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New MA courses at Canterbury School of Architecture
Our MA Architecture courses run over 3 semesters, 12 months full-time, or 6 semesters 24 months part-time. You will gain a comprehensive understanding of your subject area through sustained engagement with creative activity. We are happy to accept applications from mature students seeking CPD or retraining. Designers or artists with appropriate experience and qualifications are also encouraged to apply. As a career strategy, our courses equip you with the essential skills to succeed in contemporary emergent design environments.
MA Architecture: Advanced Architectural Design
The course will equip those with a first degree in architecture or cognate disciplines with key contemporary skills, both in theories of design and in material production. Methodologies, theories and practices of design research are central to the Masters agenda. The MA is project based, supplemented by workshops, lectures and independent study. New materials, techniques and construction methods are of increasing importance for architects and designers: during your course you will gain specialised knowledge of your chosen area of study: we support research in a wide range of areas including interdisciplinary perspectives on the built environment, digital fabrication technologies, architectural graphic design, physical computing, 3D parametric modelling, design visualisation, high-end rendering, animation, texturing and lighting. Methods of output and production include haptic techniques, laser cutting, 3D printing, large format photo printing, web publishing, video and film.
John C Bell
Course Leader
For further information please email jbell(at)ucreative(dot)ac(dot)uk
Download the application form
MA Urban Design
Rapid population growth, post-industrialisation, and environmental factors all pose significant challenges to urban design practices, demanding responses to complex design problems that are both nuanced and appropriate. The course understands urban design to be a social, material and ecological discourse, modulated by diverse spatial, economic, political and temporal influences. During the first semester, students are introduced to a range of analytical tools including videographic, diagrammatic, digital and analogue modelling and mapping in the context of design exercises. The MA Urban Design draws upon a range of disciplines, from landscape design and ecology to civil engineering and anthropology to facilitate students’ abilities to develop individual proposals and interests, which may extend to performative, experimental and interactive technologies.
For further information please email jbell(at)ucreative(dot)ac(dot)uk
MA Architecture: Sustainable Design
Today architecture faces the challenge of dramatic ecological change. By examining relationships between environmental contexts and architecture, the needs of its inhabitants and the resources required to achieve it, this course enables students to develop methodologies, design tools and approaches that facilitate the identification, development and delivery of sustainable design solutions. The MA Architecture: Sustainable Design understands buildings as living entities, where material cycles are defined and implemented to address reductions in both depletion rates of natural resources and waste production.
By focusing on the challenges and opportunities facing sustainable design as an integral part of the architectural profession, the course enables students to develop a comprehensive understanding of the discipline. Areas of study include the current national and global challenges reduce the environmental impact of the built environment, opportunities offered by novel uses of existing and emerging materials and construction forms.
For further information please email jbell(at)ucreative(dot)ac(dot)uk
MA Digital Ekistics
From September this year the Canterbury School of Architecture, a part of the University for the Creative Arts will be offering an MA in Digital Ekistics The original impulse for developing the course came from a long-standing personal research interest in the place of electronic spaces as architectural constructs as distinct from scenographic or sculptural form.
So what is or are digital ekistics?
Ekistics is the study of human settlement, an academic discipline of many years standing. Digital Ekistics is, thus the study of human settlement in electronic spaces – be they the existing game worlds on line or emergent or novel forms of dwelling in virtual communities. The new MA is concerned most particularly with the architecture and urbanism of virtual environments: those spaces which have been designed to house our virtual bodies or avatars. For spatial designers, these environments present particular opportunities and singular challenges. From a design research position the conventional metrics of building design no longer have to apply: for instance the central discourse of tectonics is shifted on the one hand to a semiotic register, on another to a computational problem of tessellation and graphical processing. Habitation, in a predominantly retinal, picturesque environment into which the haptic is only beginning to achieve presence confounds many of the precepts of architectural and urban design: materiality, programme, circulation and structure are all radically transformed: where gravity is optional and weather virtual, new architectural morphologies must evolve. Movement and boundary, privacy and access become highly flexible – in 1996 Beatriz Colomina wrote:
“Today, the boundaries that define space are first and foremost an effect of the media. (And not exclusively visual media. Think for example about the space of sound: the radio, telephone, walkman.) The status of the wall has changed.”
That change is presses hard on architectural design in ways unimagined even ten years ago - and the profession must address it if it is not to be sidelined in the near future by other disciplines more familiar with new technologies. This would be a huge loss, to both users and architects: who is better placed to rise to the challenges raised by these new environments?
From the development of spatial interfaces to the design of new worlds, the press of the virtual will surely erupt into the physical with increasing force and frequency. This speculation appears to be borne out by events: persistent virtual environments or 'always on' internet-based electronic spaces are already prominent features of many people's online experience, yet these environments are still in their infancy. A well-known example is Linden Labs Second Life, which has registered nearly than 13,000,000 users as of March 2008. The social impact and gaming aspects of these environments have and are being addressed at postgraduate level; however the architecture and urbanism which houses and mediates the activities in massively multi user virtual environments is not as yet explicitly the focus of any postgraduate course. There will undoubtedly be further developments of these and other electronic environments – if we are to begin to explore the possibilities from the standpoint of design, there must be informed engagement and research opportunities available to foster this creative exploration.
Sited in the Canterbury School of Architecture, the MA digital ekistics provides opportunities for both specialist and interdisciplinary work in the areas of architecture, urbanism and architectural history and theory in the context of virtual environments and their interfaces. The course benefits from a close relationship with the culture of the school and is supported by a range of specialist tutors. There is also much to be gained from the close relationship between architecture and fine art, which continues to develop in Canterbury and across the University as a whole. Students will follow an individual programme of study, based on a personal project. However, students will also attend lectures and seminars and undertake joint projects with other postgraduate students. The personal project may be realised in the form of a series of resolved design solutions or theoretical proposals. It should be fun.
John C Bell
Course Leader
For further information please email jbell(at)ucreative(dot)ac(dot)uk
MA Spatial Practices:
Art, Architecture, and Performance
The notion of 'practices' and in particular spatial practices has recast much work being done in architecture, fine art, performance-based disciplines, geography, sociology, anthropology, and archeology. Space is not considered to be an 'empty vessel' to be filled (for instance, by buildings), but a tangle of practices and relationships amongst people and things which enact, or perform, it. So a masters in Spatial Practices does not concern itself with a discipline per se, but a 'frame' through which to look at many other disciplines. It is in fact transdisciplinary, and asks students to look at their own work through this frame.
The course provides opportunities for students and practitioners from a breadth of backgrounds to investigate critical issues of how we make and 'practice' space, and how it makes us. The course focuses on issues of ‘site’ and the ‘spatial’ – which may be interpreted widely as architectural, phenomenological, institutional, discursive, cultural, specific or performative. Final work therefore may be realised through various modes, including exhibition, performance, (spatial) proposal, or dissertation and research will be contextualized within the wide debate relevant to contemporary spatial practices which include how spaces are produced, performed, theorised, and gendered.
The course draws on the close relationship between Fine Art and Architecture at Canterbury and is supported by a visiting programme of artists, architects, geographers and cultural theorists. Students may work collaboratively or on individual projects, which extend the boundaries of contemporary art, architecture, performance and spatial practices.
Applicants will need to have a background of Fine Art, Spatial Design (Architecture, Interior Design/Architecture), Performance, Dance, Design or the Humanities and the course encourages interdisciplinary debate and practice.
You will be part of an evolving postgraduate culture at Canterbury; all postgraduate courses, including the MA Digital Ekistics, MA Fine Art, the Graduate Diploma in Architecture and of course MA Spatial Practices share a large studio and have use of the excellent faciiities provided on campus.
Oren Lieberman
Course Leader
For further information please email olieberman(at)ucreative(dot)ac(dot)uk