Architecture

Year 1

Studio I, Studio II & Studio III

In your first year, you'll work on a live project, and a studio project within a pedagogical framework established by the Architectural Design Studio (ADS) tutors. Once briefed on the nature of each ADS, each student is invited to nominate their order of preference. Places are allocated based on a synoptic portfolio and entrance interview.

The ‘Live’ project introduces you to forms of external engagement, industry practice and the role of field work in a design process. The ‘Live’ project brief is set by the ADS tutors and is integrated into the overarching studio brief.

Studio I forms the basis for the briefing and strategy for the Studio II & Studio III project. Studio II develops the project of Studio I. Studio III is the final development of the individual design project initiated in Studio I and developed over terms 2 and 3. The final project should be developed and communicated through the production of drawings, models, digital models, moving images, and processes of making.

Technical Studies I & Technical Studies II

This unit provides first-year students with a comprehensive understanding and working knowledge of the technologies and innovations in construction, engineering and environment and energy associated with the built environment. Technical Studies is an integral part of the studio design project and essential in the advanced development of the design. As such it complements ADS project work.

The Technical Studies unit equips you with an understanding of contemporary challenges around engineering and construction industries. In doing so, it challenges you to engage with larger global questions inherent in contemporary practice. You will explore broader ideas of sustainability that extend beyond the detailed design of the building envelope and services, and that acknowledge larger environmental and contextual developments alongside important focus on human comfort, whole life carbon impact and integrate fire and life safety strategies. You will engage with physical exploration of a technical aspect of their building through a physical (and or digital) one-to-one scale test. This one-to-one material or detail test of the project, tests a portion of your design through actual fabrication. As part of any design development, it is essential to research, test and design through physical prototypes. This unit emphasises the importance of the integration of technical knowledge and effective partnership between architects and related engineering disciplines in fostering design excellence.

Elective unit

All Architecture students will be offered an Elective unit.

Professional Practice Studies

Professional Practice Studies gives you an understanding of the professional duties and responsibilities of the Architect, and the pathway to registration for UK architectural practice. It introduces the planning, policy, procurement processes, and legal frameworks relevant to the profession, and principles of business management. You are encouraged to understand the agency afforded by these frameworks to shape their chosen forms of practice and career path, and your ethical responsibility in practice in relation to questions of social and environmental sustainability, health and life-safety.

Design Strategy

The unit provides the intellectual, technical, and professional foundation for the Independent Research Project. You will define a research area and research question, then outline a clear design strategy and working methodology that translates these questions into a design response.

History & Theory Studies

The History Theory Studies (HTS) unit enables you to identify a personal position through engagement with a broader cultural framework in support of the independent research project. The unit helps you build a systematic understanding of the history of modern architecture, constructing a shared knowledge, methodology and vocabulary so that you can define your own position and lines of research enquiry.

Media Studies

The unit is subdivided into multiple sections led by tutors with a diverse range of media experience. Lectures are delivered by staff and invited guests and introduce a range of media and spatial practice methodologies. In the tutorials, you will learn specific skills related to your section, and deploy your research through the execution of new media-based projects. The unit’s mission is twofold: first to encourage the incoming MA students from disparate programmes to increase their cross-disciplinary communication and secondly to challenge you to expand your media practice beyond architecture’s reliance on media as purely representational.

Studio IV & Independent Research Project

In this unit you will independently develop a design response to the research question identified in the Design Strategy unit.

The thesis project builds on your skills, knowledge and experience, developed over the course of the programme, to develop a mature and sophisticated design project that clearly identifies your personal practice within the field.

Successful projects will develop a spatial proposition in response to a clear research question identified by you, that is developed and tested against a context and set of parameters identified by you.

Projects are to be presented and represented in the most effective means to communicate project intent and agency within the field, capitalising on the diverse resources of the College.

Situated at the core of your RCA student experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College- wide AcrossRCA unit supports how you respond to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds by engaging you in a global creative network that draws on expertise within and beyond the institution. It provides an extraordinary opportunity for you to:

• make connections across disciplines
• think critically about your creative practice
• develop creative networks within and beyond the College
• generate innovative responses to complex problems
• reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts.

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations from internationally acclaimed speakers that will encourage you to think beyond the discourses of art, architecture, communication, and design, and extend into other territories such as economics, ethics, science, engineering, medicine or astrophysics.

In interdisciplinary teams you will be challenged to use your intellect and imagination to respond to urgent contemporary themes, providing you with an opportunity to develop innovative and disruptive thinking, critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world. This engagement with interdisciplinary perspectives and practices is designed both to complement your disciplinary studies and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

The core of learning on the MA Architecture programme is project-based and structured around Architectural Design Studios (ADS), with each offering you a unique set of concerns, methods and critical frameworks. Each ADS has approximately 14 students, with first- and second-year students working alongside each other.

Year two Architecture students will be offered the opportunity to engage with practice mentors. This enables them to map shared research themes as well as developing a greater understanding of the diverse range of industry activity.

Exposure to and understanding of the working methods, approach and environment of each practice supports students in being reflective on their own emerging practice methods.

The mentoring scheme offers students another voice on their student work but can also offer guidance on professional development and industry engagement.

This initiative recognises the value of the collaborative networks that drive our students and continues the tradition of linking architectural education with industry as first established by the Royal College of Art, as a direct descendant of the Government School of Design, in 1837.