Architecture BSc Design Units

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 2025/26, along with links to unit blogs and social channels.

Find out more about the Architecture BSc via the prospectus page. 

You can also check out more work on our Instagram channel - @bartlettarchbsc.

UG1

Circular tectonics

Margit Kraft and Toby O’Connor

“The limitations of a material’s use, or misuse, depend solely on our capacity to imagine alternative and unexpected means of incorporating it into the design process.” - Mohsen Mostafavi.

Circular materials present urgent opportunities for radical shifts in contemporary building practice. This year UG01 ask: What can we do with what we already have? Learning from emerging circular activities in the UK and Europe, we will investigate sourcing scenarios, life cycles, combinations, transformations, and new articulations of circular materials as a basis for architectural innovation addressing the climate and ecological crises.

Our study trip will be to Copenhagen and Malmö, where circular materiality is visible and increasingly embedded in the fabric and life of cities. Through visits to buildings, makers, and universities we will explore and debate the cutting edge of circularity in architecture. Our project focus is the Westway, London, where each student will select a representative urban morphological site suited to the making process they are investigating.

From Stonehenge to Atelier Luma, from medieval polyphony to resampling in hip-hop, trap, and techno, processes of reuse, recycling, and transformation have deep histories and contemporary resonance. Balancing systematic logic with subjective poetics, what kinds of beautiful architecture can emerge from circularity.

Image: View of a demolition site.
Bios: Margit Kraft is a Lecturer (Teaching) m.kraft@ucl.ac.uk, Toby O’Connor is a Lecturer (Teaching) and works for Public Practice (Swansea City Council) toby.o’connor@ucl.ac.uk.
Issuu: UG01

UG2

Bit by Bit: An Architecture of Parts

Zachary Fluker and Maxwell Mutanda

“Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse.” - Lacaton and Vassal.

In a world shaped by environmental, economic and cultural change, the ability to adapt is no longer optional; but essential. Architecture that embraces adaptability becomes not only resilient but radically resourceful. By embedding a design intelligence that rethinks permanence, embraces reuse and enables spatial futures beyond the now, architecture positions itself not as a fixed solution, but as an open framework for ongoing transformation.

With a strong focus on how architecture can empower people, UG02 will explore how community engagement combined with adaptative construction systems can generate new relationships between the city and its users. In redefining our role as architects within the process of designing space, students will develop hybrid building proposals that consider lifespan, use and environment.

UG2 aligns with the aspirations of the circular economy and will continue to innovate and experiment through upcycled material development. This approach will be strengthened by a focus on implementing construction methodologies rooted in design for disassembly. To explore the potential of buildings that have adapted their function over time, the unit will travel to Paris, France, to experience first-hand how architecture can evolve, respond and endure.

Image: USAF Aircraft Hanger, Konrad Wachsmann.
Bios: Zachary Fluker is a Lecturer (Teaching) and cofounder of ao-ft, z.fluker@ucl.ac.uk, Maxwell Mutanda is a Lecturer (Environmental and Spatial Equity) and co-founder of Studio [D] Tale maxwell.mutanda@ucl.ac.uk.
Instagram: @ug2.bartlett
Issuu: UG02

UG3

Remain in Light

Daniel Dream and Ifigeneia Liangi

This year, we ask students to consider thresholds not as passive divisions but as active architectural protagonists. Your building designs will investigate how thresholds are constructed to control, protect, exclude or invite projection. Drawing from architectural and cinematic examples, we will examine how architecture becomes a stage for secrecy and interpretation in those in-betweens where visibility, power and intimacy collide. The complex histories of thresholds such as windows, curtains and corridors will be reimagined as spatial characters.

In Parasite, stairs, windows and a hidden door become instruments of class division and infiltration. In the Mood for Love uses corridors and shared walls to evoke restraint and longing. The Shining transforms a hotel through repetition and surveillance unsettling the domestic.

We will interrogate how architecture choreographs visibility and how buildings regulate perception and presence. Light is a threshold material. It passes through windows, filters through curtains and defines corridors, shaping how space is experienced. To Remain in Light evokes questions of exposure and visibility, suggesting tensions between what is seen and what is allowed to be seen.

This brief was written with Clara Varela Cuartero, Eleonora Vena and Gracie Whitter, who were in UG3 last year.

Image: A Toilet for the Flâneuse. Clara Varela Cuartero, UG03.
Bios: Daniel Dream and Ifigeneia Liangi are Lecturers (Teaching) and co-founders of Night Kitchen Studio, daniel.dream@ucl.ac.uk, ifigeneia.liangi.10@ucl.ac.uk.
Instagram: @bartlettunit3
Issuu: UG03

UG4

Continuum

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 practice Bureau de Change.
Just like culture, architecture is not static but temporal: a continuum articulated through cycles of extension, adaptation and inhabitation. Cities are written as palimpsests — foundations buried beneath asphalt, details
re-emerging in altered guises, histories erased yet lingering as latent geometries. To design is to acknowledge this lineage and to extend the life of the as-found into futures yet to unfold.

In the UK, four-fifths of buildings existing in 2050 have already been built. What endures will not be permanence but adaptability. The role of the architect is no longer to conjure perfect wholes, but to cultivate openness: frameworks for renewal, thresholds where past and future intermingle.

UG4 will inhabit this in-between. The work will unearth London’s layered sites, speculating on the intermediate lives that lie between what once stood and what stands today. A field trip to Germany will encounter architectures of extension and entanglement, where ruins, relics and inventions converge. Architecture here is understood not as closure, but as continuation.

Image: Kolumba Art Museum by Peter Zumthor.
Bios: Katerina Dionysopoulou and Billy Mavropoulos are Lecturers (Teaching) and co-founders of Bureau de Change, k.dionysopoulou@ucl.ac.uk, b.mavropoulos@ucl.ac.uk.
Issuu: UG04

UG5

Cheap

Patrick Massey and Bongani Muchemwa

This year UG05 will interrogate what cheapness means for architecture. Not as cost-cutting or compromise, but as a provocation to rethink how we define value in design. Cheapness unsettles assumptions of worth, beauty and dignity, opening space for new hierarchies, inventions and subversions. Architecture has always negotiated questions of economy and effect, from Palladio’s marble veneers to the Smithsons’ “as found,” from Ruskin’s moralising to Venturi Scott Brown’s embrace of the ordinary. UG05 positions cheapness within this lineage, not as stigma but as an opportunity for radical invention.

Our methodology combines typological critique, experiential design and experimental drawing. Each year, UG05 begins from a building type, using it as a lens to explore cultural values and spatial possibilities. This year we start with the bank, a site where worth is materialised, protected and exchanged. From temples and vaults to data centres and digital finance, the bank prompts us to ask how architecture gives form to systems of value.

From Deptford High Street to Rome and Florence, and finally to speculative building projects, UG05 will explore how even modest means can produce intensity, wonder and meaning.

Image: El Anatsui Installation, photograph by Bongani Muchemwa
Bios: Patrick Massey is a Lecturer (Teaching) and works at Populous, p.massey@ucl.ac.uk, Bongani Muchemwa is a Lecturer (Teaching) and the co-founder of McCloy + Muchemwa, b.muchemwa@ucl.ac.uk.
Instagram: @bartlett.unit5
Issuu: UG05

UG6

Situated Speculations: An Architecture of the In-between

Ashley Hinchcliffe and Ben Spong

With one foot in the here and now and the other in a world beyond, UG6 is exploring architecture’s ability to hold together situated and speculative forms of knowledge. We aim to work in the space between the world as it is and as it could be, addressing the sociological, ecological, and political challenges that shape our sense of place – challenges increasingly unsettled by the forces of globalisation.

This year, we will start by investigating three Sites of Specific Speculative Interest: Rainham Marshes, Epping Forest and the City of London. These locations provide contrasting conditions, from fragile ecologies to dense urban fabric and will be explored through deep readings of site, material experiments and constructed instruments, leading to a sited architectural prototype.

Our field trip to Barcelona will further extend these ideas, studying the radical works of Gaudí, Enric Miralles, Flores & Prats, H Arquitectes, and others. Here, architectural experimentation meets urban resilience, offering fertile ground for us to test methods of placement, projection, and speculative making for the building project. The ambition is to develop projects that are hyper-specific to their surroundings yet visionary in outlook - buildings that could exist nowhere else yet point towards a place beyond.

Image: Noémie Goudal, Cascade, Lightjet Print, 168 x 211 cm, 2009.
Bios: Ashley Hinchcliffe is a Lecturer (Teaching), and founder of Ashley Hinchcliffe Studio, ashley.hinchcliffe@ucl.ac.uk, Ben Spong is a Lecturer (Teaching) b.spong@ucl.ac.uk.
Instagram: @unit6.bartlett
Issuu: UG06

UG7

Here Comes the Sun

Joseph Augustin and Christopher Burman

Every second our local nuclear fusion power station and G2 V type yellow dwarf - aka the Sun - converts 620 million tons of hydrogen into 616 million tons of helium. The remaining 4 million tons will burst into electromagnetic energy that we know as sunlight. Radiated in all directions, just one of every 2.2 billion photons will travel in a direction towards us and yet such is their volume that enough will arrive for 120,000TW of heat energy to be absorbed by the Earth, sustaining both our finely tuned biosphere and powering all the life within it.

While of course never looking directly at it, the Sun is at once an object of worship, of deep cultural and social symbolism, the metronome by which we organise the days and years of our lives and the original architectural client. In the current era, as the atmospheric warming of climate change progresses at pace, we may also be increasingly aware – and potentially wary of – its presence.

This year UG07 invites students to set controls for the heart of the sun - expanding our collective notion of solar orientation to include both the cosmically local and locally cosmic in search of new earth-based architectural propositions driven by heat, light, shade, shadow, human physiology, deep time, deep space and ritual.

Image: A huge solar eruption can be seen in this Spectro heliogram obtained during the Skylab 3 mission by the Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrograph/Spectroheliograph SO82A Experiment aboard the Skylab space station in Earth orbit. SO82 is one of the Apollo Telescope Mount experiments. Credit: NASA.
Bios: Joseph Augustin and Christopher Burman are Lecturers (Teaching), and cofounders of Heat Island,j.augustin@ucl.ac.uk, christopher.burman@ucl.ac.uk.
Instagram: @ug07_bartlett
Issuu: UG07

UG8

Chance Encounters

Maria Fulford and Jörg Majer

A plastic sheet lifting in the wind, a pause on a stair landing, a gentle hollow in a stone step, dappled light falling through a wall. These are chance encounters in architecture. They emerge from weathering, arrangement, context, and occupation. They are not drawn into plans or sections, yet they give meaning to space and time.

Architecture is often framed as a discipline of control. Design seeks order, construction seeks precision, use seeks predictability. Yet chance is always present. Events unfold, materials shift, people adapt, and meanings change. Rather than resisting this unpredictability, what happens when we invite it in? How might architecture construct the conditions for chance encounters to occur?

In a world increasingly defined by standardisation, prediction, and control, this year we will ask: how far can we go in leaving room for the unexpected? What do we choose to fix, and what do we let slip beyond our grasp? Between materials, spaces, and light lies the possibility of surprise, connection, and transformation.

The ambition is not to design events directly, but to design for contingency. To build gaps, overlaps, thresholds, and flows where chance encounters may emerge. Our architecture will exist between intention and accident, between order and indeterminacy, an architecture of chance.

Image: Man Ray (1920) Dust Breeding. Photograph. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Bios: Maria Fulford and Jörg Majer are Lecturers (Teaching) and co-founders of Fulford Majer and Picture Plane, maria.fulford@ucl.ac.uk, joerg.majer@ucl.ac.uk.
Instagram: @ug8_bartlett
Issuu: UG08

UG9

The Natural Contract

Jessica In and Chee Kit Lai

“Humanity is not just about human relationships; we address our humanity through our relationship with other living creatures on the planet” - Boonserm Premthada.

This year, UG09 explores architecture through the lens of the “natural contract,” a concept proposed by Michel Serres that calls for a reciprocal relationship between humans and the Earth. Instead of centring design solely on human needs, we will examine how architecture can engage with other elements of the natural world. We will learn from historical precedents - from Egyptian dovecotes to Swedish and Norwegian modernism, (where our field trip will be), to illustrate traditions of designing with, rather than against, the living world. Such practices reveal architecture as an interface between human survival and non-human habitation.

Students will test these ideas through two projects. Project 1, a live project collaboration with Beam Camp in New Hampshire USA, focusing on designing a temporary structure for co human and non-human inhabitants or natural phenomena. Developed through research, drawing and model-making, your project may be realised at the camp in 2026. Your main building Project 2 will be sited in Stockholm, you will develop complex proposals responding to climate, ecology and urban development within Sweden’s landscapes.

UG09 is interested in circular economy, non-reductive sustainability and materiality. We question permanence in architecture and promote coexistence with the natural world. Through design research and speculative practice, students will develop a personal architectural language that reconsiders human roles, ecological responsibility and the legacy of built environments for future generations.

Image: Elephant World by Bangkok Project Studio.
Bios: Jessica In is Lecturer (Teaching) j.in@ucl.ac.uk, Chee Kit Lai is Associate Professor, BSc Programme Co-director and founder of Mobile Studio, chee.lai@ucl.ac.uk.
Instagram: @design.unit9
Issuu: UG09

UG12

Settlement: “both-and” over “either-or”

Hannah Corlett and Niall McLaughlin

This year we explore architecture through the lens of pluralism, juxtaposition and tactical design. Rather than seeking harmony or resolution, we embrace anarchic overlaps, aesthetic contradictions and the coexistence of multiple ideological, cultural and personal narratives within a single architectural field.

We begin with the assumption that the city is not a coherent whole, but a collision of fragments of differing social histories, political beliefs, material practices and personal occupations. Architecture, in this unit, becomes a means of productive disruption, of enabling differing values to exist in parallel.

Guided by Michel de Certeau’s distinction between tactics and strategies, students dissect Hampstead through GIS based cubic fragments and diverse, transformative figures - crafting tactical insertions that reflect the particularities of context and character. These evolve into experimental urban assemblies, where Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism frames colliding scales and narratives as lively constellations of co-existence,
informed by collage, negotiation and rhizomatic urbanism.

Our pilgrimage to Cologne, Hamburg and Duisberg extends this enquiry, confronting contrasting legacies of post-war reconstruction - from Rudolf Schwarz’s vision of Stadtslandschaft (urban landscape) to Gottfried Böhm’s Gegentakt (counter-rhythm) - asking how today’s architectures might curate tension, overlap and multiplicity.

Image: Sketch of the Concept of Stadlandschaft (city-landscape), Rudolf Schwarz 1949.
Bios: Hannah Corlett is Lecturer (Teaching), BSc Programme Co-director and founder of HNNA and Assemblage, h.corlett@ucl.ac.uk, Niall Mclaughlin is Professor of Architectural Practice and founder of Niall McLaughlin Architects, n.mclaughlin@ucl.ac.uk.
Instagram: @bartlett_ug12
Issuu: UG12

UG13

Forecast Factory – Architectures of Prediction

Laurence Blackwell-Thale and William Victor Camilleri

Prediction formulates an architecture between control and uncertainty. It constructs systems, drawings and fabrications which aim to stabilise change – to account for geometric, environmental and temporal tolerances. But at its core, it folds human fallibility into the logic of construction. An architecture of prediction is thus a calibrated fiction; built to anchor what drifts, whilst remembering architecture is constantly in motion. It is a method for calculating the altitude of a mountain, plotting a course, unfolding a landscape and capturing what cannot yet be seen.

Architecture’s business with prediction is tied to the making of such evolving datums. These spirit-level markers define existing conditions and establish a set of constants from which change is measured – and from which futures are launched. However, the ‘spirits’ of these levels are capricious agents: liable to disruption, deviation and mischief. Here, we find an architecture oriented toward control, yet riddled with disorder – mountains that shift, clouds that will not form, vessels that drift off course.

UG13 considers this dilemma: how to embed the temporality of a journey within the drawing of inhabitation; how to design contingent architectures that carry within them the inevitability of disruption; and how to fabricate enclosures that regulate an unforeseeable outcome.

Image: HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program).
Bios: Laurence Blackwell-Thale and William Victor Camilleri are Lecturers (Teaching), laurence.blackwell-thale@ucl.ac.uk, w.v.camilleri@ucl.ac.uk.
Instagram: @only.plans_13
Issuu: UG13

UG14

The Third Eye

David Di Duca and Tetsuro Nagata

This year in UG14, we will be exploring non-alignment and the concepts behind establishing an architectural language defined by what it is not, rather than what it is. We will be studying how a city reacts to the shifting political landscapes surrounding it and how being an independent observer can shape an identity in surprising ways.

In an era of deepening ideological and cultural divides, we will learn from the past and witness how cities and nations have attempted to symbolise their neutrality by distorting institutional norms established by others. By offering new perspectives on the status quo, we will question what it means today to design architecture that is pluralistic, engaged and unique.

In UG14, we discuss architecture through an anthropological lens; studying how societies and individuals remember and forget through the built environment. In previous years, we have focused on the role that nostalgia, rituals, authenticity and trauma have on the collective identity. To confront the global ecological crisis, the unit will continue to imagine innovative and evocative futures by adapting existing structures and constructing new approaches to tell new stories.

Image: Gas station “Petrol”, Ljubljana by Milan Mihelič 1968. Credit: igoyugo@tumblr
Bios: David Di Duca is a Lecturer (Teaching) and founder of Between Art and Technology Studio, d.duca@ucl.ac.uk, Tetsuro Nagata is a Lecturer (Teaching) and Senior Designer at Jason Bruges Studio, tetsuro.nagata.09@ucl.ac.uk.
Instagram: @ug14_bartlett
Issuu: UG14

UG21

Recipe and Agency

Abigail Ashton, Tom Holberton and Andrew Porter

New agentic AI systems are testing how machines better improvise, breaking free from rigid sequence. Rather than models that generate things, systems can act and find new methods themselves. In this emerging animism, anything from a drawing to a piece of building might be imbued with agency. How can we design within environments that are uncertain and dynamic, with an architecture that revises itself? This year we ask you to develop your own design process with new kinds of drawings, physical models, machines and films that operate as recipes and manuals – both constrained and with agency, they combine structure and generate constant improvisation.

What happens when we incorporate other agencies into the design process? Do these ingredients behave as we expect or intended, or do they set and pursue other objectives? What happens when our architecture is not inert and well-behaved but has other alchemic aspirations – when parts want to spin out of control or dissolve?

The unit will visit Bologna and follow the Po River, with its thick fog and constant changes of course, visiting Milan, Parma and Modena, renowned centres for precision engineering and foods, made possible by a culture of messa a punto or perpetual fine-tuning.

Image: Shelves of Parmigiano Reggiano drawn with a recipe (version 4, human+AI).
Bios: Abigail Ashton is Associate Professor, BSc Year 3 coordinator and co-founder of Ashton Porter Architects, a.ashton@ucl.ac.uk, Tom Holberton is Associate Professor and co-founder of SoHo+Co, t.holberton@ucl.ac.uk,
Andrew Porter is Professor (teaching) and co-founder of Ashton Porter Architects, andrew.porter@ucl.ac.uk.
Instagram: @bartlettunit21
Issuu: UG21