RCA Architecture

New Royal College of Art dean of architecture Alex de Rijke will steer students away from proposing unrealisable “paper architecture” and instead focus on how their ideas could be built.

 In an interview with Dezeen at the RCA Show 2012 last month, de Rijke said: “Historically [at the RCA] there’s always been a very strong agenda on paper architecture – the speculative, the work that is provocative but not necessarily make-able.”

 In future, “Students will be encouraged to speculate not just about future uses or programmes or places, but actually speculate about how they will be built,” de Rijke says. “Material experiment will very much become part of the course.”