Compulsory modules

Advanced Digital Practice (20 credits)

This module is designed to teach you how to design using a range of geometry, data, and scripting methods. It will also help you develop an understanding of the role of computational design in both theory and practice, and enhance your skills and control of digital tools to generate and rationalise complex geometry. Additionally, the module will assist you in developing the ability to systematically work through complex design problems using digital tools and communicate your process and key principles effectively.

Design for Digital Manufacture and Assembly (30 credits)

This module offers you the opportunity to learn and develop skills in both analogue and digital manufacturing techniques, as well as develop an awareness of materials and their uses, performance, and application in an industrial setting. You will develop your skills in transforming digital geometry into manufacture-ready information and designing parts and components with automation and digital manufacturing in mind. Throughout the module, you will build prototypes to test materials, processes and assembly, gaining an understanding of tacit knowledge of construction and embedding that in your design.

Contextual Theory (20 credits)

You'll attend lectures and seminars on the history of the master builder and the aspects of:

 The significance of building tectonics from the perspective of anthropology
 The relationship between designing, making and knowing
 The 'modern' approach to materials and details in buildings.

On this module you'll gain an understanding of how building knowledge has developed and been broadcast in cultures. In the past, as well as in modern times, both in ceremonial and everyday contexts.

Collaborative Project (20 credits)

You will collaborate with practices, industry, academic researchers and tutors for your research project. They will help you plan a research proposal that has clear ambitions and impact in its outcome.

Using your acquired skills, you will explore the potential of digital technologies. To reformulate and reinvent traditional knowledge of materials, craftsmanship and practice.

You will create and test to produce your ‘proof-of-concept’; which starts your final project.

Compulsory modules

Final project (50 credits)

Your final project will represent a culmination of your research and skills learned throughout the programme. It's your opportunity to show your:

 Research skills
 Technical skills
 Design skills.

Contextualised as an architectural project.

You will develop a body of research into your chosen topic and propose and build an original work at 1:1 in groups. You will show a maturity of purpose and deep understanding. With your research in its wider context through the submission of a thesis report.

Research

Oxford Brookes is renowned for its world-class research into how architecture has evolved in different cultures around the world, notably the Paul Oliver Vernacular Architecture Library and the network of hundreds of researchers connected to this body of work. This unique collection of traditional or vernacular architectures represent an extensive and detailed knowledge database, expressed as an architectural language specific to the spirit and ecology of a place. It also represents an extensive body of research into the way economies and cultures relate to, and utilise, sustainable materials in the construction of architecture.