2023 - London Metropolitan University

Studios and units 2023-24

An undergraduate 'studio' is a smaller study group taken by Year 2 and 3 architecture students at the University's School of Art, Architecture and Design. A postgraduate 'unit' is a smaller study group taken by students of the Architecture RIBA 2 – MArch course. Each studio or unit is led by a member of academic staff, often in association with a professional practitioner or organisation. At the start of the year, the leaders of each studio and unit present their studio's themes, position and approach to all students during a market day. Students then choose their preferred studio from the wide range of issues, methods of working and types of projects available.

The studio approach brings many benefits including smaller and more focused teaching groups, a joined-up approach to modules, experience of professional practice, collaboration and teamwork, opportunities to exhibit and even an element of healthy competition. Academic staff work hard every year to make sure that they are appealing, engaging, challenging and relevant.

Red patterned fabric showing the silhouettes of two people

Archive studios

Our studios evolve year on year. You can see details of older studios in our studio archive.

Undergraduate architecture

1/2

green and white sectional model of a building in a domestic setting with back of bentwood chair

UG Architecture Studio 01: Building and Belonging

Holly Jean Crosbie, Kieran Wardle, Owain Williams

Exploring identity, place and belonging through proposing a new cultural anchor in a coastal town

silhouette of child against window through India fabric

UG Architecture Studio 02: Spaces of Birth – Spaces of Death

Charlotte Harris and Colin O’Sullivan

Times of birth and death represent the two most momentous times of our lives, and those of our families and friends. Often, the spaces where these events are played out are ill considered and show scant regard for what is happening inside, and here too, people’s power and agency is often disregarded. We will make proposals that suggest an alternative to the current norms. “I have now decided that…….. I’d like my death to be as interesting as my life has been.” David Bowie

collage of maps and photos of people pushing a wooden object

UG Architecture Studio 03: SCHOOL OF EVERYDAY PRACTICE - Pedagogy of Play

Jane McAllister, Alex Somerville

Overview “The difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied.” John Dewey ‘SCHOOL OF EVERYDAY PRACTICE’, will establish a sustainable platform to foster long-term knowledge exchange and growth for the village of Belmonte, Calabro. It will combine new industries with the everyday, initiate forms of playful governance.

Top of red sandstone tenement buildings in Glasgow showing the bay windows and turrets.

UG Architecture Studio 04: The New Tenement

Fran Balaam, Ingrid Petit

This year the studio will design a new housing typology for Glasgow: A new tenement. We will look at the specific spatial characteristics of a home in the 21st Century city in a housing crisis, and how, in a commodified housing market, a typology can create a sense of community. We will help you develop a close understanding of materials, tectonics and construction methods with proposals that are practical, robust and tied to how people live

View out from the 18th storey of a high-rise building.

UG Architecture Studio 05: Home?

Theo Thysiades, Chris Smith, Spyros Kaprinis

As the world and our environment is quickly changing around us and our lives are increasingly becoming more complex, we will ask you to think about and design a simple house whose interior is a kind of sanctuary, a place you can feel at home.

Postgraduate Architecture

1/2

photo of 2 storey building at dusk with well-lit interiors seen through large windows

PG Architecture Unit 02: A New Camden Arts Centre

Tony Fretton, Jack Hawthorn

Design a new building to replace the existing Camden Arts Centre. As with all Unit 2 programs, the program this year has a high degree of reality and with some realities removed.

Courtyard space floating above the ruins of an ancient city

PG Architecture Unit 04: Phenomenal Stratification

Jonas Lundberg, Nate Kolbe

Unit04 continues its quest and exploration of how 3D scanning techniques and a range of emergent digital media allow us to work on a higher level of specificity when it comes to a time based ecological architecture forging an integral bond between landscape and building. What other/new forms of digital transformations can we utilize? Can emergent technology propel our search for a regenerative architecture?

View of a sports court, with housing blocks in the background

PG Architecture Unit 06: After the Arrival City: Neos Kosmos

Dr Bo Tang and Robert Barnes

Unit 06 will explore prosfygika (refugee housing) and social infrastructure in the neighbourhood of Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece.

landscape photo with sailboats on stretch of water and light industrial structures on an island

PG Architecture Unit 07: Poetic Pragmatism II: FACTORY

David Grandorge, Ted Swift

The design of a low embodied and operational energy factory for the fabrication of engineered timber components and pre-fabricated planar elements on a site on Frog Island, Rainham.

An interior picture of a stripped-out warehouse building

PG Architecture Unit 08: Tolerance in the practice of architecture

Takero Shimazaki, Alex Butterworth, Katherine Nolan, Paolo Emilio Pisano, Jennifer Frewen

This year, Unit 8 will work with a theme of tolerance in architecture practice and design, exploring a way to design that is embracing of the anomalies and the ‘uncontrollable’ physical elements in the idea of re-use. We welcome Katherine Nolan and Alex Butterworth of Studio KA to our teaching team, collaborating and exploring the potential of re-use in architecture today and for the 21st century.

A passage into a Parisian courtyard is framed by sculptural facades.

PG Architecture Unit 09: Convivial City

Stephen Taylor, Giles Townshend, Han Wang

This year Unit 9 will base its projects in London and focus its programmes to address the inequality of housing provision towards young people and key workers.

Abstract painting by Hilma af Klint; a spherical ‘bullseye’ shape on a red background, painted

PG Architecture Unit 12: The Invisible World

Peter St John, Amy Grounsell

The year’s design project will examine environments for learning, and focus on the design of a school in North London with classrooms and a garden. We will visit sites of ecological interest with an ecologist, and study the ideas of artists and architects interested in nature. We will look for underlying relationships in the natural world that might provide a model for human inhabitation.