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 11 ²⁰¹⁸

BLOODY AGENCY

THOMAS CHAPMAN & NJABULO PHEKANI

'Architects do not solve problems and therefore are not helpful to society. What architects should be doing is to define and develop their own discipline.' - Peter Eisenman, 2011. Originate: On the Merits of being a Generalist (as opposed to a Specialist). In becoming generalists at ease with mainstream economics and politics, architects have the potential to originate projects that both respond to a social need and are attractive to private investment. Adopting the moniker, ‘Bloody Agents’, (a reference to politicians such as Julius Malema’s suspicion of the private sector), Unit 11 takes the stance that the only space for architects to exercise agency in the origination of projects is in the private economic sphere. Innovate: Architectural Innovation in Upward Social Mobility. In most socially-transformative projects, programme plays a far more significant role than spatial or tectonic innovations. For example, an innovative curriculum in a standard classroom has far more transformational potential than a standard curriculum in an innovative classroom. However, this is not the case with housing. By testing historical typologies like the New York tenement block and the Singapore HDB in the Johannesburg landscape, Unit 11 will generate projects which bring together the mass-rental and sectional title silos of our housing sector through innovations in temporality, adaptability and place-making. Implement: Architect-as-Developer . . . and the problem is? With Carel Kleynhans, a seasoned Johannesburg economist and developer as Unit 11’s resident critic, Major Design Projects in Unit 11 will include detailed economic feasibility studies which test proposals against the political and economic realities of our time. Project reviews throughout the year will thus largely take the form of ‘pitches’ to a panel of potential project funders.

J Evetts & D Beetge 01

R Deal, B Masikane, S Manyoni & J Kumalo 001

R Deal, B Masikane, S Manyoni & J Kumalo 002

D Cronje, S Chen & J Kapp 001

S Manyoni 001

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