Modular Pathway
The Modular Pathway offers a choice of design studios across the two years. The studio choices for the Modular Pathway are independent of each other and allow students to sample a range of particular specialisms.
The Pathway is structured around one core 40-credit architectural design studio module that focuses on the comprehensive design of a public building which incorporates structural, technical and environmental systems.
Recent projects
Recent projects have included Lifelong Learning Centres for various subjects such as Digital Media, Circus, Biology, Musical Performance and Recording.
Themes and topics
You will also take other design studio modules within which a number of units run, offering a choice of distinctive themes and topics:
Disruptive technology: material and immaterial
This studio explores critical ideas underpinning Disruptive Technology in the context of architectural design. The process and its realisation is conditioned by evolving material strategies and digital technologies.
Architecture and particularity
This studio works around a European city (recently Berlin, Budapest). Acknowledging its particular histories of power, culture and ideology, individual architectural projects are generated and situated in contemporary city life.
Architecture and the arts
This unit explores the relationship of architecture to other art practices, including the disciplines of drawing, painting, sculpture, landscape, poetry, dance, film-making, music, drama etc.
All share in the making of physical interventions in real locations to be experienced by others. Making in this way can be seen as a kind of thought, connecting us to both the physical world and our intellectual, cultural and emotional lives.
Architecture and urbanism
This unit sets out to form a connection between the discipline of urban design and the normal realm of architecture.
It offers students the opportunity to deal with design problems from the scale of the city to the individual building and thereby gain a better understanding of the resultant pressures and interactions between them.
Architecture and intervention
The city of Edinburgh, with its unique historic built form, offers great potential for the art of contemporary architectural intervention.
The unit is allied to the Scottish Centre for Architectural Conservation but encourages students to develop an individual creative approach to contemporary design within an historic context.
Architecture and wellbeing
This unit aims to extend the thinking of ‘palliative care’ building types to explore the meaning of ‘wellbeing’ in architecture. Students explore the potential to create architectural programmes that combine aspects of health and education with a positive outlook, to enhance the human condition.
Recent projects that have run within these units include:
- a new Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop
- a Masterplan for the East River Waterfront in Manhattan
- an Edinburgh Literature Centre as a contemporary intervention in the Old Town
- a Refuge for the Senses in various cities
This article was published on Jul 14, 2011