BACHELOR OF ARTS IN ARCHITECTURE

Introduction

The Bachelor of Arts in Architecture is a platform for critical inquiry, design experimentation, and intellectual production, where students and researchers engage architecture not simply as the making of buildings, but as a cultural, technological, ecological, and political project.  It is a space where students and researchers engage rigorously with the theoretical, material, spatial, and technological conditions that shape the built environment, while confronting architecture’s agency in the production of social realities. The programme cultivates a collective of intellectually ambitious and creatively driven individuals committed not only to the design of buildings, but to the rethinking of architecture itself -its histories, ideologies, ecologies, and futures. Through speculative inquiry, critical reflection, and design experimentation, the programme positions architecture as an active force capable of transforming how societies organise space, negotiate power, and imagine collective life.

Students engage with modes and methodologies of reading and imagining space, defining program, investigating atmospheres, enabling alternative and emancipatory modes of living and making place. Emphasising the need for measure-and-care, they are asked to reflect on how to operate and devise spatial strategies whilst approaching questions pertaining ecology, fostering tactful ethics and promoting sustainable practices. The tropical, diverse and technologically oriented setting of Singapore offers a base to pursue studies foregrounding innovation and inclusivity, aiming through architecture at devising spaces and producing relations in support of more sustainable modes of living, of diversity, and community-making. The local settings of Singapore offer a rich environment whence to start mapping and understanding the global dynamics affecting the planet, its deep and ever-evolving ecologies, the complex fabric of  the living, the human and more-than-human actors involved. The global>to<local pendulum allows us to keep reflecting on how to locate and engineer the human in relation to nature, ultimately prompting a multi-scalar understanding, and formulating new ways to discuss ethically what we mean with such terms.

At DOA BA Arch we endorse a layered way of thinking able to span and connect a variety of domains converging towards what we call architecture. The program welcomes students with no prior architectural knowledge, it is a four-year course, scaffolded to progress through the modules providing a comprehensive understanding of what architecture entails. Design studios are curated to progressively expose students to questions of: scale, precedent, context, aggregation, structure, space, environment, climate, envelope, density, urbanism, publicness, systems, comprehensiveness, integration, criticality, agenda and methodology. Studios and hands-on workshops are accompanied by seminars covering areas of history and theory, urbanism, and the environment. Fusing criticality and embracing engineering skillsets, we welcome students ready to carefully and critically employ technology to shape the future.

We help developing, and support, students’ ideas and explorations through a blend of analog and digital approaches, from hands-on material experiments to advanced computational methods. Through a curated pairing of research-design we organically foster the growth of students’ independence, getting them to gradually determine the architects they want to become. Students get enmeshed with architectural thinking, discipline, and practice, understanding the value of problem-solving as a mix of analysis, criticality and creativity. Sharpening skills through iterative processes and guided tutorials, throughout the academic years we hope students acquire confidence, endurance and resilience.

BA Arch DOA, in the spirit of CDE of which we are part, cultivates inter-disciplinary thinkers, a generation of makers able to document the world equipped with synoptic visions, comfortable with moving between fields of knowledge, grasping the need to operate locally and globally, synergising, distilling and organising architecturally a vast array of cultural elements, morphological types, and modes of making. Paraphrasing what someone has said, it is not enough to reflect on the world, the necessary task is that of collectively changing it. Architects commit to the future through acts of optimism, affecting the living and contributing to the making of society, its eco-logical grounding. Architects contribute to shaping the forms-of-life that are possible and the relations that are enabled and disabled within each space, in time. Such agency is not to be taken lightly and for granted, as that is architecture’s enormous potential, a vow that requires new creative individuals to be constantly renewed and reactivated.

Federico Ruberto
BA Arch Programme Director

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Apply now to our Bachelor of Arts in Architecture Programme.