Architecture BSc Design Units
Explore the briefs that our design units will be working on during their study.
In Years 2 and 3, the Design Projects modules are taught in design units, each consisting of around 15-17 students from both years. Each design unit is led by distinguished tutors from academia or professional practice, usually both.
Below, please find summaries of the briefs that our design units will be working on in 2024-25, along with links to unit blogs and social channels.
Find out more about the Architecture BSc via prospectus.
UG1
Flora-culture: Recomposing Regenerative Cities
Margit Kraft and Toby O’Connor
“It is possible to build with respect for nature and people” - Guillame Habert
Plant fibre materials present fundamental opportunities for urgent and radical shifts in contemporary building practices. This year Unit 1 is asking: What can our flora do for us - and us for them?
Learning to build with our whole range of plant matter, the unit will investigate and speculate on sourcing scenarios, life cycles, combinations, transformations, and articulations of local trees and other plants as the basis for architectural innovation that responds directly to the climate and ecological crises.
The study trip will be to Vorarlberg in the Austrian Alps. Learning from building visits, artisan makers and large scale manufacturers we will explore over 1000 years of innovation in timber construction in this unique region.
The project focus area will be in Clerkenwell, London, where students are invited to find their own representative urban morphological site to suit the making process they are investigating.
As the main material for earthquake proof pagodas, modular high alpine shelters, the foundations of water cities like Venice, bridges and much more, plant life has provided the planet with millennia of beautiful tectonic structures and spaces.
From forest and street trees, via coppice to grasses, rushes, leaves and husks: What kinds of beautiful architectural practices can be developd that engage with these incredible resources?
UG2
On the Mend: Patterns, Assembly, and Form Through Self Build Practices
Zachary Fluker and Jhono Bennett
The needle has shifted within the discipline of architecture. The field is now operating in a new normal of city-making that requires design work to perform for both the planet and people. This change towards more collective responsibilities compels architects to reconsider how carbon usage and consumption patterns can be reduced within the built environment, addressing all scales of building – from material procurement to long after users take ownership of their new structures.
Architects now have clearer parameters than ever to innovate and re-evaluate their design and construction processes to meet this shared global challenge. More hybrid and people-focused approaches will be required to repair, reprogram, and reassemble the current urban fabric. By working more collectively across social, economic, and environmental dimensions within the city, UG2 students will address this challenge by developing more grounded and resource-attuned designs that embrace people-centric systems of making.
By redefining the relationship between client, user, and maker, UG2 will design architectures that resonate with the aspirations of urban communities in both form and operation. The unit will explore how systems like the circular economy and the collective agency of self-build can reshape the way we construct. Through this approach, design research in London, combined with a field trip to Brussels, will generate proposals that are deeply embedded within their context in form, material, and inhabitation.
Image: Celia Pym, Fraser Jacket (detail)
UG3
Ifigeneia Liangi, Daniel Dream and Vasilis Marcou-Ilchuk
This year UG3 will consider the significance of darkness in architecture. Historically, architecture has prioritised daylight, neglecting the potential of darkness and gloom. By examining the cultural, historical and technological factors shaping our relationship with the luminous and the dark, UG3 aim to challenge this bias and explore the atmospheric qualities of night.
The unit will examine how poets, novelists and thinkers have perceived nightfall as a space of danger and reverie. By considering the contemporary political factors surrounding darkness, such as public safety and energy consumption, students will explore how darkness has shaped culture, identity and urban experience.
UG3 will consider the importance of electric light as a starting point for our designs, along with its importance for the design process in the form of rendering. While digital rendering offers unprecedented control over light it can also create a gap between the image and the actual experience of a built space. The unit will consider how artificial light can be integrated into the design process and how to better align the magic of rendering with physical experience as students design buildings that pine for the twilight.
Between midnight and 3 AM, the veil between the worlds is thin.
Image Credit: Sasha Audas, Ad-Hox Nexus, UG3 student, 2023-24
UG4
FUEL
Katerina Dionysopoulou and Billy Mavropoulos
UG4 is driven by the dialectic between the pragmatic reality of architecture as a profession of restrictions and the deep creativity we as practitioners bring to our projects. The studio is led by Katerina Dionysopoulou and Billy Mavropoulos of the award-winning architecture practice Bureau de Change.
A society's energy availability dictates its architectural achievements. In the last 300 years, construction methods, building forms, and materials have changed more significantly than in the preceding 5,000 years due to the implementation of fossil fuels. Yet, the same source that once defined progress and modernity now drives climate destabilisation, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion.
UG4 will investigate our evolving understanding of energy and fuel, shaping new architectural strategies, lexicons, and polemics. Retrofitting will be approached as an act of architectural stewardship, interweaving a building’s past and future in a dialogue that reveres both history and sustainability.
UG4's exploration will extend through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, investigating adaptive reuse and sustainable projects to examine how diverse contexts address the challenge of energy refurbishment.
The adoption of renewable energy sources, circular economy principles, and regenerative designs are not merely technical solutions but are indicative of a deeper ontological reorientation towards an architecture that is symbiotic with the natural world.
Bureau de Change is an award-winning architecture practice founded by Katerina Dionysopoulou and Billy Mavropoulos, who hail from Greece and met while training as young architects working at Foster + Partners.
Projects by Bureau de Change are a direct product of the founders' upbringing, passions and experiences – combining the pragmatism and formality of their architectural training with a desire to bring a sense of theatre, playfulness and innovation to the design of spaces, products and environments. The result is a studio where rigorous thinking and analysis are brought to life through prototyping, testing and making. The practice is celebrated for its highly inventive and playful private residences, which celebrate material, form and light, as well as richly textured commercial projects and has won numerous awards. (www.b-de-c.com)
Image: Pink Floyd Inflatable Flying Pig at Battersea Power Station. © Jonathan Rhodes
UG5
CLICHÉ
Bongani Muchemwa and Patrick Massey
“I take things that are worn out through overuse, that have become clichés - like the shed, a traditional place of rest and retreat - and I give them a more incandescent future.” - Cornelia Parker
Clichés hold a hidden transformative potential. This year UG5 will embark on a journey to explore the duality of clichés, using them as a starting point for exploratory drawings that challenge conventional thinking and subvert familiar ideas, embracing the unfamiliar to uncover the vast possibilities hidden in their opposites. By exploring these direct and indirect counterpoints, the unit aim to uncover the true meaning behind the cliché.
A cliché is the most known thing - so familiar it numbs the senses, becoming dull and irritating. But in its inversion lies a path to the unknown and a profound sense of wonder and delight. Inverting cliché becomes a transformative act, a starting point for creating work that resonates with deep meaning and beauty. UG5 will use this notion to question modes of architectural practice, understand the historical and cultural context in which they work and challenge norms.
This year, students will develop design methodologies through exploratory drawing and explore the spatial consequences of these methodologies. In the building project, the unit will question established typologies on the theme of cultural exchange. The field trip will take students from Catania to Palermo, Sicily, Italy.
Image: Collage of past UG5 students experimental drawings.
UG6
Contingent Matter(s)
Ashley Hinchcliffe and Ben Spong
UG6 is a space for exploration and experimentation. Taking a hands-on approach to design, the unit encourages individuals to establish their own methods that resonate with them and the ideas they are exploring. The unit moves between the speculative and the tangible, the drawn and the made to reveal possibilities for the architectural that lie beyond convention.
Both within and outside the discipline, architecture is often perceived as the creation of fixed, permanent structures that allow for a specific kind of use, yet the built environment is profoundly shaped by contingent matters - circumstances of an unpredictable and changing nature that affect how buildings are designed, constructed, and adapted over time.
This year UG6 will ask how architecture can better engage and maintain contingent matters. Drawing on the relationship between climate and contingency, the unit aims to develop practical and poetic measures that expand architecture’s ecological, material, and spatial boundaries.
The field trip is to Belgium where students will see a range of intensely detailed and personal Art Nouveau buildings, a weird and wonderful range of museums and exemplary contemporary buildings.
Image: Yellow Hallway No.II – James Casabere.
UG7
Sensational States
Joseph Augustin and Christopher Burman
It could be argued that architecture is fundamentally experienced through contrast - even though contemporary construction often results in atmospherically bland, homeostatic, unsenseable spaces.
The unnatural consistency and ‘performance’ of much of our contemporary environment sharply disregards what neuroscientist Michel Cabanac terms “Alliesthesia”, the physiological role of sensory pleasure in helping individuals calibrate to the environments around them. Indeed, our enjoyment of sensory delight may even be a vital perceptual and biological mechanism.
From this perspective, the pleasures of a cool breeze or hot bath might be considered as small fragments of a design agenda interested in reconsidering deeper environmental relationships. What is the architecture that emerges as we amplify, modulate or blur these sensory signals?
Building on previous on-going interests in material systems, supply chains and civic space, UG7 invites students to pursue sensation - to resolve architectural experiences defined by heightened contrasts and fluctuating states of body, thermodynamics and energy. The unit will embrace a primary function of architecture - the modification and moderation of habitable climates - to consider how rich sensory propositions interact with the unavoidably urgent reality of ecological change and the rapidly shifting patterns of heat, winds and rainfall brought about by planetary warming.
Field Trip: Andalusian Alliesthesia
The UG7 field trip will take students to Seville, Cordoba and culminating in a visit to Alhambra in Granada.
Along the way students will explore the deep historical, political and cultural dynasties - The Alcázar of Seville, Seville Cathedral, the legacy of Mudéjar architecture, the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba - each contending with the intense Andalusian summer heat through a variety of vernacular and contemporary architectures strategies designed to cope with extreme climatic realities.
Image: Thermal Image Capture, Islamabad by Christopher Burman, 2024.
UG8
Maria Fulford and Jörg Majer
In physics, entropy is the measure of disorder in a system. The more chaos the more entropy. It is based on the second law of thermodynamics which defines the nature of energy and reveals that: not all energy within a system is useful; energy naturally dissipates; entropy increases over time; and ultimately the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness.
As a continuation of our interest in time and its effect on the built environment this year Unit 8 will explore the relationship between entropic processes and the order of things. Inspired by the work and writing of Robert Smithson and Rudolf Arnheim UG8 will think about what entropy means in terms of architecture, construction, use and decay. The unit will consider our human desire to create order and systems that work against entropy and the constant work that this creates. This cyclical process gives rise to opportunities of doing and undoing, transformation and the reworking of things.
This year UG8 will also have a material focus on stone and its entropic qualities. Stone is created by geological processes that occur over millennia, though its matter is inert it is an active material which lays bare the forces of nature and time. Through rigorous testing, experiments and workshops, the unit will explore the potential of this ancient material and its ability to transform itself into future forms and composite materials.
Fieldtrip: Italy, Naples.
Image: Face to Face by Anthony McCall. Photograph: Jason Wyche, New York, 2013
UG9
Gathering
Chee Kit Lai and Jessica In
This year, UG9 will explore the concept of 'gathering' - coming together to mark special events, achievements, or milestones through activities, ceremonies, or festivities. Gatherings express a collective mood at a specific moment in time and serve functions like Celebration, Commemoration, and Demonstration. These events can take place in both digital and physical spaces, playing a crucial role in art, culture, and civic life. They highlight the role of art and artists as catalysts for collaboration, expressions of hope and joy, and as vehicles for protest.
UG9 will examine how the city's physical and digital constructs interact with its inhabitants, shaping societal ideas and vice versa. By studying public gathering spaces, from concerts to political rallies, UG9 aims to understand the spatial qualities that encourage people to gather.
The design of public spaces is never apolitical - open spaces encourage life and activities, windows and balconies encourage natural surveillance, while wide roads may serve strategic purposes. The unit is also interested in the materiality and improvised designs people use to express their messages during gatherings, especially in today's hybrid reality, where events are experienced both in person and remotely. The timeline and legacy of gatherings, whether planned, spontaneous, or site-specific, are also key areas of focus.
Image: Emmeline Pankhurst addressing a crowd in Trafalgar Square, Photo: Central Press, October 1908.
UG12
Settlement: Oculi
Hannah Corlett and Niall McLaughlin
Each year, the unit creates a constitution for a new settlement together, agreeing a tool kit of shared values, with each student designing an individual building on our shared site. A settlement suggests a community of buildings in a particular place, a situation with its own origins, which grows and develops over time. It is also an agreement acceptable to all parties. Both meanings require each other. Individually, settling belongs to our oldest animal intuitions and is at the heart of architectural experience. Buildings also settle, they wear and weather, they acquire and shape histories.
This year, the focus will be on understanding the environmental significance of density, light, and curation. The settlement will be located on the western edge of Regent’s Park and take inspiration from introverted architectures that curate light and frame aspects. UG12 will create a dense urban network nestled between the ‘Sublime Beauty’ of Regents Park and ‘The High Hopes’ of Somers Town, manipulating light from the zenith through techniques learned and experimental and articulating a matrix of connected and controlled views born out of the environment and our collaboration. For the field trip with UG4, Unit 12 will journey across Northern Europe looking at exemplar buildings that manipulate light.
Image: Photograph of the ceiling of the Baptistery of Saint John in Florence, Italy by Hannah Corlett. View looking up at the ceiling of the Baptistery of Saint John in Florence, Italy, showing light entering the central and side oculi.
UG13
Flight Lines: An Architecture of Trajectories
William Victor Camilleri and Laurence Blackwell-Thale
A line of flight allows the architect to track their construction’s development through space and time. Fabrication involves the movement of materials from points of origin to sites of assembly, a shift from matter to component, the realisation of potential set against the realities of construction; these moments of transfer and interchange are what we call trajectories.
The inter-relationship between drawing for construction and constructions for drawings is the origin for the year, allowing students to embody the multi-faceted position of the architect-maker. This parallactic position enables the collapse of distinctions between registration, process, production, and output, challenging the conventions of architectural completion and representation.
UG13’s outlook hybridises the material with immaterial, haptic fabrication with ephemeral experience. With a historical pursuit for everything exquisite, the unit explores iterative and collaborative processes at the cross section of performative architecture, landscape sensibility and workshop fabrication. This principle enables work at the junction between the analogue and digital, where three-dimensional fabrication techniques are combined with precision drawing methods throughout the design process.
Image: The photographer pigeon, UG13 Collective, 2024
UG14
THE HEALING CITY
David Di Duca and Tetsuro Nagata
UG14 discusses architecture through an anthropological lens; studying how societies and individuals remember and forget through the built environment. In previous years, the unit focused on the role that nostalgia, rituals, manufacturing and authenticity have on the collective identity. This year, students will study how a city can heal and recover after a traumatic event, and the capacity for memorials to act as a barometer of the political consciousness, as well as a tool for empathy.
The examination of different modes of shared remembering will serve as the starting point for these investigations. Unit 14 will question what the memorials around us, both hidden and established, reveal about the events they describe and the societies that placed them there. Through their designs students will explore how narratives are woven into the built environment and attempt to translate one person’s experience to another.
In a time when global environmental and economic factors advocate against the inexcusable demolition of buildings, the unit will continue to imagine innovative and evocative futures by adapting existing structures. Unit 14 will aim to transform the urban fabric that experienced this trauma and construct new approaches to tell its stories and aid the healing process for the city.
Image: Retirement home in Nedžarići, Sarajevo. Credit: Alen Petrovic @4LifeVideos
UG21
Multimodal
Abigail Ashton, Andrew Porter, and Tom Holberton
“Though nothing will keep us together” - Heroes (1977) written by Bowie / Eno
The multimodal holds things together. Design involves combining different modes - drawings, physical models, digital models or material fragments - to develop an idea. Each type of representation has its code, but it is in the projected space between different media that the design can emerge, formed through intersections, combinations, layering, or transduction, combining indeterminacy and abstraction.
This year, the focus will be on creating unique design processes that reimagine multimodality, considering how drawings, models, and media can come together. In all these cases, whether analogue or digital, drawings can be both representational and operational. UG21 will ask you to create new ‘codes’ that redefine the possibilities of these familiar formats, creating new forms of drawing and models that can be dynamic, interlinked and generative and work in new ways when combined.
In 1977 David Bowie and Brian Eno recorded Heroes with Tony Visconti. From a studio overlooking the Berlin wall, they created a new sound through the layering and overdubbing of patterns in music. The unit will focus on Berlin, a city that is perpetually considering how to combine and reconcile competing ideas.
Image: Lewis Brown, Printed Morphologies (2022) from PG21.