YEAR PROGRAMME 2021 

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Unit 19 places emphasis on the rhetoric nature of architecture and its mythological role in society, approaching foundational service systems as the mythological frameworks of any society. The current profession sits at the mercy of the superficial demands of clients and capital (be it political, economic, social, or cultural), in ways that often overlook the much-needed engagement with the ideological frameworks that underpin it. As research methodology, Unit 19 delves into storytelling’s tools of representation, such as film, photography, and performance, to derive its languages and modes of production. The essential aims of this methodology are to enable students to reclaim architecture as a tool of realizing fictions, as it evidences, renames, and ritualizes ideological constructs. The Unit has students search and produce evidence that is accessible to a myriad of audiences, including the wider profession and the public. Reflexive design processes are established through instruction, automation, composition, iteration, and critique. Students are guided to develop their questioning and analytical skills so that their works - while remaining their own - engage with the architectural profession from a critically rigorous, rooted, and informed position. The Unit’s formation of knowledge presents as a complex interaction between facts/data, opinions/critical readings and lived experience. This relationship is honed and managed by tutors and students on a ritual basis. The Major Design Project (MDP) is anchored within reality, and used as a laboratory within which students practice and sharpen their skills of investigation, collection, interpretation, iteration, and propositioning.

 

The programme is broken down into four overlapping intervals:

Q1: Theme Exploration & Critical Positioning

Q2: Project Location & Development

Q3: Project Synthesis

Q4: Project Resolution

 

The first quarter is used to develop and articulate the range of interests that are particular to students, before the selection and documentation of specific programmes and sites are refined during quarter two. The theoretical and material complexity, as well as the scale of projects are also determined at this point. The design project then serves as the space where students’ interests are synthesised and represented.

 

In 2021, students will investigate architecture’s mythological role in society – with a focus on military service and the myth of violence in the production and maintenance of political states. Through presentations, workshops, tutorials, discussions, theoretical essays, critical reflections, storytelling and making, the Unit analyses myths architecturally and architecture mythologically.

 

The dissertation comprises of four main parts:

PART 1: MAJOR DESIGN PROJECT (MDP)

PART 2: HISTORY & THEORY DISSERTATION (AHT)

PART 3: DESIGN REALIZATION (NOW CALLED ‘MAKING’) PORTFOLIO

PART 4: PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE COURSEWORK / SUMMARY & ESSAY

 

Supporting courses (AHT) and (DR/Making) are delivered throughout the year through a combination of lectures, seminars, tutorials, and workshops, which bring students’ projects to the required level of resolution in their respective fields. The emphasis throughout the year is on the synthesis of the above criteria, rather than the abstract demonstration of unrelated principles.