Head of School Professor Juliet Davis's welcome address

This show has been a fantastic collective effort.

This is a semester in which students across the school have a lot on their plates, and yet they've managed to come together, along with the various staff members who've been teaching them and assessing them to pull it together.

I hope you'll agree that it looks fantastic, articulating a journey in design think that runs from the first year in our BSc Architecture all the way to PhD level.

In this speech, I'm just going to share a few words that relate to my own encounter with the show, and through the lens of some thoughts that I've been having about architecture and architectural education in light of a personal experience.

All those of you who've seen me around the school in the last few months, or worked with me directly, know that, since February, following a slip on a snowy mountain slope, I've had some problems with my right hand.

At first, it was injured but still very much my hand. Then, gradually, over a few weeks, it deteriorated to a point at which all tasks - handwriting, pushing my laptop across the desk, holding implements at the dining room table, and yes, even sketching and drawing, which this exhibition is full of the evidence of, were next to impossible.

Apart from being frightening and frustrating, the experience has made me conscious about how we act and gesture constantly with our hands, how we are in a fundamental way through our hands, and the roles that we ascribe and require of the hand in architectural education and practice, both historically and at this stage in the development of the digital drafting tools and the AI technologies that have so rapidly become mainstream.

But before I talk about those roles, I'm going to say a few words that connect directly to the show, something about the word ‘hand’.

'Hand', as it turns out, is of Germanic origin, and it seems to be linked to concepts of catching and seizing. Makes sense. We reach out to catch things with our hands but also to obtain and hold. The hand therefore is practical, but also possessive; it is active but also aspirational as it reaches for things.

Several English words also have the Latin word for hand, ‘manus’, embedded within them: manual for example, which speaks to practical tasks, but also manage - something I do all the time in my everyday job - which relates to leadership and governance.

In Welsh, the word hand is ‘llaw’, a term that seems to have multiple meanings too, linking the physical hand not only with actions such as handwriting and drawing, but also authority and, this time, interestingly, care.

Of course, there are all sorts of ways in which the hand figures in colloquial speech, and the libraries of emojis that we all use constantly. We might sense the need to 'get a grip of a situation', have to admit to the need to 'hand it' to him or her when they're actually in the right, and there many other examples… 'hands off', 'hand over', 'backhander'.

On WhatsApp, we constantly use the thumbs up of encouragement, the crossed fingers of hopefulness, the prayer hands of thanks, and so forth.

The architect’s hand embraces or holds all of this complexity of meaning, all these different cultural interpretations of and metaphors for the hand. This hand has been at the heart of the arts and crafts of architecture through time – from drawing, including translations of eye to paper through the sketch, and measured drawings that involve the hand in gauging scale and proportion, to modelling and the making of prototypes. But as CGI, coding, digital fabrication, virtual reality and simulation become key to the skill set of the architect, the role of the hand is constantly changing, and we need to make sure these tools remain within our grasp and reach.

The exhibition shows, I’m glad to say since it reflects intention in our pedagogies, that the handmade and making by hand generally continue to be centre stage in the school - key to exploration of new ideas, to iteration, to learning to navigate a site spatially. The motions of the gesturing hand have long been used as metaphors for spatial moves - the drawing hand not only gestures as it moves but forms spatial gestures that solidify into the key elements of form shaping and being shaped by everyday life.

But the notion that the hand of the architect is an authoritative or possessive, controlling hand is more problematic. Along with many schools of architecture, we have been moving away from traditional ideas of the architect as author/ genius, as from actions of the modernist architect’s hand that sweep existing cityscapes away, that place people, that diagnose urban ills in order to solve them, or that control and determine form.

We have been embedding new methodologies in our studio teaching to encourage students to learn from local experience and place specific knowledge, to recognise architectural expertise as one thread in a web of agencies, to adopt participatory modes of imagination and spatial design. There is evidence of this all around the second floor and it is great to see.

Coming back to the Welsh notion of the hand, the idea that the architect’s hand going forward for the future is a caring hand is appealing. Drawing with care and precision is one dimension of this and once again there are plenty of examples of this in the show. But designing caringly in ways that perhaps reflect an ethics of care is another, related to the work that goes into researching diligently, to listening hard, to deploying the sensitivity of nerves, to adopting an ethical disposition with regard to place in the future, to being prepared to reflect on impacts and outcomes, to changing tack and taking responsibility.

The work in the show may not all be framed explicitly in terms of an ethic of care but I see examples of it throughout the exhibition too, tying in with our mission as a school to attend to the well-being of present and future generations through our architectural context, and care for the planet.

As we go forward, I like to think that the making hand, the handmade, and the hand that cares are key to the school's approach to curriculum development – our knowing, acting and being framework, for example – to design and to all your hands as you go forward.

As for my hand, there's a lot to relearn, but I'd like to finish with a thumbs up to our graduating students and massive hi-five to the exhibition team - great work! - and, with prayer hands, thank you so much.