Year Two Design

Studio is taught separately from Architecture. Design students are taught as year group by a group of studio teachers who  come from a range of design disciplines including architects and engineers. As in first year, studio explores the four primary strands of Create, Critique, Analyse, and Explain. Projects are chosen to provide opportunities for students to develop and demonstrate knowledge and understanding, qualities, skills and other attributes in the context of creative interdisciplinary design. As in first year, the projects set will usually be buildings, but this will not always be the case and students will also be set projects that might involve making objects, or products. The projects will vary from year-to-year, but the themes and learning outcomes remain the same. Examples of studio themes in year two are:

Michaelmas Term    Fragile Earth: Geotechnics

The theme of this term is earth and water. The studio is accompanied by lectures on soil mechanics, water engineering and geotechnical engineering. Students carry out a design project that explores problems in geotechnical engineering design and water sustainability. This might involve exploring building retaining structures or buildings in difficult soil conditions or building in a flood plain. It might also include the design of buildings made out earth or soil and the problems of drainage. As well as designing the project, students test their designs through calculation or physical loading tests.

Lent Term   Efficiency: Energy Use and Water

The projects in this term are set to explore energy and water use and the accompanying lectures cover hydraulics and water infrastructure. Students will design small structures and carry out more complex environmental calculations on their projects including lighting, ventilation, heating, water use, and energy efficiency. They will explore the possibilities of low energy design.  

Easter Term     Timber and Natural Materials 

The studio this term is accompanied by lectures in timber design and fabrication and working with natural materials (such as hemp fibres and bamboo). This will include structural analysis of timber structures and methods of assembly. The project will involve the design and/or building of a timber structures in groups or as a solo project.

A short compulsory course in surveying is run at the beginning of the Easter holidays. 

This course introduces architectural representation as both a mode of critical inquiry and a generative design tool. Through five thematic modules, Context, Concept, Tectonics, Experience, and Ethics, students will explore how to test, develop, and communicate spatial ideas. Emphasis is placed on critical thinking through making, iterative testing, and ethical reflection. A web-based portfolio will serve as the final vehicle for integrating visual and textual reflections across all modules. A range of digital platforms will be introduced, including Rhino, QGIS, Illustrator, After Effects, and Cargo.

The Materials part of this course aims to build on the first year and explores in more depth the methods of analysis used in Materials Science. It explores in more depth the structures of materials and the way the choice of materials affects design and looks at mechanisms of chemical change, decay, and failure. The course will continue to explore the range of materials available for design, their chemical and physical structure and how materials are chosen for particular purposes. The Fabrication part of this course explores the basics of façade engineering and building envelope design. 

In the Second Year Environmental Design course students can expect to gain an understanding of the fundamental scientific principles underlying the thermal and acoustic behaviour of buildings alongside with key issues of sustainability in architecture. They will also look at lighting and ventilation. Broadly the course examines these phenomena and introduces students to a range of technologies and analysis techniques for designing comfortable indoor environments. Students will be challenged to apply these techniques and explore the role light, energy, and sound can play in shaping architecture.

At the end of the course the students will be able to: understand and apply the scientific principles regarding energy, light, heat ventilation and sound in the design of buildings and be able to carry out simple calculations; evaluate the costs and benefits of a range of technologies for creating comfortable indoor environments; conduct iterative design analysis optimized to climate, building energy use, and daylighting; and build the knowledge for critically examine concepts of environmental design of a building.

This course is in two parts. Structural Form, taught in the Michaelmas Term which is shared with architecture, looks at the choice of various structural buildings systems available and their relative merits. 

In the Lent Term the Design Tripos students are taught in more depth about structural analysis. The course aims to increase the understanding of the behaviour and analysis of structures, and to introduce students to concepts of stress-state, strain-state and yield, statically indeterminate structures and implications of redundancy, the plastic theory of structures, the Bernoulli equations and the basics of fluid mechanics. 

This lecture course builds on the mathematical understanding developed in the first year to provide students with the mathematical tools they need to operate as structural engineers and designers. While students covered topics included in further maths at A level in first year, the second year course extends the study of mathematics to look at vector calculus and linear algebra. The students also learn the basics of programming and an introduction into how to apply analytical tools such as finite element analysis to the structures using software such as Autodesk or MATLAB. The course is assessed through written examinations at the beginning of Lent and Easter Term. Supervisions are provided throughout Michaelmas and Lent with practice questions to prepare for the exams.

Students get to choose three courses from a list of options, one in each term. The list varies from year-to-year but is designed to enable students to pursue their particular interests.   Subjects being offered in second year in 2026-2027 are: 

History and Theory Courses 

• Urban Planning and Design                  
•  Current Topics in Urbanism                   
•  Sound and Architecture                           
• Sacred Modern                                             
•  Acting Through Architecture                   
• The British City in the Global Context
• Relational Approaches to Architecture and Its Others
• Theories in Twentieth-Century Architecture
• Landscape and Gardens
• Sustainable Cities                                       
• A Matter of Substance 
• Thresholds and Borders 
• Environmentality
• Architecture and Gender 

Technical subjects 

• Inclusive Design Futures
• Human-centred design and neurodiversity 
• Artificial intelligence and design 
• From Natural Science to Design: Techniques in the study of materials