Our lively PhD community were glad to be able to return to Bute this year and to settle into a completely new suite of study spaces with a communal kitchen and social area on the North West corner of the first floor of the building. The new home for our Postgraduate Research Students sits strategically between the Library and the Research offices. We hope over time that this spatial connection will help informal collaborations and conversations to develop which draw on the very varied and rapidly diversifying research methods that these students are working on. As processes reliant on Artificial Intelligence inform and impact on almost all forms of inquiry from the highly technical to the economic, social and environmental aspects of architectural research, so too is it challenged as a force. Our MPhil and Doctor of Philosophy programmes address the interests of the school’s six research groups and we currently host over 70 Doctoral Candidates whose emerging research we trust will shape intellectual frameworks of the future.

Professor Oriel Prizemann, Postgraduate Research Course Director