Is the colour of the future blue? 

When we picture the past, it often appears black and white, or faded like old photographs. Yet the world has always been full of colour. So why do images of the future so often look washed in blue? This year, we will question this blueness.

Diploma 11 is preoccupied with time. Our work is situated within a practice of ‘reverse archaeology’, studying the present as though uncovering hidden layers. We imagine the future as fragments already embedded in the now: buried stories and forms that are not one colour or shape. Our non-linear journeys will explore these shades, scales and ways of living, asking how we might recognise traces of the future in the contemporary city.

We will search for knowledge not yet linked to any familiar context. What parts of London hold undiscovered insights? How might surfaces and spaces become fragile evidence in a future shaped by shifting cultures and climates? As time drifts into amnesia and narratives dissolve, how do we record what we can no longer easily see?

Our study will begin with a catalogue of unfindable and de-classified artefacts, failed patents, heritage de-listings and speculative objects that test how we notice the present. A second catalogue will gather imagined objects: forms awaiting the right context to be activated by our capacity to sense, touch and respond beyond the visual. We will fabricate them across scales – hand, body, building – and through experiments in collage, bricolage and narrative-building. 

The design brief may be a short story, fable, semi-fictional speculative documentary or parafictional screenplay. We will aim to explore how narrative and physical models together might serve as evidence of time and as instruments for imagining unseen futures.

This is an epistemology of the city as a way of knowing its architecture; a study of how we come to know and believe what the city is, and how the city – both real and imagined – continually reshapes our understanding of what architecture might become.