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For nearly 200 years, UCL has been a vital component of architectural education, helping to shape key players and the profession as we know it today, says Jeremy Melvin
them gradually more receptive to architecture. As a pioneer of those changes – certainly in the UK – UCL provided an appropriate base in and through which architecture could become a fully fledged academic subject. The history of teaching architecture there, outlined over the following pages, reveals how that process has evolved through a series of t is hard now to imagine how radical experiments, a proportion of which, by creating a chair of architecture was when University College London did definition, were bound to fail, while others so in 1841. As writers like Vitruvius, continue to prove remarkably successful. In 1841 there were only two other chairs Alberti and Marc-Antoine Laugier had in architecture in the UK: one was at the shown, architecture was a subject fit Royal Academy of Arts, which was for speculative thought. Meanwhile founded in 1769 and still exists (although Christopher Wren – best known to us as an architect – held various professorships the RA stopped teaching architecture in in different subjects over the course of his the 1940s); the other, established in 1840, was at King’s College London, and its long life (1632-1723), so there had been school of architecture merged with UCL’s some overlap between universities and more than a century ago. As such, UCL architecture for well over a century. has the longest continuous record of But in the 1840s only a select few had teaching architecture of any institution embraced architecture as part of an in the UK. Its history provides us with academic curriculum. What brought about more formal engagement from this insights into the history of British architecture over that period – and in time onwards were rapid technological and social changes that fundamentally particular how architecture has altered the nature of architecture and developed from a practice based on knowledge acquired through pupillage its purposes. These, in turn, demanded more specialist knowledge and a growing with a ‘master’, to a knowledge-based profession brought into being by researchurge for that knowledge to grant status based education. to its holders – all underpinned by Despite the necessary tension between developments in the nature and profession and education, UCL has composition of universities, which made
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