Architecture

This research methods module helps you develop your approaches to design research and futures through fieldwork, archives, and speculation on/through/for architecture. You will learn about the histories of theories and methodologies of our discipline and those that influence it from philosophy to linguistics, computation, anthropology, geography, and ecology, among others. The module considers the unbuilt, the literary, the cinematic, and the interactive through an architectural lens. It examines books, magazines, and the discipline’s periodicals, together with artefacts produced in exemplar architectural practices and academic studios. By the end of this module, you will establish a critical versatility in several modes of knowledge production and an ability to create and validate transdisciplinary futuring practices such as architecture.

This studio module is practice-based and research-led through design workshops. The interdisciplinary future of Architecture and its ecological associations across the urban, rural, and landscape scales are a central concern for the studio. It is framed within contemporary and relevant eco-environmental research themes and aims to produce outputs grounded in landscape urbanism and urban ecologies. The studio allows you to engage with relational and systems thinking in urban analysis, enabling you to experiment with design research, digital technologies, and communication skills. It embeds core principles in the first year of design exploration, expanding the remit of architectural research and extending its thought process to mobilities and flows across the landscape.

This studio module is practice-based and research-led through group seminars, workshops, and tutorials. The transdisciplinary future of Architecture and its relationships with theory and experimentation are a central concern for the studio. It is framed within contemporary and relevant socio-political research themes and aims to produce outputs responsive to global challenges and accelerating technological transformation. The studio allows you to engage with speculative, performative, and ethnographic methodologies in architectural research and design, enabling them to experiment with digital technologies and pursue novel solutions. You will develop your communication skills in various representation and narrative techniques.

This practice module helps you develop a critical understanding of the nature of professionalism and the architect’s duties and responsibilities to clients, building users, constructors, co-professionals, and the wider society. The relationship between Technology, Innovation, and Law is central to the module. It takes a philosophical stance and develops a practical grasp as to how planning law, the Building Safety Act, building regulations, the Construction Design Management regulations, and International Standards, such as BIM, affect architectural practice. The module focuses on the role of the Principal Designer within the design team and on developing the independent learning abilities required for continuing professional development. You will explore emerging technologies, innovative methods and models of procurement, entrepreneurship, manufacturing, and interdisciplinary practices.

Design Studio 3 is one of a pair of design research modules running in three consecutive phases across the final year. It provides an experimental platform which informs the design thesis (Design Studio 4) and typically establishes the programme or content of the final design thesis, involving a design-led investigation of your matter of concern. Design Research methodologies, coupled with the Dissertation, provide conceptual frames through which you will critically engage with the formulation of your proposition and communicate its intent.

Design Studio 4 typically establishes a scale shift in design proposals, from site strategy to programme and also from form to programme/programme to form, testing aspects of the proposition made between the dissertation and Design Studio 3. The module is structured in three phases across the year includes an investigation of significant speculative and technological strategies that are critical to the thesis. Your Thesis concludes in a public showcase which communicates the final resolution of the project and all associated research, exhibited to professional presentation standards and includes a critical study of a significant aspect of the proposition as a work of architecture.

The Dissertation provides an opportunity for you to explore a research topic that relates your interest in a matter of architectural concern through the production of an extended piece of scholarly academic media (7000 words). Extending your engagement in Histories Theories and Methodologies from year 1 into year 2, in the Dissertation, we encourage you to develop the subject of your enquiry or the matter of concern for your thesis. The research dissertation is to be developed in parallel with your interests, and career aspirations and whilst submitted at the end of the first term should continue to inform the exploratory design research of Design Studio 3 through three phases and conclude in re-presentation of the dissertation with the thesis at public exhibition. The subject chosen will therefore reflect the symbiosis between design practice and theory and allow for individual specialist scholarship to be located within a deeper understanding of an architecture driven by socio-political, accelerating technological, and eco-environmental matters of global concern.