Interact Challenge

“Interact” is an interdisciplinary design exercise, which has taken place for a number of years with the objective of promoting good interdisciplinary working relationships.

This exercise involves teams of students from The Mackintosh School of Architecture, The School of the Built and Natural Environment (Quantity Surveying) at Glasgow Caledonian University, the Department of Civil Engineering at The University of Glasgow, and from Civil Engineering at the University of the West of Scotland. There will be around 56 teams, which will have various combinations including: Architecture student, Engineering student, and a Quantity Surveying student; an Architecture student and two Engineering students; an Architecture student and one Engineering student.

This year the project will be a temporary building which can be constructed and dismantled fairly quickly and easily and transported from site to site. The brief set by GSoA is to create awareness of the brand, and to attract future visitors, students, and staff, GSoA has expressed the need for a building offering space for gathering (i.e. lectures, workshops, etc.) and exhibiting (student work, Mackintosh building, Mackintosh artefacts, etc.). The building is intended to be portable in order to generate a physical presence in several major cities around the globe over a period of 10 years. The structure would remain in one place for around 2 to 3 month before being disassembled, transported, and reassembled in another city; or as Robert Kronenburg in ‘Portable Architecture’ termed it: “an architecture that rolls, floats or flies”.

Each team is required to develop a design for a building to meet the brief. Final critiques will be undertaken on 6th March 2017 when each team make a formal presentation of their design (using PowerPoint) to a panel of tutors from each institution. The presentations will be assessed and around six teams with the best marks selected to participate in the evening Final held in Glasgow School of Art, Reid Lecture Theatre. Each team is given ten to fifteen minutes to present their design. A panel comprising a leading member of each profession judges the Final.