Last week the diploma students got their critique and today the jury held a lecture about their experience of the presentations and projects. Boris Brorman Jensen talked about the importance of the critique as a way of conducting the diploma judgement and gave us some statistics from his half of the projects concerning themes and approaches.

This indicates a general idea of a local and personal approach to projects, while the next chart described the variety of ways in which these topics were handled.

There was a spread even within the various themes as to how they handled their own setting. Boris left us with a few questions to consider for future projects and our engagement with our own profession. How do we choose to communicate our projects? This is interesting as far as convention is concerned. In what way do the project need to describe itself? What is the relevant debate we want to raise and on what arena? As Boris stated  the architectural debate is a public matter and the conventional vocabulary might not communicate as well in a tabloid setting or a meeting with the public of a municipality for example.

His other question, which I touched in on now is the debate and theme following the project. Boris pointed out that projects siting external references along their process often brought a wider discussion to the critique as well. The personal projects had an ability to be overly autonomous and hard to discuss in their relation to anything else. It can be very fruitful to the development of a project as well as the debate around its themes to introduce external sources in the process and presentation as well as influence the focus of the critique.