Rob Vinall

I have worked in both architectural and spatial practices, working on projects from exhibition design, high end retail through to residential and the public realm. This subsequently led to me undertaking a masters in Interior Design at the Royal College of Art, graduating with distinction in 2014. Post masters, my practice focussed on set design before becoming a full-time lecturer, working on projects in London, America, Spain and for the English National Opera.

Having spent a number of years running a studio on the BA (Hons) Interior Architecture course I am currently the course leader for the Architecture and Design Foundation at the University of Brighton, which teaches students on the foundation years for the undergraduate Architecture, Interior Architecture and Product Design courses.

My approach to teaching utilises iterative techniques and processes of learning through layered drawing and making practice. Running the foundation year has given me the opportunity to focus on applying this reiterative approach, not just to practical work, but to group and seminar-based activities. It’s also allowed me to explore the importance of the ‘workshop’ – designing quick, deliverable and acute teaching and learning activities to facilitate outcomes that enable students to utilise the skills learnt in their further practice.

Much of my teaching relies on previous student experience – talking, expressing and applying their own life experiences within their process of working. Research on the PGCert also allowed me to explore assessment and feedback methods in creative practice and education and how to enable students to be part of the process. My aim with teaching is to provide students with the confidence, knowledge and disciplinary skills to have full autonomy over their education.

My research is situated in the fields of community engagement, social justice and political commentary and seeing how these themes can be intersected with spatial, architectural and artefactual experience and practice. My masters thesis focussed on post-war social housing, specifically in the immediate 6 years, exploring whether for all the architectural rhetoric, they truly were places of 'home' and spaces to enable socio-economic change. Research focussed on exploring minimum space requirements, structural layout to ephemeral understandings and interpretations of furnishings, objects and colour.

I am interested in spatial practice and the discipline of architectural and spatial communication as a method to bring about change. Explorations tend to be developed through mapping, drawing, making and filming. I am also interested in performance, performance space, the public realm, public space / social space, psychogeography, memory, trace and spaces of shared knowledge.