The degree programme is offered within the School of Arts, Culture and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh and has extensive links with the newly formed Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA). It treats architecture as a mode of cognition that, with its own disciplinary techniques, has the capacity to help explore wider social, cultural, political and economic themes. Teaching takes place through lectures, seminars, site visits, and field-research that draw on the extraordinary urban surroundings of Edinburgh itself, as well as the architectural heritage of Europe. Many graduates make direct, vocational use of their degree qualifications, working for heritage organisations in the public or private sector, both in Britain and abroad. Others work in more general areas, including museum and gallery curatorship or architectural journalism.

The four-year programme, leading to the general MA (Hons) degree, is divided into two parts: two years of general study at Pre-Honours level, and two years of specialist study at Honours level (Junior and Senior Honours). The Pre-Honours years (1 & 2) offer an introduction to and grounding in the topic, beginning in year one with foundation courses in the history of architecture and fine art. In year two students build on this foundation by studying architecture in the wider context of urbanism and the cultural history of cities. The Honours years (3 & 4) provide the opportunity for students to study particular periods, movements, and theories in depth, including the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and European Modernism. A dissertation of 12,000 words on a topic of the student’s choosing is also undertaken in year four.

For a profile of the programme structure, please click here

 

Core Academic Staff

Alex Bremner: Victorian architecture; nineteenth-century theory; British imperial and colonial architecture; post-colonial history and theory; architecture and nationalism; religious architecture.

Jim Lawson: Italian Renaissance art and architecture; architecture and landscape; early modern Scottish architecture; history of photography

John Lowrey: Georgian architecture; eighteenth-century theory; Scottish architecture; Edinburgh townscape.

Iain Boyd Whyte: Modern art and architecture; nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture in Germany; architecture and nationalism; Modernist history and theory; architecture in the United States.

 

Associated Staff

Ian Campbell (Palladio and Scottish Renaissance)

Lara Day (nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany)

Dr Emma Dummett (IASH Fellow: European Modernism, Le Corbusier)

Laura Fernandez-Gonzalez (Renaissance and Baroque, Spanish empire)

Graham Harris (Medieval architecture and construction, urban history of Glasgow)

Robert Hillenbrand (Islamic art and architecture)

Angus McDonald (cultural landscapes and construction history)

Kirsten McKee (eighteenth century, Scottish architecture)

Joanne O’Hara (British Palladianism)

Margaret Stewart (Scottish architecture)

Nicholas Uglow (eighteenth century, country house architecture and British classicism)

Dagmar Weston (European Modernism, Le Corbusier)

Yue Zhuang (Chinese architecture)