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 3

JOHANNESBURG THEN AND NOW: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL PRACTICES

Elective Leader: Melinda Silverman

This course focusses on the history of Johannesburg as South Africa's preeminent modern city – a city pre-occupied with fashion, the new, the novel, the contemporary. It explores how aspects of modernity were mobilised to create the unique characteristics of the city. By interrogating how modernist architecture and urbanism were transported from Western Europe to a colonial context, it attempts to unravel the complex interrelationships between global forces and local conditions, and to identify both the losses and gains of translation.

Buildings and urban spaces are explored both as material artefacts, concrete manifestations of their time and place, as well as ideological constructs, channelling ideas about race, class, nation and gender. Using Johannesburg as a site, the course brings into dialogue ideas ordinarily associated with the social sciences – colonialism, nationalism, identity, power… – and the particularities of South African space.

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