Architecture MArch Design Units
Explore the design units that Architecture MArch students will be working on during their study.
Please find summaries of the briefs our design units will be working to in 2024-25 below, alongside links to unit blogs and social channels. Current Architecture MArch students will receive full briefs at the start of term via Moodle.
Visit our online prospectus for more information about the course.
PG11
Natureculture
Unit 11 is a space for creative thinking where conceptual and pragmatic approaches to architectural design intersect with playful and experimental methods.
The Unit explores the intersections of land use, architecture, technologies, infrastructures, and ecologies, navigating both spatial and conceptual dimensions. This year’s framework is shaped by Donna Haraway's concept of ‘natureculture,’ which refers to the entangled histories and blurred divides between nature and culture, and the interdependent needs of human and nonhuman entities. Haraway’s work calls for the radical integration of art, design, architecture, and science - precisely where the Unit positions itself.
The field trip will take students to Rome, but it begins by exploring its ‘natureculture’ stories from afar. Drawing from film, literature, and archival research, students will delve into Rome’s material entanglements and curious intersections. Through speculative design and material experimentation, Unit 11 will ask:
- As climate and environment rapidly change, how can Rome’s edge ecologies and transitional spaces inspire new ways of designing spaces for architecture, infrastructure and habitation?
- How can architects engage with Rome’s layered material past in ways that neither fetishize nor discard it?
There are hundreds of examples of student work from Unit 11 on smoutallen.com along with work from the practice.
Image: Athanasius-Kircher, ‘The Topography of Paradise’, 1675
PG12
Corridors of Time/ Corridors in Time and Space
Izabela Wieczorek and Elizabeth Dow
The corridor has the capacity to cross time and space, linking hours to days, rooms to buildings, weeks to years, neighbourhoods to cities, decades to centuries, regions to countries. The corridor is a witness, glimpsing and overhearing; and a conduit, offering a short-cut, or a lengthy derive, providing a temporary sanctuary or long-term escape. By conceiving the corridor beyond the linear experience that mirrors how time is similarly conventionally charted, the potential for spatial invention and surprise is enabled.
Travelling through time and space, including a field trip to Madrid – a city known for its urban corridors – Unit 12 will be looking at how buildings and cities are formed around corridors, exploring their architectural potentials. An instrument of modernity, besides its programmatic meaning, the corridor has also symbolic dimensions, reflecting political and social dynamics. The phrase ‘corridors of power’ – commonly associated with the seat of government and coined by C.P Snow in 1964 – will prompt a re-investigation of the architect’s ‘power’ in a world of over-stretched and iniquitous resources, challenging architectural preconceptions and unearthing unexpected consequences for the buildings that will be designed in Unit 12 this year.
Image: James Hepper, Taking Time: [For] An Island of Reciprocity, PG12 2023-2024
PG14
INVESTIGATIVE DOMAIN
Dirk Krolikowski and Jakub Klaska
At the center of Unit 14’s academic exploration lies Buckminster Fuller’s ideal of the ‘The Comprehensive Designer’, a master-builder that follows Renaissance principles and a holistic approach. Fuller referred to this ideal of the designer as somebody who is capable of comprehending the ‘integrateable significance’ of specialised findings and is able to realise and coordinate the commonwealth potentials of these discoveries without disappearing into a career of expertise. Like Fuller, Unit 14 is opportunistic in seeking new ideas and their benefits via architectural synthesis.
Unit 14 serves as a test bed for exploration and innovation, examining the role of the architect in an environment of continuous change. The unit's propositions are ultimately made through the design of buildings and an in-depth consideration of structural formation and tectonic. This, coupled with a strong research ethos, will generate new and unprecedented, one day viable and spectacular proposals. They will be beautiful through their intelligence - extraordinary findings and the artful integration of these into architecture.
The focus of this year’s work evolves around the intrinsic chance and professional desire for creative and systematic investigation. Students will enage in the explorative and intellectual process of iterative learning through informed experiment,seeking architectural applications catalyzed by potent discoveries. An intensely investigative approach enables the architect’s fundamental agency and core competency of the profession to anticipate the future through the highest degree of synthesis of the observed underlying principles underpinned by strong research.
The unit trip destination is Germany and takes advantage of Europe’s rich industrial legacy as a contemporary centre of invention and making.
Image: ‘Investigative Domain’ copyright UNIT 14 @Midjourney
PG16
María Páez González, Brendon Carlin, and James Kwang Ho Chung
Unit 16 will explore ‘archipelagos’ as both geographical formations and as ways of thinking, pursuing the possibility of a world with distinct ‘reality islands’. The unit will use the archipelago as a heuristic device, examining architecture’s role in shaping relationality between distinct yet interconnected beings and places, while also inventing radically different modes of practice and form. Archipelagos are clusters of islands connected by the same substances, bodies, technologies, and forces that separate them. They serve as microcosms of the world, where global crises - such as climate change, migration, monoculture, species extinction, poverty, and psychological or health crises - converge and become urgent. These crises stem from incessant urbanization and the 'disappearance of form' driven by architectures, technologies, laws, and abstractions that fragment and scale, excluding people from directly participating in imagining and constructing their world.
However, as communities and ecologies are pushed beyond their capacity to live happily or reproduce, they re-establish tangible, participatory forms of relationship-building and architecture that emphasise care, protection, and collective governance, incorporating non-human beings, ancestors, and future generations. Beginning with your personal habits, stories, and fascinations, the unit will weave connections to the Canarian Archipelago, a pivotal global node and microcosm of the wider world. Focusing on ‘flashpoints’ of conflict around the architecture of elements such as data, water, soil, energy, agriculture, or volcanoes, Unit 16 will engage with and develop installations and speculative architectures for those resisting colonial legacies, experimenting with modes of thinking, knowing, and building that prioritise care and pleasure over endless production.
Image: Flat House by Dakyung Lee , Diploma 19, 2021-22
PG17
Yeoryia Manolopoulou and Tamsin Hanke
Architecture is found in the unity of idea, building and way of life. Unit 17 will focus on the concept of the chronotope (chronos: time / topos: place), a complex and implicit reality that cannot be adequately captured through photorealism. The dominant and commodified culture of hyper-realistic architectural visualisations weakens the relevance of the architect as a radical innovator, subjugating design knowledge to the curation of image.
With a degree of scepticism toward digital ‘world-building’, the unit will develop experiential practices for situated proposals in London’s margins. Margin marks borders between conceptual, material and social entities, and refers to minor conditions, left-overs and fringes outside of the mainstream. Alongside the development of individual projects, Unit 17 encourages collaborative engagement to expand the possible scale and breadth of work. Students will visit Finland and learn from the Nordic design sensibility to create new and sublime understandings of the chronotope - not only projects but enduring forms of practice.
Image: Made by Human, Irene Albino and Muzzumil Ruheel.
PG18
MONEY URBANA
Ricardo de Ostos and Isaie Bloch
They say that money rules the world and corrupts all. In art and architecture patronage by the wealthy (individual, institutional or industrial) have supported and enabled the creation and future memory of great monuments of the world.
Unit 18 will study how money, currency and patronage (often anonymous or disguised) shapes city culture through physical institutions. Students will study spaces specifically designed to store and trade value physically/virtually, material/immaterial. Whilst banks, stock exchanges, vaults, freeports, sovereign wealth funds, digital wallets are the immediate responses, we will also look at museums, heritage sites, festivals, libraries, palaces, archives as storage of cultural currency and value
Students will study type, programme and context through key patrons and characters and their spaces of trade. Here form and narrative will be a tool for subversion and social commentary.
The unit will travel to Morocco at the crossroads of Western African, Maghreb, European and Berber influences - a place where old and new merge, influenced by historic and current colonial enterprise, creating a rich and hybrid architecture and urban morphology.
Image: The Citadel of alluvial sanctuaries by Momchil Petrinski (Unit 18, Y5)
PG20
The City as a Jungle
Marjan Colletti, Javier Ruiz and Tony Le
PG20 is a ‘growth-minded’ unit that empowers individuals while honouring collective values. The unit views architecture as a series of dynamic, time-based systems and use design processes that enable constant transformation in forms, spaces, and events. The 'City as a Jungle' brief reimagines urban living through the lens of natural ecosystems, blending architecture with nature to create vibrant, sustainable, and resilient urban environments. This vision fosters harmony between urbanisation and the natural world, making cities not only human hubs but also thriving, living systems.
By focusing on timber, in combination with prefabrication and 3D printing, the project introduces an innovative construction approach that enhances efficiency, design flexibility, and sustainability. This hybrid method leverages the potentials of additive manufacturing and timber's eco-friendliness, potentially revolutionising urban design and construction. A key part of the unit includes a visit to Berlin, known for its rich architecture and cultural dynamism. The final projects will be showcased in the CityX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Image: The Antrhopogenic Leech. Matthew Choy, PG20 2023/24
PG21
Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton and Andrew Porter
“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 design processes that re-imagine how to be multimodal, considering how drawings, models, and media come together. In all these cases, whether analogue or digital, drawings can be both representational and operational. The unit will ask students 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.
PG22
LIVING CERAMICS / LIVING CITIES
Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno and Daniel Ovalle Costal
Unit 22 is a speculative design studio on how architectural ceramics can act as an interface to re-naturalise cities.
Many cities have lost their contact with nature. In this context, rewilding is widely understood as a process of restoration of past ecosystemic balance, often defined as a looking-backward action. Rewilding cities is essential for the wellbeing of their population, but it should be framed as a forward-looking action that requires creative, collective, and participatory work, along principles of environmental justice.
This year Unit 22 is invited to reframe ceramics as containers for life as well as the literal building blocks of our cities to unlock a critical rethink of the role of nature and biodiversity in urban environments.
Ceramics have accompanied humankind for millennia. Their base material, shaping and firing techniques give them a wide range of physical characteristics, becoming objects from China tea sets to brick domes. Critically, they have historically been excellent containers for life, used to store food, flowers, plants, animals.
Unit 22 will travel to Tétouan, Morocco, to explore the role of ceramics in its vernacular and historic architecture and what rewilding strategies within a close knit urban grid could entail.
Image: Terraza Eco-Housing, Izaskun Chinchilla Architects, 2024. Photography by David Frutos, furniture by Sancal.
PG23
Continuous Assemblies
Farlie Reynolds and Ben Spong
Unit 23 takes a hands-on approach to design through making and direct experimentation, producing work that spans the gulf between the speculative and the tangible, the represented and the real, the poetic and the practical. The unit champions innovative architectural strategies that boldly address the environmental challenges of our time.
The long-exposure photographs of Michael Wesely hold subjects, ecologies and their temporality together, dispelling the myth of the building as an autonomous and static entity. As materials and people are shown to move in and out of synchronicity, they raise important questions of architecture’s unique capacity to continuously assemble a multitude of worlds throughout its practice, production and occupation. A thought that cuts through the idealistic notion of the finite, iconic, completeness of the building which has historically governed architecture’s disciplinary norms and values.
This year Unit 23 will advocate for the perpetually incomplete as we situate architecture within the continuum of multiple, interwoven states which it simultaneously produces and occupies. Unit 23 will develop unique methods of designing, building and perceiving architecture while exploring questions around how, where, when and with whom to build?
The unit will travel across northern Italy from East to West, beginning in Verona and travelling into the Dolomites, then venturing on to Milan, Como before ending in Turin. This itinerary traverses sublime alpine landscapes, picturesque lakes and post-industrial cities. Students will visit sites of production, seminal case-study buildings and lesser-known experimental architectures along the way.
Image: Michael Wesely, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin (01.04.2016–25.10.2018). A long-exposure photograph composited over 2.5 years presenting a sophisticated interplay of identity and change during the renovations of the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin.
PG24
Super Common
Hadin Charbel and Nasios Varnavas
Architecture’s relationship to 'Common' uncovers complexities and contradictions; opposing forces such as ‘individual-collective’, ‘private-public’, ‘global-local’, ‘regeneration-conservation’, potentially leading to an “either - or”, dialectal form of thinking. By engaging with these conflicts simultaneously, an unexpected and carefully situated response can emerge.
PG24 is interested in understanding these frictions and working with them to shape a research argument for architectures which the unit will define as Super Common. Super Common seeks an architectural language derived by a method and attitude of relational practice. It welcomes the everyday, the boring, the normative as it does the extraordinary, the peripheral, the odd, and everything in between. It is malleable to both specificities of place and the global urgencies of our world.
Sited in Porto, the unit aims to produce work which is visionary and pragmatic, serious and fun at the same time, showcasing high-level thinking and systems understanding, as well as rooted in reason and place. The unit seeks to nurture individual voice and collaborative work, normative and non-normative thinking, following and bending rules to act in the present with a sharpness, a softness and a generosity that fosters a type of architecture engaged with history, relevant to the present, and propositional for the future.
Image credit: snoopy latte, via instagram @imgur
Image carousel: 2021 work by Hiu Junn Kam (PG10), Ellisavet Manou (PG24), Niall O'Hara (PG18), Tony Le (PG20), Arinjoy Sen (PG12), Michelle Hoe (PG21) and Peter Davies (PG11)