Yanqi Huang (RCA) - 2025-26 Students
yanqi.huang@network.rca.ac.uk

Pedagogies, Professionalism and Practice: Architectural Education at the Royal College of Art 1962–95

This PhD examines the transformation of architectural education, professionalism and practice in post-war Britain through an institutional biography of the RCA architecture department from 1962 to 1995. Using archival analysis, biographical studies of unsung actors and oral history interviews, it studies the architectural culture being taught at the RCA and transmitted through its international knowledge networks, and public and building programmes. In doing so, it chronicles the RCA’s role in the emergence of practice-led and interdisciplinary pedagogies, situating their development in the evolvement of built-environment discourses and the decline of ‘public-service’ architecture.

Principal supervisor: Prof. Sam Jacoby