The Dissertation, Second Edition

by Iain Borden, Katerina Rüedi Ray

The Dissertation is one of the most demanding yet potentially most stimulating components of an architectural course. Properly done, it can be a valuable contribution not only to the students own learning development but also to the field of architecture as a whole. This book provides a complete guide to what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and the major pitfalls involved.

This is a comprehensive guide to all that an architecture student might need to know about undertaking the dissertation, including new material on CD-ROM and online sources, web based research techniques, digital images, alternative imaging strategies, key architecture links, referencing and new dissertation extracts. It clearly navigates the student through the whole process of writing, preparing and submitting a dissertation, as well as suggesting what to do after the dissertation has been completed. Subjects covered include how to write a proposal, which research methodologies and techniques to adopt, which libraries and archives to utilize (including special architectural resources on the net), as well as how to structure, reference and illustrate the final submission.

The authors also take architecture students into new terrain, suggesting alternative methods of undertaking dissertations, whether as video, prose writing, multimedia or other forms of expression. Furthermore, this guide includes new examples of exemplary dissertations of all kinds, as completed by students in Europe and North America so that the reader can clearly see the kinds of work which they themselves might choose to pursue.

Also in the Seriously Useful Guides
* The Crit
* The The Portfolio
* Practical Experience

Genres: Architecture

342 pages, Paperback

First published July 10, 2000

About the author

Iain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, England.

His research explores how architecture and cities are experienced and re-used by the public.

Architecture and cities are crucial to how people live and society operates. Without homes, shops and parks, without offices, workplaces and airports, our world would grind to a halt. As a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, he is interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced.

To do this, he has studied a diverse range of subjects and places, from Italian renaissance piazzas to surveillance cameras in shopping malls, from architectural modernism to recent postmodernism, from issues of gender and ethnicity in cities to the way architecture is represented in cinema and photography. In particular, he has completed an in-depth study of the urban practice of skateboarding, looking at how skateboarders adopt modern cities as their own pleasure-ground, creating a culture with its own architecture, clothes, attitudes and social benefits. He has also extended this investigation into the world of automobile driving, looking at movies to explore how people’s experiences of the city from the car changes their engagement with architecture and urban space. Recent work explores how specific places and buildings in cities worldwide can be encountered through different kinds of social engagement, such as memory and risk-taking.