Environmental Architecture

The MA Environmental Architecture programme aims to expand the scope and content of design-led research in the field of architecture, environmental studies and territorial management. Possible areas of inquiry can include: sustainable forms of urbanisation; concepts of stewardship and care for nature; environmental change and its effect on migration and settlement patterns; climate justice adaptation to land use practices; impacts of resource extraction on ecosystems; environmental impacts of the energy transition; post-development and degrowth; indigenous struggles for land and environments, among many others.

Students on the MA Environmental Architecture programme will have the opportunity to pursue a degree within a leading art and design institution, and to access the rich culture of radical and experimental interdisciplinary work at the Royal College of Art. Moreover, the programme will help students to establish a network of colleagues and mentors by offering them the opportunity of connecting to leading figures in Environmental Architecture both in London and internationally through an innovative practice mentorship scheme.

Term 1

Research Studio I: Architectures of Extraction (15 credits)

This unit consists of an introduction to the programme’s field-focused investigation into resource extraction architectures and their role in the climate and environmental crisis. It familiarises you with particular modes of work, especially design-based research methodologies, and collaborative forms of knowledge production.

Seminar I: Metabolic Rifts (15 credits)

In Seminar I: Metabolic Rifts you are introduced to the complexity of the contemporary climatic breakdown beyond the problem of global warming, and at both global and local scales. You will master different theories of environmental change, and will be asked to critically reflect on architecture’s role for devising mitigation strategies. The unit is delivered through a mix of lectures and workshops. Core theories and debates will be introduced through lectures. These will be complemented by workshops where key environmental concepts will be explored and discussed.

The end-of-term review consists of a video dialogue on a seminar topic of choice. This will be supported by the submission of an online work blog bringing together the various seminar and reading group class exercises in an appropriate range of media. A mid-term oral presentation will assess the students' work in progress.

Media Studies I (15 credits)

Situated in the School of Architecture and welcoming a student cohort from across multiple spatial design disciplines, Media Studies provides a rigorous and granular examination of historical and contemporary methodologies of media practice and research. Our collective goal is to increase critical engagement with media. We achieve this through lectures, tutorials, and workshops in which new approaches to media are conceptualised, refined, and implemented in innovative proposals and projects.

You'll also take AcrossRCA (15 credits), which supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

Term 2

Research Studio II: Environmental Interventions (15 credits)

In Studio II you will develop a design intervention strategy for the site explored in term 1. Emphasis will be placed on the definition of outputs, in relation to key project aims and stakeholders.

Working in groups within your Research Studios, you will propose an intervention strategy for the case studied in term 1. The strategy should be articulated in the form of a design brief, including its aims and objectives, scales of intervention and key stakeholders. You are expected to work in relation to multiple scenarios rather than a single proposition, and to consider the project's different phases of implementation.

A core element in this unit is the understanding of potential externalities such as conflicts between stakeholders or changes in the environmental, political and economic conditions that structure the project. You will be asked to consider local populations, NGOs, advocacy groups, governmental bodies or others that might be currently operating in the context of your project. You will be asked to critically explore modes of representation and communication in relation to the different forums where the project might take place. A combination of one-to-one, small and large group tutorials will be conducted regularly between students and staff. Specialists and invited experts will also contribute depending on each unit’s research interests and sites.

Seminar II: Critical Future Scenarios (15 credits)

Seminar II: Critical Future Scenarios is delivered in a blended mode. The unit will deepen your understanding of contemporary environmental architecture, through a focus on different techniques and concepts of scenario planning. Paradigmatic cases, concepts and tools will be introduced through lectures and seminars with guests, complemented by weekly student-led roundtables. Students will engage in a series of world-building exercises, exploring the possibilities of mapping and counter-mapping as both a reflective and propositional practice. Students will be asked to collectively discuss written work on a bi-weekly basis and will present work orally in the mid-term critique. Midway through the term a writing workshop will help students to start developing their end-of-term written submission. The end-of-term submission consists of a work blog which will be accompanied by a critical reflective ‘metalogue’.

School-Wide Elective (15 credits)

You choose one elective from the options given below.

You'll also take the Core Skills unit (15 credits), which supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career.

Term 3

Independent Research Project (60 credits)

The purpose of the Independent Research Project (IRP) is to enable you to apply the intellectual, technical and professional skills that you have developed throughout the programme to a challenging self-set brief. The IRP can be developed either individually or in group, and it should be based on the proposition for intervention developed in Research Studio II, Environmental Interventions. This is an opportunity for you to reflect on the theme of the studio while pursuing your own research interests.

The IRP includes a public presentation of work and exhibition, alongside peers from your programme, and following the conclusion of taught elements of the unit. This activity will help you to present the key design intentions of your work orally and visually. Focus will be given to forms of representing and communicating complex environmental issues, with a particular focus on exploring environmental aesthetics. You can make use of a variety of media including film, animation, models, drawings or other as adequate.

IRP teaching consists of studio-based tutorials and seminar sessions focusing the written components. Additionally, you will require access to technical facilities and the library. The IRP can be submitted through project or by thesis, and across a multiplicity of media and formats, from drawings, to film, animation or model making.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.

AcrossRCA

At the RCA we are working – as artists, designers, architects, historians, writers and curators – within physical and digital worlds that are undergoing constant change, and defined by shifting complexities and interconnections. The 15-credit AcrossRCA unit supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

The unit revolves around a set of thematic pillars that reflect key areas of flux, uncertainty and complexity that cut across local, global, individual and collective contexts today. Working in interdisciplinary collaborative groups, you will develop your thinking and reflections on a key issue, question or tension under the umbrella of a larger theme as you generate a creative response. The focus is on learning through the process of the collaborative development of an idea. Rather than aiming for a completed product, solution or concrete answer, AcrossRCA is about an openness to what is generated through experimentation, dialogue and reflexivity. What happens when we move across disciplinary borders and put the kinds of knowledge, experience and skills we each bring to the RCA into conversation with others?

This provides you with opportunities to:

• share and adapt approaches from your personal practices and/or discipline;
• collaborate with peers outside your programme;
• interrogate collaboration through experimenting with and reflecting on collaborative models and approaches, and thinking about what your practice means in relation to others;
• critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and the role of creative practice in making our understanding and experience of the world;
• position your practice and skills and what you bring to a team and larger context.

This engagement with perspectives and practices from across disciplines and across the College is designed to complement your disciplinary studies, feed back into your individual work, and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

Core Skills

The Core Skills unit (15 credits) supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career. The unit also supports you in moving from Term 1 to the independent work you will undertake in your IRP in Term 3, as an opportunity to more deeply and systematically develop and deploy select core skills related to your practice. The transferable academic and professional skills covered in this unit reflect those required of a postgraduate student, and are adapted by Schools and programmes according to specific disciplinary perspectives and requirements. The Core Skills complement the work you are undertaking in your programme units and underpins and elevates the development of your future direction. The Core Skills will focus on specific skills most relevant to your expanded discipline, which may come under areas including inclusive, critical, sustainable and ethical approaches, the networks of knowledge, practice and communication within which your work sits, and the positioning of your practice. Throughout, the unit emphasises how these skills are situated not only disciplinarily within art, design, architecture, communication and humanities practices, but also within larger contexts, inside and in the world beyond.

The unit is informed by the following three themes:

• Making Meaning: How does questioning and contextualising inform the development of your practice? This theme builds on skills in critical and creative thinking, reflective practice, navigating complexity and research.
• Making Together: How do we think and make in dialogue and collaboration with others? This theme encompasses skills such as inclusive, ethical and sustainable practice, and peer learning and building networks.
• Making Public: How is your work and practice positioned within larger ecologies? Exploration of this theme may include developing skills in engagement, communication, entrepreneurship and leadership.

The weekly design studio is the core of the MA programme. Work in the studio is organised individually and in small student groups (2–4 students), and teaching is conducted during weekly group tutorials and pin-up presentations.

The design studios introduce the pedagogy of the programme, provide you with design skills and research methodologies to analyse case studies, while assisting you with the formulation of research and design proposals. The teaching model combines written and design components, as both are considered essential practices in the generation of a disciplinary ecology. Currently, the programme features three design studios, each exploring architecture’s potential contribution to communities and organisations engaged in territorial disputes and resource extraction: 

RS3: Alentejo Research Unit / Liquid Deserts Studio

RS4: Anemoi

RS6: Saharan Becomings

Previous design studios:

RS5: 1,000 rivers

RS2: The Orang-orang and the Hutan Studio

RS1: Lithium Triangle Research Studio

Environmental questions are rarely far from contemporary public debate.

Climate change, global warming, global forest fires, and extreme weather events, mass species extinction, the pollution of our air, seas, land and rivers, not to forget the pollution of our own bodies and food supplies are all daily headline news in print and televisual media.

How should we think about these questions within a school of architecture?

Seminars require constant engagement and involvement by students in course material selection and preparation, collective discussions and oral presentations.

Past guests include: Susan Schuppli, Pedro Neves Marques, Adrian Lahoud, Lindsay Bremner, Nabil Ahmed, Nikos Katsikis, Shela Sheik, RIVAL, Zannah Mae Matson, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Phineas Harper, Imani Jacqueline Brown and Professor Aran Chadwick. 

This unit enables students to explore how architects communicate ideas from both a contemporary and historical perspective. This encompasses a range of media that spans disciplines, ideologies and methods.

Students will use both analogue and digital technologies to understand better how a designer creates, interrogates and manipulates spatial environments.

This investigation will take place in a critical context, which explores how images are used to manufacture socio-political ideologies and negotiate public identities.

A practice mentorship programme connects students to a network of practitioners through regular meetings taking place in Term 2 and 3, who will introduce you to different types of practice and career issues. You will have the opportunity to meet with different practices representing a variety of possible professional pathways that you might be interested in after completing your studies. In doing so we hope professional practices and organisations might have a foundational role in your development.

Recent practice mentors include:

AFO

Atelier 10

Atmos Lab

BBUK

CatalyticAction

Hassell Studio

Ian Ritchie Architects

Interprt

Rival Strategy

T-E-D-S

Wayward

Yves Daccord

Vineet Diwadkar

Matilda Cassani

Autonomy

Dr. Samaneh Moafi

Marc DuBois

Claudia Montero - Fundación Desierto de Atacama

Skye Moret

Pippa Howard – Fauna & Flora International

Jess Myers

Dr. Maria Guevara, MD – Médecins Sans Frontières

Nashin Mahtani 

Future Firm

Konstantina Koulouri – Dark Matter Labs

Dane Carlson – REALMS

Curation, installation, and exhibition are important methods of communication that opens new dialogues about environmental conflicts; while helping creative the threads of research and design travel and form new collaborations. Throughout the programme students have opportunities to show their work within and outside of the RCA.