Architecture and the Sustainable Environment

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the MASE programme, which was first launched in September 2012, in order to help establish sustainability as a core area of post-graduate research and teaching at KSAP. This programme, which last 1 year in the full time, and 2 years in the part-time mode, now forms the core part of a suite of postgraduate taught programmes at KSAP. MASE offers a route for careers in environmental consultancy as well as research, and over the last ten years several students have stayed on for a PhD, undertaking research engaging with different areas of sustainability.

In this programme students explore ways of addressing the challenges of sustainable architecture, looking at the design of new buildings as well as the adaption of existing buildings, which includes listed heritage buildings. In this programme students engage with questions of sustainability design not only from a technological perspective, but also from a historical, design and cultural angle.

This year we had a cohort of 16 students and all students are required take four core modules, which is the focus of the first two terms. In the autumn term the students take module AR8270 Principles of Environmental Design, which introduces the building physics fundamentals of environmental design, and ARCH8280 Rediscovery. The latter is concerned with the study of environmental technologies in historic buildings. In the Spring term the core module were ARCH8290 - Monitoring and Modelling of Environmental Performance, and ARCH8300 - Sustainable Design Project.

Alongside classes and course work, students also took part in extra-curricular events. In November 2022 I took the students on a day-trip around London, looking at historic public buildings from an environmental perspective. We focused on buildings from the 18th to the early 20th century that were designed to follow past principles of ventilation and natural lighting. The trip, which begun at the John Soane Museum, included Covent Garden, St Martin’s in the Fields, and three museums: Natural History Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate

Britain.

This year several students from MASE had also presented research papers at the Annual Conference of the Construction History Society, which was held at Queens’ College in Cambridge in April 2023. These papers were based on original archival research that students had undertaken for module ARCH8280 Rediscovery in the autumn term. It gave them the opportunity to gain their first experience of an international academic conference. It involved going through two stages of peer-review - their full papers, each 5,000 words long, were published in the Proceedings – and giving an oral presentation to a larger audience.

After completing their core module, the students conducted a 4-month research project for their final dissertation. This year the students used the Spring term to develop the proposals for their dissertation, which was supported through seminars. Most of the dissertations are based on small individual projects, but this year we also got several students collaborating to undertake larger research projects. In one of these projects, three students collaborate to develop a net-zero carbon plan for the historic church of St Martin and St Paul’s in Canterbury. The other large projects focused on the Port of Dover and Canterbury Cathedral.

Professor Henrik Schoenefeldt Director of Graduate Studies