New Coasts exhibition of student work opens today. Students from Unit C, Masters of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at University of Greenwich, have curated an exhibition of their in-progress designs. Projects explore the coastal landscapes of Landguard Point, Felixstowe, and they question what is lost and gained as these landscapes go through designed and unplanned change. 

New Coasts, Project Space, 10 Stockwell Street, SE10 9BD from 28 February to 6 March, 2024

Helena Rivera and Ed Wall have worked with students over the last three years in Unit C, developing techniques of making tapestries to tell stories of landscapes going through change.

The tapestries are layered to portray complex urbanizing landscapes of infrastructures, processes and operations. Their three dimensions reveal spatial forms and sectional thickness. And their multiple scales connect human interactions with material, political and more-than-human contexts.

The New Coasts exhibition presents a curated work-in-progress through tapestry prototypes and working drawings. Students develop individual projects through generous collective practices. Their endeavours build on three years of in-depth research, design experiments, and evolving discourse between students and tutors in Unit C. 

The landscapes going through change that students have examined over the last three years include those told through myths and land injustice (2021/22), future coasts and climate (2022/23) and working coastal landscapes (2023/24). 

The tapestries are thick and heavy, designed to be hung, and read as narratives that connect specific histories of places with designed futures. They tell stories of everyday landscapes, challenged by processes of shifting sands, complete urbanisation, rising sea levels, extractive dredging and global container ports, layered with extraordinary designs of more equitable, shared and possible futures.