Suggested Topics for Master’s Projects

Listed below are some general areas of investigation that can lead to good Master’s projects. Click on the title to find names of architects and books that focus on the topic. At the end of this page is a list of general resources.

Issues of Event and Performance

Buildings that induce events or present people to each other: Public social spaces, Places of display, interactive spaces.

Places that teach or tell stories, create a narrative path or architectural choreography.

Experimental performances that explore issues of space.

Issues of Perception and the Body

Buildings that create an environment for the senses. Design that explores light, visual phenomena, sound, or an analogy with other senses such as taste or smell. Design that creates cinematic views such as quick cuts and tracking shots in three dimensions. Design that engages the body in architectural choreography or composes space like music. Full scale experimental projects that engage the body.

Explorations of Design or Construction Techniques

Buildings that explore the design implications of a material or technique such as green design, energy-saving strategies, incorporating natural systems. Design that explores implications of non-linear mathematics or 3D computer modeling. Furniture or small objects that will be built at full-scale.

Issues of Landscape and Urbanism

Buildings that extend as infrastructure or minimal interventions that modify an existing fabric. Design that focuses on an issue of urban architecture such as the social spaces between sidewalk and interior, or strategies for multiple, repeated units, or issues of scale/size in the city, or how two contrasting programs might intersect. Buildings that explore a specific issue of urbanism or landscape such as multiple scales of motion, marking the city, bringing the natural world into the city, defining urban corridors, edges, or nodes. Buildings that use strategies of landscape architecture such a composing continuous paths and views, manipulating the ground plane, using plants and natural materials, engaging natural systems.

Issues of Identity and Difference

Buildings that explore identity and differences in culture, gender, age, ability. Buildings for specific groups of people, or that celebrate identity or differences between groups. Design for multiculturalism, or anonymous global culture, for example, places for travel or buildings that can be placed anywhere. Design for other species or for many species, for example wildlife sanctuaries in the city.

Theoretical Explorations

Buildings that explore a theory, metaphor, or specific influences from other disciplines: literature, art, music, philosophy, mathematics, biology, medicine, psychology, law.

General Resources: Anthologies of Contemporary Architectural Ideas

Hays, Michael, ed. Architectural Theory since 1968. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998.

Jencks, Charles, and Karl Kropf, eds. Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture. London Academy Press, 2006.

Leach, Neil, ed. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, 1997.

Moneo, José Rafael. Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects, 2004.

Nesbitt, Kate, ed. Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996.

Sola-Morales, Ignasi. Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996.

Tschumi, Bernard, and Irene Chung, eds. The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century, Columbia Books of Architecture. NY: Monacelli Press, 2003.