MA Architectural History Programme Director: Professor Peg Rawes
Teaching Staff Iain Borden, Eva Branscome, Ben Campkin, Mario Carpo, Edward Denison, Murray Fraser, Peter Guillery, Polly Gould, Michal Murawski, Jacob Paskins, Barbara Penner, Jane Rendell, David Roberts, Tania Sengupta, Michael Short, Robin Wilson
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2017
Architecture consists not only of buildings and projects, but also of the life that takes place within them, and the ideas and discussions that they give rise to. MA Architectural History actively explores what history can do for architecture. Over twelve months, students develop skills for interrogating, extending or reframing the discipline and its phenomena, often by situating architecture within broader debates about culture, history and politics. These ‘situated histories’ show us the active roles that architectural history has today: how it can transform and innovate our understandings of the built environment; how it can change our modes of engagement with cities and buildings; how different materialisations of history have different powers and effects and how different modes of verbal and visual expression can produce different audiences. Frequently, the work brings in ideas from different fields to re-situate architecture within the discipline and beyond – for example, in relation to ecological, feminist, digital or postcolonial theory; film, conceptual art or literary criticism; urban ethnography or activist politics. Each final project is an experiment in which a specific architectural phenomenon is examined in the light of a particular theory or set of ideas, to see how our view of it might change – or, alternatively, how a theory might need to be refreshed. The programme’s Situating Architecture Symposium published work by the cohort in ‘Disputed Architectures’ (October 2016); visit The Bartlett School of Architecture on issuu.com to read it online.
Image: ‘Disputed Architectures’, MA Architectural History Symposium, October 2016 341