship with water in a world increasingly disconnected from natural rhythms. It challenges the narrative of pollution, industrial harm and ecological neglect, proposing instead a story of renewal, care and reconnection.

Dowr Kernow creates spaces where people can interact meaningfully with water: clean wild swimming spots; places of rest and convalescence; and learning environments focused on ecological awareness, water safety and self-care. The project advocates for a future in which water is treated with reverence, protected, shared and celebrated.

Thea Brooman – The Centre for Environment and Humanity, Kodaikanal, India

This project is situated in the high-altitude hill town of Kodaikanal in South India and is conceived as a catalyst for sustainable development for the town, its local community and the surrounding landscape.

The aim is to reconnect people with their local environment and promote stewardship of biodiversity. Developed on a site owned by a local international school, the proposal forms part of a broader initiative to transform an existing campus into a centre for ecological education, conservation and community engagement. Central to the vision is the restoration of the native Shola ecosystem, a unique and endangered montane forest that once thrived in the region.