Architecture and Sustainability MSc

Architecture and Sustainability MSc

Reducing energy consumption which contributes to global climate change and pollution is an international imperative, and the future architect must be equipped with the skills and vision to tackle this challenge both innovatively and responsibly. This course helps you master the knowledge and skills required to produce thermally comfortable, healthy, and habitable building designs while minimising energy consumptions. The curriculum embraces the interface between the environmental, economical and socio-cultural dimensions of sustainability in terms of building design and carbon neutrality.

You will join a community that is co-designing new ways of thinking and challenging architectural conventions through bold experimentation and boundless enquiry. This enquiry-led approach to education will encourage you to take creative risks and to learn from your mistakes in a way that will shape your future design choices.

We provide state-of-the-art facilities for you to realise your ambitions, with workshops offering cutting-edge digital fabrication facilities, alongside a wide range of craft workshops, where you can innovate with materials and processes. We’ll help you to graduate with the tools to take your own personal and critical position on embracing the challenges of sustainability in the globalised architectural world.

Term one

Research Methods

Enhances your knowledge and understanding of the nature and scope of research focusing on systematic techniques required for critical analysis.

Principles and Methods

Provides you with a holistic perspective of environmental sustainability and development. You will explore the interface between the three pillars of sustainability and investigate how they inform architectural design.

Design Research Lab 1

Allows you to explore and critically evaluate complex issues within your research unit and to test them within design studies.

Term two

Building Performance Modelling

Enables you to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings by exploring opportunities and methods used to test the building project delivered in the concurrent module.

Design Research Lab 2

Further develops the knowledge, skills and research themes from Design Research Lab 1. It helps you explore in more detail and depth, the boundaries of your strategic proposal.

Term three

Major Project: Dissertation

Gives you the opportunity to apply your research skills in order to present a detailed independent study on a topic of your choice.

This course will help equip you with both the necessary skills and innovative approach to address the challenges of sustainable architecture and development. Such skills are in high demand by businesses, governments, multilateral and unilateral organisations contending with issues of environmental sustainability. By helping you to develop sophisticated research skills, this course also provides excellent preparation to progress onto a PhD.

The mode of delivery considered appropriate in individual modules will vary, as will the assessment regime, so that both are carefully matched to the learning outcomes. The course provides a learning environment that enables students to develop an integrative approach to their learning as the course develops.