Module Index — Architectural Future(s)

Architectural Future(s) is a History and Theory module for Year 4 MSci Architedcture students at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. The module invites students to formulate a critical proposition for architecture’s future, grounded in the urgencies of the present, neither detached fantasy or naïve optimism. Students anchor their work in a contemporary debate, exhibition, or publication, define a clear field of speculation, and develop their argument through a hybrid of researcg and creative experimentation, drawing on theory, archives, interviews, and design projects. The module culminates in a 2,500-word illustrated essay, conceived as an independent publication, where text, image, and typoegraphy work together as parallel arguments, submitted both digitally and as a crafted hard copy. In testing convictions and giving for to personal propositions, the module asks students to locate their own voice within architecture’s unfolding futures.

Module

Architectural Future(s)
MSci Architecture, History and Theory
The Bartlett School of Architecture
University College London

Team

Kay Sedki (Coordinator)
Emily Mann
Lo Marshal
Stamatis Zografis

H&T Director
MSci Directors

Guang Yu Ren
Sara Martinez and Alicia Gonzalez-Lafita Perez

Guests
2025–26

CJ Lim
Clare St George
Guang Yu Ren
Hlib Velyhorskyi
Murray Fraser
Nic Clear
Peg Rawes
Rory Sherlock
Tim Waterman

UCL
Editor
UCL
Biblioteka
UCL
Huddersfield
UCL
UCL / AA
UCL

Guests
2024–25

Edward Denison
José L. Torero Cullen
Rami Daher
Ruth Lang

UCL
UCL
GJU / Turath
RCA / LSA

Guests
2023–24

Emily Mann
Emily Priest
José L. Torero Cullen
Michael Hebbert
Peg Rawes
Polly Hudson
Reinier de Graaf
Toby Day

UCL / Survey of London
UCL / AA
UCL
UCL / BSP
UCL
Alan Turing Institute
OMA / AMO
UCL

Yesterday’s Future(s)

Each year, the module opens with Yesterday’s Future(s), an inaugural lecture and annual provocation, looking backwards at past visions of the future to set the theme for the year ahead. Each edition takes a different thematic lens, treating the future as a historical object and examining how futures were imagined through utopias, manifestoes, predictions and speculations, exploring the assumptions embedded within them. Past editions have traced non-linear histories of speculative thinking, histories of equity, and critical imaginaries, each revisiting key historical episodes, projects, and texts to open up questions that students carry into their own proporistions for the future.

Critical Imaginaries: In Light of Yesterday’s ShadowYesterday’s Future(s). Lecture. K Sedki (2025)

The future is unpredictable, irreversible, uneven, and inescapable. To speculate is to risk error. This lecture examines how that contingency unsettles a mode of thought that has long sustained architecture’s confidence in its own projections: that social conditions can be transformed through aesthetic forms, and that intention reliably translates into consequence. Revisiting the promises, failures, and afterlives of twentieth-century architectural futures, it explores the limits of prediction and the contingency of outcome, not as a verdict on speculation itself, but as an invitation to rethink its purpose. Drawing on examples of mediums and methods of architectural speculation, from visionary projects, technological experiments to manifestoes, publications and critical fictions, the lecture traces the diverse ways architects have imagined, communicated, and contested alternative worlds. What emerges is speculation not as the assertion of styles and assumptions, but as an open critical practice of inquiry, interrogating the latent possibilities within architecture and its capacity for change.

Past Justice: An Atlas of (Un)Equal FuturesYesterday’s Future(s). Lecture. K Sedki (2024)

Framed as a historical atlas of (un)equality, this lecture traces moments, architectural, political and cultural, that challenged inequality and sought to advance more equitable futures. Spanning continents and centuries, it examines declarations, projects, institutions, social movements and architectural propositions that expanded, redefined or contested ideas of justice, inclusion and collective life. Rather than presenting a single history, the lecture reveals a constellations of overlapping struggles, ambitions and contradictions. Students contributed their own suggestions for material, which were woven into the final lecture, framing the future of architecture as inseparable from past and ongoing struggles for equity and justice.

Building and Time: Non-Linear HistoriesYesterday’s Future(s). Lecture. K Sedki (2023)

Architecture’s slowness makes it an inherently speculative discipline. Buildings often outlive architects, their consequences offset in time from their intentions. This lecture examins this dissonance between concept and consequence, tracing the contingent and non-linear trajectories that bind, separate and transform the two. From Pruitt-Igoe to Robin Hood Gardens, the familiar image of the modernist project’s undoing is set against the dream-image of their conception, revealing how the present becomes obscured when detached from the futures it once imagined. Resisting linear accounts of progress, the lecture traces how architectural ideas emerge, crystallise, evolve or persist across time, establishing a foundation for the module’s broader ambition: to understand the future not as a destination to be predicted, but as a field of possibilities to be critically imagined and actively shaped.

Future Declarations is a reflective exercise given to students at the start of each academic year on the Architectural Future(s) module, serving as a point of departure for each student’s research. Students are asked to write and illustrate a handwritten letter looking back on their architectural journey so far and forward toward the futures they hope to bring into being through architecture. Equal parts personal manifesto and speculative drawing, the exervise sets a tone of ambition and imagination for the year ahead, asking students to declare, in their own hand, what they hope to contribute to a rapidly changing world.

Index

Last Updated 24.10.37

2026