Starting in September - Sustainable Tall Buildings!

The term is about to start at the end of September and we have had most of the course planned many weeks ago. Here's a few highlights:

• Phil Oldfield has arrived from Chicago and has joined the team as a full member of staff.

• We have a London field course planned in October, and a day in Manchester later in the term.

• For the first semester, we are sticking to our main plan of a 'pocket tall building' on sites in 5 different parts of the globe, where there is a need for our students to research CLIMATE, CULTURE and CONTEXT.
• The main project will start in October, before which we will do some short tall building design exercises.

• This year, the sites will be Chicago, Rotterdam, Mumbai, Abu Dhabi and Kuala Lumpur - all of which present interesting levels of difficulty.

• Since this is going to be almost bigger than the Olympics, cities around the globe are welcome to apply to us to be chosen in 2010 :)

• For the second semester, we will continue the project that we have successfully done for the last three years, a 'Super-Tall Bioclimatic Mixed Use skyscraper', in a capital city location - London. We have an excellent site in London, a sort of outdoor urban laboratory, on which we can test out far-out concepts such as vertical farming, algae generating towers, solar and wind experimentation, extreme density, parks in the sky, sports or educational towers and much more.

• As this course is still unique, we are exploring the means of distance learning, using webcasts, movies, pdfs, summer school, for those who cannot afford the full year of Masters course.

Yes.... this is the World's first Masters course in Sustainable Tall Buildings - starting on Monday 21st Sept!

We are starting this blog to share with our present students and tutor team, to keep in touch with the alumni of our previous Tall Buildings design studios, and to help those who might come in future to find out more of how the course progresses.