• Offered for Year: 2024/25

• Module Leader(s): Mr Toby Blackman
• Co-Module Leader: Mr Matthew Margetts

• Owning School: Architecture, Planning & Landscape
• Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus

Semesters

Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.

Aims

This module aims to broaden and expand your architecture and spatial design skills, building on the knowledge and learning developed during your first year of study. Importantly, the module aims to develop and nurture your evolving understanding of prominent and important topics, ideas, and agendas shaping contemporary architecture design culture.

These topics, ideas, and agendas include:

• Developing and broadening your understanding of various design methods, techniques, and strategies with a view to integrating these approaches into your own design process.

• Developing and broadening your awareness of global architecture practice and culture, inclusive of precedents, practices, ideas, and theories influencing contemporary architecture design and construction.

• Developing and expanding your understanding of the current challenges posed by the global climate emergency and how these challenges might be addressed and considered through architecture design and practice.

• Developing, broadening, and nurturing your skills in communication and representation through visual, verbal, and written methods.

• Developing and broadening your understanding of professional architectural practice and your responsibility as an emerging professional to uphold ethical standards and adhere to essential regulatory frameworks.

In addition, this module also seeks to provide you with opportunities to:

• Work both independently and collectively in small peer and study groups.

• Synthesise and integrate knowledge, learning, and skills acquired from parallel taught modules.

• Continue to shape and develop your own personal ethics and values as a designer.

Outline Of Syllabus

This module delivers project-based learning through a series of design projects across Semester 1 and Semester 2. Each project requires you to engage and respond to a project brief that sets-out the scope and requirements of the design and spatial proposition you are expected to develop to satisfy module assessment criteria. Project briefs are structured to develop and nurture critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, as well as encouraging you to engage with contemporary issues and ideas shaping how we design and maintain our built and natural environments.

Projects across both Semesters 1 and 2 provide opportunities for you to develop your design skills across various scales, from developing strategic and tactical responses at an urban scale through to detail and technical scale considerations integrating constructional, material, environmental, and technological parameters. Projects will provide you with opportunities to develop design propositions for different types of spatial programme and for different groups of prospective building occupants and user groups. They will also enable you to engage with a broad and diverse range of global precedents, practices, ideas, and theories informing contemporary architecture design and culture.

Throughout each project, and across the duration of the module, you are encouraged to engage and experiment with a wide variety of design methods, practices, and techniques that are introduced to you through scheduled learning and teaching activities including small group teaching sessions, lectures, module talks, and project-related workshops. Your engagement with various methods, practices, and techniques will form the basis of a clearly documented design process that you are expected to develop across the duration of each project.

During Semester 1, design projects allow you to explore and develop your skills at designing at the domestic scale, proposing a small-scale housing scheme on an urban site. Throughout the project, you are encouraged to consider carefully how your design and spatial propositions address the needs of building occupants as well as how your proposals might engage productively and sustainably with existing neighbourhoods and communities.

During Semester 2, design projects allow you to develop your skills at designing a small-to-medium scale public building within a broader urban, civic, and ecological context. Across the semester, you will engage more explicitly with theories, practices and technologies of the arts and consider how they may influence your design decisions. You will also develop more in-depth insights into designing for specific building occupants with a view to translating these insights into detailed design and spatial propositions, communicated using a range of appropriate representational techniques.

Across both Semester 1 and Semester 2, opportunities will be provided for you to work both independently and collectively in small peer groups to help you develop important creative and collaborative team-working skills that are essential for future professional practice. You will also have opportunities to present your ideas in a variety of formats, from conventional design review 'pin-up's' through to more expansive and immersive exhibitions of large-scale models, drawings, and installations.

Teaching Methods

Teaching Activities

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Scheduled learning and teaching activities are largely delivered through small group teaching. You will meet with a small group of peers and a design tutor on a weekly basis during both Semester 1 and 2 to discuss your work and the development of your project. The delivery of these small group teaching sessions can take a number of forms, from seminar style discussions through to more structured oral presentations. Small group teaching sessions operate as the primary teaching and learning activities, aiding development of module learning and skill outcomes through regular dialogue with both design tutor(s) and peers.

Small group teaching activities are further supported by other scheduled learning and teaching activities including lectures, module talks, and workshops that explore a variety of related and important themes and ideas associated with the module. These sessions also aid the development of both module and project specific learning and skill outcomes.

Throughout the duration of the module, you will be expected to conduct both structured guided learning and guided independent study to support a thorough and well-documented submission in accordance with both Semester 1 and 2 project briefs and assessment criteria. Both structured guided learning and guided independent learning should reflect and respond to discussions and dialogue conducted during weekly scheduled learning and teaching activities with your peers, design tutor(s), module leader(s), or invited guest contributors such as reviewers or guest lecturers.

Assessment Methods

The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners

Other Assessment

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

Summative assessment will take place at the end of each Semester. Each project submission is awarded a final grade (0-100) constituting a specific percentage of the overall module grade. The final module grade will be awarded as an averaged total grade (0-100) from grades awarded for both the Semester 1 and 2 project submissions.

Importantly, students must achieve a passing grade in the Semester 2 project/assessment component in order to progress into Stage 3 of the BA(Hons) Architecture degree programme

The assessment criteria for each semesters' project submissions are based on the learning outcomes and assessment criteria outlined in their respective project briefs.

The assessment criteria in all design projects broadly integrates the following expectations:

• Demonstration of a considered and thorough design process offering a clear relationship to a declared design proposition.

• Evidence of engagement with ethical and professional considerations that assist design decision-making.

• Declaration of a design proposition.

• Evaluation and integration of construction and material considerations.

• Application of a range of representation techniques to coherently communicate both design process and proposition.

At certain points in each Semester, you will receive formative feedback indicating broad performance to assist you with further developing project submissions that are consistent with the project assessment criteria.

Reading Lists

• ARC2001's Reading List

Timetable

• Timetable Website: www.ncl.ac.uk/timetable/
• ARC2001's Timetable