BA3 Humanities offers students the opportunity to choose from a range of electives, each approaching architecture and the built environment in a different way. Electives are taught in small groups, and are framed around the research specialisms of elective leaders. They explore themes such as environmental histories, queer theory, spatial psychology, and many others. Tying together these various different themes is an understanding of architecture as situated with and in relation to the wider world. This research-led teaching builds upon some of the world-leading research in architectural humanities at MSA, and provides students with the space to develop their own positions within contemporary debates.

Humanities 3 Electives

Architectural and Spatial Psychology

Spatial psychology refers to the study of human behaviours within the context of the built and natural environment and plays a crucial role in our wellbeing and quality of life. Architecture has the capacity to influence human emotions, encourage feelings of excitement, safety, unease, calm or control. Dependent on the building’s purpose, architecture skilfully curates the user’s interaction and feelings towards a space and their engagement with it. This may be consciously or subconsciously. Spatial design, materiality, environmental strategy, parti’s of scale, approach, proportion and perspective all play a part. Exploring studies of cinematography, curation of spaces, the principles of haptic responses, analytical discourse and visual experimentation, this course with examine the ways different building typologies and places make people feel, examining the methods used, the reasons why and considering the consequences. We will discuss methods of environmental control from a psychological perspective, exploring the applied neuroscience of spatial perception with regard to implicit biases such as cultural expectation, instinct and tradition and the ethics of how such phenomena are deployed by architects, urbanists and designers throughout history from a global perspective. We will look at how common and subversive methods of design are used differently at a variety of scales and typologies to create and maintain a very different sense of place depending on its purpose.

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Architectures of Authority

This course is interested in the ways in which architecture and the built environment contribute to the production and distribution of power. Drawing particularly on the work of Michel Foucault, whose 1977 Discipline and Punish charts the emergence of the panopticon prison as an architectural technology of discipline and its diffusion throughout modern society, the course asks: to what extent is the panopticon still useful as a conceptual tool for understanding power in contemporary cities? The course explores authority and architecture through a number of examples of historical and contemporary building typologies and develops understandings of various different types of power, working through different scales throughout the urban environment.

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Contemporary Perspectives on Environmental Histories of Architecture

Over the last two centuries, the way architecture related to nature/the environment has drastically changed regarding how nature, or the natural world has been not only imagined by humans, but also used and abused. This elective will focus on the origin of environmental issues, both the shiny utopias and the dark sides, through a transdisciplinary perspective, on issues which have emerged since industrialization, imperialism and colonialism and are currently becoming problematic. In times of climate change and global heating, architecture’s historical relationship to nature/the environment, in all its complexities and contradictions, will be seen as contested and conflictual, with the environment not only being a passive backdrop, but an actor in its own right. Starting from the hypothesis that architecture and related disciplines and professions, by creating environments, extracting knowledge from and exerting power upon nature, the course will highlight certain episodes, beginnings and ends, also ruptures, when architecture’s relation to nature/the environment has been transformed, having become seen as part of the problem, yet presenting itself as contributing to a solution, too.

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Queer Architecture and Queer Architectural Histories

This BA3 Elective Course offers an exploration into architectural and urban relationships with queerness. Both an introduction to queer architectural historiography and theory, and reflections on queer design practice, this course interrogates two provocations: what makes a space queer? And, beyond this, what role does built and urban space play in constructing and sustaining queer identities?

Since the 1990s, architectural historians and theorists have been uncovering ways that queer people throughout history have formed and adapted architectural and urban spaces, and how we can, as a result, read buildings and urban ensembles as ‘queer.’ Reciprocally, queer theorists have become increasingly interested in the architectural and spatial metaphors that bound queer experience: ‘Out of the closet and into the streets’ was a rallying cry of mid-20th-century gay liberation movements, and as a result, the closet, as a spatial locus of queerness, has been subject to intense theorising (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1990).

More recently, in a time of reversals of queer rights and acceptance, questions of spatial inclusion and exclusion have taken on new urgencies. The trans historian and activist Susan Stryker and the architect Joel Sanders have noted a pressing need to ‘explore the architectural implications of gender variance,’ to unpick how hetero-norms underpin design practices, and how these can be productively challenged during the process of design (Sanders and Stryker, 2016: 782).

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Industrialisation and its Discontents

This course seeks to explore the consequences of industrialisation on the architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To do this, we will interrogate how the purely utilitarian form of the industrial factory provoked existential anxieties concerning architecture’s social, symbolic and historical functions. Taking three paradigmatic industrial cities – Manchester, Chicago and Detroit - as our case studies, we will attempt to discern the radical effects the increasingly abstract form of these iron and steel framed factories had on built form and the organisation, structure and function of the city itself.

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User-centred Design

In our modern, capitalist society, architects rarely have the opportunity to engage with those who will occupy their buildings. Architects’ clients are often building contractors, speculative developers or public bodies, rather than individuals who will inhabit the completed buildings. This can make it difficult for architects to understand building users’ needs and aspirations. This elective lecture course will take a critical look at the term ‘user’ as employed within architecture and will explore a range of strategies for understanding the needs and aspirations of building users. The various strategies will be set in historical context, and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach will be examined. The difficulties of designing buildings for unknown users, who might differ from the architect in terms of age, gender, class and ethnicity, will be discussed along with the risks of reducing potential users to stereotypes. The course will explore how these strategies, for understanding users’ needs and aspirations, can be applied in architectural practice.

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Social Architectures in South America

The means of manifesting urban dissent and the repertoire of tactics used to circumvent the physical and social traits of pervasive forms of urban inequality are rapidly changing. As urban processes enforce greater influence on the articulation of global commercial and financial flows (Brenner, 2017), a growing number of urban collectives are relying on spatial interventions to defy expulsive and fragmentary market-driven territorial dynamics. In this context, architecture and the moment of construction have acquired a distinct political dimension.

This course focuses on the emergence of a new wave of social and political architecture in South America. Looking at different actors, from social movements to official planning agencies, NGOs, and architectural collectives, it examines what is distinct about the material interventions; how they are organized, financed, and the spatial programs they seek to put in place. The sessions engage with the impacts that auto-construction, social urbanism, popular logistics, and the struggles surrounding the right to the city have had on metropolitan landscapes in South America.

The course builds on extensive research on popular construction practices in South America. It is shaped by texts and experiences presented by an active set of architectural collectives and practices. It covers issues regarding construction strategies, operational and logistical tactics, the financial architectures of community projects, and the use vernacular materialities.

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Architecture in the Age of Acceleration

This course considers the systemic challenges posed by the continued climate crisis, rapid urbanization, and globalization, as well as the threat of collapsing eco-systems as the starting point for theoretical reflection on architectural design today. But, instead of searching for answers outside the discipline, it stays as close as possible to architecture itself. In other words, an underlying point of this course is the conviction that the discipline already offers a rich field of knowledge on which to build possible answers to the current crises. After an introduction on the theme of Acceleration, the course proposes to investigate five strategies – Commons, Participation, Critical Regionalism, Transformation, and Resilience - looking at their historical roots in the postmodern period and projecting their applicability all the way into our contemporary era, allowing students to uncover both historical continuities and new possible directions. Each strategy will be anchored in a key text of the period (1961-1992) and will testify to the political and social contexts in which architects have started to challenge their role under the conditions of modernity. The changed perspective on fundamental aspects of technology and culture which is the result of a growing acknowledgment of the finite nature of global resources is also reflected in the rediscovery and rereading of authors. These texts will be analysed, situated, and most importantly debated with the students, in relation to current architectural practices. Therefore, going beyond mere critical rereadings of the recent past, this course proposes to open a discussion on the relevance of these strategies for today’s practice vis-à-vis conditions of acceleration. For their final essay, students will look at specific examples of architectural practices, always from the hypothesis that architects, through the very act of defining and redefining their roles, exert different forms of agency on and beyond the building site. As such, they will explore new insights in the relationship of architecture to society and of the architect to the act of conceiving space. Offering new perspectives on and understandings of the age of acceleration, this course aims to show how current strategies have emerged as alternatives to modernization.

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Architecture and the Body

Throughout history, the human body has influenced systems of belief, which have in turn found numerous means of cultural expression. This elective will focus on various moments when the thinking of the body and its relationship with architecture became significant, or underwent significant change. In addition to introducing these particular moments, sessions will introduce a range of enduring concerns that have accompanied bodily connections (the distinction between body, mind and soul; the influence and extent of scientific and medical understanding: gender and ‘otherness’; authority and control; movement and perception; politics and aesthetics). Alongside these topics, the influence exerted by techniques of observation and representation will also be noted. In particular, lectures, workshops and discussion will explore the grounds that have been claimed (expressly or covertly) for an authority that is based on the body, and the related claims that this authority can extend to provide criteria for the design and judgement of architecture. Although the body has been an enduring point of reference for architects, it has also provided an enduring point of argument. We will be tracing a number of these disagreements, thus contextualizing and developing your own attitudes towards the body and architecture.

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Logistics

This course will use infrastructure, buildings, and institutions to explore architecture in the long nineteenth century (1789–1914). Although focused on the history of Greater Manchester, a focus on logistics as a central concern for ‘Victorian’ architecture will allow us to examine broader themes in the built environment across wider geographies including capitalism, technology, energy, political economy, colonialism and global trade.

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Housing

This course focuses on one building type, housing. Concentrating on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this course takes a wide definition of housing to investigate broader themes such as communities, ethics, emotions and memory. Throughout all the sessions, we shall be looking at how race, gender and class intersect and impact on housing. This course will encourage students to think critically about ideas associated with housing such as ‘streets in the sky’ and ‘sink estates’. The course will also focus on the cultural and social significance of housing, council housing in particular, and how this is represented within culture and, crucially, whose voices are represented.

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Student Abstracts

A’lla Al Busaidi

How has the commercial skyscraper typology developed in response to capitalist globalisation and to what extent is it reflective of global distributions of power?

This essay utilises the skylines of two infamous global cities, New York City and Dubai, to examine the development of the commercial skyscraper typology in response to capitalist globalisation. An analysis of the Empire State Building and its contemporaries establishes the early skyscraper as a symbol of American ingenuity and proof of the American Dream, as early American industrialists memorialised their success within these tall towers. However, from the 1970s onwards, the ‘iconic’ American skyscraper is rendered unprofitable as capitalist globalisation made way for the ‘Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC)’ (Sklair, 2006), whom desire a different set of symbolic values attached to their commercial skyscraper, ones that are less place-bound and place-loyal, like the corporations that intend to occupy them; the skyline of Dubai becomes indicative of this new generation of commercial skyscrapers. Pre 1970s American skyscrapers perpetuated ideas surrounding American capitalist power, creating an architectural ‘icon’ that reaffirmed that power on the global stage. Nevertheless, the 1970s represented a period of both economic and political instability for the US, most notably, the 1973 Oil Crisis, which fuelled the rise of Dubai’s first skyscraper. An analysis of these events establishes the commercial skyscraper as an indicator of global distributions of power. The proliferation of the ‘iconic’ commercial skyscraper in today’s built environment is unprecedented, with the competition for the world’s tallest tower seemingly mirroring that for global power. The commercial skyscraper becomes a powerful symbol as many begin to speculate on the end to the pax Americana.

James Edward Knowles

Building on the ‘Environmental Histories of Architecture’ series published by the CCA, and responding to the observations of Amitav Ghosh regarding a notable lack of petrofiction despite the centrality of oil within contemporary Western culture, this dissertation examines the deeply-entangled links between freedom and resource exploitation within twentieth and twenty-first century narrative media, exploring how observation through the lens of ecocriticism can reveal such entanglements regardless of authorial intention.

With a focus on the American road narrative as a symbol of freedom and possibility, the author draws parallels between literary, photographic, and cinematic works - Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), and Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland (2021) - arguing that each can be regarded as a form of ‘oil media’, through which their architectures make visible a freedom materially, socially, and societally dependent on extractive geologies.

Thus, through the broader reframing of contemporary narrative media within the context of petromodernity, this dissertation invites the reader to harness an ecocritical perspective that, via an engagement with various literary, filmic, and philosophical concepts, makes central the extractive geological agency of humanity.

Connie Bellass

In the late 1980s, against the backdrop of Thatcherite austerity and deindustrialisation, a new kind of space emerged in the disused mills and warehouses of Blackburn: the acid house rave. Fleeting, chaotic, and unlicensed, these gatherings became spatial ruptures, engaging with the world politically, socially, and subjectively. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopias, this essay positions the raves as real spaces that reflect and subvert dominant societal structures through a form of lived, utopian resistance. Angela Jones’ concept of queer heterotopias expands this lens, framing these events as spaces where non-normative bodies and desires were not only visible but celebrated - where binaries dissolved and alternative modes of being could emerge.

Rather than offering a fixed reading of the rave scene, the essay explores how space - unregulated, communal, and affective - enabled fluid, contingent expressions of identity. 'Resistance to Power Structures' examines how raves reclaimed post-industrial architecture and resisted neoliberal, heteronormative ideologies through collective autonomy. 'Sites of Solidarity' considers how rhythm, movement, and shared altered states forged temporary but powerful connections. 'Subjectivity and Ephemeral Nature' explores the liberating potential of temporality, where identity could be performed outside normative frameworks.

Though contradictions surfaced, such as emerging hierarchies and the limitations of ephemerality, these tensions reveal the scene’s complexity. Ultimately, this essay argues that architecture must be seen as more than physical form: it is a social, personal, and political practice. Through this lens, the Blackburn raves become a blueprint for how queerness, resistance, and community can be spatially imagined and temporarily realised.

Connor McCarty

Accelerated Urbanism explores how the Age of Acceleration, defined by rapid advancements in the 21st century, can lead to the alienation and collapse of cities, as seen in dystopian sci-fi like Elysium and The Handmaid's Tale. It critiques modernist urban planning, exemplified by Le Corbusier and Robert Moses whose top-down approaches priorities efficiency over human connection, often creating fragmented cities. In contrast, the essay proposes that architecture can foster reconnection through principles of transformation, commons, and resilience. Nordhavn in Copenhagen exemplifies this approach, repurposing industrial spaces into sustainable community-driven urban environments offering a forward-thinking blueprint for future cities that balance ecological, social and cultural needs.