The Unit System

The Unit System is an innovative approach to learning, first pioneered by Alvin Boyarsky at the Architectural Association in London, in the 1970s. It is a holistic learning environment, organised around year-long design studios or ‘units.’ See below for more details.

The Unit System

‘I don't think the problem of architectural education is to teach people to be almost proto-professional operators, because that's for them to work out as they go out into life. The problem is to actually produce witty people who've got lots of conversations echoing in their ears when they leave. They've heard a lot of conversations; they've seen a lot; they've met people who are on their way up into the world.’

Alvin Boyarsky, quoted in Irene Sunwoo's ‘Pedagogy’s Progress: Alvin Boyarsky’s International Institute of Design’, Grey Room, (34)(2009):53.

Many of the world’s top schools of architecture owe a collective debt to the innovations in teaching and learning first introduced by Alvin Boyarsky, Head of School at the Architectural Association in the 1970s. His most important contribution to architectural education was the ‘unit system’, an approach which is now global in its reach. Broadly speaking, instead of the traditional, year-based horizontal hierarchy in which students progress through a series of modules/years until graduation, Boyarsky envisioned a holistic ‘learning’ environment (as opposed to a ‘teaching’ environment), in which student life in both the undergraduate (2nd & 3rd year) and postgraduate (4th & 5th year) is organised around year-long design studios or ‘units’.

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  • This innovative approach emphasises the development of comprehensive design projects undertaken within the setting of a single unit selected by a student at the outset of the year.

    Students work in close contact with unit leaders and tutors who independently set the agenda, aims and objectives for that year’s design project.

    At the GSA, students in 2017 were able to choose from six Units; in 2018, this has continued with six postgraduate Units.

    Our now-famous Unit System Poster is available at the start of each year, allowing students to peruse the Units on offer before making their all-important choice.

HTD 2

FORMULATING DISSENT: HOW TO BE PRODUCTIVE WHILE REMAINING ON THE MARGIN

Elective Leader: Mxolisi Makhubo 

"As a radical standpoint, perspective, position, 'the politics of location' necessarily calls those of us who would participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the process of re-vision …[f]or me this space of radical openness is a margin - a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a 'safe' place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance." Bell Hooks, 1989

 In Rabelais and His World (1965) by Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, he proposes the carnival as a space for waging war on the status quo. He argues that the European folkloric carnival, and those that occupy the carnivalesque – or being in the moment– (explain or remove being in the moment) are undoing ontological bodily conventions (gender, race, class etc.) through the occupation of a grotesque body– a body that stands in stark contrast to its ‘intended' use. In the carnival, all societal rules get waived in favour of excess, parody, and hedonism. The suppressed can occupy the carnival for counter-hegemonic practices under the safety of a second world utopia, in which authoritarianism gets suspended for the extrapolitical – the carnival's rules are the only rules. Brad Erickson (2016) in his article: George Clinton and David Bowie: The Space Race in Black and White, Popular Music and Society argues that this mode of practice, of revolting with laughter, allows the artists for dissenting while avoiding the severe consequences that would be applicable outside the carnival period. The carnival becomes a place ripe for sowing the seeds of dissent with a smile on your face.

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