Course summary

MArch at AUB explores new approaches to architectural practice through making, innovation and collaboration for a variety of communities. The course is a creative professional qualification, validated by RIBA and RBA. If you’re looking for something different and fresh in your route to becoming an architect in a changing world, the MArch at AUB is for you. This two-year, studio-based course, which is accredited by ARB and RIBA, is structured around the idea of architectural intervention. You’ll work alongside fellow makers, collaborators and enablers who have come from different schools around the world and have the opportunity to collaborate across the arts. You’ll cut into society’s deepest, darkest myths and build interventions in utopias and dystopias past, present and future. What you will learn The course starts with the body and its spatial rhythms, before taking these into an urban and landscape context. The final term of the first year is a research unit that prepares you for the main thesis unit. This thesis unit gives you the opportunity to develop a complex project on a site of your choice or in a group – international or local – we have had projects in Angola, Bangladesh and New York and more locally in Bournemouth, Boscombe and the New Forest. The course recognises that research is understood in a broad sense. You will research into architecture's theories, histories, and methodologies. You will also need to do research on various aspects of both design-related and discourse-related areas for your proposals and spatial transformations. The cross-overs with the other MA level programs create the potential for innovation and the collaboration of ideas and research methodologies. A distinguishing quality of the course is that all teaching and learning is integrated and assessed alongside studio practice. We stress the importance of exploring and understanding architecture through the notion of contextual knowledge, which refers to how architecture is situated within a larger field of interconnected disciplines and domains of knowledge, including the social, the technological and the cultural. Through the study of contexts and their histories, you will develop ways to address and critically discuss the various issues that affect and inform architectural practice and its theories. The architecture course at AUB thus promotes and encourages both concept and research driven approaches to architectural design that link history, theory and design. In the majority of units this learning outcome is assessed through the provision of written and illustrated analysis of history and theory appropriate to the studio project. By the end of the course you will be able to...

• Ability to generate complex design proposals showing understanding of current architectural issues, originality in the application of subject knowledge and, where appropriate, ability to test new hypotheses and speculations.

• Ability to evaluate and apply a comprehensive range of visual, oral and written media to test, analyse, critically appraise and explain design proposals.

• Ability to evaluate materials, processes and techniques including construction, structures and environmental control that apply to complex architectural designs and building construction, and to integrate these into practicable design proposals.

• Critical understanding of how knowledge is advanced through research to produce clear, logically argued and original written work relating to architectural culture, theory and design.

• Understanding of the context of the architect and the construction industry, including the architect’s role in the processes of procurement and building production, and relevant legislation.

• Ability to identify individual learning needs and understand the personal responsibility required to prepare for qualification as an architect.