Architecture

The core of the programme is a series of project-based activities taught in the first-and second-year design studio units. These are conducted through a vertically integrated system of Architectural Design Studios (ADS) with diverse and innovative positions on contemporary architectural practice that constantly inspire, challenge, motivate, and support each student's individual approach.

Each ADS has two to three dedicated tutors and offers a unique outlook on architecture, thematic interests, and corresponding skill sets that together establish a pedagogical framework articulated through the ADS brief. In their own ways, each studio challenges the role of the architect and considers how architectural design can embody creative responses in an experimental and practical way. The interests of the respective studios span major theoretical and practice-based aspects of architecture today.

Important to the ADS structure is peer learning, with first- and second-year students working alongside one another. The community of students in each ADS is itself an essential structure of the learning environment. The student desks and working spaces are arranged loosely according to ADS to foster collective work and engagement.

History & Theory Studies (HTS) offers you critical tools to contextualise the political roots of spatial practices. HTS constructs a genealogical overview of architectural thinking seen through the evolution of a specific concept that changes every year, ranging from landscape to care to domestication. The unit seeks to establish a shared vocabulary aimed at encouraging debate within the cohort, and proposes a working methodology aimed at understanding how social, environmental, and economic pressures influence the production of form – both built and drawn.

Ultimately, HTS seeks to bridge the imagined divide between theory and practice, and provides you with the ability to understand long-term processes in the built environment as well as to argue for your own design choices.

Radical Practice introduces the processes and frameworks within which architectural projects are delivered in the UK. Though a series of lectures, collaborative workshops, and tutorials, Radical Practice helps you develop an understanding of the legislation, professional duties, and contractual relationships that frame the work of an architectural practitioner. Your research provides an opportunity to explore real-world contexts, drawing on considerations of social, economic, and climatic justice to characterise individual approaches to architectural design. This enables you to explore the opportunities and constraints that you will engage with in your work – both at the RCA and beyond.

Technical Studies teaches a working knowledge and comprehensive understanding of the construction, engineering, and environmental practices associated with the built environment. Many of the global challenges facing the built environment today can be answered through interdisciplinary innovations in technology and design based on regenerative principles. Technical Studies presents you with an understanding of developments in architecture, engineering, and construction that respond to the climate crisis and with knowledge of how technical solutions can intervene in broader architectural, social, and political problems.

Technical Studies focuses on integrated structural, environmental, and material strategies as well as the impact of fire, construction, and carbon assessment on design. The Technical Studies unit emphasises the value of close working relationships with engineering disciplines and practice. Technical Studies provides you with a broad range of approaches to environmental engineering, from bioclimatic design principles to energy-efficiency design tools.

Welcoming a student cohort from across multiple spatial design disciplines, Media Studies provides a rigorous and granular examination of historical and contemporary methodologies of media practice and research. Our collective goal is to increase critical engagement with media. We achieve this through lectures, tutorials, and workshops in which new approaches to media are conceptualised, refined, and implemented in innovative proposals and projects.

AcrossRCA

At the RCA we are working – as artists, designers, architects, historians, writers and curators – within physical and digital worlds that are undergoing constant change, and defined by shifting complexities and interconnections. The 15-credit AcrossRCA unit supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

The unit revolves around a set of thematic pillars that reflect key areas of flux, uncertainty and complexity that cut across local, global, individual and collective contexts today. Working in interdisciplinary collaborative groups, you will develop your thinking and reflections on a key issue, question or tension under the umbrella of a larger theme as you generate a creative response. The focus is on learning through the process of the collaborative development of an idea. Rather than aiming for a completed product, solution or concrete answer, AcrossRCA is about an openness to what is generated through experimentation, dialogue and reflexivity. What happens when we move across disciplinary borders and put the kinds of knowledge, experience and skills we each bring to the RCA into conversation with others?

This provides you with opportunities to:

• share and adapt approaches from your personal practices and/or discipline;
• collaborate with peers outside your programme;
• interrogate collaboration through experimenting with and reflecting on collaborative models and approaches, and thinking about what your practice means in relation to others;
• critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and the role of creative practice in making our understanding and experience of the world;
• position your practice and skills and what you bring to a team and larger context.

This engagement with perspectives and practices from across disciplines and across the College is designed to complement your disciplinary studies, feed back into your individual work, and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

Core Skills

The Core Skills unit (15 credits) supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career. The unit also supports you in moving from Term 1 to the independent work you will undertake in your IRP in Term 3, as an opportunity to more deeply and systematically develop and deploy select core skills related to your practice. The transferable academic and professional skills covered in this unit reflect those required of a postgraduate student, and are adapted by Schools and programmes according to specific disciplinary perspectives and requirements. The Core Skills complement the work you are undertaking in your programme units and underpins and elevates the development of your future direction. The Core Skills will focus on specific skills most relevant to your expanded discipline, which may come under areas including inclusive, critical, sustainable and ethical approaches, the networks of knowledge, practice and communication within which your work sits, and the positioning of your practice. Throughout, the unit emphasises how these skills are situated not only disciplinarily within art, design, architecture, communication and humanities practices, but also within larger contexts, inside and in the world beyond.

The unit is informed by the following three themes:

• Making Meaning: How does questioning and contextualising inform the development of your practice? This theme builds on skills in critical and creative thinking, reflective practice, navigating complexity and research.
• Making Together: How do we think and make in dialogue and collaboration with others? This theme encompasses skills such as inclusive, ethical and sustainable practice, and peer learning and building networks.
• Making Public: How is your work and practice positioned within larger ecologies? Exploration of this theme may include developing skills in engagement, communication, entrepreneurship and leadership.

We are embarking upon a series of refurbishment works at our Kensington campus.

These involve making essential repairs to some areas of our much-loved heritage buildings and improving our facilities for future generations of RCA students and staff.