The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment is the UK's largest and leading multidisciplinary faculty of the built environment covering architecture, planning, construction and project management, development planning, environmental design as well as many other specialist fields. In the UK's 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) overall it had the greatest proportion of 4* or world-leading research in the field, placing The Bartlett at the forefront internationally.

Building alternative possibilities

Researchers at the Bartlett are motivated to act by the challenges of the 21st century, involving issues of ecology, finance, natural resources, cultural interaction, power and wealth. Collectively, we believe that the way to respond to the future is by taking nothing for granted, and so both to question givens and to put forward new ways of engaging old problems. This means drawing on diverse approaches, that is from tried and tested skill sets, the use of thoughtful reasoning and carefully gathered empirical evidence through to speculative theorising and experimental aesthetic inventions. Our key ambition is to build alternative possibilities.

Cross-disciplinarity: a diversity of values, methods and outputs

Drawn from disciplines as varied as theoretical physics and organisational management, we place the analysis, design, construction and inhabitation of our built environments and the communities who inhabit them at the heart of our research. Our approach thrives on bringing differing approaches into close and critical relations, both conceptually and materially. Deploying the methods of science, social science, design, the arts and the humanities, we collaborate with partners from the global north and south to engage with issues associated with the built environment across the world, at all scales from dust mites to the master plan.

Critiquing existing concepts and imagining new scenarios

The complexity of the built environment means that we must bring together scientific and artistic modes of working, allowing technology and economy to be understood through social and cultural perspectives, producing a diverse range of research products from books and buildings, through to patents and papers. We believe that a creative attitude to research comes from balancing a practical approach to problem-solving with a critical perspective, which refutes existing concepts and imagines new scenarios. This open-ended and dynamic approach also requires that research keeps close to teaching, and so allows students to engage with the unexpected views of those new practitioners and theorists who will build our future.