This course aims to identify and develop individual strengths in material investigation and architectural model-making, and to develop an understanding of the significant role of 3D manual processes within a design context. Model-making will be approached as an intensely exploratory, experimental and catalytic practice in which models act not only as communicative devices, but as conduits for exploring spatial ideas.This studio-based course will focus firstly on a series of material and process exercises, in which a range of alternative model-making materials will be explored. Students will consider an extended range of material possibilities; they will draw relationships between spatial qualities and the tactile, sensory and symbolic properties of materials during the thinking-making process. Armed with this knowledge, students will then identify a series of spatial precedents to work with as they develop a single model to exhibition standard, considering aspects of tectonic assembly, abstraction, representation and scale.