Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Study Details: MArch 2 years full-time
The accelerating impact of climate change and biodiversity loss dramatically question the established roles of the architect and architecture’s relationship with the economic, political and social systems within which it operates. These systems are often built upon continuous growth, demanding extractive and resource-depleting practices which enshrine social and environmental injustices further into the built environment. While the course provides you with the professional pathway toward registration as an architect, it also questions that professional role: how can we move from a position of complicity to one that actively helps to regenerate the environment?
Care and ethical awareness is a central concern of this course; it shapes the way we work and learn, emphasising positive social relations of support and collaboration. Care informs the way we articulate our roles as emerging spatial practitioners through empathy, allyship and dialogue. Care underpins the way in which we intervene in the world, using regenerative design methods to actively restore and renew the places and systems we impact upon.
M ARCH: Architecture breaks open dominant teaching practices in architectural education by creating dialogue between students and practitioner-educators. Our pedagogies centre on your lived experiences. The development of your subjectivity is foregrounded, which creates a more inclusive and safer space where issues such as race, gender, equity and intersectionality are discussed and can become central to design projects.
Through collaboration with local users and contexts, we aim to empower stakeholders (human and non-human) to become active agents in development. We collaborate with other disciplines in the College and external partners. The art school setting provides a rich and multi-disciplinary learning environment from supporting you to critically respond to these challenges through research, knowledge exchange and design interventions.
The standard entry requirements for this course are as follows:
For fees and funding information, please see website
M ARCH: Architecture prepares graduates for employment in architectural practice, urban design, planning, development, and public consultation. In addition, the course provides a solid grounding for continued academic development toward research and PhD study.
Drawing upon extensive industry links within the Spatial Practices Programme, the Course seeks to offer students a unique learning opportunity to engage with live projects and real clients, developing innovative approaches to public engagement and a radical reconsideration of architectural practice.
"In 10 years we probably will not call ourselves an architecture practice, it will be something else entirely" (Architect, Small London-based practice)
From "The Future for Architects", Building Futures, RIBA, 2010.
Change is inevitable and being prepared for change is a challenge. M ARCH: Architecture encourages students to take a radical approach to architectural practice; seeking ways in which the architect of the future can work across the industry and beyond. The course is predicated on the reality that the practice of architecture is changing. There are increasing pressures on the profession from shifts in the way that projects are developed, as well as the changes to the global economy. How will we practice in the future?
"The invasion of the architect's role shouldn't be seen as a threat but as a natural change that can be exploited - we must find our new opportunities and education should shift to accommodate that." (Architect, Large global practice) From "The Future for Architects", Building Futures, RIBA, 2010.
Unit 1: Situated Modes of Engagement
This unit will encourage you to experiment with multidisciplinary research and design approaches. You will develop situated research methodologies to expand and challenge the conventional role of the architect. The unit enables you to articulate your individual methods of working while situating your emerging practice in the extended field of Spatial Practices, focusing on the entanglement between decolonisation, anti-racism, climate/environmental justice and care. You will test and refine these approaches through critically-engaged design propositions.
Unit 2: Collaborative Practices for Common Good
This unit is sandwiched or nested within Unit 1, and addresses the theme of collaboration through co-operation with other postgraduate courses within the University. By working co-operatively with fellow students from parallel and contrasting courses, you will experience at first hand the value of cross-disciplinary thinking and problem-solving that is so central to the course.
Unit 3: Regenerative Construction
This unit, you will explore technical aspects of making and construction in close detail, understand regenerative design principles and construction methods to achieve zero carbon standards. This unit embeds climate literacy and climate innovation within your learning journey. You will engage with the conditions and constraints of structural, constructional and material systems through a constructional prototyping project. Unit 3 will involve research and testing, collaborative teamwork and constructional implementation as well as life safety.
Unit 4: Professional Spatial Practice (Industry Placement)
In this unit, you will define your own direction for your major project. The unit is centred around an industry placement giving you the opportunity to step out of the college context and extend your community of practice to external stakeholders. With your advisor, you will work with a selected organisation that will provide you with insights into contemporary forms of spatial practice. You will assess the nature of their practice and understand ethical implications of fieldwork and within contemporary architectural practice. The contextual study component of the unit will help you establish research agenda and brief for your own self-directed major design project.
Unit 5: Design for Planetary Care
This unit asks you to develop a self-led major project which concludes with a design proposition centred around ideas of planetary care. Building on previous units, it asks students to synthesise the contextual studies thesis, the industry placement experience into a clear brief and proposition. Unit 5’s technology component will build on the work in Unit 3 and will centre climate innovation within the major project via dedicated material and technology focused workshops. The contextual studies strand concludes with a declaration of intent via a public, student-led event, allowing students to contextualise their work within a larger discourse.
Unit 6: Situated Architectural Practice
Unit 6 is a culmination to the major project and of the course. It sees the refinement and dissemination of the design project and its key innovations to a large audience at the end-of-year College show. The unit will conclude with a speculation on future career ambitions and pathways by asking students to propose new forms of architectural practice in relation to their design propositions and outlining pathways into practice rooted in the extensive professional and peer networks created across the two years of the course. Barriers to implementation of the work will be addressed in the professional practice component addressing planning, building control, health and life safety, cost, contract and construction documentation. Unit 6 prepares students to enter professional live beyond Central Saint Martins.
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