Overview
Design practice for a fairer world
Key details
- 180 credits
- 1 (FT) / 2 (PT) year programme
- Full-time or part-time study
School or Centre
Location
- Kensington
Next open event
- 25 Jan 2025
- Visit Open Day
Round 1 application deadline
- 13 Jan 2025
Engaging with the built environment in a sustainable way
- Develop the skills and confidence to make a difference as part of a community of changemakers addressing climate change
- Contribute to positive change in design practice by embracing innovative approaches
- Benefit from our close connections in London with architects, researchers and policymakers actively working in the field of sustainability
We’ve created this new one-year MArch Design Practice for architects and designers who want to study spatial practice in a broader sense. While this isn’t a RIBA/ARB validated part II programme, it’s a unique opportunity to develop tools to deliver renewable and equitable futures.
Develop your practice in a flexible way. You take core units such as material processes and carbon economies and choose from a range of electives, including housing & social reproduction, digital storytelling or soundscapes.
A mentoring network
Tackling the climate crisis as an individual may seem overwhelming. Our connection to the Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) offers students a Practice Mentor Network which will support their studies and future practice trajectories.
Sustainability experts are in demand. You could find a role as a specialist within a global company, set up your own consultancy or work with an NGO. Whatever route you take, you’ll be making informed decisions to design a better world.
Catch the replays from our latest online Open Day.
Gallery
Staff
Facilities
The RCA has facilities at Kensington, Battersea and White City. MArch students will benefit from being supervised by world-leading academics at the forefront of research and practice.
View all facilitiesStudents are encouraged to situate their practice within the wider public and will have access to a ‘Live Room’ to support research, development and dissemination of their work. You will also have access to College-wide workshops on an individually planned and negotiated basis, and in dialogue with programme tutors
Stories
What you'll study
Flexibility and choice are at the heart of the offer, with a combination of Core and Elective units enabling you to create a bespoke programme of studies that best suits your approach, context and interests.
What you'll cover
Programme structure
The programme's core units will be mainly delivered on campus, with some electives available online. Online resources will further contribute to students' learning.
Full time
Term 1
Material Processes (15 credits)
Carbon Economies (15 credits)
Cross-College elective (x2) (15 credits per unit)
Term 2
Detailing Risk (15 credits)
Just Transition (15 credits)
Cross-College elective (x2) (15 credits per unit)
Term 3
Independent Research Project (60 credits)
This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.
Part Time
Term 1
Material Processes (15 credits)
One cross-College elective (15 credits)
Term 2
Carbon Economies (15 credits)
One cross-College elective (15 credits)
Term 3
Independent Research Project (30 credits)
Term 4
Detailing Risk (15 credits)
One cross-College elective (15 credits)
Term 5
Just Transition (15 credits)
One cross-College elective (15 credits)
Term 6
Independent Research Project (30 credits)
This MA is delivered over 90 weeks.
Core units
Material Processes
This unit critically engages with the materiality of the built environment. The unit builds on physical, aesthetic and structural understandings of materials toward a deeper examination of their complex climatic, cultural, and political properties. The unit equips you with knowledge of wider implications and potential uses of material in architecture and design.
Carbon Economies
Through this unit, you will examine the role of carbon within a globalised building industry. You will explore methods of carbon modelling and accounting, campaigns for divestment and energy reform, and the potential of alternative, renewable energy sources to radically reconfigure practice. You will learn to analyse energy sources and evaluate the spatial implications of their use, and strategically position your practice at the forefront of technical and social changes.
Detailing Risk
The design detail is a site of connection and mediation between different aesthetic, legal, material, structural and energetic requirements. The failure of the detail creates risks that might imperil life or have adverse impacts on human health and well-being. This unit inverts the normative study of design detailing by turning to breakdowns and catastrophes where details, joints and connections have failed, because those failures illuminate problems that may have otherwise remained obscure or badly formulated. Drawing on forensic methods, you will learn to track the network of relations that radiate out from these moments of failure in order to better understand the role of detailing in the context of communal and social risk. Upending the typical design process, you will begin with final construction details and design through disassembly, ‘unbuilding’ failed details to understand their yield points and the underlying conditions of their catastrophic undoing.
Just Transition
This unit requires you to project into possible, just futures and rigorously develop the means of realising the transition to those futures. You will be exposed to the imaginaries, strategies and tactics of climate justice movements that contest and project beyond carbon, and consider the spatial implications of the ideologies and methods of these movements. You will critically engage the worlds these movements seek to bring about and consider how the skills and knowledge of spatial practitioners have a role to contribute in facilitating change. You will work across temporalities, producing Design Policy Proposals that can be implemented in the present that contribute towards operationalising renewable, just futures.
Independent Research Project
The Independent Research Project (IRP) unit comprises a substantial student-led investigation. You will be tutored towards the formulation of a research question, and supported to find appropriate and innovative research methods and documentation. You will be encouraged to draw on their existing contexts and/or develop new sites of practice towards making meaningful contributions to knowledge on climate and the built environment.
The MArch in Design Practice offers you the opportunity to engage the social and political systems underlying the climate crisis by design. You will be equipped to understand, analyse and contend with these systems and supported to develop propositions which seek to creatively and constructively bring about change.
College-wide Electives
Terms 1 & 4
Health and Care: Poetics of Care: to welcome, to love, to recover (15 credits, School of Arts & Humanities)
Sites and Situations – Spatial Feelings (15 credits, School of Arts & Humanities)
Art & the Urban (15 credits, School of Arts & Humanities)
Material Engagements (15 credits, School of Arts & Humanities)
Performing Practice (15 credits, School of Arts & Humanities)
Synthetic Encounters - Shapeshifting the Digital (15 credits, School of Arts & Humanities)
Housing and Social Reproduction (15 credits, School of Architecture)
Mobility and Debility (15 credits, School of Architecture)
Digital Storytelling (15 credits, School of Communication)
Design Ethics: Design for Good Practice (15 credits, School of Communication/School of Design)
Design Innovation: Models and Life Cycle (15 credits, School of Design)
Design Resilience: Future Forecasting (15 credits, School of Design)
Education for Change (15 credits, MEd Creative Education)
Term 2 & 5
Curatorial Practices: Curatorial Approaches (15 credits, School of Arts & Humanities)
Synthetic Encounters - Radical Matter: Coded Skins, Sticky Cohesions, Wild Science (15 credits, School of Arts & Humanities)
The Workshop (15 credits, School of Arts & Humanities)
Milieu Milieu Me (The Ecology) (15 credits, School of Architecture)
Capital’s Shadow (15 credits, School of Architecture)
Worldbuilding (15 credits, School of Communication)
Interventions (15 credits, School of Communication)
Design Ethics: Design for Responsible Behaviour (15 credits, School of Communication/School of Design)
Design Innovation: Venture Creation (15 credits, School of Design)
Design Resilience: Sustainability (15 credits, School of Design)
Introduction to Design-Led Robotics (15 credits, School of Design)
Making Pedagogies (15 credits, MEd Creative Education)
Requirements
What you need to know before you apply
The programme is aimed both at postgraduate students and mid-career professionals, and offers a balance between core knowledge, elective and collaborative work and a self-defined research project – enabling you to choose your own areas of interest, while developing the skills to implement your ideas.
Candidates are selected entirely on merit, and applications are welcomed from all over the world, as well as from mid-career designers and career changers. The selection criteria considers creativity, imagination and innovation as demonstrated in your portfolio or equivalent professional experience, as well as your potential to benefit from the programme and to achieve the MArch standard overall.
The programme welcomes architects, designers and spatial practitioners from a range of backgrounds, including those from other design disciplines such as sound, moving image or performance, with an interest in the built environment. Applicants from other backgrounds are also welcome, such as practitioners involved in local government, NGOs, journalism and activism.
What's needed from you
Portfolio requirements
Applicants from art, design and architectural backgrounds
Please submit a 10-page PDF portfolio that showcases your skills and motivations as an architect, artist and/or designer. Please include at least three projects you have worked on that are relevant to the programme. Clearly identify your contributions to any collective projects shown.
Please submit a 10-page PDF portfolio that showcases your skills and motivations as an artist and/or designer. Please include at least three different projects you have worked on, and clearly identify your contributions to any collective projects shown.
Applicants from non-portfolio disciplines (e.g. social sciences, sciences, humanities, politics, NGO/development work)
Please provide an illustrated 10-page document of previous work related to the MArch programme's themes. Clearly identify your role and contributions in the work.
Personal statement
Please provide a 300-word written personal statement that addresses the following points:
- Introduce yourself, your interests and your motivations for applying to the Royal College of Art, and to this programme in particular.
- Briefly summarise any educational background and professional experience to date that will support your application.
- Tell us what you want to do in the future.
Your journey: video requirements
You must also submit a short video introducing yourself, how you envisage the programme will allow you to develop as a spatial practitioner, and what contributions it will support you to make in the world.
English-language requirements
If you are not a national of a majority English-speaking country you will need the equivalent of an IELTS Academic or UKVI score of 6.5 with a 6.0 in the Test of Written English (TWE) and at least 5.5 in other skills. Students achieving a grade of at least 6.0, with a grade of 5.5 in the Test of Written English, may be eligible to take the College’s English for Academic Purposes course to enable them to reach the required standard.
You are exempt from this requirement if you have received a 2.1 degree or above from a university in a majority English-speaking nation within the last five years.
If you need a Student Visa to study at the RCA, you will also need to meet the Home Office’s minimum requirements for entry clearance.
Fees & funding
For this programme
Fees
Fees for September 2025 entry on this programme are outlined below. From 2021 onward, EU students are classified as Overseas for tuition fee purposes.
Home
Overseas and EU
Deposit
New entrants to the College will be required to pay a non-refundable deposit in order to secure their place. This will be offset against the tuition fees for the first year of study.
Home
Overseas and EU
Progression discount
For alumni and students who have completed an MA or MA/MSc at the RCA within the past 10 years, a progression discount is available for MArch, MFA, MDes, MRes & MEd study. This discount is £5,000 for full-time study, or £2,500 per year for two years of part-time study
Scholarships
Scholarships
The RCA scholarship programme is growing, with hundreds of financial awards planned for the 2025/6 academic year.
For more information and examples of financial awards offered in 2024/25, visit the Scholarships & awards webpage.
You must hold an offer to study on an RCA programme in order to make a scholarship application in Spring 2025. A selection of RCA merit scholarships will also be awarded with programme offers.
We strongly recommend that you apply for your programme as early as possible to stand the best chance of receiving a scholarship. You do not apply directly for individual awards; instead, you will be invited to apply once you have received an offer.
More information
Additional fees
In addition to your programme fees, please be aware that you may incur other additional costs associated with your study during your time at RCA. Additional costs can include purchases and services (without limitation): costs related to the purchase of books, paints, textiles, wood, metal, plastics and/or other materials in connection with your programme, services related to the use of printing and photocopying, lasercutting, 3D printing and CNC. Costs related to attending compulsory field trips, joining student and sport societies, and your Convocation (graduation) ceremony.
If you wish to find out more about what type of additional costs you may incur while studying on your programme, please contact the Head of your Programme to discuss or ask at an online or in person Open Day.
We provide the RCASHOP online, and at our Kensington and Battersea Campuses – this is open to students and staff of the Royal College of Art only to provide paid for materials to support your studies.
We also provide support to our students who require financial assistance whilst studying, including a dedicated Materials Fund.
Start your application
Change your life and be here in 2025. Applications now open.
The Royal College of Art welcomes applicants from all over the world.
Before you begin
Make sure you've read and understood the entrance requirements and key dates.
More information about eligibility and key datesCheck you have all the information you need to apply. Choose the programme you want to apply to and review programme-specific entrance and portfolio requirements on the programme page.
Read our application process guideConsider attending an Open Day, or one of our portfolio or application advice sessions.
See upcoming sessionsPlease note, all applications must be submitted by 12 noon on the given deadline.
Ask a question
Get in touch if you’d like to find out more or have any questions.
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