The Department of Architecture is committed to providing an atmosphere which allows students to produce intellectually rigorous, creative and worldly work. The showcase pages that follow offer selections of such work. The work is drawn from various programmes across the Department, and is curated by individual members of staff and students on a rotating basis.

This project by Philip Obayda explores the idea of a Motion Capture Centre. It was produced in Years 3 and 4 of the MA Architectural Design degree, in two courses: Architecture and Multimedia (Richard Coyne) and Architecture and Technology (Fiona McLachlan and Remo Pedreschi). This is how Philip describes the idea of motion capture and his response to it: 'Motion Capture is essentially choreographic mapping, a process of translating physical displacement into digitised information. The design consists of two motion capture environments - the main motion capture stage and the adjacent aquatic motion capture pool. Both utilise the capacity of the dome, a form that is inherently described by an infinite number of vertices drawn from its centre. The dome is a digital grid, a virtual landscape whereupon choreographic mapping is enabled through the use of digital voyeurs, the sensor cameras. Two mutual landscapes occupy the motion capture space - the virtual and the physical. This dichotomy stipulates a design premise - to provide a physical environment that is independent of and yet described by the virtual environment. To provide and utilise a dome without constructing a dome.'

The project is interesting for a number of reasons: the proficiency of the digital representations, the structural rigour of the design development, and the way in which the body/architecture interface is integrated into the logic of the design parti. Examples of work.

The projects pictured here were assembled in the 'Architecture and Multimedia' course (Richard Coyne and Dorian Wiszniewski), one of the Design Options available in years 3 and 4 of the MA Architectural Design and Architectural Studies programmes. Examples of work.

Architectural History courses are designed to encourage an independent approach to study using project work of various kinds throughout the programme.

At Honours level, The Evolution of the Edinburgh Townscape makes a detailed study of the city and incorporates a particular theme that is further explored in student research projects, for example, Calton Hill, the importance of the medical institutions in the development of Edinburgh, and the buildings in Princes Street

In second year part of the course examines Paris, focussing on the relationship between house and city. Students prepare their own sketch designs of Parisian Hotels for tutorial discussion.

This project by David Eland (MA Architectrual Design, Year 4, Design Option) is for a park-and-ride facility integrating a series of fast food outlets on Edinburgh's ring road. The brief asked students to explore a set of issues to do with mass consumption, globalization of leisure, the edge-city, suburbanization and McDonaldization. The course introduced a diverse range of theoretical material, from Georges Bataille on expenditure, to Robert Venturi on decorated sheds, to the AJ Metric Handbook on vehicular turning circles. This project proposes a series of towers in which storage, production and serving facilities for fast food franchises (McDonalds, Subway, etc.) are stacked vertically. These towers are complemented by refuse-recyling towers. In between these vertical elements are threaded a series of parking strips where dining can take place in roadside picnic mode. This is David's text on the project:

'Supply, demand, disgust. This project attempts to understand and improve the architecture that exists on the edge of a city - often a featureless landscape of business parks, retail sheds and roundabouts. Running through this is the verge - a mass-produced extruded strip of greenery. Creating a blurred distinction between what is natural and what is artificial - the asphalt road surface or the grass alongside? Uniting these two elements is an established way of dining - the picnic. A picnic table joining a space for the car with an area of grass to sit on, boxed and extruded to accommodate the right number of customers.'

The project was commended in the Corus Steel national student design competition in 2003.