Design Practice

This information is subject to validation.

Material Processes: This unit critically engages with the materiality of the built environment. The unit builds on physical, aesthetic and structural understandings of materials toward a deeper examination of their complex climatic, cultural, and political properties

Carbon Economies: Through this unit, you will examine the role of carbon within a globalised building industry. You will explore methods of carbon modelling and accounting, campaigns for divestment and energy reform, and the potential of alternative, renewable energy sources to radically reconfigure practice.

Detailing Risk: The design detail is a site of connection and mediation between different aesthetic, legal, material, structural and energetic requirements. This unit inverts the normative study of design detailing by turning to breakdowns and catastrophes where details, joints and connections have failed, because those failures illuminate problems that may have otherwise remained obscure or badly formulated.

Just Transition: This unit requires you to project into possible, just futures and rigorously develop the means of realising the transition to those futures.

This information is subject to validation.

Elective units offered within the School and available to students across the College include:

Housing and Social Reproduction: Through this unit, histories of struggles for housing are critically examined alongside ideas of security, safety, and hospitality. Students will understand how the provision and politics of housing figure within a just transition, and engage with how ideas of the home are mobilised through cultural production and media.

Mobility and Debility (The Global Climate Ghetto): In this unit, students will draw on crip and dis/ability theories and scholarship on maiming and mass debilitation to analyse the institutionalisation of social inequality as it materialises through bodies and movement in relation to the city.

Capital’s Shadow: In this unit, students examine the concept of waste as a central product of capitalist and colonial systems, exploring the spatial and material implications of globalised economies of excess and scarcity.

Milieu Milieu Me (The Ecology): This unit examines the history of different concepts of environments and ecosystems through the spatial and artistic practices of social movements.

This information is subject to validation.

The Research Project comprises a substantial student-led investigation. You will be tutored towards the formulation of a research question, and supported to find appropriate and innovative research methods and documentation. You will be encouraged to draw on your existing contexts and/or develop new sites of practice towards making meaningful contributions to knowledge on climate and the built environment.

The MArch in Design Practice offers you the opportunity to engage the social and political systems underlying the climate crisis by design. You will be equipped to understand, analyse and contend with these systems and supported to develop propositions which seek to creatively and constructively bring about change.