Structure and Staging

In your thesis, you will be expected to engage in, and contribute to, the extensive body of theoretical work on the subject in question, putting forward a clear argument in the form of a project and associated text.

To help with the management of this, the year has been structured into the following key phases.

Please note, key submission dates and whole-year events will be detailed in the year 5 Module Guide.

Key Phases:

Notes: Texts (both on the reading list and those discovered) are expected to inform and supplement all phases. All data gathered should be organised and put into a collective resource.

Phase 1: Researching Urban ‘Grounds’ | ‘Critique,’ statement, contestation, affirmation. We will research the relationship between architecture, its grounds, and socio-spatial, socio-economic and socio-political ideas. We will do this through analysing projects whose intention is one of critique, political statement, contestation or affirmation – “political” projects. Non-exhaustively, some notable examples are listed on page 11. In their own way, all these projects oppose, expose or affirm political ideas.

Working alongside year 4 students in their Humanities Thinking Machine, The Pattern Book of Power, we will question how power is represented in morphological ideas? Considering Lefebvre’s notion of space being “produced” by power relations, in an upturning of order, we will ask how new social patterns might yield different powers?

Phase 2: Understanding “Totality”. We will research the notion of “total” space – earth as a continual, uninterrupted field of social relations. We will explore questions of totality, fragmentation, continuity, and discontinuity in physical, spatial, and temporal terms, building understanding of architecture as a socio-spatial discipline deeply interwoven with socioeconomic and socio-political ideas and concerns.

Phase 3: Hypothesising on a Unitary Spatial Idea. Neil Brenner, in Urban Growth Machines–But at What Scale? observes that: “. . . cities may well remain a central object and terrain of investigation, but they are grasped by being positioned analytically within broader, supraurban political-economic configurations–” What he describes as “putatively urban processes” are “often multiscalar, stretching beyond any single municipality into a tangled jigsaw of metropolises, regions, national or transnational interurban networks, and worldwide spatial divisions of labor.”(234)

You will prepare a working hypothesis for a spatial idea that can in some manner unify fragmented supraurban terrain. Your hypothesis will be set up to allow you to test some idea of how “the urban” can be a unifying condition, rather than a condition concommitant with the fragmented power-relations of our current economic system. In building the hypothesis, you may well also want to develop the antithetical argument, so that your eventual synthesised thesis can stand in opposition to it.

Phase 4: Testing the Hypothesis / Synthesising the Thesis. The final thesis might be brought together in a number of ways. The hypothesis might be tested through detailed scenarios, devised to illuminate conditions imagined as part of a much bigger complexion; it might develop into an antithetical (or critical) project, devised to stand in opposition to particular existing conditions; it might be a project of the nature of No-Stop City, which pushes a pre-existing idea or trend to its extremity, thus exposing its values or end-game; or it might use a pre-existing hypothetical project to make an opposing or alternate point, as Stop City does with No-Stop City.