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 14 ²⁰¹⁸

ROGUE ECONOMIES: (IN)SECURITY – BETWEEN RISK AND OPPORTUNITY

THIRESH GOVENDER & SARAH DE VILLIERS

‘…it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves—it is by our crimes. — the recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance have led to an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy…’ — Jean & John Comaroff

Unit 14 continues its interest in ‘rogue’ economies, those subversive economic practices, tactics and transactions that shape contemporary Johannesburg in bewilderingly dramatic ways. We look to understand these dynamics to build a relevant architectural literacy around emergent economic practices that are defining our African cities. This year, Unit 14 will focus our attention on (in)Security. We examine both the attainment of security and the consequences of its inverse, insecurity, which results in the forfeiture of rights, sovereignty and stability. Instability’s self-perpetuating and pervasive nature is here to stay. The great social and political shifts since ‘94 in South African cities have resulted in a deeply contested and divisive geography. However, Johannesburg offers us a rare opportunity to examine the relationship between architecture and security at both intimate and grand scales. The city comprises fascinating social and spatial juxtapositions that yield peculiar and yet unique relationships to negotiate risk and opportunity. In the places of great inequality, those with resources secure their livelihoods and assets with reinforced infrastructure (barriers, private security, insurance policies and brute force), while those with limited resources resort to softer infrastructure (trust, threshold, power and programme) to navigate and negotiate risk. Employing forensic drawing methods to decode our public and private spaces, students in Unit 14 communicate through maps, catalogues and cartographies the hidden meanings and value of how security operations have come to define and construct our urbanity. Insights are employed to speculate an architectural proposition that purposefully operates between binary extremes of risk and opportunity. The Gate House - a typology that reconciles its operation for both fortification and access – is explored in terms of its capacity to provide a threshold for retreat, safety, passage, access and vantage. What kind of architecture is cultivated from the very drama of this impulse to secure, protect and seek opportunity? How and by whom is it constructed? Whom will it serve and to what end?