Architecture

Overview:
The Centre for Architecture and Construction Management addresses the issues of architectural and urban design in an increasingly globalised world, where factors such as sustainability and climate change, identity and heritage, and notions of craft and form create a complex context that architecture has to mediate. The Centre values both traditional and practice-based research, particularly research-by-design, which it uses to make new knowledge through not only the analysis of the existing, but also the documentation of new processes and situations created by new design thinking. Architecture and construction is seen both as a lens and as a measure of the 'city', allowing action-based research to create new situations that can be analysed and compared with the existing, whilst traditional work creates more epistemic impact. RESEARCH STRENGTHS Construction Management Research undertaken ranges from construction law and finance to business strategy and risk/disaster management. Particular expertise has been developed in urban construction management, sustainable project management strategies, procurement methods, competence-based modeling, BIM and post-disaster reconstruction. Materiality Technological innovation: the Centre has an outward reaching research portfolio working with business to develop innovative new technologies for designing, such as developing composite fabric and concrete panels which challenge the perception of concrete as masonry, and food producing facades that climatically control space as well as grow food crops. Design innovation: working as designers within real economic and social contexts, allows studies of material and space that connect social briefs within a research by design framework. Urbanism Within Urbanism, the Centre has close ties with the Institute of Spatial and Environmental Planning: and works with an inter-disciplinary...