Architectural education in the United Kingdom performs a difficult balancing act: meeting the requirements of professional accreditation bodies and preparing students for practice, while also offering a meaningful education for those who do not intend to become architects. Increasingly, professional pressures frame architectural education as training rather than as an exploratory, experimental process - one that equips students to face unpredictable future challenges in the profession and beyond.
In response, many educators develop a hidden curriculum: an implicit set of values, methods, and priorities that sit alongside formal learning outcomes. This hidden curriculum tends to privilege curiosity, criticality, and open-ended inquiry, often through interdisciplinary and art-based approaches. Working in the gaps between what can be specified and what must be discovered, they complicate the “university-to-practice conveyor belt” narrative and widen what architectural education can be.
This book shines a light on those creative pedagogical practices—working within, and often despite, systemic pressures - and shows why they matter for the vitality of architectural education at a time of deep uncertainty across higher education. It is organised into two parts: Discussions, which offer in-depth explorations of current challenges, and Insights, which present a selection of case studies. Together, they argue for architectural education as a space that cultivates imagination, agency, and adaptive ways of thinking - qualities essential for shaping futures that are not yet known.
The book provides essential reading for educators and advanced students of architecture.
Table of Contents:
Section: Discussions 1. Uncertainty as an educational method 2. Beasts sleeping furiously: An investigation into transdisciplinary creative practices on the intersection of creative writing and architecture 3. Comfort beyond limits: Precedents for creativity 4. Snorkelling in Soil: Architectural Care for the Ground 5. The Case for the Dissertation 6. (Re)making the case for Studio 7. The Other School Section: Insights 8. A hopeful glimpse through the window - an outsider's perspective of pedagogy as creative practice 9. A Grand Day Out 10. The Foundation Studio: Space, practice, and belonging in architecture and design education 11. Unfolding – a first-year introduction to conceptual thinking and reflective practice at Liverpool School of Architecture 12. Realising Feminist Architecture: Identifying ‘Ah Ha’ Moments 13. The Making Manifesto: Reclaim the joy of practical skills in architectural education Note from the Editors
About the Author :
Kasia Nawratek is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester School of Architecture, a registered architect, and a writer. Her research brings posthuman approaches to the climate crisis into dialogue with literary and narrative methods of architectural investigation. Grounded in Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony, her teaching nurtures inclusive, dialogic studio cultures and frames speculative design as a form of world-building. She edited Space and Language in Architectural Education: Catalysts and Tensions (Routledge, 2022). Her pedagogical work was recognised with the SCOSA Innovation in Architectural Education Award (2024). Alongside her academic practice, she writes fiction in Polish: her children’s book Kresek, Bartek i całkiem zwyczajny początek won the Kornel Makuszyński Award (2017), and her YA novel Ja, świnia was published in 2023.
Christopher Little is a Senior Lecturer in Academic Development in Manchester Metropolitan University’s central University Teaching Academy. Chris offers academic development consultancy at Manchester Metropolitan and co-leads the university Advance HE Recognition provision. His leadership in this area of staff development and recognition was crystallised in 2024 with the award of Principal Fellow from Advance HE. His research interests include academic literacies, undergraduate research cultures, assessment and feedback and inclusive teaching practices and he remains research active in all of these areas.
Review :
"A vital and timely provocation, Pedagogy as Creative Practice shows how the most meaningful work in architectural education often unfolds beyond institutional and professional metrics, where creativity, care, and critical resistance are quietly reshaping the discipline from within. It is an inspiring sourcebook: one that re-energises the radical pedagogical project by reminding us that architectural education must remain a space for experimentation, critical inquiry, and unchartered possibility."
Professor Harriet Harriss (PhD), Pratt Institute, NYC
