As a student of architecture, it is useful to grab some insight into the cultural environment in which we will soon be launching ourselves. The history and politics of development is complex and obtuse. The Production of Place can often seem like a fierce and muddy battleground in which the architect can only hope to play a positive role. As this influence is often hard to obtain it is prudent to spend quality time discussing why, where and how the act of design can make an impact, so that we are ready when the time comes.

In between the vigorous debates, a number of students at UEL, myself included, took part in a series of four-day ‘live research’ workshops. Alberto Moletto and Catalina Pollak engaged students in the task of using handmade technology to create surprising acoustic interactions in public places. Alan Chandler’s workshops resulted in a series of hard concrete sculptural casts of soft comfortable places.

I took part in a workshop led by the artist Richard Wilson, with Raphael Lee. A day was spent on site at the Woolwich river crossing. We collected as much raw data as we could – sketches, photographs, imprints of surface and edge. We presented these individual explorations back at the studio, but our conversations meandered. Richard suggested we stop talking and warm-up by making some basic forms using the stacking chairs that we were sitting on. By the end of the day we were still building. The floor was covered with teetering towers and tunnels hastily fastened with tape. By the following day, we had forgotten the details of our personal site investigations and had become focused on an emerging collaborative task – to use the chairs to create a large sculpture in the space that would reference the foot tunnel at Woolwich. Every chair from the Architecture department was gathered up. Groups of 17 were laid horizontally in circles, and fastened with cable ties. The circles were lifted vertically and fastened together generously. As the chairs creaked and groaned we cleared studio detritus out of the way to gain an unencumbered escape route, but the structure held.

We were happy with the end result, it filled the space very well. Most importantly, we learnt some lessons that touched on the central themes of the conference. The piece of work that we produced together was as much to do with the place we were working in as the place we had visited. Through making and doing, rather than personal expression, we found a solution that encouraged us to work well together. And it was the insecurity in the form, its potential for collapse that gave the final piece a lot of its presence in the studio. It was a great end to the term, and the sculpture was still standing in January when we returned to campus.

(The Production of Place was organised by Roland Karthaus, Adam Chandler & Juliet Sakyi-Ansah, and the exhibition was organised by Michela Price – for further information, please visit the website: www.tpop2012.co.uk).

East Tropicana is a tributary of the Strip. It is a functional supply route, an eight-lane thoroughfare that provides a conduit for cheap labour from the suburbs. I arrive at University Plaza, a large parking lot surrounded by drab post-colonial style one-storey commercial units, tan rendered, and scan the perimeter for the object of my destination; the only coin-operated laundrette within a mile of the Strip, and one of the few places where I can wash my clothes before I make the long drive to Los Angeles. I enter and take an unadulterated pause to breathe in the moist processed air, a welcome respite from the arid heat of the street. I investigate the methodology, and make my own arrangements with a washing machine. Luckily, I am not short of quarters, a week on the road has provided well in that department, and soon my own sun-worn clothes are darkening in a pool of warm water, giving up their form to the liquid and rotation of the drum. Las Vegas was built around a desert spring, but the oasis ran dry years ago and the water that feeds the half-million residents of the city is now sourced thirty miles away from Lake Mead, a reservoir of the Colorado River created by the Hoover Dam. This water has taken a path into my own body through the ice in the whisky sodas that I drank last night, and into the sprinkler systems that feed the trees lining the boulevards of modest bungalows that surround the plaza, and now into the fabric of my clothes. Current predictions suppose that the lake might run dry within the next ten years, so a new source will have to be found.

A boy, aged about ten, is sitting on a chair opposite to me. He is rocking his head back and forth and his pupils are lodged at the top of his eyelids. He sees nothing but hears everything; the whirring and sloshing of the machines, the clunk of the coin-machines, the change of air pressure as the door swings open and closed, and the soft chatter of the clientele. I make up my mind that he is a fixture here, that this laundrette provides his sensory world and his daily routine. He cannot be moved by the flashing lights or the post-modern architecture of the Strip, but for him, this small interior space is Las Vegas. The young woman in cut-off jeans, whose teenage son is helping to fold her evening work clothes into a carefully separated pile has a different understanding of the city, as does the middle-aged man whose branded coloured shirts now hang neatly from a mobile rack.

But the blind boy is smiling, he is content here. We are behind the scenes at Las Vegas, and for the first time I feel relaxed in this city.