PART 2: MArch

If you are looking for a truly progressive and practical route into the architectural profession, come to the LSA for your Part 2. We provide a progressive and practical educational model that unites a world-beating network of professional practitioners and academics (the first of its kind in London), alongside a design-focused curriculum that combines studio-based study with practice-based learning. These pages will give you insight not only into what we teach, but how we enable, and collaborate with, our students to meet their ambitions.

HOW WE TEACH

Our Student Experience is unique. We seek to empower you in exploring the kind of practitioner you want to be in a fast-changing industry, and in clarifying the change you envisage to save a world facing interlinked crises.

FINDING RELEVANCE AND CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT

Humanity and the planet face profound and urgent challenges. So when you join our programme we ask you three questions:

What change do you want to see in the world?
How does your architecture contribute to that change?
Who do you want to be as a designer?

We link bold ambition and social innovation with a rigorous and methodical approach to design skills and process, and the application of critical and analytical thinking. We encourage you to be propositional, while staying rooted in the real. We explore the production of the built environment under ‘real life’ conditions – your projects will revolve around a built proposition, not just through the creation of new buildings, but working inventively and responsibly with what we have. We encourage you to find poetry and meaning through a radical realism. This means a relentless and unapologetic focus on diverse forms of practice and the immediate and urgent demands of the development of the city, as well its long-term future prospects in an age of Climate Emergency and rampant inequity in urban life.

DEMANDING AN ARCHITECTURE THAT SERVES HUMANITY AND THE PLANET

Sian Wells, “Feminist City”, 2021. Developed as part of Design Speculation.

In order to meet the major challenges of catastrophic climate change and growing inequity, we encourage you to explore you theses and projects through critical lenses including:

Built Environment Fellowship: Our programme asks you explore architecture as a product of design, development and construction. That requires a focus on collaboration, respect, and inter- and multi-disciplinary knowledge for a safe, sustainable and socially inclusive built environment. We want to explore frameworks for understanding and respecting labour and the means of production in the built environment alongside design.

Meaningful Municipalism: We encourage practice that cultivates and celebrates real and long-term engagement with communities, local authorities and civil society, connecting with like-minded partners who align design with new forms of political action and intervention

Decolonising, Decarbonising, and Destandardising Design: our economy, industry and practice will change as we meet the challenge of climate crisis. We encourage you to test different ways of understanding design and construction, and world-making more broadly, that seek to decarbonise through sustainable and regenerative design, and which acknowledge and enable a built environment for all

FOSTERING INTIMACY, LEARNING THROUGH COLLABORATION

We are a small school: we currently have 110 students split across two cohorts on our Part 2. The LSA is a social as well as a creative enterprise – a family, not a factory – and we like all our students to know each other, our Faculty and Operations Team personally. Our modules encourage group work and collaborative working. Beyond the studio, we encourage you to establish a rich and diverse Community of Practice from across the sector and our Practice Network and we equip you with the tools to work as an agile, proactive and resourceful proto-practitioner.

UNITING ACADEMIA AND PRACTICE

Design Think Tank Symposium 2023. We welcomed tutors and representatives from practice and the broader Built Environment to discuss our engage with our student’s work and drive their projects forward.

Our Part 2 is research-led, practice-embedded and responsive to a changing world. We educate future leaders to design innovations that will shape better places, spaces and societies. Our Faculty is drawn from the full range of contemporary practice. Our core programme is complemented by a Practice Programme of events and collaborations with our Practice Network and the wider world of design, creativity and innovation.

EXPLORING THE CITY AS CAMPUS

The city is our campus and our muse. Our Student Hub is our studio in the heart of Hackney, East London, but teaching takes place in practices and places across the capital. The city provides us with a vast learning resource that includes our ever-expanding network of outstanding London-based architectural practices, local authority and industry expertise, access to archives, libraries and learned societies and use of specialist making facilities. But London is also our focus for study – research and project work is rooted in different quarters of the city from year to year. Engaging with varying localities allows greater opportunities for shared urban analysis, deeper engagement with architectural and urban issues, and the opportunity to test design experiments against real constraints and user groups.