AUB, MA, Architecture (ARB/RIBA Part 2)

The masters in Architecture explores new approaches to architectural practice through making, innovation and collaboration, and for a variety of communities. This course is a creative professional qualification, validated by RIBA and ARB.

This two-year, studio-based course, which is accredited by ARB and RIBA, is structured around the idea of architectural intervention. You’ll work alongside fellow makers, collaborators, and enablers who have come from different schools around the world and you will have the opportunity to collaborate across the arts. You’ll cut into society’s deepest, darkest myths, and build interventions in utopias and dystopias, past, present and future.

The course starts with the body and its spatial rhythms, before taking these into an urban and landscape context. The final term of the first year is a research unit that prepares you for the main thesis unit.

The thesis unit gives you the opportunity to develop a complex project on a site of your choice or in a group – international or local. Recent projects have been based in Angola, Bangladesh and New York and more locally in Bournemouth, Boscombe and the New Forest.

The course’s unique location near a dramatic rolling and beautiful landscape (i.e. New Forest & Jurassic Coast), and within a vibrant and energetic seaside town, and with a proposed urban project by Zaha Hadid Architects provides a great context and research for projects and interventions. The modelmaking, printmaking and workshop facilities encourage a culture of making and production.

On this Masters, you’ll join the eclectic architecture student body, with weekly visiting lectures from international and national guests ranging in the last year from Norman Foster and Mike Davies, to Jessie Brennan and Shumi Bose. Michael Hopkins and Peter Cook started their architectural education in Bournemouth. The campus itself is enhanced by its new, ‘very blue’ drawing studio with ‘exceptional light’ that was designed by Professor Sir Peter Cook RA, Honorary Fellow and visiting professor, and opened by the late Zaha Hadid. If you’re looking for something different and fresh in your route to becoming an architect in a a changing world, then the MArch at AUB is for you.