Architecture MArch Architecture

ARB/RIBA Part 2

Isaie Bloch, Course Leader

Architectural Design Staff:

Unit 2 Christoph Hadrys, Uwe Shmidt-Hess, Tony Fretton

Unit 6 Isaie Bloch, Igor Pantic

Unit 8 Armor Gutierrez, Rosa Rogina

History & Theory teaching staff: Christoph Hadrys, Anna Minton, Clare Penny, Teresa Serrano, Bridget Snaith, Fulvio Wirz.

Technical & Environmental Studies teaching staff: Alan Chandler, Armor Gutierrez, Teresa Serrano, Deborah Do-Rosario-Benros.

Professional Studies teaching staff: Roland Karthaus, Deborah Do-Rosario-Benros.

Technicians & Demonstrators: Daryl Brown, Luiz Bueno, Garry Doherty, Paul Nichols, Mark Sowden.

External Examiners: Teoman Ayas, Julian Cross, Raymond Quek, Jessica Reynolds, David Short, Michael Trousdell.

Our school is enriching lives and is addressing the climate emergency. We have developed a strong position in sustainable design and for many years, have developed the shared theme across the course zero percent carbon one hundred percent people. The link between environmental and social sustainability has grown our engagement with new and emerging technologies and organisational structures as well as people and communities in need. In this process, we engage students in knowledge transfer, skill-building, research, placemaking, iterative explorations and testing. Our students develop their work through a culture of critical, practical, and creative engagement as designers and thinkers. We ask questions and aim to enable answers, from the things we touch to the world around us and from the individual to society. This approach to sustainability whilst preserving human experience is a core value shared by all staff and students.

Situated in the department of Architecture and Visual Arts (AVA) the close proximity between courses also brings access to a wide variety of technical workshops and labs including the full range of Engineering and Arts workshops, such as photography, the traditional metal, plaster and wood workshops as well as the newer digital fabrication and robotics workshops. Students are encouraged towards a hybrid use of the workshops with project work spanning both traditional and more contemporary digital technologies. As part of our making culture, the hands-on learning by doing is an important aspect of our teaching and learning.

Our professionally accredited part 2 programme at UEL produce directed, environmentally responsible and socially aware graduates that understand architecture as a beautiful, radical tool to make ‘place’ and engage with the complexities of social and environmental interaction. Through our programmes, our students develop a rigorous and strategic understanding of context encompassing social and environmental, physical and non-physical concerns, enabling them to make engaged and critical architectures. Our teaching is centred on the interface of social and spatial structures, on people and place. At the core of this education are our design units in year 4 & 5, each of which provides students with a particular thematic and methodological approach to design, and as a whole contain a diversity of students and staff that stimulates critical awareness.

The aim of the MArch programme, in Years 4 & 5, is to stimulate students to become critical agents in the social production of space through thorough and in-depth engagement with environmentally sound responses addressing real-life issues and uncertainties. Sustainability is key for us and can only be achieved by aligning human behaviour, use, technology, place and space together. We believe students need more than just a traditional understanding of how to do their job. As such our course does not attempt to replicate office practice, instead it prepares students to push practice forward. We teach how to maximise potential and to generate impact by addressing new methods of project and design development as well as through the use of contemporary technology. We believe that by engaging on a practical level with real-life scenarios you will affect the whole, not just the part. We will stimulate to look at architecture as the opportunist, not the problem-solver only.

Within this process students transform complexity into elegance, animate aesthetics and organise space for social use. Preparation for professional practice and beyond integrates essential technical, philosophical, regulatory and practical knowledge as baseline skills that enable the final thesis at MArch level to critically extend beyond the ARB and RIBA requirements. Decision making and technical innovation, develop from and relate to wider socio-political contexts, grounding the design work and emphasise the importance of the critical task we have in creating better architectures for all generations to come.