architecture phd london

Architecture Research (PhD)

Working at the intersection of theory, research, media and critical-spatial-practices, the MPhil/ PhD programme in Architecture supports experimental practice-led and interdisciplinary theses aiming at tangible public and social impact. The programme fosters architectural research at the intersection of history and theory, critical ecologies, new materialism, and digital culture. The programme is investigating the diverse ways in which architects, artists, filmmakers, curators and other cultural producers have negotiated crises associated with globalisation, migration and statelessness, the hauntings of empire and the colonial present, new digital technologies, and the growing biopolitical conflicts around ecology and climate change. We strongly encourage to think about the performativity of space, or architectural forms and practices in their interrelation to the climate crisis, social movements and institutional change.

We support written academic research in the history and theory of architecture and new media of exploration and documentation. We are especially interested in practice-led research, which could involve an architectural project, a work of heritage preservation, community work, an artistic practice, an exhibition, or a film production. Our programme is relevant to diverse research careers in academia, spatial practice, curation, publishing, and critical conservation. We encourage establishing real world collaborations with industry-based research groups, leading design practices, policymakers, social and environmental justice groups, human rights organisations, and cultural institutions. We particularly welcome research proposals aligned with the strategic areas of research in the School of Architecture: Climate Justice , ‍ Architecture & Social Movements , ‍ Institutional Forms & Practices , ‍ Documentary Research, Heritage & Digital Materialities , ‍ Interior Architecture & The Culture of Care , ‍ Feeling, Fiction, Frame , Laboratory for Design and Machine Learning .

All research themes encourage interdisciplinary research with new models of collaboration between postgraduate research students, as well as academic and non-academic institutions or partners.

Film: A Short History of the Elevator Pitch by Ines Weizman

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MPhil/PhD Research Architecture

Course information.

Visual Cultures

3-4 years full-time or 4-6 years part-time

Course overview

This MPhil/PhD programme is aimed at practitioners of architecture and other related spatial practices who would like to develop a sustained multi-year practice-led research project.

• It allows you to produce intensive, rigorous, and scholarly research as well as further elaborate your own practice.
• The programme is structured around an annual series of two-day long seminars, which take place each month during the Autumn, Winter, and Spring terms.
• The seminars are organised as a Roundtable discussion of student research projects as they progress each year. Each of the Roundtable seminars is supplemented by invited guests who bring relevant scholarly knowledge or practices into the Centre. Student and guest presentations, along with assigned readings, provide the common conceptual ground for discussion of work and ideas.
• Visual Cultures assessment are 100% coursework. Normally this consists of essays, sometimes accompanied by creative projects, group projects, multi-media projects, presentations, symposia, reviews, and studio work.
• Find out more about  research degrees at Goldsmiths . 
• Find out more about the Centre for Research Architecture .

Contact the department

If you have specific questions about the degree, contact Dr Susan Schuppli .

What our students say

Susan schuppli, entry requirements.

You should normally have (or expect to be awarded) a taught Masters in a relevant subject area. 

You might also be considered for some programmes if you aren’t a graduate or your degree is in an unrelated field, but have relevant experience and can show that you have the ability to work at postgraduate level.

International qualifications

We accept a wide range of international qualifications. Find out more about the qualifications we accept from around the world.

If English isn’t your first language, you will need an IELTS score (or equivalent English language qualification ) of 6.5 with a 6.5 in writing and no element lower than 6.0 to study this programme. If you need assistance with your English language, we offer a range of courses that can help prepare you for postgraduate-level study .

Fees, funding & scholarships

Annual tuition fees.

These are the fees for students starting their programme in the 2024/2025 academic year.

• Home - full-time: £TBC
• Home - part-time: £TBC
• International - full-time: £TBC

If your fees are not listed here, please check our postgraduate fees guidance or contact the Fees Office , who can also advise you about how to pay your fees.

It’s not currently possible for international students to study part-time under a student visa. If you think you might be eligible to study part-time while being on another visa type, please contact our Admissions Team for more information.

If you are looking to pay your fees please see our guide to making a payment .

Additional costs

In addition to your tuition fees, you'll be responsible for any additional costs associated with your course, such as buying stationery and paying for photocopying. You can find out more about what you need to budget for on our study costs page .

There may also be specific additional costs associated with your programme. This can include things like paying for field trips or specialist materials for your assignments.

Funding opportunities

Find out more about postgraduate fees and explore funding opportunities . If you're applying for funding, you may be subject to an application deadline.

AHRC studentships .

How to apply

You apply directly to Goldsmiths using our online application system. 

Before submitting your application you'll need to have: 

• Details of  your education history , including the dates of all exams/assessments
• The  email address of your referee  who we can request a reference from, or alternatively an electronic copy of your academic reference
• Contact details of a second referee
• A  personal statement – t his can either be uploaded as a Word Document or PDF, or completed online

           Please see our guidance on writing a postgraduate statement

• If available, an electronic copy of your educational transcript (this is particularly important if you have studied outside of the UK, but isn’t mandatory)
• Details of your  research proposal

You'll be able to save your progress at any point and return to your application by logging in using your username/email and password.

Before you apply for a research programme, we advise you to get in touch with the programme contact, listed above. It may also be possible to arrange an advisory meeting.

Before you start at Goldsmiths, the actual topic of your research has to be agreed with your proposed supervisor, who will be a member of staff active in your general field of research. The choice of topic may be influenced by the current research in the department or the requirements of an external funding body. 

If you wish to study on a part-time basis, you should also indicate how many hours a week you intend to devote to research, whether this will be at evenings or weekends, and for how many hours each day.

Research proposals

Along with your application and academic reference, you should also upload a research proposal at the point of application. 

This should be in the form of a statement of the proposed area of research and should include: 

• delineation of the research topic
• why it has been chosen
• an initial hypothesis (if applicable)
• a brief list of major secondary sources

When to apply  

We accept applications from October for students wanting to start the following September. 

We encourage you to complete your application as early as possible, even if you haven't finished your current programme of study. It's very common to be offered a place conditional on you achieving a particular qualification.  

If you're applying for external funding from one of the Research Councils, make sure you submit your application by the deadline they've specified. 

Selection process 

Admission to many programmes is by interview, unless you live outside the UK. Occasionally we'll make candidates an offer of a place on the basis of their application and qualifications alone.

Find out more about applying .

Similar programmes

Graduate Diploma in Contemporary Art History

The Graduate Diploma in Contemporary Art History is for graduates of other disciplines with an interest in contemporary art and ideas, and who wish to carry out research at higher levels in the fields of visual cultures.

MA Contemporary Art Theory

The MA Contemporary Art Theory is for those with a special interest in contemporary art, and a commitment to theoretical work in the subject.

MA Research Architecture

The MA Research Architecture is for graduates from a range of disciplines who want to examine how architecture can engage with questions of contemporary culture, politics, media, ecology and justice and question whether spatial practice can become a form of research.

MPhil/PhD Advanced Practices

This program will provide you with an opportunity for your own work to engage with the widening horizons of new practices. It will also enable you to invent methodologies, reframe urgencies, and reimagine the contexts for work.

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Course requirements:

Candidates accepted for this course will have a 1st class or a high 2i honours degree and, a Masters degree with 70% overall (or equivalent) in Architecture or a related discipline.

The University requires all applicants to demonstrate competence in the English language at a very high level before they begin their proposed course of study - adherence to this requirement is strict. You must be able to demonstrate that you are able to communicate in English at a level and in an idiom suitable to the subject. You will, therefore, need to provide evidence that you meet the University’s minimum requirements for competence in English. For further information see  Postgraduate Admissions Office .

How to Make an Application for the PhD in Architecture

If you do meet the course requirements, you are recommended to consult the list of our established University Teaching Officers (UTOs) and their research interests (see below for links to information about each of our UTOs). If one of our UTOs has relevant research interests to your own, please email them directly with a short research proposal of about 300 words, an example of your writing and a CV to determine whether they are potentially available to work with you as a supervisor before you make a formal application. See:

Dr Ronita Bardhan - Data-driven built-environment design, spatial analysis and climate change, Big data for sustainability in the built-environment, design for demand side energy management

Professor James Campbell - History of building construction, history of library design

Dr Ramit Debnath - Cutting-edge interdisciplinary domain of environmental data science, computational social science, and human-in-the-loop AI design to enable climate action. Applicants should be able to demonstrate excellent data science and quantitative research skills and a passion for interdisciplinary engagement

Dr Michal Gath-Morad  - Exploring how architectural design impacts spatial cognition, behaviour, and social dynamics in diverse environments, from healthcare and workplaces to complex urban settings. Proposals can encompass empirical studies, the development of digital simulation tools for human-centred design, or action research investigating the influence of evidence-based design tools on design cognition

Dr Felipe Hernández - Architectural and urban design, participatory design, social urbanism, history and theory

Professor Ying Jin – City planning, urban design, and urban modelling

Dr Irit Katz -  Socio-politics of architecture and urbanism; transitional spaces, camps and borderscapes; spaces of displacement, migration, and climate mobilities; ethnic and cultural diversity, exclusion and inequality; conflict and violence; housing insecurities; radical spatial and urban transformations; participatory architecture and urban design

Dr Antiopi Koronaki  - Computational design, architectural engineering and geometry, and design optimization principles. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to automation and design for disassembly, modular buildings and circularity in the construction sector, engineered timber construction, as well as advanced fabrication and robotics in architecture

Dr Michael Ramage – Designing and building structural masonry spans using traditional techniques and new materials

Professor Flora Samuel  - Affordable housing, participatory planning, community consultation, social value and mapping data with communities

Dr Darshil U. Shah  - Design and manufacture with biocomposites and low-carbon materials, Structure- property-processing relations in natural materials and structures, Biomechanics and biomimetics, History of natural materials & materials processing, and Design education and pedagogy

Dr Nicholas Simcik Arese - Social theory and urban planning, international development, property rights, youth, masculinity, migration, Middle East, Mediterranean, Mexico, legal geography, science and technology studies, anthropology of value, ethnography

Professor Emily So - Casualty estimation in earthquake loss modelling, risk in the built environment.

Professor Koen Steemers – architectural and urban implications of environmental issues ranging from energy use to human comfort

Dr Max Sternberg – architecture & philosophy, socio-politics of architecture, urban conflict, architectural history

Dr Minna Sunikka-Blank - sustainable building policies, thermal retrofit, energy use behaviour, aesthetics of sustainable architecture

Dr Matteo Zallio  - Interdisciplinary research on Inclusive Design for the built environment, product, and service design

You are recommended to only make a formal application via the University’s Graduate Admissions Office, once an established UTO has confirmed that they would be interested to consider a formal application.  Please note that an offer of admission to the University is subject to final approval by the University's Graduate Admissions Office.  Do not assume that you will be made an offer on the grounds that your prospective supervisor has suggested you make a formal application – this just represents the first stage of admission administration.

All applications must be made via the Applicant Portal available on the Postgraduate Admissions Office  website. It is important that you read through the information available on the Graduate Admissions Office website before submitting your application. If you are already a current graduate student at Cambridge you will be referred to as a ‘Continuer’ on the Graduate Admissions Office website.

You will need to arrange for the following documents to be submitted with your application:

• Academic Reference(s) 
• A Personal Reference will be required if you are applying for the Gates Cambridge Scholarship
• Evidence of Competence in English if English is not your first language
• Sample of Work - this could be a journal publication or a chapter from your undergraduate dissertation
• Research Proposal of 1000 - 1500 words should consist of a topic and a hypothesis, a literature review, a statement on method, and key references

Application Deadlines

The PhD in Architecture commences in October each year and applications for the course can be made from the preceding September. All applications must be made via the Applicant Portal available on the Postgraduate Admissions Office  website. It is important that you read through the information available on the Graduate Admissions Office website before submitting your application.

The final deadline for applicants seeking funding is 7 January 2020. Even if you are not seeking funding, we strongly recommend that you submit your application by 7 January, as no applications will be accepted once this competitive and popular programme is full.

If places are still available on programmes beyond this deadline; self-funded applicants will continue to be considered until the final deadline of 15 May 2020.  No applications will be considered after this deadline.

Course Fees

Information relating to the fee for this course is available from the  Postgraduate Admissions Office .   

If you are seeking funding for your course via one of the University’s main funding competitions, there are specific deadlines and eligibility criteria for each competition. Please check the Funding Section of the  Postgraduate Admissions Office  website for information and application deadlines.  

Applicants classed as 'Home' or 'EU' for fees purposes and wish to research an AHRC approved research subject are eligible to be considered for an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP studentship. Applicants wishing to be considered for these awards need to check the appropriate box on the application form. Applicants will also need to ensure that they make their application by the funding competition deadline for Home/EU students. Please see the University's AHRC DTP funding website for more information: https://www.csah.cam.ac.uk/Education/ahrcdtp together with the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP website: https://www.oocdtp.ac.uk/

The Department sometimes offers EPSRC awards for students classified as 'Home' or 'EU' for fees purposes.  These awards are advertised on the Department’s website and other media during the Easter Term (Summer Term) if available.  Applicants who have already applied for the PhD degree will automatically be considered for these awards if they meet the criteria for them.

After your Application is Submitted

When the application reaches the Department, it will be considered by the Department’s Graduate Admissions Team. Applicants may be invited for an interview in Cambridge, or, via Skype if it is not possible to travel to Cambridge.  The Faculty’s Degree Committee will then consider the application and make a recommendation to the Graduate Admissions Office as to whether an offer of a place on the course should be made, and if so, with what academic conditions.

Please be aware that this process may take several months.  You can check the status of your application at any time via your Applicant Portal.

Full information about making your application, Colleges, fees and funding opportunities is provided on the  Postgraduate Admissions Office  website pages.

For further information on graduate admission to the Department of Architecture contact:  [email protected]

At a Glance

Course length and dates:

3 years full-time/5 years part-time, October start.

Examination:

A dissertation of not more than 80,000 words. 

Academic requirement:

A 1st class or a high 2i honours degree in Architecture or a related discipline, and a Masters degree with merit (if a merit category exists).

English language requirement:

See  Postgraduate Admissions Office . 

Applications accepted from:

The preceding September.

Application Deadlines:

The final deadline for applicants seeking funding is early January, please see  Postgraduate Admissions  for exact date. Even if you are not seeking funding, we strongly recommend that you submit your application by 7 January, as no applications will be accepted once this competitive and popular programme is full.

Course Fees:

Information relating to the fee for this course is available from the  Postgraduate Admissions Office .  

If you are seeking funding for your course via one of the University’s main funding competitions, there are specific deadlines and eligibility criteria for each competition.  Please check the Funding Section of the  Postgraduate Admissions Office  website for information and application deadlines. 

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The Phd Research Programme at the Architectural Association

Vitruvius translator – and the missing source text.

Sokratis Georgiadis

MA HCT & PhD Debates: History in Translation. Marina Lathouri and Guest Speakers

Thursday 12 March | 4:00pm | 32 Bedford Square (First Floor Back)

In portraying the architecture of the temples, which make up the contents of Books 3 and 4 of Vitruvius’ “Ten Books on Architecture” and can be considered the core of this work, its author makes no secret of his dependence on Greece. But which were his sources? In the preface to his 7th book, he himself gives the names of more than 20 Greek architects who have written about their art before him; these writings, the oldest of which date back to the 6th century BC, are all lost today. Which of them he knew and used and to what extent we do not know. Nor is it likely that the Roman theorist and author of the “Ten Books” knew first-hand the architecture of which he wrote, not even the Greek architecture of southern Italy and Sicily. The source text Vitruviusʼ, is therefore not secure and this is a problem for his theory, but above all for its reception, i.e. the more than two-thousand-year-old tradition of European Vitruvianism.

Image : Delphi ex-Cnidienne. Photography by Sokratis Georgiadis

Graf, Fritz, “Pompai in Greece – Some Considerations about Space and Ritual in the Greek Polis,” in: Robin Hägg (ed.).  The Role of Religion in the Early Greek Polis , Stockholm 1996. 55-65.

Biography : Sokratis Georgiadis, born in 1949 in Thessaloniki (GR), studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin and received his PhD from the University of Stuttgart. In the years 1987-1994 he held a research and teaching position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), he also held temporary teaching posts at the Universities of Zurich and Bern. In 1994 he became Professor for Architectural Theory and Design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Berlin-Weissensee and, shortly after, Professor of Architecture and Design History at the State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart where he taught until 2018. He lectured widely in Europe and North America, wrote articles for numerous architectural magazines and organized architectural exhibitions. His research interests include architectural history and theory in the 19th and 20th centuries and, more recently, Greek architecture of the archaic period. His studies on Sigfried Giedion include book publications (An Intellectual Biography 1989 [engl.1993], The Project of a New Tradition [co-editor of the exhibition catalogue, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, 1989 / German], Introduction to Giedions’s “Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete” in the Text & Documents Series of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Epilogue to the German reprint of the same book [2000]) and numerous articles. He is presently working on the edition of the papers of Giedion’s unfinished book-project “Die Entstehung des heutigen Menschen” (1929-1938, The Growth of Contemporary Man).

Empathy and the Phenomenological Ethnography of Space

Thursday 30 January | 4:00pm | 32 Bedford Square (First Floor Back)

This lecture will address the Debates’ theme of history ‘in-translation’ in terms of an inquiry into three interrelated phenomena:  empathy ,  corporeity , and  spatiality . We will draw primarily on contemporary scholarship on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein on empathy ( Einfühlung ), and Jan Patočka and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on embodiment, in dialogue with the architectural theory of the late Dalibor Vesely. Beginning with this initial sketch of the philosophical problems, we consider concretely the question of the sense perceptual and empathic basis of the experience of the historical horizon of an ‘Other’s’ world, in terms of the expressive and communicative structures of corporeity and spatiality. The concrete, exemplary event that will guide our inquiry is a ritual practice of an Afro-Brazilian religion—called a Candomblé  caboclo reunião  of Tupikinim—situated in the periphery of the city of Salvador in the Brazilian Northeast. Our access to the ritual will be primarily through ethnographic descriptions of its spatiality, and thus implicated in our considerations is the question of the status of ethnography as a method and descriptive practice. Following the critiques of philosopher Valentin Mudimbe, we will foreground the ethical implications of the hermeneutic sense of empathy ( Einfühlung ) for ethnography. Mudimbe’s empathic thesis derived from hermeneutics, I propose, bears a certain affinity with anthropologist

Marilyn Strathern’s methodological grounding of ethnography in the concrete conditions of fieldwork and its ‘effects’. We will thus explore the question of the status of spatiality for ethnography in Strathern in relation to Mudimbe’s critique of ethnography’s historicity. The problems raised through a consideration of the above phenomenological and anthropological relations will guide us in investigating the tensions in the understandings of the relationship between historicity and spatiality for the shared, embodied experience of the ritual as exemplary, and its more general implications.

Image :   Caboclo  figurine on the ritual table. Salvador 2010. Photography by Tao DuFour

Marilyn Strathern, “The Ethnographic Effect I”, in  Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things  (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), pp.1-26.

Klaus Held, “Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Life-World”, in  The New Husserl: A Critical Reader , edited by DonnWelton (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp.32-62.

Dermot Moran, “Edith Stein’s Encounter with Edmund Husserl and Her Phenomenology of the Person”, in  Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood: Essays on Edith Stein’s Phenomenological Investigations , edited by Elisa Magrì and Dermot Moran (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017), pp.31-47.

Tao DuFour, “Toward a Somatology of Landscape: Anthropological Multinaturalism and the ‘Natural’ World”, in  Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture , edited by Ellan Braae and Henriette Steiner (London: Routledge, 2019), pp.156-170.

Valentin Mudimbe, “The Patience of Philosophy”, in  The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge  (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp.135-186.

Biography : Tao DuFour   is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. His work explores the overlaps between architecture, anthropology, and philosophy, building on his research on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. His current research is concerned with the question of architecture’s embeddedness in environmental histories. He holds a PhD and MPhil in the history and philosophy of architecture from the University of Cambridge, and a BArch from The Cooper Union. He is the author of  Husserl and Spatiality: Toward a Phenomenological Ethnography of Space  (Routledge, forthcoming 2020).

The Female Body Politic: Re-modelling The Book of the City of Ladies

Penelope Haralambidou

Thursday 13 February | 4:00pm | 32 Bedford Square (First Floor Back)

The paper will present my practice/drawing-led research, which focuses on two works by French late medieval author Christine de Pizan:  The Book of the City of Ladies , 1405; and  The Book of the Body Politic, c .1404-07. Conflating the act of writing a book – a thesis against institutional misogyny – with the construction of an imaginary city, the first work,  The Book of the City of Ladies,  has been seen as a proto-feminist manifesto. Although widely studied in terms of its literary significance, I focus on the under-researched architectural and urban allegory depicted in the text, which imagines a Utopia inhabited solely by women and constructed for them by a woman (de Pizan herself), as well as its accompanying illuminations (miniature illustrations) displaying three different stages of the foundation and physical construction of the city. Inspired by Aristotle’s  Politics  and revisiting the ancient Greek metaphor, by which a state or society and its institutions are conceived of as a biological human body, in the second work,  The Book of the Body Politic , de Pizan offers her version of a medieval political theory, which I attempt to connect with her allegorical city.

Image : Photograph by Andy Keate

Penelope Haralambidou (2016). ‘With-drawing Room on Vellum: The Persistent Vanishing of the Architectural Drawing Surface’. In Allen, L., Pearson L. (Eds.).  Drawing Futures: Speculations for Contemporary Art and Architecture  (pp.82–89). London UCL Press

Sandra L. Hindman. ‘With Ink and Mortar. Christine de Pizan’s Cite des Dames’. In:  Feminist Studies , Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 457-483

Earl Jeffrey Richards. ‘Where are the men in Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies. Architectural and Allegorical Structures in Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cite des Dames.

Biography : Penelope Haralambidou   is Associate Professor and Director of Communications at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She coordinates MArch PG24, where she promotes a highly innovative research-based teaching methodology that uses digital film and immersive environments to re-think architectural design through time. Her research employs architectural drawing, model-making and digital film as investigatory tools to analyse ideas and work, not only in architecture, but also visual representation, the politics of vision, art and cinema. Her work has been exhibited internationally, she is the author of the monograph  Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire  (London: Routledge, 2013), and she has contributed writing on themes, such as architectural representation, allegory, figural theory, stereoscopy and film to a wide range of publications. Her solo show, ‘City of Ladies’, presenting her practice-led research of Christine de Pizan’s proto- feminist text  The Book of the City of Ladies , 1405, was hosted by DomoBaal gallery in January–February 2020.

Animals, Architecture, and the Critique of Modernity

Kostas Tsiambaos

Although the representations of animals in architecture since 1900 receded, as positivism and functionalism prevailed, one can still notice various representations of animals in the work of modern and postmodern architects. From the goat in Hans Poelzig’s  Porzellanpavillon  (1922), and the pack-donkey in Le Corbusier’s  The City of Tomorrow  (1929), to the horse in Superstudio’s  Atti Fondamentali  (1972), and the dog in Lina Bo Bardi’s  Intermezzo per bambini  (1984) the animal, as a symbolic representation, comes to serve a critical-interpretive function. In my talk, I will focus on a few case studies in which the animal comes to question the form and content of architecture by pointing towards a meta-architectural future.

Image :  Massimo Scolari, The Solitary Sparrow, 1974

Spyros Papapetros,  The Birth of Design https://www .e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/68709/the-birth-of-design/

Boris Groys,  Romantic Bureaucracy: Alexander Kojeve’s post-historical wisdom  (in: Radical Philosophy 196, March/April 2016)

Efthymia Rentzou,  Animal  (Columbia University Press, 2016)

Biography : Kostas Tsiambaos is Assistant Professor in History & Theory of Architecture at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University in Athens (NTUA). He is Chair of do.co.mo.mo. Greece. He studied in Athens (NTUA) and New York (GSAPP Columbia University). His research has been published in international journals ( The Journal of Architecture ,  ARQ ,  Architectural Histories, AΡΕΝΑ JAR ) and international collective volumes. His recent books include  From Doxiadis’ Theory to Pikionis’ Work: Reflections of Antiquity in Modern Architecture  (London & New York: Routledge, 2018) and  Ambivalent Modernity: 9+1 texts on Modern Architecture in Greece  (Thessaloniki: Epikentro, 2017 – in Greek). He has also co-edited the exhibition catalogue  The Future as a Project: Doxiadis in Skopje  (Athens: Hellenic Institute of Architecture, 2018). In the fall semester of the academic year 2019-2020, he was a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Fellow at Princeton University.

Geo-aesthetics of the Anthropocene

Thursday 23 January | 4:00pm | 32 Bedford Square (First Floor Back)

This seminar will explore aesthetics as central to the various issues debated today under the rubric of the Anthropocene. It will do so especially by attending to the ways in which the environment is aestheticised as part of political projects and by asking how these aestheticisations in turn engender, encourage and legitimise particular environmental interventions. In terms of its critical analytical objectives, the seminar aims to complicate flattening notions of humanity and universality that continue to characterise mainstream approaches to the Anthropocene in architecture and related disciplines.

Image :  View of a Coal Seam on the Island of Labuan  (engraved by L.C. Heath & lithographed by C.W. Giles, 1847)

Dilip da Cunha,  The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent  (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

Kathryn Yusoff,  A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None  (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018)

Timothy Mitchell,  Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity  (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002)

Biography : Eray Cayli, PhD (University College London, 2015), studies the aesthetics and geographies of political violence in Turkey anthropologically. His current research concerns with how these legacies shape and are shaped by contemporary discourses and practices around disaster and resilience. Eray is Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow (2018-21) at London School of Economics and Political Science where he also teaches the postgraduate course ‘Imaging Violence, Imagining Europe’. He is currently completing a monograph tentatively titled  Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of ‘Confronting the Past’ in Turkey , co-editing the volume  Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement, Catastrophe , and guest-editing a special issue of the  International Journal of Islamic Architecture  themed ‘Field as Archive / Archive as Field’. Eray is a co-founder of Amed Urban Workshop, an independent academy for critical spatial research based in the city of Amed (officially known as Diyarbakır) in Turkey’s Kurdistan, where he also undertook a residency at the artist-run space Loading in summer 2019.

The Ecological Superblock

Aiman Tabony Supervisors: Michael Weinstock, George Jeronomidis

The rapid undergoing and coming climatic and ecological change coupled with rapid acceleration in population growth, raise doubts and concerns regarding the ability of the existing urban systems to adapt to the future change. Although, these changes represent key opportunity for using ecological based design superblocks. The research departs from a critical reflection on the work of Hilberseimer’s “Decentralized City “and Soleri’s “Arcology”, who considered the city and the superblock to be a single and unified ecological system. It contextualizes the research within the larger scope leading the focus to the investi- gation of ecology and its subfield, the ecosystem. This brings the study down to three dominant areas of research: ecology, computational ecology and urban design. Through the integration of System Dynamic modelling method in the design process, the research investigates the Implantation of ecological parameters coupled with morphological and metabolic parameter and process. The design methodology is proved by the development of a computational design model which integrates System Dynamics model And Evolutionary Design model. The model was examined through a set of design experiments of a superblock that is integrated with the flow of the dynamics of the climate and ecologi- cal system. The output of the design method is a multi-dimensional da- tascape, opening up new possibilities in the field of urban design and planning that are more robust to changes in the environmental context. 

Biography : Aiman Tabony is a researcher and the second generation architect in Dr Tabony Architects. An architecture and engineering office founded in Nazareth in the 1960s by his father. During the last two decades, Aiman has been the leading architectural agenda of the practice, building an extensive curriculum in the design of public buildings. From 2012 to 2013 Aiman was teaching in the Technion-Haifa, as member of the computational design group. Aiman moved to London in 2014 to continue developing his curriculum in architecture, computation and ecology as a PhD researcher at the Architectural Association in London. He develops his Thesis under the supervision of Dr. Michael Weinstock; founder and leader of the design research group Emergent Technologies EmTech at the Architectural Association, London. His research concentrates on the implementation of computational methods for design and fabrication of ecological architecture and urban design. Departing from the city understood as a dynamic complex system his work focuses on the development of dynamic system models for cities and how the development of these systems influences the architectural discourse at the scale of the urban block.

Lola Lozano Lara

Supervisors: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria Giudici

The thesis considers the notion of vicinity, observed within the historic and legislative context of housing in Mexico City. A  vecindad  in Mexico is a building typology that allows a group of households to share domestic facilities through a central street.  Vecindad  translates to neighbourhood, stemming from the Spanish  vecino  which in English means, both,  neighbour  and  close , alluding to proximity, a relationship of close distance. 

The thesis is an investigation of domestic space and the relentless and unplanned accumulation of itself in the metropolitan city, focusing in Mexico City as a model of this condition, highlighting the state of living in extreme vicinity and raising the question of sharing what is perceived as a finite resource in the metropolitan city: housing. The existing housing stock in Mexico City does not satisfy the volume of the population. The number of inhabitants is a factor, and yet it is not the root of the problem. The crisis is engrained within a political system of reigning bureaucracy, resulting in a way of life where misfortune is inevitable and normalised.

The study looks closely at the architecture typologies in which inhabitants have been housed within the city, paying close attention to how these result in the redistribution of space and services through necessity and commodification, rather than through design. The investigation traces the history of Mexico as a newly sovereign state, autonomous since the consolidation of its first Constitution in 1821, and provides an understanding of its initial housing legislation and the instrumental reforms that will follow to enable its current ruthless and futile development of real estate. The research responds to the need of finding ways to contain the population in metropolitan areas of unlimited and unstoppable physical growth, where a perception of scarcity is promoted in relation to space, wealth, infrastructure, and time – in turn, fostering the image of an unsolvable problem and justifying the dissolution of a possibility for domestic space.

Biography : Lola is a practicing architect working in London and Mexico City. She graduated from the AA Diploma, having previously completed her Bachelor studies at Newcastle University. Alongside her architectural practice, Lola is enrolled as PhD Candidate at the AA and teaches at various UK universities. She is Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University co-leading DS7 on the MArchD course; Visiting Lecturer at the University of Westminster MA Interior Architecture; and collaborates with the BA Technical Studies and Professional Practice courses at the Bartlett and the AA.

Language and Sound: The Oracle of Delphi

Dorette Panagiotopoulou

Supervisors: Mark Cousins, Doreen Bernath

The thesis explores the space between voice, speech and writing though a study on the oracle of Delphi, an oral culture that is then transcribed and codified into written text. The manifold life of  sign  and  sound  (of language itself) as well as that of the  author  and the  receiver,  are attached by the material they share:  writing , a currency always in the throws of exchange. An ideology of writing and receiving, the relationship between sound, silence, and voice, is like all relations, about power. Does the voice have to submit to the written word? Was writing more like an act of  re-writing  or what we may call editing in the early period of the adoption of writing to speech, rather than a whole new way of representing language? The relationship of writer and receiver, sound and silence is one of domination but also – sometimes – one of commonality. 

Within the study of oracular statements and inscriptions at the temple of Delphi, I am developing a central question which concerns the tension between the narratives which describe it as an utterance by the Pythia and the oracle’s appearance, circulation, and dissemination in textual form – the tension here being between the spoken and the written word. The question of the oracle’s dissemination is a crucial one, as it presents a form of language or rather a cultural phenomenon that combines both literacy and orality. Even the Pythia’s language itself, emerges as neither deceptive nor crystalline, falling thus somewhere between the written and the illusory. There is one main concept that seems to link the two studies, specifically, inscription. The analysis of the letter “E” in Plutarch’s dialogue “On the E at Delphi”, leads to an understanding of inscription as something that acts as a lure or an invitation to investigate. The letter “E” takes the form of a pure symbol of judgment that evokes both the acts of interpretation and intuition in relation to truth. The Delphic inscription, mediated by Plutarch, has become a classic instance of the problem of interpretation. Not unlike oracular formulations that neither conceal nor reveal but indicate, inscription appears as both formal and hermeneutic. It entails the ability to say and to represent at the same time, while revealing the division or even blurring the lines that separate sign, form, and word. The very thing that is both seen and read is muted in the vision, and concealed in the reading. Thus, inscription bears a “not yet to say” and a “no longer to represent” that leads to the search for that force that produces a full meaning – one beyond the grasp of the linguistic – that utters the unspeakable through the “space” of emptiness and silence. 

Image : Juxtaposition of film still and the Temple of Apollo (Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, RA)

Biography : Dorette Panagiotopoulou has obtained a Masters degree in  Cultural and Intellectual History  at the Warburg Institute after having completed her Undergraduate Studies at the AA, from which she graduated in 2013 from Diploma unit 14. She is currently undertaking a PhD that examines the subject of the Delphic Oracle, under the supervision of Mark Cousins and Doreen Bernath, while teaching in the AA History and Theory Studies courses as a seminar tutor. She has previously worked at  Hopkins Architects  in London, as well as in the  Re-Activate Athens  project – a research and design initiative led by Urban-Think Tank studio based at ETH in Zürich in collaboration with the Onassis Foundation in Athens. She has also briefly worked on the report “ Rafah: Black Friday”  at Forensic Architecture based at Goldsmiths University. She is currently collaborating with a of group professors and architects from the Polytechnic School of Athens (NTUA) on a large project aimed to be realized in 2021 in Eleusis.

Towards Jerusalem: The Architecture of Pilgrimage

The thesis explores the ritual of sacred travel to the city of Jerusalem. It studies pilgrimage as a project in which the pilgrim, as a subject who is led by spiritual orientation, contributes to the appropriation of the cities and landscapes that he or she is perpetually crossing. While pilgrimage is indeed acknowledged as a journey in pursuit of a religious objective, it will nevertheless be studied, in this thesis, as a powerful social and cultural vector that often destabilized the economic, civic, and political conditions of the places of worship. The thesis will expand the definition of pilgrimage to Jerusalem by including a variety of analogous ‘Jerusalems’ that proliferated around the world as pilgrimage sites in their own right. As such, it will place the ritual of travel to the City of Jerusalem as a flexible practice that is not geographically confined but could be enacted by the varied combination of text, place, memory, and visual imagination—arguing for the possibility of relief from territorial confinement, and the violence it conceals. 

The thesis will unfold both chronologically and thematically in order to explore how the mentality of pilgrims and the scenography of pilgrimage has produced particular structures, landscapes, and representations that I refer to as the  Architecture of Pilgrimage.  Each of the five chapters looks both into a specific era in the history of Jerusalem pilgrimage (early Christianity, the Middle Ages, the beginning of Modernity and the 20th Century), as well as a particular theme, such as the fabrication of sacred landscapes, the intelligence of analogical thinking, the importance of movement in ritual, the politics of heritage and preservation, and the formation of collective memory. While these paradigmatic ideas did not necessarily originate in Jerusalem, the city’s condition allows their examination in a state of acceleration and saturation.

Methodologically, the thesis uses photography as a tool for architectural research and design, producing a travelogue composed of photographs and text. As documentation, this project will provide primary evidence of the current condition of Jerusalem pilgrimage. As representation, it will join a lineage of past endeavours that has used the medium of photography to frame spaces as a tool of architectural design. As a series,   the images will unfold along the itinerary of the thesis and form cartography of pilgrimage. As a project, it will trace, define, and speculate on a possible new route  Towards Jerusalem .

Image : Stations of the Cross in the Sacred Mountain of Varese, Italy. Photo by Gili Merin, 2018

Biography : Gili Merin is an architect and photographer She is a Diploma unit master at the AA, a lecturer for History and Theory of architecture at the Royal College of Arts, and a visiting professor in Syracuse University. She was trained as an architect, editor and researcher at OMA in Rotterdam, Kuehn Malvezzi in Berlin and Efrat-Kowalsky in Tel Aviv. Gili writes and photographs regularly for the Architects’ Journal, Frame Magazine and Haaretz newspaper. Her essays and reportages have been published in a number of print and online journals, amongst them the AA Files, MITs Thresholds, The Guardian and The Architectural Review.

The social factory: Social movements from autonomy to precarity

Enrica Mannelli

The thesis studies the evolution of the “social factory” and the related social movements that tackled this evolution. The concept of the social factory rises from a theory developed by Mario Tronti in early 1960 who claimed that in a Fordist society  “the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society” . Therefore, the history of the social factory is the evolution of an exploitative system, marked and challenged by a series of struggles led by the working class, the subject exploited. From an urban perspective, the Fordist social factory is the first moment that every single element of the city (such as factories, housing projects, and parks) and urban activity (working, dwelling, and leisure) is commodified and planned according to the main production system in order to fulfil the main goal of reproducing the labour force, i.e. making people productive. The urban history of the social factory – which this thesis sets out to trace – is the evolution of the city structure in relation to the evolution of the system. 

In the last 60 years, the working world has moved from a production system based on the factory assembly line to the contemporary “creative factory” that exploits not only intellectual labour but also the workers’ life as such; from  zoning  policies to a condition where we are unable to mark the spatial boundaries of the work field. As an illustration of this shift in the nature of work, Italy represents an exemplary and fast-paced case study while at the same time, Italian thinkers and practitioners of the 1960s and 1970s produced extensive theoretical and political contributions on this precise topic. Among them, the rejection of the system expressed by the Italian theories of autonomy and the Autonomia movement is the most interesting. 

Therefore, this research will analyse the structure of several Italian cities in relation to a particular shift within the evolution of the system: Turin, the factory; Bologna, the creative city; Rome, the autonomous social centre; and Milan, the cooptation of the autonomous social centre. In doing so, it questions the urban form in two ways: as an outcome of the capitalist system, reading urban planning as a means of capitalism itself; and as a contested spatiality in which the struggles of workers and citizens occur. Ultimately, this project questions the opportunity to tackle the contemporary Roman social factory through an urban policy to enable a system of social factory workshops. The latter is imagined as a critique of the Centro Sociale Occupato Autogestito (Self-managed occupied social centre; CSOA) that represent an important moment and space within the evolution of Italian theories of autonomy, and an opportunity to challenge the relentless nature of capitalism.

Image : Tano D’Amico, Girl and Guards, Rome (1977)

Biography : Enrica Mannelli is an architect. She graduated in Architecture in Rome (2008) and holds a Master of Arts in Housing and Urbanism from the Architectural Association (2017). As a firm believer in the importance of acquiring hands-on experience alongside academic study, she worked in a number of firms of different sizes, methods, and ambitions: among them, she collaborated with Cino Zucchi Architetti in Milan and Lynch Architects in London. She is currently working between Rome and London while pursuing her PhD by Design.

School of Architecture and Cities

The School of Architecture and Cities has a strong reputation for research and hosts a series of research centres and groups. Doctoral students interested in the design and management of urban environments benefit from supervision by staff working at the forefront of research on strategic design, mobilities and place making.

The unique composition of the School combines the disciplines needed for the design of environmentally and socially sustainable cities. Our aim is to encourage the cross-fertilisation of ideas from architecture, transport, infrastructure, tourism and urban planning. The multi-disciplinary configuration of the School encourages innovative and joined-up thinking from our doctoral students.

Engagement with practice is part of the School’s research culture. Alongside a passionate group of around 100 research-productive staff, the School hosts high-impact professorial positions and influential visiting fellows. Staff collaborate with a variety of influential partners in the UK and globally.

Due to the applied and practice-oriented nature of the research, the School creates a substantial impact in a variety of policy communities. Symposia and workshops are hosted on a regular basis.

The School boasts an outstanding portfolio of externally funded research in Air Traffic Management, Sustainable Freight Practices, Smart Urban Development, Cycling Policy, ‘Monsoon Assemblages’, Major Events and Urban Change, Heritage and Cultural Resources.

How to apply

The academic staff member responsible for PhD admissions in the School is Dr Kate Jordan who can be contacted by email via: [email protected] .

You can find more information about study options on our Mode of study page .

PhD via MPhil

The majority of students will apply via the PhD via MPhil route. You can read more about the application process and entry requirements on our How to apply page .

Distance Learning

If you intend to apply for a research degree by distance-learning, you will need to demonstrate that you have appropriate local support for the duration of registration – please refer to the information on our Distance learning page .

PhD by published work

If you intend to apply for a PhD by Published Work please refer to the information on our PhD by published work page as the application process differs from the normal MPhil/PhD. Before applying, you should first make contact with the relevant academic for an informal discussion of your publications. You should only submit a formal application at this stage.

Apply for the following subjects

Architecture.

• Architecture by Practice
• Urban Design

Apply to our research degrees using the links below.

You'll be able to select your subject area in the 'Supporting Information' section of the application form.

September 2024 start

January 2025 start, studentships.

The Graduate School and each of the academic schools at the University of Westminster are committed to doctoral programmes which encourage and make possible excellent research. As part of this, we are committed to offering a range of studentships.

Find out about current studentships being offered across the university on our Studentships page .

Research centres and groups

Find out more about research based in the School of Architecture and Cities:

• Active Travel Academy
• Architectural Humanities Research Group
• Emerging Territories
• Design Practices Research Group

Planning, Transport and Tourism

• Max Lock Centre
• Place and Experience Research Group
• Transport and Mobilities

Related pages

Fees and funding.

How much will it cost to study a research degree?

How to write your research proposal

Discover how you should write your research proposal before applying for University of Westminster.

Research degree by distance learning

Find out about Research Degree distance learning options at the University of Westminster.

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The Cambridge Department of Architecture has been ranked top by the Times Higher Educational Supplement in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework for research quality in a joint submission with Land Economy, one of four Cambridge University disciplines to have achieved first place in their respective Units of Assessment.

A doctoral degree at the Department of Architecture offers the opportunity for independent research under the supervision of a departmental member of staff.  Unless the candidate is part of a research group, the research is undertaken entirely by the candidate on their own, with regular supervision on progress with their supervisor.

The Department welcomes applications from postgraduates to undertake research towards a PhD in most areas, including Urban Studies, History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism, Digital Media Design and Communication, Design, Technology and Natural Materials, Planning and Environment, but is unable to accept candidates for whom no supervisor is available.  The Department does not offer a taught PhD programme. Instead, it admits those applicants who meet the academic admissions criteria and whose research interests match those of an available member of the academic staff who is willing to act as the student's supervisor.

As well as the research and skills training programme and undergraduate teaching opportunities offered by the Department of Architecture, candidates have the opportunity to attend numerous training and personal development courses offered by the university.

The examination constitutes the oral examination of a thesis not exceeding 80,000 words for the PhD on a subject approved by the Degree Committee for the Faculty. 

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the programme, candidates will have acquired excellent skills, experience and knowledge to undertake postdoctoral work (research and teaching) or another related profession.

To continue to read for the PhD following an appropriate Master's degree, students must achieve a pass in the MPhil by Research or an overall total score of at least 70% in the MPhil by Advanced Study course. Continuation is also subject to the approval of the research proposal, and the availability of an appropriate supervisor.

The Postgraduate Virtual Open Day usually takes place at the end of October. It’s a great opportunity to ask questions to admissions staff and academics, explore the Colleges virtually, and to find out more about courses, the application process and funding opportunities. Visit the  Postgraduate Open Day  page for more details.

See further the  Postgraduate Admissions Events  pages for other events relating to Postgraduate study, including study fairs, visits and international events.

Key Information

3-4 years full-time, 4-7 years part-time, study mode : research, doctor of philosophy, department of architecture, course - related enquiries, application - related enquiries, course on department website, dates and deadlines:, michaelmas 2024.

Some courses can close early. See the Deadlines page for guidance on when to apply.

Funding Deadlines

These deadlines apply to applications for courses starting in Michaelmas 2024, Lent 2025 and Easter 2025.

Similar Courses

• Architecture and Urban Studies MPhil
• Master of Studies (MSt) in Architecture (Degree Apprenticeship) MSt
• Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment MSt
• Professional Practice in Architecture PGCert
• Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment PGCert

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