Royal College of Art

About Just what is the role of the architect and interior designer in an the age of the Internet, multi-culture and the space of flows? We see our task as integrating new designs for the future into the gritty fabric of the existing city.

By combining experiment with rigour, we aim to show how wit, invention and the desire to question can be carried over successfully into the real world. We look at architecture from an experiential base, trying to connect people with the spaces they inhabit, whether indoors or out. Research is seen as the backbone to design, using test cases in London, this vast, ever changing, layered and visceral city.

The two-year MA course is offered equally to students of an architectural and interiors background, the city is considered a complex interior, and every space, no matter how small, is regarded as having an architectural dimension. The course offers the chance to exchange experience and approach between the two disciplines, often exposing contemporary issues of design, from the adaptation of existing infrastructure to the development of software that defines digital space.

Tutors are all engaged in professional activity as well as teaching, reflecting the combined architecture and interiors nature of the course. Strong links exist with other architectural schools and institutions, reinforcing the flavour of the course straddling the multidisciplinary context of the Royal College of Art and the most demanding standards of our own practice.

While students are encouraged to explore their own particular goals and interests within the framework of the course, projects set tend to emphasise a firm understanding of the urban condition as a starting point for these. London in particular is stressed as the context for design intervention with prevalent debates on the future of the city being foregrounded each year. More specifically last year, ADS1 - Binaries/Oxymorons: Nature vs. Culture - explored the contradictions in London as a global and a local city, looking at how these might be exploited in architecture. ADS2’s Value looked at how the city might be re-planned to create all kinds of new opportunities for raising the bar, commercially as well as architecturally. With Monumental ADS3 asked what effect new forms of social contract might accompany a rapidly evolving multi-everything society, and how might these be represented through new kinds of civic buildings. And ADS4’s Surviv.al.bion hurtled towards a future that e

Project Entries 2009