It’s very reassuring to walk into an architecture school and find yourself greeted by rows and rows of physical models. It’s that sense of intelligent model-making that perhaps surprised me most about my first visit to De Montfort University. But De Montfort feels like something of a hidden gem that deserves to be part of that conversation. The architecture school occupies the Vijay Patel Building, retrofitted and extended by CPMG Architects and opened in 2016 as part of the university’s wider campus masterplan. The word that surfaced repeatedly during conversations – and throughout the students’ work – was ‘care’.