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In the Bartlett School of Architecture, the design ‘Unit’ – of approximately 16 students – is the basis for design teaching and learning. Every Unit is taught by two or more design professionals who are either part-time or, more usually, full-time academics. Students often stay in the same Design Unit for both Year 4 and Year 5.

This module is the central part of the Architecture MArch programme and key to The Bartlett’s reputation for creative innovation. It runs for the entire second year of the programme. Students must demonstrate a competent, inventive, and authoritative approach towards architectural design and how it might be realised in the context of the architectural profession and allied disciplines.

The aim of this module is to bring students to a point where they can demonstrate, through their submitted documentation, competence in designing an appropriately complex architectural proposition, presented to a professional standard. The module’s aims and objectives reflect a number of RIBA/ARB criteria and attributes. On successful completion students are expected to have advanced knowledge, understanding of, and skills in the following areas:

1. Graduate-level ways of working.

2. Experimentation with different approaches to design and representation, to find an appropriate method of working.

3. Research within the design projects, which actively make use of resources outside of the School.

4. The production of an intensive thesis project which enters into specialised areas in some detail.

5. Investigative methods and brief preparation that appraise the user, environmental and site on texts of the building proposal. This includes the critical evaluation and understanding of how architecture impacts both existing and/or future communities.

6. Development of an inventive and authoritative architectural proposition that leads to a competent and appropriately complex design proposal, which is underpinned by the study of appropriate precedents.

7. Illustration of informed choices about key aspects of environmental strategies and how they are incorporated into the finished design proposal.

8. Creation of a complex spatial design that responds to site, context, and brief.

Students taking this module will also develop an advanced understanding of research enquiry and the professional approach towards architectural design and associated fields of knowledge in technology, history, theory, communications, and culture. They should develop a critical approach in what concerns the aesthetic and functional/programmatic dimensions of their projects. They should also be able to generate design investigations that address a variety of theories, practices and techniques used in fine art, and how show they impact on the conceptualisation and representation of each project.

Work produced can take on a variety of media, including analogue and digital drawings, physical and computational models, animations, photography, making and 1:1 installations.

Students are encouraged to draw on their exploratory work from their previous year and must also fully integrate it into their Thesis module (BARC0011).