Architecture MArch Design Units

Please find summaries of the briefs our Design Units will be working to in 2025/26 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 Architecture March

PG11

Access to Tools  

Professor Laura Allen and Professor Mark Smout

Unit 11 is a space for creative thinking where both conceptual and pragmatic ideas meet playful and experimental methods. Each year our brief evolves, building on research in environmental and future-facing themes. 

This year the Whole Earth Catalog (1968–72) serves as provocation and precedent, structuring an introductory project and informing the building designs that follow. In 1968, countercultural thinker Stewart Brand founded the Catalog with a radical purpose: to give “access to tools.” Part newsprint, part manual, it brought together resources from solar power to weaving looms, wind energy to recycling, shaping how experimental communities rethought ways of living.  

This year, we take its idea of “Access to Tools” and explore it through collective experimentation, speculative devices, material experiments and spatial interventions that lead to architectural and infrastructural proposals, and that engage ecological, social, and infrastructural systems in the present, near, or imagined future.  

How can architecture act as a tool that blurs object, system, and environment to address planetary-scale issues. 

Our field trip to Turin and Milan, cities with a history of radical experimentation and layered legacies of industry, counterculture, and contemporary art, will aid our understanding of how future architecture might operate as a tool: practical, experimental, and speculative. 

There are many of examples of student work from Unit 11 on smoutallen.com along with work from our practice. 

Image: Earthrise Apollo 8 (1968) Image Credit: NASA. 

Instagram: @smoutallen @unit11bartlett

PG11 Anthology on ISSUU. 

PG12

House within a Home. Home within a House | Nested Realities, Speculative Histories, and the Architecture of Empathy 

Izabela Wieczorek and Elizabeth Dow

Alluding to Aldo van Eyck’s quote: ‘A City is a Large House, A House is a Small City’,’ Unit 12 will explore the recursive, multiscalar, and layered nature of domesticity and urban living. Drawing on the visual logic of mise-en-abîme, we will investigate how architecture can embody circularity (of time, space, matter, and meaning) through nested scales and speculative design.  

We will consider how the notions (and actions) of home and house both reflect and refract broader socio-political, ecological, and cultural conditions, and how the act of dwelling is simultaneously personal and collective, material and imagined, intimate and public, as well as oscillating between past, present, and future. The cabinet house and the doll’s house will serve as metaphors for this recursive condition: miniatures that replicate, distort, and reframe the domestic realm.

Jonathan Hill noted: a recurring analogy in architectural discourse is that ‘the home is the origin and archetype of architecture.’ Following such a logic, we will decode the notion of home beyond its purely domestic nature, revealing more nuanced and layered readings into its public functions and multiplicity of scales, meanings, and programmes.  

Recognising Dutch influence on our contemporary perceptions of home, the Netherlands will be the destination of our field trip. 

Biographies:

Elizabeth Dow: e.dow@ucl.ac.uk

An architect since 1995, full-time academic at UCL since 2015 and Professor since 2022, Elizabeth Dow has co-led PG12 since 1998. She champions interdisciplinary design, directing BSc AIS, 2015-23, alongside this as departmental tutor since 2012 and BSA School Experience Director since 2023 she coordinates the school’s academic pastoral support.

Izabela Wieczorek: i.wieczorek@ucl.ac.uk

UCL profile

Izabela is an EU-registered-architect, researcher, and educator with over 20 years of teaching in Spain, Denmark, and the UK. She joined BSA in 2024 as Director of Professional Accreditations. Her work has been published and exhibited internationally, including Works+Words Biennale of Artistic Research in Architecture and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Image credit: Jordan Panayi, Rural Assemblies: Discarded Landscapes | Discarded Cultures, PG12 2024-25.

Instagram: @bartlettunit12

PG12 Anthology on ISSUU.

PG13

Strange Climate, Odd Future  

Déborah López Lobato, Haden Charbel, and Ivan Chan 

Cities were often created and developed according to how agriculture, livestock, resources and habitable conditions intersected, and in turn informed the development of architecture, social structures, industries, politics, protocols, rituals and economies. However, a new climate regime is currently playing out; one that is less certain and unpredictable, which demands revisiting old ways of living while proposing new ones. In response to this, the unit will explore Climate-Fiction (Cli-Fi) and world building as vehicles for these new initiatives to be explored, engaging with questions of economy, ecology, society, technology, energy, infrastructure, media, AI and automation.  

The unit is concerned with two primary strands of research topics: (1) cli-migration - the forced migration of people due to changing climatic conditions; and (2) autonomous ecologies - the automation, rights, and participation in discourse of nature. This asks for strategies of preservation through adaptation; moving away from a nostalgic return and instead embracing imminent realities, recognizing some things will inevitably be lost and others can and should be preserved through a practical yet sensitively tuned strategy. Finally, as the focus is on experimentation of new futures, the unit will look within and beyond mainstream narratives by investigating indigenous and uncommon world views. 

Biographies: 

Déborah López and Haden Charbel are the founders of Pareid; an interdisciplinary design and research studio. Her work approaches design from various fields and contexts addressing topics related to climate, ecology, human perception, machine sentience, and their capacity for altering current modes of existence through imminent fictions (if). Through research and interdisciplinary techno-bashing, projects are narrative driven while varying in scales and mediums, often positioning themselves within a socio-political discourse as a tool for disruption.  She is an Associate Professor at The Bartlett School where she leads topics on “Monumental Wastelands”, with a focus on themes of ‘cli-migration’ and ‘autonomous ecologies’, at local and planetary scales. She is the co-editor of “Monumental Wastelands”, a two volume book exploring the themes of Autonomy and Logistics, and most recently the co-editor of “Press Play”, a journal exploring the current state of architecture and new media.  

Instagram: @pareid.architecture 

Ivan Chan is an architect and founder of Studio Noct, working across installations and community projects. His research explores Shanshui painting as both a design methodology and an alternative pedagogical approach. His practice further investigates the role of poetics and storytelling in architectural design and education. Using these as a design research tool, his thesis examines how the understanding of environmental sustainability can redefine community resilience in Hong Kong. He has contributed to the publications “Dreams + Disillusion” on the project Rainbow over London and “Smart Cities: Eco Warriors”, both offering alternative perspectives on topics such as migration and environmental resilience. He is a Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture where he also teaches BSc program and technical studies. 

Image Credit: ‘Pool’ by Ulf Mejergren Architects. 

Image Caption: Proposal after the burning of the spire on Notre Dame’s Cathedral. 

Instagram: @ivanc_studio 

PG14

Expressive Capacity

Dirk Krolikowski and Jakub Klaska

Unit 14 is a test bed for exploration and innovation, examining the role of the architect in an environment of continuous change. Our propositions are ultimately made through the design of buildings and through the 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. The focus of this year’s work revolves around the expressive capacity of architecture—its power of expression, its evocative force, and its communicative strength as both discipline and practice. Our investigations unfold as iterative experiments where discovery and speculation become catalysts for architectural application. Each act of design is conceived not only as technical resolution, but as an articulation of representational richness, a search for symbolic potency, and an expansion of architecture’s aesthetic reach. Through this investigative process, constructional logic, spatial innovation, typological organisation, and environmental and structural performance are negotiated as carriers of meaning. Architecture here is not reduced to mere solution, but emerges as a narrative potential, generating spatial systems of resonance and intensity through sets of mutual interactions. 

Image credit: Image: ‘expressive capacity’ copyright UNIT 14@Midjourney.

Instagram: @unit14_ucl

PG16

Archipelagos II: The Cultural Architecture of Water Security

María Páez González, Brendon Carlin, and James Kwang Ho Chung 

Given time, water will seep through and dissolve everything that tries to contain it. Water is never only H₂O: it is resource, commodity, coolant, data, and for many, living kin and capricious, sentient entity which, depending on how it is treated, can nurture or destroy civilisations. Across cultures, it has always been a locus of hybrid practices, never merely technical or economic resource, ‘natural’ or chemical, but always ‘cultural’ and cosmological, shaping and shaped by worlds.

The UK’s mounting ‘security’ crisis is at the deepest levels about water: floods, droughts, contamination, and biodiversity collapse are inseparable from social, political, and psychic crises. Yet technofixes, more tech, storage and data, cannot get to the root of the problem: centuries of enclosure, dispossession, and distancing of common lands, and embodied, emplaced ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to each other, watery lands, and the nonhumans we depend on, enjoy, and must reciprocate care for. 

PG16 invites you to imagine an archipelago of Experimental Hydrocultural Zones and investigate how, as architects, we can side with emerging practices and movements which are re-enchanting their relationships to waterscapes in crisis. We are interested in chimeric types that reconceive of architecture at the scale of a ‘hydrosocial’ territory—cloud, to source to tap to sea—interweaving typologies of infrastructure, architecture, and practice once deceptively reduced to technical, cultural, political, religious, ‘Nature’, or scientific—but now simultaneously none and all of these.

Unit tutor biographies:

María Páez González is Programme Director of Professional Practice at The Bartlett School of Architecture. She also teaches Critical Practice and History and Theory at the AA and is a Postdoctoral Researcher with RAUM at TU Vienna. María recently completed her PhD at the Royal College of Art, which examined the relationship between subjectivity and architecture in the context of Big Tech as a dominant social power. Together with Brendon, she co-leads an archipelago of research groups exploring where infrastructure and ecology explicitly become architecture. 

Brendon Carlin leads Diploma 19 at the Architectural Association and is a Postdoctoral Researcher with RAUM at TU Vienna, where he also leads the PhD programme and teaches across undergraduate to doctoral levels. His research practice, Non-Typological Architecture, examines the historical emergence and disappearance of typology in architecture and its entanglements with infrastructure, technology, and ecology as apparatuses of state- and extrastatecraft. His work asks how architecture can ally with communities—human and more-than-human—that are already experimenting with more grounded and more fluid ways of relating to the beings, things, land and waterscapes we depend on, from within and against dominant typologies of property, economy, and infrastructure. 

James Kwang Ho Chung is an architect, researcher, and educator who founded the design and research studio Therapeutic Forms and Practices, focused on architectural typologies of healing. His work has been exhibited internationally, including the Seoul Architecture Biennale, and his project Medicinal Architecture was showcased at the Hyundai ZER01NE exhibition in 2022. Along with Brendon, James is Unit Master of Diploma 19 at the AA and also a Postgraduate Design Teaching Fellow at the University of Cambridge. 

Image credit: Murray’s Hill Reservoir as Park in Egyptian Revival Style, by Nathaniel Currier, 1842. 

Instagram: @bartlettunit16 

PG17

PLASTICITY 

Yeoryia Manolopoulou and Tamsin Hanke

Plasticity is the ability to receive, give and break form, whether form is conceptual, built or experienced. It designates an openness to change, even rupture. This adventure of form has the capacity to carry its own history of transformation. The earth itself is a project of plasticity over millennia whereas stone is carved into a new form but cannot return to an earlier state. The brain’s neuroplasticity alters the structure of thought and eventually human agency and the lives and environments we create, and vice versa. Importantly, to talk about plasticity is distinct from flexibility as an adaptation to neoliberal forces. Plasticity is ‘an agency of disobedience to every constituted form, a refusal to submit to a model.’   

What should architecture be at this time? Plasticity invites you to repeat differently. You will explore the radical and healing potential of plasticity as ecological, seasonal and programmatic elasticity, a social state, a process of design, and a material and felt condition of building. You will develop a plastic mindset and hands-on design research to address creatively the climatic and political conditions we face. You will end the year with restorative architectural proposals for rural sites in Spain that will hold emotional content and a potential for disobedience. 

Biographies:

Tamsin Hanke is an architect and founding director of THISS Studio, a progressive and experimental East London practice. 

Yeoryia Manolopoulou is an architect and founding partner of AY Architects. She is The Bartlett’s Professor of Architecture and Experimental Practice and author of Architectures of Chance. 

Image credit: Edward Burtynsky, Carrara Marble Quarries, 1993 (photographed by Yeoryia Manolopoulou in Extraction / Abstraction, Saatchi Gallery, 2024). 

Instagram: @bartlettu17

Quotation: Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, Fordham University Press, 2008.

PG18

MOTHER WEALTH

Ricardo de Ostos and Samuel Esses 

In Unit 18, students will explore how architecture responds to varied ideas of wealth, extending beyond the financial to include cultural, ecological, and digital dimensions. Through design research, students will develop projects within one of four Wealth Factions: Accumulators, Redistributors, Transformers, or Speculators. Each offers a lens to examine how value is created, stored, or shared in the built environment. 

The unit methodology is grounded in the study of architecture as a cultural artefact through material investigation. Students will be introduced to a working methodology of materials and digital crafts, where experimentation drives design exploration. This approach will be supported by seminar readings including ‘Doughnut Economics’ by Kate Raworth, ‘Black Swan’ by Nassim Taleb, and ‘Thinking in Systems’ by Donella H. Meadows. 

The field trip will take place in Belgrade, Serbia, a city shaped by socialism, conflict, and recent waves of global speculation. Students will visit contrasting sites such as Ottoman relics, brutalist monuments, and contemporary urban ruins. These investigations will frame discussions about private gain versus cultural wealth and form the context for architectures that can be both culturally and economically productive. 

Biographies: 

Ricardo de Ostos is a Brazilian architect merging fiction, forestry and architectural design. He is the co-director of NaJa & deOstos studio building projects in climate affected zones in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Brazil. He is the co-author of ‘The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad’ (Springer Wien/New York, 2006) ‘Ambiguous Spaces’ (Princeton Press, 2007) and ‘Scavengers and Other Creatures in Promised Lands’ (AA, 2017). 

Samuel Esses is an architect and lecturer who has worked with international practices such as Grimshaw Architects, London, and Safdie Architects, Boston. His research focuses on additive manufacturing and digital materiality. His work was most recently featured in ‘3D Printing and Material Extrusion in Architecture’ (DOM Publishers, 2024). 

Image credit: Staging Authenticity by Ik Hui Lam, PG18 2024/25.

Instagram: @unit_18_bartlett 

PG20

TWINS. How Nature and Nurture affect Architecture (and vice versa) 

Marjan Colletti, Javier Ruiz and Tony Le

PG20 is a ‘growth-oriented’ (Dweck) unit emphasising growth, individual empowerment, and collective values. It explores architecture as dynamic, time-based systems using advanced digital tools, AI, and simulation to create adaptable, 4D scenarios. We champion a shift from traditional drawings to programmable, interactive, and intelligent 21st century designs that consider cultural, societal, and environmental contexts. 

Central to 2025-26 is the concept of ‘twins’, which examines how paired forms with same origins diverge or converge under different influences, embodying the relationship between nature (materiality, geometry, systems) and nurture (environment, culture, social factors). It highlights the importance of ethical studies, ‘phygital’ twin models, and adaptive, resilient ‘antifragile’ design strategies that are capable of future evolution. Students will engage in projects that balance stability and change, drawing inspiration from real-world examples to site their projects in Cyprus’s (our field trip destination) divided heritage.

Overall, PG20 fosters critical discourse, experimentation, and innovation, preparing students to shape architecture that responds to and influences societal transformations. No prior experience is needed, as the program encourages a learning environment centred on curiosity, ethics, and future-oriented design. No prior expertise is required, as we aim to cultivate a learning environment where critical thinking, experimentation, and future-focused design thrive. 

PG21

Recipe & 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.

Biographies:

Abigail Ashton and Andrew Porter run an award-winning London architectural practice (ashtonporter.com) and have worked on projects in the UK and Japan. They have taught on a wide range of Bartlett courses including the BSc, MSci, MArch, and BPro courses over the last 25 years. 

Tom Holberton is an architect and researcher specialising in the use of artificial intelligence within design. He previously worked as an Associate at Rick Mather Architects, alongside exhibitions and collaborations for Japan with his studio SoHoKo.

Image credit: Shelves of Parmigiano Reggiano drawn with a recipe (version 4, human+AI)

Instagram: @bartlettunit21

Visit PG21 website

PG22

News from Somewhere South - An alternative southern path to industrialisation 

Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno and Daniel Ovalle Costal

Societies across the so-called Global North are in crisis, struggling to come to terms with stagnant economic grown amid a landscape of de-industrialisation and climate emergencies. These crises seem to haunt us after two centuries of a very linear process of industrialisation, enabled by colonial endeavours and extractive capitalism. Northern industrialisation was historically devoid of democratic scrutiny or any meaningful public debate, safe exceptions such as the inspired and inspiring News from Nowhere by William Morris. This year, we would like to prompt our students to look South for alternative paths to industrialisation. Inspired by Morris’s imagination and informed by the rich critiques of industrialisation and capitalism explicit in scholarship and implicit in everyday life across the Global South, PG22 students will be challenged to design new relationships with technology, industry and the environment. 

Biography:

Daniel Ovalle Costal, Associate Professor (Teaching), is an architect trained between Spain and the UK. He works as a sole practitioner in London where he has led commercial and mixed-use projects across many sectors while working for Wilkinsone Eyre and Acme. Daniel’s research interests lay at the intersection of architectural design, domesticity, and queer studies. He has a special interest in forms of making that relate to popular culture, Including dollhouses, miniatures, paper theatres, and pop-up books.

Image credit: Terraza Ecohousing on-site construction, in Orihuela, Spain, Izaskun Chinchilla Architects, 2024.

PG23

Recursive Operations: Architecture Between Matter and Media 

Farlie Reynolds, Ben Spong and Maria Fulford 

Architecture has long been framed as a linear process: ideas conceived in drawings, translated into models, then materialised in buildings. Media - whether drawing, model, or simulation - are often treated as neutral tools in this chain, their effectiveness resting on the belief that they have no stake in the message they convey. Similarly, materials are assumed to be obedient, ready to perform as prescribed. 

We see this in the pseudo-accuracies architects often produce and proclaim: the measurement defined to an impossible degree, or the render that promises the building in its fullness before it is built. Together, these assumptions uphold the authority of “proper” practice - the belief that architecture advances through correct sequences, correct knowledge, and correct forms of making. 

Unit 23 is sceptical of this stability. Not only does it restrict the agency of matter, it also excludes wider bodies of knowledge that participate in architecture. In our pursuit of an improper architecture, we will understand architecture not as the production of fixed forms, but as a field of exchanges between matter and media. Neither medium nor material is passive; both filter, distort, resist, and transform. 

Drawings generate conditions as much as they describe them. Models loop back into new models. Fabrications become drawings again. Likewise, the grain of wood, the fracture of stone, the tensile pull of steel, or the slipperiness of data speak back to the designer. Our architecture emerges through this recursive feedback, where errors accumulate productively, where tolerances and interferences become sites of invention, and where media and matter act as co-authors. 

Beyond the pleasures of this enquiry, in a world where spatial and material boundaries are entangled with aggressive politics and an uncertain climate, the need to critique architecture’s inbuilt methodological biases and to expand its sensibilities, is increasingly urgent. Our aim is that by challenging the disciplinary core of architecture, we will discover previously unimagined futures for it. 

Between the workshop and the studio, our work will reveal the generative potential of difference as we produce prototypes from the withdrawn dimensions of matter. Our practice will be necessarily experimental. It will intentionally misuse, disrupt, and augment materials, making, and drawing technologies — letting them lead the way in our pursuit of an improper architecture. 

Location of Fieldtrip: Athens, Greece.

Image Credit: Martin Parr, Acroplis Now 2021. 

Instagram: @unit23bartlett

Summer Show 25 

Bartlett Design Unit 23 Anthology ISSUU: 

PG24

Counter–Commons: between periphery and centre

Nasios Varnavas, Matthew Butcher and Thomas Aquilina

PG24 will focus on London’s peripheries. The city is constantly shifting. It is spreading and existing in multiple forms, both at its centre and, perhaps more importantly, in and through its many peripheries. 

For us, these margins can be understood as physical locations, as well as cultural, social, and emotional spaces embodied by communities who have historically been, and continue to be, marginalised and overlooked by financial and political hierarchies. The margins are not always at the periphery. 

Situated within our research of London’s peripheries, and following on from last year’s Super Common theme, PG24 will consider its investigations and eventual architectural design propositions through the lens of the commons or, in our terms for this year, the counter–commons. This counter–commons exists as structures to enable communities to engage in forms of self-government outside existing pre-determined structures. 

As an entry into both collective and individual understandings of the notion of peripheries, we will embark on a slow embodied experience of London. This exploration will take the form of a series of fieldworks, including walking and other types of street-level encounters. 

We will consider London’s many peripheries, not only as places of interest and possibility, but also as sites of active cultural, political, and social agencies. Studying these peripheries will provide a lens through which to understand London’s deep migrant histories and its spaces of diaspora. 

Through a close examining of the periphery, the counter–common, and our slow embodied methods, we will explore alternative approaches to self-governance—creating imaginative and expansive architectures. How do we design in the shifting landscapes between the periphery and the centre?

Biographies:

Nasios Varnavas is an architect and co-founder of Urban Radicals, who co-curated and designed the Cyprus Pavilion at the 17th Biennale in Venice. He was part of the Young Architects Residency at the Architecture Foundation. Nasios previously tutored BSA PG16 and PG17, as well as teaching at Westminster. 

Matthew Butcher is an academic and designer. He is Deputy Director of The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is the editor and founder of the architectural newspaper P.E.A.R. (Paper for Emerging Architectural Research). Matthew has taught on the BSA MArch in PG12 and PG16 for over 15 years. 

Thomas Aquilina is an architect and Co-director of Spatial Justice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is Senior Associate at We Made That and Co-Director of New Architecture Writers. In 2019, he co-founded the collective Afterparti. Thomas has taught at the RCA, LSA, and London Metropolitan. 

Image credit:   
Claremont M11 Road Protest, 1994, Andrew Wiard. 

Instagram: @bartlettunit24

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)