News

Environmental, architectural, and structural: three disciplines, one degree.

The upcoming academic year will see University College London (UCL) offer a new undergraduate course: a MEng in Engineering and Architectural Design.

UCL appointed our firm and Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCB) as their industry liaison partners. We have been working with UCL over the last 18 months to help scope the course content, raising its profile in the industry and to prospective students. Applications for the first year were hugely oversubscribed, with the first 40 students starting in October this year.

Ian Durbin and Ian Taylor – managing partner of FCBs’ London office – will be co-presenting the inaugural lecture to students and staff entitled: The Design Process in the Context of the 21st Century. We also have the pleasure of delivering some of the course content on the acoustics modules.

The MEng course will explore new and developing aspects of the built environment. Taking the form of a four-year integrated undergraduate programme, it aims to challenge students to develop a critical, experimental, and technically rigorous approach to architectural, environmental and structural design and engineering, delivered in a cross-discipline integrated design studio environment at new, state-of-the-art facilities at Here East in Stratford.

This course seeks to address the fact that engineers and architects often exist in disparate settings, lacking understanding of the other’s priorities, or finding it difficult to communicate ideas to each other. With support from CIBSE, RIBA and JBM we understand this will be the first programme in the world accredited by three building-design-related professional bodies, so we’ll be helping to create a new kind of graduate who should be able to overcome fragmentation in the construction industry.

But don’t take our word for it, here’s a whole swathe of industry leaders who are backing the course.