History and Critical Thinking (HCT) offers a postgraduate platform from which to develop and communicate knowledge that connects contemporary issues with systematic historical enquiry. At stake in the writing of history is a political engagement with the social, material, cultural and environmental exigencies of the present. Therefore, the ambition of the programme is threefold: to provide conceptual resources to explore social, political, economic and institutional structures as well as their impact on architectural histories and forms of production; to understand contemporary discursive and material organisations from a historical, critical, environmental, interdisciplinary and transnational point of view; and to highlight the ways in which architecture is entangled with other spatial practices and alternative forms of knowledge production and dissemination.
Through a programme of lectures, seminars, open debates, group readings, archive visits and writing workshops, students are encouraged to critically reflect on practices of historiography and the archive, language and translation, and social, environmental and territorial issues. This enables them to develop the resources and skills required to engage with recent scholarship, and to advance architectural thinking and practice. The programme sees specific and canonical architectural histories as valid sites of investigation, while supporting students, epistemologically and methodologically, to discover and promote missing and marginalised voices, as well as new ways of thinking.
Writing is essential to the programme and is considered here as a pedagogical project, a practice of thinking and a tool to articulate and communicate ideas in a precise, effective manner. We explore different modes of writing alongside other communicative media such as drawings, photographs, film and literature. Students are encouraged to explore, adopt and adapt elements of disciplines and practices in their own writing, while preserving their own voice.
The historical and theoretical understanding that HCT graduates gain through the programme allows them to pursue doctoral studies, to develop their careers in other fields such as curation or journalism, or to become involved in research and teaching in architecture.
The programme takes place over 12 months: students complete six courses during Terms 1 and 2, after which they participate in the Thesis Research Seminar and produce a written thesis in Terms 3 and 4. Language and critical writing are integral to all of these courses, which focus in Term 1 on issues of historiography and histories, theories and practices of the archive. In Term 2, courses focus on disciplinary, social, territorial and environmental questions. Throughout, students are encouraged to engage in conversations, to expand their disciplinary knowledge from a variety of viewpoints, to enhance their analytical and critical skills, and to develop new competencies in visual, verbal and written communication. Historians, critics, architects, artists, curators, archivists, publishers and editors contribute to the programme through the annual HCT and PhD Debates, Workshops and Open Seminars, which enable discussion and collective reflection.
HCT also provides research facilities and supervision to research degree candidates (MPhil and PhD) registered under the AA’s joint PhD programme, a cross disciplinary initiative supported by all the Taught Postgraduate programmes.
Term 1
Writing History
Tutor: Marina Lathouri
This course reviews the historiography of architectural modernism to interrogate the conceptual assumptions and epistemological frameworks that have dominated historical research and writing in the 20th century. Sessions will critically examine political, social and cultural realities, as well as geographies, ideologies and structures of power, material technologies and formal considerations. These are understood as intertwined histories of modernity that are produced, propagated and contested in relation to changing scales, scopes and sites of modernisation.
Unpacking the Archive: Evidence and Mediality
Tutors: Marina Lathouri with Guillermo Arsuaga and guest tutors
The institutional infrastructures and material technologies of the archive play a critical role in the storage and transmission of knowledge, but the archive is not only rooted in material reality. It is also a form of intervention, with implications in relation to disciplinary positions which impact how we systematise knowledge and articulate narratives. A series of seminars, supported by visits to archives including Drawing Matter in London and the Cité de l’architecture Archives and Bibliotheque de la Ville de Paris, will question these implications by asking: what are the strengths and limitations of the archive as a source and site of knowledge production? How might we rethink the complexities and entanglements of the archive? How are its boundaries drawn, and what conditions govern its accessibility? What constitutes evidence in architectural history? How does the archive legitimise historians’ expertise and authority?
Term 2
Writing Architecture: Intertwined Practices
Tutor: Marina Lathouri
This course traces the formation of disciplinary knowledge in architecture. It begins with a close examination of early European architectural writings and the way these texts conceptually and visually describe the object of architecture and the city, as well as the practice and responsibilities of the architect. Subsequent sessions investigate the search for origins and language in architectural theory and in relation to the growth of national histories and the emergence of the concept of race in the 17th and 18th centuries; the professionalisation of historical research and teaching in the 19th century; processes of colonisation and planning; and the role of drawing and various technologies of graphic and visual representation. The course highlights the historical terms needed to build an understanding and reassess histories, objects and methods at the heart of the architectural discipline.
Title: Architecture Agents and Economies
Tutor: William Orr
Architecture now faces an accelerating set of cultural, political, ecological, professional, economic and even existential challenges; in response, new modes of practice and production are expanding the discipline in diverging directions. This course will develop a theoretical and historical perspective on architecture, considering the discipline as a dynamic social institution which is simultaneously determined by external forces while being constructed and reproduced from within. Focusing on the changing disciplinary landscape, we will draw upon ideas and analyses from sociology and political economy, as well as historical encounters with European industrialisation, colonial South Africa and rapid development in East Asia, among other contexts.
Climate Peace
Tutor: John Palmesino
Architecture is struggling to contend with the rise of a new climatic regime and with the magnitude of the technosphere, which seems from our perspective to be the result of multiple human projects, designs, actions and processes. Yet humankind is only one component of the technosphere, despite our endeavours to sustain it. This seminar investigates how this inversion of agency affects narratives of modernisation and highlights the connections between processes of architectural development, rapid urbanisation and the human impact on the Earth System.
Annual PhD and HCT Debates Series, Writing-with: Architecture and Land
Tutor: Marina Lathouri with guest speakers
The PhD and HCT Debates are a venue for the exchange of ideas and arguments. Guest speakers are invited to attend, enabling a process of thinking-in-common that is distinct from the seminar or the lecture. Open to the wider school community, this year the sessions aim to bring together voices in architectural theory, criticism and environmental history to create space between writing as a practice of collective doing and making, and ecological and political realities. Presentations by guest speakers and roundtable conversations will be interspersed with interviews and writings, resulting in the production of a publication.
Term 3
Thesis Research Seminar
Tutor: Marina Lathouri with HCT staff and guest critics
The thesis is the largest and most significant component of students’ work within the MA programme. This seminar helps students decide on appropriate research topics, organise their research and develop their central argument. Critical method and historical analysis are equally important within each individual research project. The seminar establishes a set of resources and questions regarding the ‘production’ of history and the accountability of research and writing which allows students to develop and test their own ideas, methodologies and ambitions. At the end of Term 3, the thesis outline is presented and discussed with tutors and invited critics.
Term 4
In Term 4, each student develops and finalises their 15,000-word thesis independently. During the summer term, group presentations and individual tutorials provide students with support and guidance to refine their writing and ideas. The presentation of the final thesis to HCT staff and guests, as well as to new students embarking upon the programme, provides a formal conclusion to – and celebration of – the work of the year.