Hugo Hinsley Introduces the AA Housing & Urbanism programme 2014-2015.
Unit staff: Jorge Fiori, Hugo Hinsley, Lawrence Barth, Abigail Batchelor, Nicholas Bullock, Florian Dirschedl, Elad Eisenstein, Dominic Papa, Elena Pascolo, Anna Shapiro, Alex Warnock-Smith.
The Housing and Urbanism Programme engages architecture with the challenges of contemporary urban strategies. Today’s metropolitan regions show tremendous diversity and complexity, with significant global shifts in the patterns of urban growth and decline. Architecture has a central role to play in this dynamic context, developing spatial strategies as part of urban policies and generating new urban clusters and types. This course focuses on important changes in the contemporary urban condition and investigates how architectural intelligence helps us to understand and respond to these trends. Offered as a 12-month MA or a 16-month MArch, the course is balanced between cross-disciplinary research and design application. Students’ work is divided among three equally important areas: design workshops, lectures and seminars, and a written thesis for the MA or a design thesis for the MArch – all of which allow students to develop an extended and focused study within the broader themes of the course.
