The Dissertation: An Architectural Student's Handbook

by Iain Borden

Dissertation: an Architecture Student's Handbook is a comprehensive guide to all that an architecture student might need to know about writing a dissertation. It clearly navigates the student through the whole process of starting, 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 utilise (including special architectural resources on the internet), as well as how to structure, reference and illustrate it.

Dissertation also takes architecture students into new terrains, suggesting alternative methods of undertaking dissertations, whether as video, prose writing, multimedia or other forms of expression.

* Learn how to organise and direct your studies with this clear and accessible guide
* Extracts from first class UK and US dissertations provide inspiration to get better marks
* Get advice from an experienced international author team

Genres: Architecture

256 pages, Kindle Edition

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.