In our latest Research Spotlight, Joshua Waterstone, Assistant Professor and Course Leader for BA (Hons) Architecture, shares an insight into Parallels in Contemporary Practice - one of seven projects awarded funding from the Vice-Chancellor's Fund for 2025-26.
As well as being a deep dive into his practice and pedagogy within Architecture, Joshua’s Spotlight highlights how colleagues who were awarded have used support from the Vice-Chancellor's Fund to explore new ideas and embed research into their practice.
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About the project
Parallels in Contemporary Practice is a research-led teaching project centred on two live projects: the Highgate Mews House in north London and the Charlottenlund Terrace House north of Copenhagen.
Both projects operate as reflexive pedagogical instruments, where design, construction, and procurement are utilised as a single disciplinary framework through which architecture is tested and understood.
The work situates construction as a mode of enquiry. Decisions around material, procurement, and assembly are resolved through making, exposing the relationship between environmental performance, spatial organisation, and tectonic form. At The Highgate Mews House, a reductive material strategy establishes a continuous environmental and structural system. In Charlottenlund, an additive approach extends and reorders the existing house, using typology and material continuity to connect new and old in a coherent way.
Embedding Parallels in Contemporary Practice into teaching practice
Each project is deeply embedded within my current teaching practice. Students engage with the work as live case studies, participating in analysis, documentation, and critical reflection. The buildings function as evolving frameworks through which questions of material provenance, construction logic, and spatial experience are tested.
The research positions architecture as both practice and pedagogy: a disciplinary field where knowledge is constructed through the alignment of design intent, material reality, and collaborative process.
A project grounded in three interrelated themes: care, compassion, and connection
Parallels in Contemporary Practice is a research-led teaching project centred on two live works: the Highgate Mews House in London and the Charlottenlund Terrace House in Copenhagen. The work positions pedagogy as a framework through which knowledge is constructed, tested, and shared with students in real-time.
The project is grounded in three interrelated themes: care, compassion, and connection.
Care is understood as a disciplinary attitude toward context, heritage, and materiality. In Highgate, this manifests through a careful negotiation of scale, adjacency, spatial constraint and conservation status, situating the project within the grain of the mews context. In Charlottenlund, care is expressed through adaptive reuse, extending the existing house through typological and material continuity. Within teaching, this translates into an attentiveness to method, iteration and resolution through a process of negotiation: students engage with work as something to be read, handled, and iteratively refined.
Compassion operates as an inclusive pedagogical model. Drawing on research-through-design and live project pedagogy, students work collaboratively across disciplines, engaging real conditions and constraints including; budget, procurement, construction and collaborative partners. The studio becomes a shared space of enquiry where uncertainty, negotiation, and reflection are integral. This approach foregrounds design as a social and ethical practice, where decisions are shaped through dialogue and collective responsibility.
Connection ultimately links practice, teaching, and research. Both projects are embedded directly within the studio as live case studies, allowing students to move between representation, fabrication detail, and construction. Tectonic expression, material provenance, and environmental performance are understood and applied through collective analysis and application in live studio projects which reflect a practice-based workflow. Workshop based making, 1:1 mock-ups, and site engagement establish continuity between the drawing, the object, and each project as built.
The research situates construction as a mode of enquiry, where procurement, material, and assembly are treated as design tools. Architecture is taught through its making, as a negotiated material process shaped by constraint and collaboration. In this context, friction is productive, aligning material, environment, and use. The outcome is both pedagogical and architectural: a model of practice-based research in which buildings, objects, and images operate as instruments for learning.
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