Studying Architecture at Trinity Hall
The course
During your four-year course at the University of Cambridge, you will read and write while also drawing and making models towards imaginative design work and learn about construction, environmental principles and materiality.
The course’s key modules are the design studio, which is taught by practising architects and designers (the Design Fellows); lecture courses in history and theory of architecture and urbanism; and lecture courses in the technical aspects of construction, environment and structures.
In the final year, you will also write a dissertation, which is a long piece of independent original research project on a topic of your choice.
Academic support
At Trinity Hall, you will be supported by your director of Studies, Dr Sabrina Puddu, who is an architect and researcher with long teaching experience in both design studio and the history and theory at international leading schools of architecture.
Our students go through a growing learning curve, achieving outstanding results in their studies. You will be supported in the choice of your design studio courses as well as in the choice of the most appropriate supervisor for your dissertation.
You will be encouraged to embrace the multifaceted aspects of architecture, to engage with the history of architecture and architectural precedents while understanding architecture’s agency vis-à-vis broader contemporary challenges – climate change and social inequalities, just to mention some. How can we carefully but imaginatively engage with existing artefacts instead of demolishing them? How can architecture serve broad society with care and generosity instead of perpetuating exclusionary spaces?
Architecture community
Trinity Hall has a thriving architecture community of both fellows and students. Fellow-Commoner Dr Ingrid Schroder, who acted as Director of Studies at Trinity Hall for many years, is now the Director of the Architecture Association School of Architecture (AA). Artist and ceramist Edmund De Waal is also alumnus and Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall.
Architecture students at the college are a diverse and engaged group, each with their own peculiar interests and focus. The welcoming and small context of Trinity Hall offers our architecture students the possibility to engage in conversations and exchanges with students and fellows from other disciplines, which is key to enrich their understanding of art, history, philosophy, society, politics, geography, and economics, which are essential to the formation of an architect.
At Trinity Hall we care that our students understand the many ways in which architecture is practised, and every year we organise a ‘Breakfast with the Architect’, inviting a practising architect to the College to share their work and their way of working with our students.
Architectural surroundings
Students are encouraged to use our library collection but also to gain first-hand experience of architecture.
Starting from our college’s courtyards, you can understand how medieval buildings were built and then modified in the next centuries, up to more recent alterations and additions like the 1975 Cherry Tree Court by Roberts and Clarke Architects, the 1990s Jerwood Library by Trinity Hall alumni Tristan Rees Roberts and the WongAvery Music Gallery built in 2022 by architect Níall McLaughlin.
In Scroope Terrace – the main premises of the Department of Architecture at 5 minutes cycling distance from our college – you will experience how architect and Cambridge Professor Colin St. John Wilson (with Alex Hardy) mastered the design for the extension of the school in the late 1950s.
Financial support
While Cambridge has been a laboratory for architecture throughout the centuries and there is much to discover and observe here, travelling is also an important activity for the formation architect. The college offers generous travel grants, which students can use to travel and visit other UK or foreign cities and rural landscapes, authorial or vernacular buildings, museums and archives.
Trinity Hall also offers the architecture students a grant to help with the costs involved in their course such as studio materials or a drawing board which you can keep in your room. We provide essay-writing support and we organise a short media workshop, each year focusing on a different media (i.e. drawing, photography, video making).