Design Yearbook 2017

MA in Architecture, Planning and Landscape (Design)
Martin Beattie
Contributors: Astrid Lund, Nathaniel Coleman,Tony Watson
The Master of Architecture, Planning and Landscape-Design (MAAPL-D) course encourages students to develop a deeper understanding
of varieties of identity in cities. Students conduct detailed studies of particular urban communities, concentrating on determining strategies
of appropriate development for specific urban sites. In each of the three semesters of the course, developing projects presuppose devising
community based urban design frameworks for selected sites that broadly consider the surrounding context. In each semester, holistic design
frameworks articulating the potential character and quality of the environment initiated by the proposed project support reasonably complex
building designs.
Semester one is divided proportionally between group explorations of the city and individual project work, augmented by developing research
into the history, theory and design of cultural buildings in an urban context. The second semester project explores ideas of meaning and
identity in the urban environment and the role that public space and buildings play in articulating notions of citizenship and community.
Students produce three architectural/urban design schemes of increasing scale and complexity for a specific urban location. Architecture as a
civic element is emphasised, including concentration on the relation between exterior and interior spaces.
The problematic of public space within an increasingly privatised built environment; the degree to which theory can be verified by the design;
and the support of both by close readings of set theoretical texts that consider architecture and the city from a range of perspectives are
central to the course; as is a developing understanding of architecture within the expanded field of an urban context in relation to notions of
identity, community, and culture more generally. No matter their scale, projects are construed as complex public buildings with key interior
and exterior public spaces specific to their location and purpose. Thesis projects developed during the third semester provide students with
opportunities for elaborating on many of the themes introduced earlier in the course. The thesis is a major design project framed by individual
students that they largely produce independently.
The MAAPL-D course challenges students’ preconceived notions of architecture, planning, urban design and the city, as well as their ingrained
habits of architectural conceptualization and representation. In the course, individual buildings are considered as component parts of cities,
rather than as isolated objects within it. As such, tendencies to over-emphasise buildings as spectacular image, interesting form, or virtuosic
technological novelty are counter-balanced by the urban, social, and tectonic qualities of projects. Within the expanded field of the city, urban
buildings are emphasised as socio-cultural elements rather than primarily as abstract objects of aesthetic (or visual) appreciation.
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