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This course differs from others like it in starting from strong direct experience of buildings, towns, museums, landscapes - places of all kinds. We put sense experience before theory and we even aim to re-sensualize theory by bringing theories back to life, reimagining the minds which made them.

It is a course which never forgets that it is taking place in a city, one of the world's most diverse and lively. We make constant use of London, in the module called 'Histories', which tells the whole history of architecture based on materials at hand in the streets and cultural institutions of London, and in 'Interpretations' where the maps, guidebooks, exhibitions, novels and films which form the texts of this module often have the city itself, or a special relation to it, as their primary subject. Frequent study-visits present history in exceptionally immediate ways.

In the module called 'Theories' we go deliberately far afield from architecture narrowly defined, to show that the most illuminating comment often comes from thinkers who were not intending to refer only to architecture, who may be philosophers, psychiatrists, painters, anthropologists or linguistic theorists. Our approach is both broader and more intense than most students will be used to, aiming most of all to provoke the innate creativity of tutors and students alike into action.

Writing in certain standard forms is a feature of all courses like this. But in this MA we have conceived a new function for student writing. We think it is a medium just as exciting as design itself. And so we encourage students to use it as a tool of discovery, as a live not neutral medium, which can express profound meanings of which the writer may be only dimly aware to start with. We will offer students many opportunities to experiment with the various possibilities in the writer's relation to a subject, more or less intimate, more or less distant. The structure of the course is both clear and flexible. There are four core modules which every student takes, one of them is the dissertation, which is the culmination of the course, a period of directed independent study which results in a long essay. Besides these core courses, there is a range of options from which students make individual choices.

COURSE CONTENTS

Core modules (click here for extended module info)

Histories is divided into three sections, Classical, Gothic and Modern. Each of them includes early and late forms: ancient fragments in the British Museum, archaeological sites in or near London, and later reconstructions by Inigo Jones, Soane and others; medieval churches or abbeys and the ingenious nineteenth century revivals of Pugin, Butterfield and others; modernism represented in industrial buildings, remnants of the Festival of Britain, Norman Foster's high tech and by postmodern commentaries. Carefully planned group visits will form an important part of this module. Reading includes Pliny the Younger, Palladio, Alexander Pope, Piranesi, Bernard of Clairvaux, Ruskin, Le Corbusier, Banham and Venturi.

Theories is a lecture and discussion course which includes writers like Kant (idealist philosopher) and Coleridge (poet writing on the imagination), Nietzsche (most playful and lethal of philosophical writers), Freud (psychologist of the unconscious), William Empson (radical literary critic), Levi Strauss (student of South American tribes) and Heidegger (bold thinker about space). Often architectural and non architectural texts are paired, the aim being to show how ideas from outside architecture have exerted powerful influence on design thinking. There is an emphasis on how ideas can inform creative activity. Readings typically include James Joyce, Michel Foucault, Manfredo Tafuri and the writers mentioned above.

Interpretation takes the city and the nature of modernity as the underlying themes of an investigation of different forms of the human act of interpretation. London is studied at different scales, in one of its districts like Covent Garden or Spitalfields, and in one of its collections like the Museum of London or Sir John Soane's Museum. Other forms to be examined are maps, guidebooks, transport networks, panoramas, novels, film and installation art. Temporary exhibitions and other events will provide material for student exploration of the possibilities of interpretation. Readings will include Benjamin, Bhabha, Robin Evans, Rem Koolhaas, Rasmussen, Ian Sinclair and Patrick Wright.

The Dissertation At the start various traditional and non traditional conceptions of research will be explored in seminars, and results will be shared, but this is essentially an extended piece of independent study supervised by one of the course team.

Options include:

Poetry and Architecture After definitions of what poetic thinking is, the idea of the poetic is extended by looking closely at the writing of Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Proust, William Blake and others. Widely different notions of the relation between poetry and architecture are then explored in the work of Louis Kahn, the Smithsons, Daniel Libeskind and Coop Himmelblau, and in visits to buildings often called poetic.

Cinema and the City links film, a preeminently modern art form, to the form of the contemporary city, regarded likewise as an embodiment of modernity. It explores the ways in which architecture can be filmic, with reference to the history of cinema (using works by Vertov, Fritz Lang, Godard, Wim Wenders, Ridley Scott and others) and the last two centuries of urban planning.

The Question of Technology questions the assumption that the progress of technology is inevitable, first of all by looking at the concept historically and philosophically. What does technology mean now, and what has it meant in the past? Most importantly, what are its potential roles in architecture? The subject is also widened towards some of its edges, in artificial intelligence, virtual reality and biotechnology.

The Forgetting of Air sets out to examine sensory experience as a cultural construct. The title refers to the most forgotten sense, touch, and its almost invisible medium, which can be shown to be crucial to spatial experience. Architecture's responsibility to the senses is probed using novel texts and examples, including Patrick Suskind's Perfume and Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows.

ATTENDANCE

The course can be taken full-time, two days per week for one year; or part-time, one day per week for two years.

TUTORS

Prof. Robert Harbison is the author of many books including Eccentric Spaces (about the imagination); Deliberate Regression (primitivism in 19-20th century art and thought); The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable; Thirteen Ways; and Reflections on Baroque. He has lectured widely in Britain, the USA and Europe.
email: + r.harbison@londonmet.ac.uk

Prof. Colin Davies is an architect, historian and writer. Former editor of the Architects Journal, he is the author of many books, including the standard work on High Tech Architecture, and monographs on the work of Norman Foster, Michael Hopkins and Nicholas Grimshaw. He writes regularly in architectural magazines on both sides of the Atlantic.
email: + colin.davies@londonmet.ac.uk

Helen Mallinson is a Principal Lecturer and former Head of School. She has taught design, history and theory and is completing a cross-disciplinary doctoral thesis on the architecture of air at the London Consortium, an organisation that includes Birkbeck College, the Architectural Association, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Tate Gallery.
email: + h.mallison@londonmet.ac.uk

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Students of diverse background and experience are invited to apply. As there is no preferred approach to the material, there is no standard preparation for the course. Degrees in literature or science are as welcome as degrees in architecture, and non-academic experience which has sensitized applicants to space and place will be valued as well.

HOW TO APPLY

Contact the address below for an application form:

Admissions Office
London Metropolitan University
166-220 Holloway Road
London N7 8DB
T 020 7133 4202

Details of fees and sources of funding are available from the Admissions Office.

View MA Architectural History, Theory and Interpretation Prospectus Page Here

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