MArch Studio and Research Offerings
Each offering has been listed below. You can click on the topic to find out more or alternatively download the full PDF brochure.
Semester 1 2025
We are pleased to share with you our MArch Studio and Research offerings. While making your course selections, we would like to remind students who commenced prior to 2023 to ensure that you are aware of the MArch program changes in 2023.
ARCH7005 Advanced Architectural Design: Landscapes and Architecture
Course Coordinator
Hydrological Futures: Altered Liveability and Ecological Re-Imagining for Climate Change in Chandigarh
Backgrounded by our recurrent discussions on the aftermath of Climate Change and the Anthropocene, this Urban-Landscape Studio engages with the contested ecological futures of Asian cities. How would new and additive urbanities envisage ‘comfort and liveability’ within such this challenging scenario? What would be the spatial changes imperative to the city fabric and its urban landscape? How could available resources be conserved, and new resources identified? Our efforts will tackle these multiple questions through a paradigmatic shift of interconnected experimentations within the tabula rasa of India’s modern city of Chandigarh. Located at the transition between the Himalayan foothills and the Gangetic plains, the alluvial tracts that pre-dated Chandigarh’s development between 1951-66 were star-architect Le Corbusier’s inspiration for an unprecedented ‘ecological urbanism’ – a modern city in harmony with its natural landscape. Our efforts will recover this harmony via selective interventions within the city plan, through singular and ensemble adjustments, scales of urban spaces, and elements of infrastructure.
UDAD7006 Urban Design: Urban Futures
Course Coordinator
Next Generation Urban Villages: Sustainable urban development using foresight, systems and design approaches
Cairns offers a unique urban context, situated between world heritage-listed environments (the Great Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics Rainforest), with only a narrow development corridor for the city’s future expansion. Looking towards 2050, the city seeks a new development pathway which enhances liveability, advances decarbonisation, builds climate resilience, and protects biodiversity. The approaches we use to address these challenges – in Cairns and globally – will determine our ability to achieve sustainability goals.
In this Urban Futures Studio, students will pursue this task by weaving together foresight and systems thinking through an iterative design process. We will begin by exploring critical environmental, social, and economic issues and urban strategies. Students will then build on this shared resource to develop an urban design proposition which achieves a ‘triple-bottom line’ outcome.
Throughout this studio, students will develop valuable professional skills and folio pieces. Students will liaise with government and industry leaders and community stakeholders as part of the design process and build on a collaboration between UQ and the Cairns Regional Council initiated in 2022. Students will also benefit from the expertise of an interdisciplinary team of researchers pursuing urban sustainability.
ARCH7074 Research Lab: Environmental Performance
Course Coordinator
Environmental Performance Research Lab
The Environmental Performance Research Lab is focused on making quantitative assessments of environmental performance of the built environment. This subject will introduce the methods and tools used to calculate the embodied carbon of buildings and building elements and to model operational energy use and indoor environment quality. Additionally, this course will cover some of the metrics and goals associated with NCC compliance and high performance buildings needed to meet Australia’s Net Zero by 2050 goals.
Over the course of the semester, students will assess the embodied carbon or operational energy use of a typical low- or medium-rise multi-residential building constructed to current standards and with typical construction materials. With these calculations as a baseline, students will research and critically assess alternative building materials and design strategies with the aim of reducing embodied and operational greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, students will propose alterations to the design and construction of their case study buildings in order to improve environmental performance and to meet Net Zero goals.
ARCH7084 Research Lab: History and Heritage
Course Coordinators
Research Lab
This Research Lab focuses on the uses and understanding of built environments constructed in the past – how we can learn from them and manage their ongoing lives. The Lab introduces theoretical and methodological issues of historiography such as forms of analysis, argument and evidence; and research practices such archival research and oral history; the collecting and maintaining of archives of architecture; and Digital Humanities techniques such as 3D scanning, data analysis and visualisation. The course includes a critical understanding of the principles and statutory regulation of cultural heritage. Students will employ the learning through researching, documenting, and analysing a building, persons, institutions, or ideas.
WATR6105 Integrated Urban Water Management
Students following the 2023/2024 Master of Architecture program structure can choose WATR6105 as a MArch Elective course.
Students following the pre-2023 program structure can choose WATR6105 as a MArch Research course.
Course Coordinator
Integrated Urban Water Management
In this unit, students will learn and apply advanced knowledge relevant to the analysis, design, and planning of integrated urban water systems. This will span natural and anthropogenic flows (rainfall, stormwater, evapotranspiration, water supply and wastewater). It will reveal the multiple interactions between different parts of the water cycle and connections with infrastructure, architecture and other cycles including energy and nutrients. Students will be able to understand and relate to social, regulatory and economic challenges and drivers, and be able to contribute to planning guidelines, policies and regulations. Supporting conceptual frameworks of metabolism, sustainability, resilience, and multi-criteria decision making will be developed.
An overview of future urban scenarios, including centralised, decentralised and hybrid system design in greenfield and existing developments in different regions will provide context. A field trip to leading contemporary designs/sites, and a team challenge for a specific site will lead into a Design Challenge based on the internationally successful and national award-winning process developed by the course team at UQ.
On completion, students will be able to use integrated water management principles and related analytical tools for developing efficient, multi-purpose and hybrid water systems including architectural, engineered and landscape components. Group and individual projects and assignments will enhance trans-disciplinary communication, presentation and teamwork skills.
ARCH7033 Climate Futures and the Built Environment
Students following the 2023/2024 Master of Architecture program structure must complete ARCH7033 as a MArch Core course.
Students following the pre-2023 program structure can choose ARCH7033 as a MArch Research course.
Course Coordinator
Climate Futures and the Built Environment
ARCH7033 is a research course designed to provide an interdisciplinary understanding of climate change as it relates to built environment design. Through a solutions-oriented and future-focussed approach, students will learn how architects are positioned to address many different types of sustainability problems through designprojects, and how we can collectively redirect systems that are currently in crisis.
Learning is guided by both core content and self-directed research to develop a proposal for a disaster-prone site in a specific context. ARCH7033 develops skills in Place-Based Approaches to sustainability through: climate-responsive design, community resilience, material resource use within planetary limits, carbon and circular economy, and integrated responses to environmental, social, and economic systems.
ARCH7060/ARCH7063 Architectural Research: Thesis
Course Coordinator
ADPS7060 –Year-long, 4 unit thesis
ADPS7060 is a guided independent research project conducted through a series of advisory meetings and self-directed study. It is a year-long, 4-unit course that will require a submission in October 2025. Thesis offers students the opportunity to undertake a focussed research project in a specific area of research interest. The course expects students to achieve an advanced level of academic argument and the mastery of instruments for constructing and expressing that argument.
The research project culminates in a body of work that communicates the process, outcomes and value of the research. This may include, as agreed with the thesis advisor, a written dissertation, fieldwork reports, artefacts from material experiments, and research reports.
Students will have an individual advisor and meet one hour per week, or a blocked equivalent. The thesis student cohort, coordinator and advisors will meet together during the semester to provide all with an overview and comparison of the research being undertaken and the expectations for thesis.
ARCH7063 –One Semester, 2 unit thesis
ARCH7063 is a 2-unit thesis course. The thesis will be submitted in Semester 1 2024. ARCH7063 has the same expectations for research quality and findings as ADPS7060, and the same requirements for the length of the dissertation, which will be marked on the same criteria. It is only suitable for students who have made substantial research findings in a prior Research Course that can be tightly articulated with 2-units of work in ARCH7063 to reach the standard of a thesis. A student’s work in ARCH7063 can draw on work previously submitted for Research Courses, but this work must be clearly identified in the thesis and overall the thesis must represent two units of new work in research and writing carried out in the current semester.
Thesis is available to students who:
- have completed 16-units of the MArch program,
- have, or expect to have a GPA of 5.5 or above,
- for ARCH7063, have completed 2-units of Research Courses,
- and have the support of a potential advisor on a topic outlined on the application.
Students who do not meet the criteria above will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Students who are considering enrolling in a Higher Degree by Research degree (Master or Doctor of Philosophy) in the future are strongly encouraged to undertake the Thesis option.
Application process
- Identify a potential advisor who is a member ofthe full-time academic staff within the School. Please be aware that staff members are generally taking on Thesis students on top of their allocated teaching load, so you need to be working on a project of interest to them and where they have expertise. You can find descriptions of staff research interests at UQ Researchers. We are unable to take on topics where no suitable staff are available to advise.
- Discuss your ideas for thesis with the proposed advisor. You are welcome (and encouraged) to propose topics of your own interest.
- If you are applying for ARCH7063 please show the research findings you have made in a previous course can be the basis of a thesis completed with 2-units of work.
- Complete the applicationform available here: https://survey.app.uq.edu.au/ThesisApplication
- The Course Coordinator will decide on applications in consultation with the proposed advisor, and on the basis of academic record. Following this, the School of Architecture, Design and Planning will advise you of the next steps.