PROGRAMME STRUCTURE
Four terms of study are divided into two phases. Phase I, a three-term academic year beginning each autumn, introduces design techniques and topics through a combination of team-based studio work, workshops and seminar courses.
In Phase II, which begins the following autumn, teams develop their Phase I work into a comprehensive design thesis project. At the end of January, these projects are presented to a panel of distinguished visiting critics. In the past, these have included Alisa Andrasek, Caroline Bos, Mark Cousins, Hernán Díaz Alonso, John Frazer, Zaha Hadid, Michael Hansmeyer, Jeff Kipnis, Ariane Koek, Rem Koolhaas, Marta Malé-Alemany, Wolf Prix, Ali Rahim, David Ruy, Marcelo Spina, Ben Van Berkel and Tom Wiscombe, among many others.
PHASE 1
Design Research Agenda: Social Ecologies
Our current agenda, Social Ecologies, explores expanded relationships of architecture by considering the future of living, work and culture. The aim of the research is to diversify the field of possibilities through exploiting behaviour as a conceptual tool in order to synthesise the digital world with the material world. Advanced computational development is utilised in the pursuit of architectural systems that are adaptive, generative and behavioural. Using the latest in advanced printing, making and computing tools, the lab is developing pioneering work that challenges the design orthodoxies of today. Architecture that is mobile, transformative, kinetic and robotic forms part of the AADRL agenda, with the aim of expanding the discipline and pushing the limits of design within the larger cultural and technological realm.
Title: Design Workshops. Simulating the Real - Term 1
Tutors: Shajay Bhooshan, Apostolos Despotidis, Mostafa El-Sayed, Evangelia Magnisali
Three design workshop modules are devised to emphasise computational and material prototyping as both an analytical methodology and the prime mode of design production and representation. Each five-week module focuses on a specific set of methods and an intended design output to introduce students to a range of concepts and techniques that can be further developed in the year-long Phase I and Phase II studio projects.
Title: Core Seminars. Design as Research - Term 1
Tutor: Theodore Spyropoulos
Pursuing design as a form of research raises a series of questions that relate to larger technological, economic and cultural contexts. The seminar will explore ways of associating design with forms of research and the implications of using this methodology in architectural and design practice. An overview of computational approaches to architectural design and processes will complement the seminar, and weekly readings on software technologies and design systems will survey computational work in art, music, new media, science and other aspects of contemporary architectural discourses. Groups of students will make weekly presentations related to the readings and provide analyses of selected projects.
Title: Constructed Histories: Technocentric History of Design - Term 2
Tutor: Shajay Bhooshan
This seminar traces synoptic histories of the built environment as a consequence of the liberating power of geometric abstraction, in order to understand such histories as additive manufacture in bricks and stone, influenced by and reciprocally shaping mathematics of graphic statics and stereotomy.
Title: Phase I Prototyping Workshop: Responsive Systems - Term 2
Tutor: Apostolos Despotidis
This workshop introduces students to prototyping and physical computing. Students will learn to use the Arduino platform, while exploring various fabrication processes to give shape to their ideas. In Phase II, these techniques will serve as essential skills during prototype development.
Title: Behaviour: Examining the Proto-Systemic - Term 2
Tutors: Theodore Spyropoulos
This seminar course follows a behaviour-based agenda to engage with experimental forms of material and computational practice. Through an examination of cybernetic and systemic thinking in relation to seminal forms of prototyping and experimentation, students will look at experiments that have been conducted since the early 1950s as maverick machines, architectures and ideologies. Team-based presentations will examine these methods and outputs as case studies for studio experimentation.
Title: Software Platforms: Maya, Rhino, 3D Studio, Processing, Arduino, Unity, Scripting - Term 1–2
Tutors: DRL staff
These workshops introduce a number of digital tools and software systems to give students a grounding in the skills required to construct and control parametric models and interactive presentations. Building upon these, subsequent sessions will cover advanced scripting, programming and dynamic modelling techniques.
Title: Synthesis: Project Submission, Writing and Research Documentation - Term 1–2
Tutors: Alexandra Vougia, Klaus Platzgummer
In weekly sessions, students will review the basics of writing and research related to course submissions. Presentations will cover the resources available to students, the preparation of thesis abstracts, writing styles and issues related to essays, papers and project booklets.
PHASE II
- Design Research Agenda: Social Ecologies
- Bhooshan Research Group
- Gamification / Robotic Fabrication /
- Mass-Customised Design
The studio explores robotic fabrication while enabling mass-customisation strategies that can compete with contemporary co-living models in highly productive cities. The promise of mass-customisation integrated with new models of housing now allows for the generation of a vibrant community fabric.
Schumacher Research Group
Cyber-Urban Incubator / Tectonism
The space of social communication after Covid-19 should be designed simultaneously as both real and virtual navigation and communication realms; as cyber-urban spaces, seamlessly integrating physically immediate and digitally mediated communicative interactions, constituting a new augmented mixed reality. The matrix is coming.
Spyropoulos Research Group
Elemental / Water / Earth / Fire / Air
The studio challenges the fixed and finite orthodoxies of building design for a latent and unknown world. Within the contemporary condition, new conceptual terrains emerge that raise questions of agency and intelligence within a deep ecology of our environment. The studio examines the elemental phenomena as technology. Can we control the clouds? Can we grow our homes? An architecture of constructed atmosphere as energy.
Title: Prototyping Workshop: Adaptive Systems and Structures, Term 1"
Tutors: Theodore Spyropoulos, Patrik Schumacher, Shajay Bhooshan, Pierandrea Angius, Mostafa El-Sayed, Apostolos Despotidis
This five-week workshop, at the midpoint of Phase II, addresses a detailed aspect of the spatial, structural, material and environmental systems of each team’s thesis project. The workshop emphasises modelling techniques that can feed back into the testing and development of larger-scale proposals.
