MPhil/PhD Architectural History & Theory Graduating students 2004-05: Nic Coetzer, Marko Jobst, Sandy McCreery, Current students: Julia Bodenstein, Anne Bordeleau, Willem de Bruijn, Lilian Chee, Gonçalo Furtado Lopez, Yi-Chih Huang, Josie Kane, Kemas Ridwan Kurniawan, Shih-Yao Lai, Suzanne MacLeod, Christina Malathouni, Iradj Moeni, Miho Nakagawa, Jonathan Noble, Victoria Perry, Aslihan Senel, Juliet Sprake, Elli Stathaki, Sant Suwatcharapinum, Noriko Tsukui, Sotirios Varsamis, Robin Wilson.
The MPhil/PhD Architectural History & Theory programme allows candidates to conduct an exhaustive piece of research into an area of their own selection and definition. Great importance is placed on the originality of information uncovered, the creativity of the interpretations made, and the rigour of the methodological procedures adopted. Approximately 25-30 students are enrolled at any one time for MPhil/PhD research study in this field. An intensive programme of research skills and methodologies is provided – this includes the PhD Architecture seminar series, which provides advanced discussions of research methodology, as well as presentations of on-going research by internal and visiting international speakers. The range of research topics undertaken in the programme is broad, but generally look at the history and theory of architecture and cities from c. 1800 to the present day, with an emphasis on the critical reading of these subjects from cultural, political and experiential viewpoints. Recent and current dissertations in the field include: ‘Ethics, architecture and Virtual Technologies’, ‘The Hebrew University in Jerusalem’, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Histories of the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank’, ‘Critical Public Art and the Urban Site’, ‘Modernity and Brazil’, ‘Landscape and Institutions in South Africa’, ‘Elizabeth Denby, (18941965), Housing Consultant’, ‘Photography and the Representation of the Modern City’, ‘Proportional Geometries in the Design of Architectural Form’.
Nic Coetzer ‘The Production of the City as a White Space: Representing and Restructuring Identity and Architecture, Cape Town, 1892-1936’. The dissertation explores how English values, architects and architectural ideas played a major role in shaping identities, architecture and power relations in Cape Town between 1892-1936. Driven by an uncompromising belief in the universal desirability of Englishness and Western architecture and culture, this architecture manifested a tension between a romanticised, historical, rural ideal, and an urban dystopia, the compromised resolution of which lay in suburban housing schemes. Ranging across discourse, images, public events, built space and buildings, the dissertation investigates notions of preservation, national identity, land possession, civilisation, the city, socio-cultural conditions, race and colonialism, and architectural materiality and aesthetics.
Vergelegen, Cape Dutch homestead.
to either language or still image, this dissertation also becomes a site of experimentation in the realm of writing and its accompanying representations.
‘London Underground’
Sandy McCreery ‘Turnpike Roads and the Spatial Culture of London, 1756-1830’. Focusing on the spaces of London’s Marylebone Road and Regent’s Park, this historical study examines the spatial culture of England’s 'turnpike boom' – the first significant speed-up of a modern society. This network constituted a new socio-spatial foundation on which new practices and perceptions became possible, leading to new spatial conceptions and constructions. For example, Regent's Park was fundamentally designed to exploit the economic and experiential potential of speed. As such, the dissertation calls for a reconceptualisation of the Picturesque, previously generally understood as an aesthetic discourse focused on optical points of view.
Marko Jobst ‘The Movement-image of the MovementMachine: Deleuze, Cinema and the London Underground’. This unique dissertation – partly theoretical and partly poetic, partly analytic and partly propositional – stands at a particular intersection of two disciplines: film and architecture, But it also stands very as the site of confrontation between two very particular realms: the Underground, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In addition, seeing as the arena of this confrontation is the written word, and, in Deleuze's philosophy, cinema is so utterly irreducible
Regent’s Park as a place of speed (1827).
Prof Christine Hawley, Prof Jonathan Hill, Dr Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Prof Alan Penn, Dr Barbara Penner, Dr Peg Rawes, Dr Jane Rendell, Prof Neil Spiller, Prof Philip Steadman, Prof Philip Tabor.