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.

Theory and History

Course Convener: Hugh Fraser 

The transformation of History and Theory into (and through) both locally relevant content and contemporary global idioms, requires the development of a diverse range and research. The new tH course at the GSA is fully described in the  tH Course Handbook

The overall intention of this Theory and History programme is to produce graduates that can beret navigate the complex, ambiguous and dynamic social, material and political environment in which they will be immersed for the rest of their careers. To do so, the programme facilitates the development of skills and literacies in writing, film making, dialectics, rhetoric and close reading.

In addition to these core competencies, the programme connects at various points to sources and networks outside the academy in order to produce locally impactful, creative research.

 

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