History and Critical Thinking in Architecture

Entry requirements

Bachelor’s degree (minimum second class honours) in architecture or a related discipline from a United Kingdom university or a degree of equivalent standard from a recognised university or higher education institution from outside the UK.

Months of entry

September

Course content

History and Critical Thinking (HCT) offers a postgraduate platform from which to produce, develop and communicate knowledge that connects contemporary issues with systematic historical enquiry. At stake in the writing of history is a political engagement with the social, material, cultural and environmental exigencies of the present. Therefore, the ambition of the programme is threefold: to provide conceptual resources to explore social, political, economic and institutional structures as well as their impact on architectural histories and forms of production; to understand contemporary discursive and material organisations from a historical, critical, interdisciplinary and transnational point of view; and to highlight the ways in which architecture is entangled with other spatial practices and alternative forms of knowledge production and dissemination. Through a programme of lectures, seminars, open debates, group readings and writing workshops, students are encouraged to critically reflect on practices of historiography and pedagogies of history. This enables them to develop the resources and skills required to engage with recent scholarship, and to advance architectural thinking and practice. The programme sees specific and canonical architectural histories as valid sites of investigation, while (encouraging) supporting students, epistemologically and methodologically, to discover and promote missing and marginalised voices, as well as new ways of thinking.

Writing is essential to the programme and is considered here as a pedagogical project, a practice of thinking and a tool to articulate and communicate ideas in a precise, effective manner. We explore different modes of writing alongside other communicative media such as drawings, photographs, film and literature. Students are encouraged to explore, adopt and adapt elements of disciplines and practices in their own writing, while preserving their own voice.

The historical and theoretical understanding that HCT graduates gain through the programme allows them to pursue doctoral studies, to develop their careers in other fields such as curation or journalism, or to become involved in research and teaching in architecture.

Fees and funding

The MA in History and Critical Thinking in Architecture is a 12-month programme of full-time study, and the tuition fee is £30,840.