The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

The second core studio addresses the agency of the building to simultaneously construct new spatial, social, and material orders in the context of the contemporary city. The second core studio situates architecture as the strategic interplay of spatial and constructive concepts towards specific aesthetic, social, and performative ends. The studio seeks to create a productive friction between abstract orders (form, pattern, organization), technical systems (structure, envelope), and the contingencies of real-world conditions (site, climate, politics). The studio asks students to link disciplinary methods to extra-disciplinary issues, with concentrated forays into the realms of structure, material, and critical preservation. Students iteratively develop architectural concepts, ethical positions, and experimental working methods through a series of focused architectural design projects with increasing degrees of complexity, culminating in the design of a mid-scale public building in an urban context.

Students are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

The second core studio addresses the agency of the building to simultaneously construct new spatial, social, and material orders in the context of the contemporary city. The second core studio situates architecture as the strategic interplay of spatial and constructive concepts towards specific aesthetic, social, and performative ends. The studio seeks to create a productive friction between abstract orders (form, pattern, organization), technical systems (structure, envelope), and the contingencies of real-world conditions (site, climate, politics). The studio asks students to link disciplinary methods to extra-disciplinary issues, with concentrated forays into the realms of structure, material, and critical preservation. Students iteratively develop architectural concepts, ethical positions, and experimental working methods through a series of focused architectural design projects with increasing degrees of complexity, culminating in the design of a mid-scale public building in an urban context.

Students are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

The second core studio addresses the agency of the building to simultaneously construct new spatial, social, and material orders in the context of the contemporary city. The second core studio situates architecture as the strategic interplay of spatial and constructive concepts towards specific aesthetic, social, and performative ends. The studio seeks to create a productive friction between abstract orders (form, pattern, organization), technical systems (structure, envelope), and the contingencies of real-world conditions (site, climate, politics). The studio asks students to link disciplinary methods to extra-disciplinary issues, with concentrated forays into the realms of structure, material, and critical preservation. Students iteratively develop architectural concepts, ethical positions, and experimental working methods through a series of focused architectural design projects with increasing degrees of complexity, culminating in the design of a mid-scale public building in an urban context.

Students are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

The Core 3 Cities studio uses the lens of housing and housing policy to dissect the ways in which these architectural choices impact residents' access to dignity in their cities. In the market of the built environment, where does architecture start? You may think it is the napkin sketch or AutoCAD but think instead of something more mundane: the government official's zoning map or the development firm's financial projection. In the architectural profession, we often lament our lack of agency in the creation of space. The architect must wait for the client, the request for proposal, or the competition. We are then at the mercy of local, state, and federal policy-responding to regulations, sightlines, zoning, and more. But how can we see the mechanisms of governance and finance as inherent parts of design? The Core 3 Cities studio uses the lens of housing and housing policy to dissect the ways in which these architectural choices impact residents' access to and dignity in their cities. Through assignments, readings, and discussions we will explore what is at stake in the urban environment and endeavor to discover new forms of design intervention that respond with nuance to those stakes.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

The Core 3 Cities studio uses the lens of housing and housing policy to dissect the ways in which these architectural choices impact residents' access to dignity in their cities. In the market of the built environment, where does architecture start? You may think it is the napkin sketch or AutoCAD but think instead of something more mundane: the government official's zoning map or the development firm's financial projection. In the architectural profession, we often lament our lack of agency in the creation of space. The architect must wait for the client, the request for proposal, or the competition. We are then at the mercy of local, state, and federal policy-responding to regulations, sightlines, zoning, and more. But how can we see the mechanisms of governance and finance as inherent parts of design? The Core 3 Cities studio uses the lens of housing and housing policy to dissect the ways in which these architectural choices impact residents' access to and dignity in their cities. Through assignments, readings, and discussions we will explore what is at stake in the urban environment and endeavor to discover new forms of design intervention that respond with nuance to those stakes.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

The Core 3 Cities studio uses the lens of housing and housing policy to dissect the ways in which these architectural choices impact residents' access to dignity in their cities. In the market of the built environment, where does architecture start? You may think it is the napkin sketch or AutoCAD but think instead of something more mundane: the government official's zoning map or the development firm's financial projection. In the architectural profession, we often lament our lack of agency in the creation of space. The architect must wait for the client, the request for proposal, or the competition. We are then at the mercy of local, state, and federal policy-responding to regulations, sightlines, zoning, and more. But how can we see the mechanisms of governance and finance as inherent parts of design? The Core 3 Cities studio uses the lens of housing and housing policy to dissect the ways in which these architectural choices impact residents' access to and dignity in their cities. Through assignments, readings, and discussions we will explore what is at stake in the urban environment and endeavor to discover new forms of design intervention that respond with nuance to those stakes.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

Can Okinawa be a design laboratory for planetary futures?  How do we grow resilient and creative on a warming planet?

The Japanese mainland is moving toward a subtropical climate, and most regions of the world have experienced excessive heat in recent years. This course investigates the material ecologies of Okinawa, a subtropical island whose cultural and architectural identity has been shaped by climate, history, and politics. Okinawa’s arts and buildings evolved under the pressures of heat, humidity, typhoons, and salt air—conditions that are no longer exceptional, but increasingly the reality of our global present. With summers growing longer and hotter each year, what lessons might be drawn from Okinawa’s centuries of adaptation to help us design for a future of rising temperatures worldwide?

Okinawa, once an independent kingdom, is Japan’s southernmost prefecture, where a distinctive and cosmopolitan culture developed from its geopolitical position and subtropical environment. This culture flourished during the Ryukyu Kingdom (1429–1879), which spanned from the Muromachi period to the early Meiji era. In the 14th and 15th centuries, trade with China and Southeast Asia introduced techniques such as dyeing. These imported practices were uniquely adapted to the Ryukyu climate and sensibilities, giving rise to the rich material cultures of Okinawa.

From coral limestone fortifications to red clay roof tiles, from lacquerware and bingata textiles to the concrete structures of the postwar era, Okinawa offers a layered material landscape that embodies resilience, adaptation, and reinvention. Although one of the smallest prefectures in Japan, it ranks third nationwide in the number of designated traditional crafts. Students will examine how traditional crafts and building practices emerged from the island’s ecology, how architecture transformed under modern pressures, and how contemporary makers and designers are reimagining material practices for ecological survival.

Students will create a collective atlas of material textures and patterns, drawn directly from observation during site visits to craft studios, historic sites, and both traditional and contemporary architectural works. These drawings, compiled into a book, will represent not only the tactile qualities of Okinawa’s materials but also their embedded histories of climate, politics, and cultural exchange. More than documenting materials and textures, we will search for clues in an island culture that has long adapted to heat, humidity, salt air, and strong weather patterns—conditions now spreading across the globe. By situating Okinawa within the planetary condition of excessive heat, this course expands design thinking, treating materiality as a cultural and ecological system that can offer strategies and inspiration for resilience in a warming world. 

Registration is not available in Workday. Students must complete an application through RISD Global Summer Studies. A minimum GPA of 2.5 is required for all RISD students. Failure to remain in good academic standing can lead to removal from the course, either before or during the course. Additional information including deadlines and travel costs can be found on the Global Summer Studies website.

This course connects the methods, traditions, and conventions of architectural drawing with contemporary technology and representational cultures. This course recognizes that for architects to operate productively, politically, socially, and ethically given the ubiquity of the digital image, both an advanced command of computational techniques and drawing techniques are immediately and primarily necessary. The digital image is the standard by which aesthetic content is transmitted, published and processed. Its pervasive role in contemporary architectural culture-and humanity-is mediated and confronted in this course. Relatedly, material drawing traditions are essential, valuable and provocative. The techniques covered in this studio-taught course include the manual and automated manipulation of digital images and material drawings at dramatically varied scales and dimensions. A structure of creative prompts continually positions the drawing and the image in parallel, with an emphasis on developing students' sensibilities, and capacity for both improvisational and scripted constructions. Students will create from memory, from life, from imagination, and from reference. As a result, students develop an architectural language that can engage multiple media and subjects.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

This course connects the methods, traditions, and conventions of architectural drawing with contemporary technology and representational cultures. This course recognizes that for architects to operate productively, politically, socially, and ethically given the ubiquity of the digital image, both an advanced command of computational techniques and drawing techniques are immediately and primarily necessary. The digital image is the standard by which aesthetic content is transmitted, published and processed. Its pervasive role in contemporary architectural culture-and humanity-is mediated and confronted in this course. Relatedly, material drawing traditions are essential, valuable and provocative. The techniques covered in this studio-taught course include the manual and automated manipulation of digital images and material drawings at dramatically varied scales and dimensions. A structure of creative prompts continually positions the drawing and the image in parallel, with an emphasis on developing students' sensibilities, and capacity for both improvisational and scripted constructions. Students will create from memory, from life, from imagination, and from reference. As a result, students develop an architectural language that can engage multiple media and subjects.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

This course centers around the digital model as a thing to be built, as a multivalent medium for architectural discourse, and as representation of built form. This course uses abstraction as the common thread between its prerequisite, Architectural Drawing, and an inquiry into the elements, natures, structures, and forms of the complex, temporal, cultural, material and political construct often referred to as "the building." Operations in the course are the techniques of analysis, translation and synthesis. The contemporary digital model is delimited and constrained by architectural software. This course recognizes that expertise in multiple digital modeling software-from Rhino to Building Information Modeling (BIM)-is as imperative as are skills to manipulate, undermine, link, automate and hack the media that dominate the discipline of architecture. A series of creative prompts engage the computational principles that underpin all digital modeling software. This "under the hood" approach is balanced by "over the hood" approaches that see students designing workflows, automation and output between software and material. The course engages the digital model as sample, system, and database as well as continually interrogates the translational relationship between model and drawing and model and image.

Students are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

This course centers around the digital model as a thing to be built, as a multivalent medium for architectural discourse, and as representation of built form. This course uses abstraction as the common thread between its prerequisite, Architectural Drawing, and an inquiry into the elements, natures, structures, and forms of the complex, temporal, cultural, material and political construct often referred to as "the building." Operations in the course are the techniques of analysis, translation and synthesis. The contemporary digital model is delimited and constrained by architectural software. This course recognizes that expertise in multiple digital modeling software-from Rhino to Building Information Modeling (BIM)-is as imperative as are skills to manipulate, undermine, link, automate and hack the media that dominate the discipline of architecture. A series of creative prompts engage the computational principles that underpin all digital modeling software. This "under the hood" approach is balanced by "over the hood" approaches that see students designing workflows, automation and output between software and material. The course engages the digital model as sample, system, and database as well as continually interrogates the translational relationship between model and drawing and model and image.

Students are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

This course centers around the digital model as a thing to be built, as a multivalent medium for architectural discourse, and as representation of built form. This course uses abstraction as the common thread between its prerequisite, Architectural Drawing, and an inquiry into the elements, natures, structures, and forms of the complex, temporal, cultural, material and political construct often referred to as "the building." Operations in the course are the techniques of analysis, translation and synthesis. The contemporary digital model is delimited and constrained by architectural software. This course recognizes that expertise in multiple digital modeling software-from Rhino to Building Information Modeling (BIM)-is as imperative as are skills to manipulate, undermine, link, automate and hack the media that dominate the discipline of architecture. A series of creative prompts engage the computational principles that underpin all digital modeling software. This "under the hood" approach is balanced by "over the hood" approaches that see students designing workflows, automation and output between software and material. The course engages the digital model as sample, system, and database as well as continually interrogates the translational relationship between model and drawing and model and image.

Students are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

This course, the first in a two semester sequence, explores design principles specific to architecture. Two interrelated aspects of design are pursued:

• the elements of composition and their formal, spatial, and tectonic manipulation

• meanings conveyed by formal choices and transformations.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $200.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Sophomore Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture

This course, the first in a two semester sequence, explores design principles specific to architecture. Two interrelated aspects of design are pursued:

• the elements of composition and their formal, spatial, and tectonic manipulation

• meanings conveyed by formal choices and transformations.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $200.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Sophomore Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture

This course, the first in a two semester sequence, explores design principles specific to architecture. Two interrelated aspects of design are pursued:

• the elements of composition and their formal, spatial, and tectonic manipulation

• meanings conveyed by formal choices and transformations.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $200.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Sophomore Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture

This course, the first in a two semester sequence, explores design principles specific to architecture. Two interrelated aspects of design are pursued:

• the elements of composition and their formal, spatial, and tectonic manipulation

• meanings conveyed by formal choices and transformations.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $200.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Sophomore Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture

Design principles presented in the first semester are further developed through a series of projects involving actual sites with their concomitant physical and historic-cultural conditions. Issues of context, methodology, program and construction are explored for their possible interrelated meanings and influences on the making of architectural form.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $200.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for Sophomore Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture