Title: Architecture of the Extreme
Tutor: Nerma Cridge
This course delves into architectural theories that deal with extreme conditions, considering what architects can learn from and how they can adapt to working in a difficult remote location, at a distance, in sites that are underwater, in the desert, in polar climates, in outer space and at war. Habitats characterised by harsh environmental conditions are becoming the norm, and rather than travelling to distant places in order to encounter severe climates, we experience them much more often in our everyday urban environments. The course will investigate the architectural consequences of events such as flooding, heatwaves, droughts, snowstorms and forest fires, with case studies used to examine how communities might grow more sustainably.

Title: The Planetary: Philosophy, Technoscience, Poetics and Polity
Tutor: Rosy Head
This course explores the emerging philosophical and political category of the planetary: a framework for understanding Earth not as a globalised system, but as a shared condition of life beyond human scale. Unlike global problems, planetary issues are both transnational and hyper-local, demanding governance, ethics and imagination beyond current systems, which struggle to address accelerating climate breakdown and social injustice. Drawing from a wideranging history of ideas – including political philosophy, cultural ecology, intellectual history, poetry, aesthetics, Earth system science and activism – this course critiques existing modes of thought while exploring new ways of thinking, living and creating architecture in a world shaped by interdependence, precarity and possibility.

Title: Psychiatric Aberrations of the Urban  
Tutor: Dena Ziari  
This course explores the relationship between the development of new urban and architectural forms from the 18th century to the present day, and what can be considered their newly coined accompanying ailments of the mind: agoraphobia, kleptomania, astrophobia and electromagnetic sensitivity disorder. By exploring urban artefacts related to these ailments, we will situate aspects of what might be categorised as illness in psychiatry within a realm that could also be understood as a product and symptom of the cultural evolution of urbanism.

Title: The Local in Social Theory: Global Perspectives and Possibilities
Tutor: Nicholas Simcik-Arese
This course addresses canonical social research and philosophy that has grappled with the scale of belonging, and pairs it with scholarship on global urban poverty to explore a diversity of neighbourhood architectures. It introduces the historical study of situated social life and architectural theories of scales existing between building and city – the scales at which most people in the world directly shape their lives: labouring, socialising and dwelling. Through this combined approach, we will question contemporary planning assumptions and explore new possibilities for the local scale, seeing the city through philosophy and philosophy through the city, from the perspective of everyday architectures around the world.

Title: Archival Anxiety: Conflicted Memory and Feverish Dreams 
Tutor: Edward Bottoms
This course will interrogate anxieties surrounding ‘the archive’, taking the position that ‘the archivist and the architect are inseparable’ (Wigley, 2012). We will look critically at the archive and at archival structures and processes, as well as at the ways in which these impact upon architectural history, theory and practice. We will consider the archive as an organisational and creative architectural tool but also as an instrument of exclusion and marginalisation. We will look at some of the ethical and ideological issues implicit within the concept of the archive and offer tools to speculate on possible archival futures. 

Title: Breaking Ground: A New History of Gender and Architecture
Tutors: Jane Hall, Sarah Ackland
This course focuses on the contribution of women and non-binary people in architecture, inviting a discussion on the role played by gender in how the built environment is constructed. As such, it focuses on identity as a form of categorisation and as an organising principle, to explore the different roles women and non-binary people have inhabited in order to assimilate, change and also challenge the norms of architectural practice as it is commonly understood. The course will unpack the role of feminist theory – and by extension, intersectional theory – in relation to architectural design more broadly, through tangible examples of buildings and construction practices.

Title: Gravity Matters
Tutor: Catherine James
This course will explore how artists, architects, filmmakers and performers have considered gravity’s pull in their creative practices. Gravity and verticality both present rules and habits that encode so much of architecture, shadowing our behaviour within city spaces. According to philosopher Michel Serres, our bodies inhabit a ‘fault line’, leaning in and out of an imagined vertical. So why are these states of physical indeterminacy so rarely reflected in the built environment? A repression of falling is often fundamental to architectural thinking, yet sky-high buildings also induce states of vertigo. Furthermore, fallen or falling buildings – both historical and modern – produce important feelings of melancholy and failure. The course constructs a journey through ambivalent spaces such the fairground, circus, garden shed, junkyard, old garage and disused factory, revealing the creative power of gravity’s hidden hand. 

Title: Invisible Hands and Evil Eyes: The Economic Logics Shaping Our Cities
Tutor: Ibrahim Abdou
This course explores the plural economic logics that govern contemporary urbanism. It examines the capitalist drive to commodify all aspects of urban life in every corner of the globe, and the ways in which this drive replaces, subsumes or is resisted and undermined by a diverse array of social and cultural logics. Each session looks at a specific arena of city-making or a genre of urban practices, in order to examine the dynamic interplay between imposed economic forces and existing modes of habitation, exchange and labour. Lectures will introduce influential discourses on neoliberalism, financialisation and the commodification of buildings, infrastructures and urban spaces.

Title: Music and Architecture: Attitudes and Explorations of Space and Environment
Tutor: Victoria Miguel
This course examines the ways in which composers and musicians work with and against a variety of architectural spaces, from the domestic home to the bespoke concert hall, and from the natural to the built environment. The course uses composers’ writings and theoretical discussions that contextualise their ideas and approaches to music, as well as first-hand accounts of experiencing these works, to consider how we listen in space and how listening is affected by the different spaces and environments we inhabit. Each week is devoted to a key composition or performance, drawing on work by John Cage, Erik Satie, Pauline Oliveros, Maggi Payne and more. Paying attention to how we listen to and experience sound through space allows us to consider our environment in different ways.

Title: Consultation (Counter-)Cultures
Tutors: Julika Gittner, Claire Staunton
This course examines the history, theory and practices of ‘community consultation’ and works to develop alternative models for resident representation in architecture and planning. Community consultation is often a performance of public participation in consensus building, conducted by architects and planning professionals to satisfy legislative requirements with no genuine consideration of stakeholders’ needs and desires. The spatial injustices that have resulted from these flawed consultation processes over the past 20 years of regeneration in London are evident in residents’ growing discontent. This course examines the theories and legislation that underpin current methods of consultation, and considers what alternative political theories and urban practices can shape genuinely democratic decision-making processes.

Title: The Fight for the City: Space, Power and Class Composition in Contemporary London
Tutors: Ben Beach, Jamie Highnett 
This course argues that class struggle is the motivating force behind the development of the capitalist city, and will examine how working-class resistance can force capital into extensive programmes of urban re-engineering to retain (or regain) political control of contested territories. Through the lens of class composition analysis, we will explore how regeneration schemes are strategically deployed to decompose working-class organisation by displacing restive communities. Using territorial inquiry as our method, we will demonstrate how communities can fight for their right to the city. We will use seminars, walking tours and case studies in Canary Wharf and Tottenham to map out power relations, ownership and contested sites in the city, revealing the latent possibilities of architecture in the struggle for a better world. Students will create a piece of propaganda in zine format, accompanied by mappings and illustrations.