Advanced Architectural Design – (M.A.)

SAC’s two-year Post-graduate Master of Arts in Architecture is an educational programme engaging with advanced topics in architectural design through individual research and experimentation. Its objective is to contribute to the advance/progress of architecture through the excellence of its graduates. Students are thus prepared for a professional and/or academic career where their individual resources and talents contribute to the development of the field through outstanding practical, intellectual and creative merits.

SAC’s Master programme builds on a two-year structure, the first of which is common to all three specialisations. Upon the completion of the first year, the students choose a specialisation in one of three areas: Advanced Architectural Design, Architecture and Performative Design, and Architecture and Critical Spatial Practice. The second year with the chosen specialisation culminates with the respective students presenting the results of their research and experiments in an architectural project thesis proposal. While SAC’s teaching programme is specifically focused on architecture and architectural design, the students learn through the conduct of research and experimentations a wide array of transferrable skills that they can later apply to a range of professional activities. This responds to the fluidity of the contemporary job market and reflects the crux of postgraduate studies where graduating students are equipped with a broad set of tools to best meet the challenges of an ever-changing professional field.

In the academic year 2009-10, SAC has 34 students from 15 different countries enrolled in the programme (16 in the second year and 18 in the first year). With the planned extension, a significant increase in student numbers is envisaged. This would naturally enlarge the school on practical levels but the intimate quality of the teaching and student-teacher relationship would be retained. The extension forms part of the ongoing endeavours to increase the scope and quality of the research undertaken at SAC. To this date, SAC’s research has focused mainly on advanced digital processing and the geometry of fibrous and textile material systems.

SAC’s teaching programme is formulated to respond to new developments that concern the future of architecture. In this way, the programme is not static but under constant revision so as to include new pedagogical, methodological, technological as much as other types of developments. In addition, the programme is formulated in accordance to developments in architecture where design and construction processes are becoming increasingly complex, demanding the involvement of a larger number of specialists from different professional fields. These issues intrinsically beg consideration of not only traditional design issues but also how these connect and are transformed through technological developments. SAC selectively assimilates these by focusing on problems in contemporary design, the creative and artistic development of the individual within the collective setting, and material and processing technology.

The teaching at SAC takes full advantage of the programme’s small size and is characterised by individual contact between students and faculty. Particular attention is paid to the personal development of each student with the intention to equip them with the necessary know-how, technical expertise and intellectual abilities to further their careers in an increasingly specialised, international and competitive environment / job market. The programme offers its students the executive ability to take on and process advanced design problems that reflect the complex conditions to which contemporary architecture must respond to and accommodate. These conditions include general technological developments, the direct and intense relationship between socio-cultural structures and economic production, as much as architecture's own accrual of historical and instrumental intelligence. Cultural and social factors contribute to the ever-escalating complexity of designing buildings - a complexity that reflects the standards in Western architecture as a body of theoretical and practical intelligence.

SAC believes that the future of the discipline of architecture lies in the full academic embrace and integration of research into its core where the practise of design is yolked with rigorous and systematic research so as to accomplish innovation and contribute to the development of architecture in a larger, societal context. SAC will train and inspire the next generation of architects with the necessary skills and expertise to tackle this new frontier and meet its array of challenges.