Advanced Architectural Design

Entry requirements

A minimum of a 2:2 honours degree, or international equivalent, in an appropriate discipline. You also need to submit a portfolio.

We will also consider applicants on an individual basis with a 2:2 honours degree, or nonstandard qualifications, who can demonstrate a high level of design ability and relevant knowledge from work experience.

Months of entry

September

Course content

Overview

Our MSc Advanced Architectural Design is aimed at international designers who want to enhance their design and research skills.

This post-professional degree helps you consolidate your own identity as a designer. You'll develop your own distinctive specialisms through research-led design, with an emphasis on sophisticated representational techniques. Our aim is to help you become a leading architect in the profession.

The course offers an innovative, absorbing, research-led pathway in advanced architectural design. It can be undertaken on a 1-year pathway.

Our School’s leading academics in Architecture, Planning, and Landscape will support you. You'll also work with leading practitioners and creative practitioners who research techniques of drawing and designing.

You'll benefit from the School’s strong culture of integrating design theory and practice. Designers must be able to deliver their speculations. This architectural design course helps you to design at the highest level, and implement your designs.

For achievements of the School’s architecture and design students please read our annual Design Yearbook.

The city of Newcastle has a legacy of global design innovation from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This legacy is matched by its world-renowned culture-led regeneration in the twenty-first century.

The city boasts both elegant historic architecture and urbanism, and contemporary design. It is a stimulating place to spend time, engaging with advanced design thinking.

What you'll learn

The emphasis of our programmes is on learning and mastering sophisticated representational techniques that help you to communicate your interests and ideas.

Semester 1

The semester 1 design project is an intensive, iterative site-specific project that introduces you to creative and critical ways of designing through different tools and media.

On this project, you’ll engage with a complex urban site to develop ways of thinking critically about the city, its past and future.

The project is supported with ‘Design Translation Workshops’ looking at techniques of composition, modelling and visualisation, photogrammetry, and more. These workshops directly inform the design project work.

Alongside your design project, you’ll also undertake the module Architecture and Landscape Studies: Critical and Comparative.

This module will introduce you to theories and methods for investigating architecture as a multidisciplinary, multicultural form of practice.

Semester 2 and 3

In semester 2 you'll frame your own Thesis Project, which you continue developing in semester 3.

This project can be speculative, large-scale and centred on your own research and interests.

The Thesis Project should confidently utilise advanced representational techniques to demonstrate your thinking and ask critical questions relevant to the discipline.

You’ll also take a module, Reading Theory, Thinking Architecture designed to stimulate your thinking and ground your thesis through understanding key contemporary texts on issues related to architecture today.

Watch our video on the student experience on our MSC in Advanced Architectural Design.

Information for international students

Fees and funding

See Newcastle University's course entry for more information.