Goldsmiths - University of London

We offer the following postgraduate programmes:

MA Research Architecture

Can spatial practice become a form of research? How may architecture engage with questions of contemporary culture, politics and conflict? This new and innovative research centre brings together MA students from a variety of backgrounds-educations and from a range of disciplines to work around questions of this kind. In keeping with Goldsmiths’ commitment to multidisciplinary research and learning, the centre offers an alternative to traditional postgraduate architectural education by inaugurating a unique, robust studio-based combination of critical architectural research and practice in the context of theoretical work.

Structure

The MA is a theory/practice programme organised around a single major spatial research project. The project, including aspects of both practice and theory, actively engages with spatial research and concentrates on a distinct issue, process or site. This project forms the core of the MA dissertation, which you submit at the end of the programme. A series of seminars, workshops and lectures will provide you with the necessary and stimulating information and create a forum for discussion on contemporary approaches and theories in architectural and spatial research.

The MA Dissertation is centred on a yearlong project. This project, responding to a general yearly brief, involves investigative research that culminates in either a long essay or a visual project.

Lecture Seminar

Part I – Introduction to Architectural Research

The introductory part of this course, lasting the first five weeks of the first term, provides you with a foundation in Architectural Research and critical spatial theory. It discusses the work of several important protagonists – writers, artists, curators, activists and architects – who explored space, especially urban space, as a medium of power and resistance and projected the city as an object of investigation and as a site of intervention.

Part II - Conflict and Negotiations as Spatial Practices (lecturer: Paulo Tavares, with Eyal Weizman and Susan Shuppli)

In this course space is explored as a medium of power and resistance and the city is projected as an object of investigation and as a site of intervention. The course is engaged with social and political conflicts as they register themselves in the transformation of the built environment. From architectural details to urban infrastructures up-scale to geopolitical assemblages, space is conceptualized as the means by which conflicts and negotiations are articulated at different and interrelated dimensions.

The course explores the intersections between legal frames, territorial divisions, environmental conditions and aesthetical regimes in their relation with contemporary spatial-political realities. It folds the urban, the geopolitical and the natural into a detailed analysis of several key aspects that give shape to the built environment, such as human rights and conflict zones, processes of globalization and uneven geographies, the politics of aid and complex emergency situations.

Studio Seminar

In this seminar the conceptual and practical tools for the studio projects will be developed. This includes both individual tutorials with the centre’s staff, workshops, and general meetings where your work will be discussed in a common forum. Products could be film, an illustrated book or mapping. For the studio seminar you will be assessed by an individual or collective project.

Site Visit

The site visit is part of the studio seminar. Every year the MA classes will travel to a place of contemporary interest, generally environments undergoing rapid, intense change where political transformation can be viewed in the development of the built environment. You will present your findings in the form of an aural presentation using photography, mapping video or text. Recent trips took place at Isnabul, Berlin, Antwerp, NYC and Philadelphia.

Choice Lecture Seminar

Students are expected to choose another theoretical course from a list of courses offered by the departments of Sociology, Visual Cultures and Cultural Studies. These courses run in either Spring or Autumn terms.

Other events

MA students would take part as well in the Weekly lecture series of the department of Visual Cultures as well as in the Monthly two-days long round-table seminar in Research Architecture.