Course summary

Successful completion of the Diploma of Architecture programme provides Exemption from the ARB and RIBA Part 2 Examination in Architecture. Uniquely positioned within a wider community of artists and designers at the Glasgow School of Art the programme offers students the opportunity to develop their creative practice in architecture while building their academic and social networks. The Programme ethos is founded on a commitment to create positive change for people, places and the planet with a focus on the relationships between architecture and the 21st Century City. Our curriculum is centred on contemporary issues of architecture, building and the City. This is pursued through critical engagement with students examining environmental, social, cultural, political, economic and ethical issues shaping the built environment both presently and in the future. Students use Glasgow and then a European City as the model for study. The Programme is studio based and design-project focussed, supported with taught courses in Studio, Architectural Technology, Professional Studio and Research, delivered holistically through a framework of six learning domains: Professionalism, Design/Create, Research, Communication, Skills, and Knowledge. The curriculum is delivered through teaching methodologies enabling students to extend their core skills of architectural production, founded on regenerative design principles, research and investigation, an iterative design process, and deploying the associated visual and verbal skills, to propose architectural responses to societal, spatial, ethical and environmental challenges facing the contemporary world. Graduates will be both climate literate and numerate, able to make informed design decisions which address both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of climate change and be ethically aware. The programme provides an intensive theoretical background in the forces shaping contemporary architecture and supports individuals to develop creative design skills with intellectual and aesthetic rigour. The studio environment provides a forum for critical discussion, peer learning and support, where inclusivity is fostered through a mutually respectful, supportive and collaborative studio culture. Diverse teaching and learning methods encourage students to be curious and confident and above all independent in developing their own personal responses to architecture and the environment. Through their design and written work, graduating students are able to demonstrate the ability to generate design proposals which integrate an understanding of environmental physics and comply with the relevant statutory standards, while synthesising complex environmental, social and spatial issues. On completion of the programme, the primary aim is that graduates, as emerging professionals, are highly competent and creative practitioners, and as graduates of the Glasgow School of Art, are engaged citizens, critical thinkers, skilled communicators, inclusive and creative collaborators and life-long learners.