From opera houses designed for insect reproduction to self-built settlements for waste workers and felted villages that revive the wool industry, this year’s graduating architecture students from the University of Westminster are exploring urgent environmental and social issues with imagination, empathy and technical boldness. The Open 2025 showcase invites us into a world where architecture isn’t just about buildings — it’s about rethinking who they’re for, how they’re made, and what futures they can enable. At a time when architecture is increasingly called to answer to climate, community and care, the University of Westminster’s School of Architecture and Cities has become a crucible for radical experimentation. The school’s 2025 graduate exhibition, Open 2025, running from June 20 to July 4, offers an unflinching glimpse into the challenges — and the dreams — of the next generation of architects and spatial designers. From insect opera houses to digital gardens, from urban motorway communities to repurposed wool, the work on display reimagines space as a living, feeling, shared entity. Below are highlights from a class that sees no boundary between ecology, activism, and architectural invention.
Opera house of insects by Anastasia Kolioliou
MArch
How can architecture serve not just humans, but the forgotten species that coexist with us? Anastasia Kolioliou’s surreal yet scientifically grounded project proposes an opera house in Athens where human music is translated into vibrational frequencies to stimulate insect mating behaviours. Located in Omonoia Square, this speculative building includes performance spaces tuned to insect reproductive frequencies, an insect spa, and composting chambers—all designed using local marble and attuned to the Mediterranean climate. Rather than centring human pleasure, the project flips the hierarchy: humans become performers in a theatre of interspecies pleasure.
The Radient Haven by Nikola Zakrzewska
BSc (Hons), Architectural and Environmental Design
Blurring the boundaries between ecological sanctuary and education centre, Zakrzewska’s project houses both birds and people within bamboo-clad, concentric pavilions in response to climate collapse. Every architectural gesture is calibrated to solar and wind performance, producing bioclimatic spaces where cohabitation becomes a teaching tool.
Do Androids Dream of Distant Futures? by Anna Samoenko
BA (Hons), Interior Architecture
In a poetic ode to digital alienation and ecological reconnection, Samoenko designs a VR rewilding program housed within a physical installation on the former Barking power station site. Users move through a “digital threshold” that blends virtual ecosystems with real community gardens, nurturing empathy and shared knowledge through environmental storytelling.
Colvestone House by Jali Parris
BA (Hons), Interior Architecture
When a Hackney primary school shut its doors, Parris saw an opportunity to craft a new type of youth centre. Infused with memory and warmth, the building now features child-scaled workshops, dormitories, and a glowing double-height playhouse, rooted in stories from local families. Oversized lamps named Greg, Bridget, and Ursula act as guardians, emitting emotional light through the night.
Baahaus: A Felted Village by Lottie Greenwood
MArch
Part architectural experiment, part agricultural revival, Greenwood’s “Baahaus” reimagines sheep’s wool not as waste, but as a viable biological building material. Located in Oxfordshire, the village offers flexible housing for transient communities while creating a centre for wool innovation, education, and collaboration with organisations like Fibreshed. Elevated housing frees the landscape for grazing, fusing economy with ecology.
Freeway Freestate – The Trolley Problem by Luke Hickling
MArch
In Barcelona, thousands of informal scrap workers—chatarreros—salvage tonnes of metal yet remain excluded from formal urban systems. Hickling’s New Mount Zion transforms the C-31 motorway trench into a self-built, self-powered circular economy. Here, infrastructure is rewilded into housing, waste facilities, and civic commons—designed by and for the workers the city has long ignored.
Disseminating Oral Histories at the Depository of Endangered Languages by Meryem Omerspahic
BA (Hons), Architecture
Can architecture preserve memory the way language does? Omerspahic’s speculative archive at the British Library becomes a performance of sound: musical notation is used as spatial language, where pauses, rhythms, and cadences are built into walkable space. The result is a living soundscape, an architectural score for collective storytelling.
Pulley to Power by Anastasia Fedorova
BSc (Hons), Architectural Technology
At Benenden’s Old Smock Mill in Kent, Fedorova updates heritage technology with a pulley-driven renewable energy system. Rather than altering the visual integrity of the site, the project quietly generates electricity by repurposing the mill’s fantail mechanism, showing how low-tech can meet high-impact without compromise.
Vanstead Inn by Edwin Zhou
BA (Hons), Architecture
Zhou’s project responds to the growing community of van dwellers with a modular riverside motel designed for long-term living. Shared kitchens, repair workshops, and composting systems create a circular, sustainable lifestyle, reframing mobility not as marginal, but as intentional.
Multipurpose children’s event space by Radmehr Jabbari
BSc (Hons), Architectural Technology
Set on a Norfolk farm, Jabbari’s algorithmically designed event space uses parametric Voronoi façades and bio-concrete to create passive climate control while maintaining visual wonder. Behind the soft, organic envelope is a rigorously detailed assembly of insulated cassettes, laminated veneer lumber, and micropiles—marrying poetic form with high performance.
The Euston Stages by Avrora Afanaseva
BA (Hons), Architecture
Against the corporate tide of HS2 redevelopment, Afanaseva proposes a community-first alternative for London’s Regent’s Park Estate. Taking cues from theatre and play, her three “stages” include an underground amphitheatre, scaffolding gardens, and a floating tennis court, tailored to all generations and meant to cultivate daily joy.
Circular Habitats by Marwah Arshad
BSc (Hons), Architectural and Environmental Design
In East India Basin, Arshad layers human and non-human life into a vertical system that includes a bird sanctuary, urban food market, and rainwater harvesting towers. Through simulations and syntactical logic, she crafts a cohabitation strategy that blurs the divide between built and natural worlds.
Building the future through speculative care
The diversity and depth of this year’s projects prove that architecture is no longer just about form and function, but about empathy, systems thinking, and interspecies awareness. As the School of Architecture and Cities describes it, theirs is a culture of “collective intelligence”—a community of learners and practitioners ready to face climate emergency and spatial justice head-on. And if the work of this year’s graduates is any indication, the future of architecture will be one that listens more closely—to people, to insects, to stories, and to the planet.
