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.

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.