M A Arch i te ct ural H i sto r y
MA ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY
Programme Director: Professor Adrian Forty
The MA Architectural History brings the latest thinking in the disciplines of history and cultural theory to bear on the study of architecture and cities. We encourage students on the course to be experimental — to try out ideas from these more theoretical fields, and to test their limits when it comes to applying them to the lived actuality of buildings and places. Every piece of work produced on the programme is an experiment in the relations of ideas to objects. The course raises expectations as to what the discipline of architectural history is capable of, and suggests how it might generate new understandings of culture. We put a premium on ambition, and originality. Ambition, in identifying issues and problems that lie at the interface between the theoretical disciplines, and our encounters with the phenomena of the urban. Originality, in searching out topics that have been overlooked, and in devising new ways to look at them. In every case, the benchmark of success, whatever is being investigated, is whether we are led to see the object under observation in a new way. The research projects listed here have been devised, researched and written up in the second half of the twelve months of the MA Architectural History programme. The first six months of the programme are devoted to two days a week of seminars on critical thought in history and cultural theory; on techniques of research and dissemination for architectural history; the study of buildings relative to documentary sources; and on alternative understandings of the contemporary city. Fifty years ago the historian E.H. Carr, in his book What is History?, described architectural history as one of the ‘auxiliary sciences’ of history, along with practices like archaeology and palaeography. If this might once have been true, when the study of politics held the high ground in history, it is no longer the case, and most people would now accept that p. 1 6 8
studies of the urban and of the built can tell us just as much about societies as the study of their political systems. But what of the relation to architecture? Is architectural history an ‘auxiliary science’ relative to architecture? The presence of a graduate programme in architectural history within a school of architecture makes this a question that we cannot avoid, and one we have to ask ourselves every day of our working lives. Is architectural history and theory a part of architecture, or is it supplementary to it, a parasitical discipline? No certain answer can be had to this, but it is part of the function of this course to generate argument about the question, and to make sure that no one ever forgets that, without a discourse around it, architecture as we know it would cease to exist. Architectural history sometimes questions that discourse, and sometimes it sustains it. Past students of the MA Architectural History have gone on to practise, or to teach, architecture; others have become architectural journalists, publishers, or concerned with taking decisions about the management and protection of the built heritage. Many have gone on to study for doctorates, either at UCL or elsewhere — it is part of the course’s role to provide a foundation for PhD research. And just a few have become politicians. Each year a new generation of architectural historians emerges, their destiny unknown. Main Tutors: Professor Iain Borden, Dr. Ben Campkin, Professor Adrian Forty, Dr. Yat Ming Loo, Dr. Peg Rawes, Professor Jane Rendell The following students, with the title of their report, graduated in 2010: Maria Cabrera Vergara The 21st Century Church; 1990–2010: ‘Constructing’ a new concept of sacred architecture Cathy Clark The Cast Iron Bandstand: a MassProduced Object with Humanity *Gabriela García de Cortazar Architecture and ‘the Public’; between discourses in journals, buildings in London and possibilities opened from the ‘50s until today *Mirian Delaney Line, Text, Silence and Scale: Reading the Raven Maps of Londonderry, 1622