Andrea Couture

Programme Leader; BA (Hons) Interior Architecture

Teaching

Andrea joined the University in September 2011, with her primary role to co-establish the BA(Hons) Interior Architecture programme. As Programme Leader, she is responsible for curricula planning, authorship, and development, also teaching across the BA(Hons) Architecture and Master of Architecture programmes.

As a Fellow of the Higher Education Association (2014), Andrea is a Learning and Teaching Mentor at Northumbria, supporting the growth and development of colleagues.

Awarded an Individual Distinguished Teaching Fellowship in 2022; Andrea puts student support at the centre of her pedagogy.

Andrea’s interests relate to creative reuse as a sensibility of design integration within an existing building, emphasising an understanding of the built fabric, site history and narrative as a precursor to development. Principle areas of teaching for Andrea are design and adaptive reuse of existing buildings through studio teaching, design communication and construction technology in existing buildings. She teaches through constructive alignment, with an underpinning ethos of professional experience enabling an authentic foundation to pedagogic activities.

Practice

Andrea spent almost a decade in professional practice as a Senior Designer at large architectural practices in London, Manchester, and Newcastle before joining Northumbria. With a broad-ranging portfolio encompassing adaptive reuse of existing, Listed, and new build projects, most notably as Project Lead for stakeholder engagement and Interior Architectural Design for the creative reuse of the Grade II* Listed Manchester Central Library. Project sectors include libraries, cultural and public buildings, education, sports and leisure, workplace, and healthcare, with project budgets up to £40million. Andrea continues to engage with practice as a consultant through practice-based research and post-occupancy evaluation processes.

Undertaking a lead advisor role for the procurement and development of our new architecture studios in Sutherland building, designed by the inspired team at Page\Park Architects, Andrea also sat client-side as the University’s architectural subject specialist through the tendering, engagement and design processes.

Research

Her research is concerned with the praxis of adaptive reuse and the rehabilitation of existing buildings through contemplation of reuse design sensibilities, spatial topophilia and phenomenology. Andrea draws upon pre-existing narratives developed through contemplation of remnants of former use and visual collective-memory as a precursor to building intervention. Her research interest also lies within art practice, primarily installation and visual assemblage created as site-specific interventions responding to physical spatial settings. She reflects upon differing disciplinary approaches to interact with space and the use of distinctive disciplinary strengths that converge through inter-disciplinarity. She has exhibited her practice-based research in the UK, Denmark and China.