M.Arch II Post-Professional Design Research

The post-professional design research program is founded on the premise that architects can contribute to myriad urgent global challenges by advancing design research as a new framework for practice. The post-professional M.Arch. II expands the possibilities for design, representation, and spatial thinking to produce new forms of knowledge addressing a broad array of contemporary topics.

Core Research Curriculum

Our two-year core curriculum equips students with an advanced degree that builds upon their previous architectural training to pursue both group and independent design research centered around an independent thesis project. The curriculum consists of a first-year seminar sequence and a second-year independent studio sequence. The design research sequences allows students to explore the breadth of courses offered at the School of Architecture and the larger community of courses throughout Yale University while providing a supportive environment that fosters interaction, dialogue, and a sense of common purpose.

Academic Flexibility

With only four required courses, the program offers students considerable freedom to shape their own curriculum to develop an increasingly responsive, critical, and speculative relationship to their work. In addition to the curriculum outlined above, during the first two terms, students will enroll in advanced design studios taught by leading practitioners from around the world. These studios are the same ones offered to M.Arch. I students. Students also take elective courses offered by the School. These courses fall into the broad categories of design and visualization, technology and practice, history and theory, and urbanism and landscape. In addition, design research students are required to take two classes outside the School of Architecture. At the beginning of each term, students meet with the program director and their faculty advisors to help choose elective courses that support their general interests and relevant classes that support their thesis project.

Community

The relatively small size of the Post Pro student body coupled with the modest size of the School of Architecture allows our students to form a collective identity while immersing themselves within the wider YSOA community. Enrolling in the required courses builds solidarity among M.Arch. II students. At the same time, Advanced Studios and elective seminars allow Post Pro students to engage with other YSOA students as well as students from other Yale departments.

Thesis

The program is centered around the development of an original thesis project. The thesis is broadly conceived and allows for many different possibilities without a clearly defined format. A design thesis can utilize different forms of representation, at different scales, and can be realized into different media including publications, exhibitions, performances, or digital experiences. Thesis projects are unified by a rigorous engagement with media and media production including drawing and image-making and a written component elaborating the critical stakes of the project that situates the work within various conceptual, theoretical, and historical contexts.

In its most simple form, a thesis is a claim. It is not simply a design project, but one that takes a stand on a topic, site, issue, or idea, and presents rigorous, original research in support of that claim. In this context, original research is one key vehicle for producing new forms of architectural knowledge. Doing original research means engaging with archives and objects, conducting field studies, and defining ways in which techniques of spatial production relate to other methods of research. This transdisciplinary approach not only looks outward to practices beyond the traditional purview of architecture but asks what architecture and spatial thinking can contribute to other disciplines.

Simply defined, the Yale M.Arch II thesis is an original, research-based design project that develops new forms of spatial thinking and representation to complex issues and their intersections with architecture, space, geography, form, subjectivity, and aesthetics.