Advanced Architectural Design

Our MSc Advanced Architectural Design is aimed at international designers who want to enhance their design and research skills.

This post-professional degree helps you consolidate your own identity as a designer. You'll develop your own distinctive specialisms through research-led design, with an emphasis on sophisticated representational techniques. Our aim is to help you become a leading architect in the profession.

The course offers an innovative, absorbing, research-led pathway in advanced architectural design. It can be undertaken on either 1-year or 2-year pathways.

1 Year programme

This pathway focuses on the dialogue and interconnection between architecture and urban regions. Each year we select an urban region in the UK, and study it through a critical, poetic and speculative lens. Recently, we’ve been looking at Newcastle and the wider North East region, and the complicated legacy of industrialisation.

A specialism of this programme is our emphasis on experimental, creative representational tools and modes to explore architectural issues. We encourage students to work in a range of media, from hand-drawing and modelling, to 3D modelling, virtual and augmented reality tools, and installation practices.

Our workshop helps facilitate the programme, and each year we work to a large-scale exhibition of work on campus.

The pathway is structured with an intensive first semester, introducing you to a variety of representational techniques and tools, followed by a two-semester long ‘thesis project’, in which you are able to set your own frameworks, sites and explorations for an in-depth architectural study through a range of experimental techniques.

2 Year programme

This two year programme extends the first year of the programme into a deeper advanced understanding of the mutual interrelationship between architecture and urban form through integration with modules from our M.Arch programme.

After completing two semesters alongside 1-year programme students, you’ll join an M.Arch design studio in your second year, and take additional modules intended to expand your critical and theoretical thinking around architecture.