Masters Degree in Architecture | Graduate School of Architecture

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’.

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.

Unit 12 ²⁰¹⁸

THE AFRICAN ALMANAC

PROF LESLEY LOKKO & SUMAYYA VALLY

‘The void contains in itself all the potential of the space, all the relations not written or experienced. Void is the place of tension of something that will be, a space in power, but also the only place where the recollection of reality, the composition of the parts, the fragments of life, can happen.’

Simone Pizzagalli

From the Greek διασπορά (‘scattering’, ‘dispersion’) the term ‘diaspora’ refers to a scattered population whose origins lie within a smaller, usually fixed, geographic locale. Diaspora has come to refer in particular to the historic dispersions of an involuntary nature, such as the Jewish Diaspora; the fleeing of Greeks after the fall of Constantinople; the African trans-Atlantic slave trade; the Irish after the Great Famine and, more recently, the dispersion of Syrians, Iraqis and Kurds in the aftermath of the Gulf Wars. Scholars have historically distinguished between different types of diaspora, based on different causes: imperialism, trade, labour or wars, for example. Social cohesion within diasporic communities and the strength of ties to their original or ancestral lands also varies, with some communities maintaining strong political ties with their homelands and others dreaming endlessly of return. Within architecture, however, scant attention has been paid to the spatial, urban and architectural implications of migration. Refugee camps, deportation centres and prisons appear to be the only spaces or architectural programmes that deal in any way with this most contemporary of issues, yet the epistemological potential locked into the history and experience of diasporic communities around the world has far-reaching consequences for all built environment disciplines, at multiple scales and levels, and from multiple perspectives. Unit 12 will visit the island of Réunion, a region of France separated from the ‘mainland’ by 6,000km and the outermost region of the EU, in order to uncover new potential spatial languages of movement, migration and diaspora to augment the architectural vocabulary of our times. The Major Design Project of the year will be the Ministry of Home Affairs. Projects may look at landscapes, seascapes, edge conditions, boundaries between land and sea, between past and present and between 'home' and 'away'. The aim is to challenge each student to find their own appropriate architectural tools of representation, form, structure, materiality, programme, with which to propose a new architecture that, in Derrida's words, 'bears some resemblance to that which might be found in it.'