MA Research Architecture

Conflicts and Negotiations as Spatial Practices offers readings of contemporary political issues as constituted by relations in space and over time. Political and social conflicts will be shown to play themselves out within constructed, real or imaginary architectures and through the representation, organisation, transformation, erasure and subversion of these spaces. As such “research architecture” always assumes an expanded notion of architecture. We discuss social and political conflicts as they register themselves in the transformation of environments, shifting the scale and register of our investigation from the architectural and urban to the territorial and planetary, all the while dealing with the spatial dimension of geopolitical conflicts. From the micro-scale of buildings and infrastructure to the macro-scale of borders and global flows, space will be analysed as an elastic medium constantly reshaped by political and mediatic forces. While the vocabulary of architectural discourse is useful – and will thus be introduced and unpacked -- it is not singularly sufficient to address the many geo-political shifts that characterise our time. For example, media has come to play an increasingly significant role in providing access to spaces of contemporary conflict and war through remote sensing technologies and online blogging by citizen journalists.

The course is organised thematically around concepts, products and processes as they bear upon questions of space, politics, aesthetics, human rights and the law. It integrates historical, theoretical, and contemporary understandings of issues and introduces students to a wide-ranging set of thinkers, spatial practitioners, artists and activists in order to develop a common language and set of tools for unpacking and working through several theoretical positions. These thematic seminars will help to construct different, and sometimes contradictory understandings of the spatial dimension of social, environmental, and political conflicts. We will deal with a number of thinkers – Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Isabelle Stengers, Gilles Deleuze, Elisabeth Gross, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, Ariella Azoulay, Manuel Delanda, Paul Virilio, Cornelia Vismann, Boaventura de Sousa Santos – and identify spatial conceptions that emerge out their theoretical and political positions. Seminars address the space of the event, material flows, contaminated geographies, bio-politics, crisis and resistance, terrorism and security, the figure of the refugee and the pirate, indigenous knowledge, critical epistemologies as well as the emergent geographies of extra-territoriality and climate change. We also take seriously the idea that engaged cultural and spatial production can play an operative and transformation role within social and political conflicts. In this seminar space is understood not simply as the backdrop of conflict, nor its consequence, but as the very medium and language within which political conflicts and negotiations are conducted. 

The MA Dissertation is centred on a year-long project. This project, responding to a general yearly brief, involves investigative research that culminates in a combination of a long written text and a substantial visual project. In the end of Term 3 there will be an assessed symposium where students present to their peers and a specially selected jury of experts.

The MA Symposium provides you with the opportunity, fairly early on in the research/writing process, to present a worked up and focused investigation of your dissertation topic or some aspect of it. Your presentation will be formally assessed.

Presenting on your dissertation research at this stage is invaluable for enabling you to define your project and, through verbal feedback and discussion, to progress your thinking.

Challenging the boundaries of architectural and visual research, human rights reporting and activist mapping, the Studio will introduce students to a critical toolbox of documentary practices as well as mapping and visualisation techniques. Hands-on workshops dedicated to the learning of specific forensic techniques will be organised on an ad-hoc basis depending on the necessities of students. The Studio will also offer a space of theoretical reflection and student-led discussion on questions of social, political, and environmental justice, asking which modes of practice are needed to investigate, document and redefine contemporary forms of violence. A period of individual placement will further allow students to work closely with the Forensic Architecture team and its wide range of partners (scientists, legal practitioners, NGOs) to produce and visualise evidence on behalf of human rights groups, threatened communities, and international organisations.

An annual brief exploring contemporary transformations of territory, violence and rights, will set the overall coordinates within which each student is encouraged to develop her own specific lines of inquiry. All combined, these elements will provide the overall framework for the development of the students’ year-long individual dissertation, which for students choosing to follow the FA Studio will present and critically analyze different forms of evidence documenting a specific situation of conflict and violence.

This new initiative is open to students and practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences including architecture, law, human rights, conflict studies, investigative journalism, visual arts, and many others.