Postgraduate Architecture

white model of building with three trees

Unit 02: Low in energy, high in style

Tony Fretton and Katherine Nolan

1. In a location in Regents Park: Design an Embassy, consisting of a Residence, the house of the Ambassador, and a Chancellery, as well as the offices of the Embassy. 2. Concurrently, study aspects of the location, and an architect from a list given.

HUge globe on support structure in dessert

Unit 04: The Space of Event

Nate Kolbe, Jonas Lundberg, Andrew Grant

Our course of study and proposition takes on the mutable and adaptable spatial and architectural strategies around events, gatherings, demonstrations, spectacles and large-scale societal interchange.

Exterior and interior of Turn End, Haddenham

Unit 05: The tectonic language of timber

Alex Ely and Michael Dillon

This year’s programme considers the implication construction methods and materials have on the landscape. We will explore the tectonics of timber construction to form tactile and expressive collective housing, buildings with a civic gravitas and urban gardens. Cement is prohibited.

Unit 06: Arrival City

Professor Maurice Mitchell, Dr Bo Tang, Jane McAllister and Sandra Denicke-Polcher

This year Unit 06 will focus on the contribution that architecture can make to the integration of refugees into a host community. Students will be offered a choice of: Athens, Greece; Calabria, Italy; or Freetown, Sierra Leone (Year 5 only). All three are migrant gateways, and transitional settlements for the uprooted.

Unit 07: Absurd Pragmatism: Pragmatic Absurdism

David Grandorge and Colin Wharry

This year’s major design project, run in parallel to a program taught by Professor Geir Brendeland to students at NTNU, will address the future life of a former submarine bunker - Dora II - in Trondheim, Norway. The Unit has also been invited by the city to design and build an ambitious timber structure within the bunker that will perform the dual functions of exhibition space for archival photographs and a gathering place for organized and more informal events.

Figure Study, Painted Paper. Sofia Ghigliazzi, t-sa Forum 2018

Unit 08: Lightness and Weight

Takero Shimazaki, Paolo Emilio Pisano and Karabo Turner

Unit 08 will explore lightness in architecture, crucially as a disposition that favours touching the earth lightly. We will pursue an architecture that is irreducible – one containing urbanity and continuity within the lightness of its approach. We will propose buildings with a civic dimension in the complex urban fabric of Battersea, overlaying education and public use within a singular project, and deploying lightness and weight toward a renewed civic life.

Unit 09: Between room and city

Stephen Taylor and Theodoros Thysiades

This year Unit 09 will explore the potential of the architectural facade to make a meaningful contribution to the streets of London. Against a current of introverted and commercially minded co-working and co-living developments, that have emerged across the city in recent times, our design research will investigate the design of buildings with a figurative presence on the street and of spaces that promote social interaction and collaboration for living and working.

4 images of construction site with circular hole in wall Gordon Matta Clark – Conical Intersect

Unit 12: Everything is Transformation

Peter St John, Fabienne Sommer, Ben Speltz and James Hand

The studio will make propositions for a new architecture school for The Cass at its site in Aldgate. The year’s work will focus on a transformation of the existing buildings.

Sailors on a fishing boat in rough sea surrounded by other boats

Unit 14: Mad about Barking [and Dagenham]

Pierre d’Avoine and Pereen d'Avoine

Unit 14 has been invited by Barking and Dagenham Council to work in the borough again this academic year, after a highly successful collaboration last year researching and making proposals for the newly formed Creative Enterprise Zone along the River Roding. This year we invite students to speculate on what constitutes an inclusive public realm and to design scenarios for exchange which impact positively on the extensive new mainly commercial development under construction in the borough.

Unit 15: The Land We Live In

Assemble w/ OMMX

Unit 15 will explore how architecture can respond to challenges facing society and the environment today through collaborative research and projects in Bridport, Dorset. Working with the local think-tank Stir to Action, Wessex Community Assets and the environmental arts group Common Ground, we will use detailed contextual research and material investigations to develop projects on two sites – the first in an industrial context in the town and the second on a rural site on the edge of Bridport.