As artists and designers our understanding of the physical universe can be a fundamental part of our engagement with our context and in production of our creative work. This course includes an introduction to selected fundamentals of physics: momentum, thermodynamics, and waves and optics - all part of the basis for Architectural Technology. These fundamental phenomena are to be considered both through their mathematical application and expression as concepts in contemporary art. Content to be examined through mathematical problem solving, critical reading, and lab sessions using both physical measurement and digital simulation in Python programming language.

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

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture

Structural Design with timber, steel and concrete (allowable stress, plastic, and composite design respectively). Students will develop understanding and application of quantitative methods of structural design for conventional structural components and systems - beams, columns, trusses, frames, walls, etc. in multiple materials. Introduces the conventions of detailing structural systems in these materials. Introduces systems and requirements for building foundation, gravity superstructure, and lateral superstructure.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Preference is given to Junior Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture

This course reinforces the fundamentals of environmental systems- thermal, light, ventilation, acoustics-and teaches design strategies to evaluate and optimize building concepts based on these systems. The lab component will include hands-on testing (e.g. data-loggers for thermal and HDR imaging for daylighting) and an emphasis on digital simulations (e.g. Rhino plug-ins for thermal and lighting analysis). The Simulation Game is an in-class activity where students compete to make the most energy-efficient conceptual building massing using an energy modeling program in Rhino/Grasshopper. The course will culminate in a case study project in which students apply design strategies to a specific building design problem.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Preference is given to Junior Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture

Capstone architectural technology design class focusing on the integration of Structural, Environmental, Enclosure, and Circulation systems. Course to be semester long group design project with labs/workshops using related quantitative analysis and design tools to design systems for a complete building in detail. Special consideration for egress, accessibility, life safety, general code requirements (construction type and zoning), and documentation standards.

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

Major Requirement | B.Arch: Architecture

Capstone architectural technology design class focusing on the integration of Structural, Environmental, Enclosure, and Circulation systems. Course to be semester long group design project with labs/workshops using related quantitative analysis and design tools to design systems for a complete building in detail. Special consideration for egress, accessibility, life safety, general code requirements (construction type and zoning), and documentation standards.

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

Major Requirement | B.Arch: Architecture

Capstone architectural technology design class focusing on the integration of Structural, Environmental, Enclosure, and Circulation systems. Course to be semester long group design project with labs/workshops using related quantitative analysis and design tools to design systems for a complete building in detail. Special consideration for egress, accessibility, life safety, general code requirements (construction type and zoning), and documentation standards.

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

Major Requirement | B.Arch: Architecture

This interdisciplinary Advanced Topic Studio begins from the premise that architecture has often claimed authority by prescribing how people should live through established canons, fixed typologies, and disciplinary conventions. Forms of Living, Forms of Building reverses that logic by asking how architecture might instead emerge from living itself: from use, adaptation, repair, maintenance, occupation, and the gradual transformation of space over time. Using informality as a lens, the course understands these everyday practices not as signs of disorder or lack, but as forms of spatial intelligence and material knowledge. In doing so, it examines how the built environment is shaped by unequal access to land and resources, racialized labor, extractive economies, and the social and environmental conditions under which architecture is produced.

Open to students across RISD, the studio treats approaches to architecture through diverse forms of material production as a way of decentering architectural authority and questioning its conventional tools, methods, and assumptions. Through seminar discussion, collective research, mapping, visual analysis, material inquiry, and project-based experimentation, students will investigate how forms of living generate forms of building, and how design might open more just, situated, and sustainable ways of making space. In this sense, the studio connects everyday practices of habitation to broader struggles over extraction, justice, and the possibility of producing architecture from lived practices.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture

This seminar examines regionalism as an expanded theoretical framework within which architecture operates, with an emphasis on its expressive, formal, and structural dimensions. In a globalized, industrial society shaped by standardized systems and construction methods, buildings often tend toward generic solutions. At the same time, regional conditions—climate, material availability, and construction techniques—offer specific opportunities to shape form, tectonics, and spatial expression.

The course considers how these conditions can inform architectural language, not as constraints alonebut as drivers of design. Through weekly readings and written responses, students will engage casestudies and texts that position regionalism as a means of producing architecture that is materiallygrounded and formally distinct.

Elective

Rituals are performed in our day-to-day lives. They are both sacred and profane, loaded with ecumenical meaning, and/or devoid of theological origin. Rituals can be both ordinary and extraordinary, quotidian and divine. They come in different forms, and accordingly, rituals determine different forms and forms of life. This semester we will research mythologies embedded in our daily life. Ceremonies and rituals will serve as the chassis for us to plumb how we hold myths and stories in our imaginaries and our bodies. Rituals are spatial, temporal, and material practices. They are embodied performances and they span myriad genres and registers. Rituals function as states of exception, but in doing so, can reify the existing status quo. They can also embody liberatory potential and rupture world orders. Rituals will be explored as a world-making endeavor, a series of performances co-created and co-authored that reenact mythologies. The sonic and spatial registers of ritual procession will be looked at via scores and notations. This seminar will be conducted as an experiment in collectivity. The intention is to create a body of work as an aggregate, but the process will be loosely determined as both a series of individual and group efforts. As a collective we will determine the processes of redefining processions.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 - $200.00

Elective

Icon Mashup addresses a persistent gap between building technology courses and architectural design studios. While technology courses often focus on the technical resolution of enclosure systems, they can lack engagement with design intent; conversely, studios frequently prioritize form and spatial organization without fully interrogating façade systems as sites of architectural thinking. This course positions the architectural envelope—specifically the wall section—as a critical interface between these domains. Rather than treating construction as a downstream problem, the course reframes it as a generator of architectural ideas—where structure, environmental performance, material logic, and representation converge to produce architectural identity.

The course is organized into two phases that mirror modes of practice increasingly relevant to contemporary architecture. In the first phase, students study canonical buildings to extract the core logics that define them—identifying what is essential to the project and what can change. These become the project’s “red lines”: the underlying structural, environmental, and material strategies that cannot be altered without fundamentally transforming the work. In the second phase, students test these limits through processes of hybridization and adaptation, introducing new constraints—programmatic, environmental, or economic—that require selective transformation while maintaining conceptual continuity. This approach parallels the realities of adaptive reuse and value engineering, where architects must work within existing systems, negotiating between preservation and change. Through large-scale drawings and physical models, students develop both technical precision and a critical, projective mindset—learning to treat enclosure as a site of negotiation, translation, and architectural invention.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $30.00 - $50.00

Non-majors may enroll pending seat availability. Email the instructor to request permission.

Elective

As artists and designers our understanding of the physical universe can be a fundamental part of our engagement with our context and in production of our creative work. This course includes an introduction to selected fundamentals of physics: momentum, thermodynamics, and waves and optics - all part of the basis for Architectural Technology. These fundamental phenomena are to be considered both through their mathematical application and expression as concepts in contemporary art. Content to be examined through mathematical problem solving, critical reading, and lab sessions using both physical measurement and digital simulation in Python programming language.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Preference is given to Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

Structural Design with timber, steel and concrete (allowable stress, plastic, and composite design respectively). Students will develop understanding and application of quantitative methods of structural design for conventional structural components and systems - beams, columns, trusses, frames, walls, etc. in multiple materials. Introduces the conventions of detailing structural systems in these materials. Introduces systems and requirements for building foundation, gravity superstructure, and lateral superstructure.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for second-year MArch (3yr) Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

This course reinforces the fundamentals of environmental systems- thermal, light, ventilation, acoustics-and teaches design strategies to evaluate and optimize building concepts based on these systems. The lab component will include hands-on testing (e.g. data-loggers for thermal and HDR imaging for daylighting) and an emphasis on digital simulations (e.g. Rhino plug-ins for thermal and lighting analysis). The Simulation Game is an in-class activity where students compete to make the most energy-efficient conceptual building massing using an energy modeling program in Rhino/Grasshopper. The course will culminate in a case study project in which students apply design strategies to a specific building design problem.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for first-year MArch (3yr) Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

Capstone architectural technology design class focusing on the integration of Structural, Environmental, Enclosure, and Circulation systems. Course to be semester long group design project with labs/workshops using related quantitative analysis and design tools to design systems for a complete building in detail. Special consideration for egress, accessibility, life safety, general code requirements (construction type and zoning), and documentation standards.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for second-year MArch (2yr) and third-year MArch (3yr) Architecture Students.

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

Capstone architectural technology design class focusing on the integration of Structural, Environmental, Enclosure, and Circulation systems. Course to be semester long group design project with labs/workshops using related quantitative analysis and design tools to design systems for a complete building in detail. Special consideration for egress, accessibility, life safety, general code requirements (construction type and zoning), and documentation standards.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for second-year MArch (2yr) and third-year MArch (3yr) Architecture Students.

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

This is a theoretical seminar course that will be concerned with ideas and architectural knowledge that may be cultivated and tested through discourse. The course discussions will focus on an expansive role of architectural tools. While acknowledging a wealth of disciplinary conventions, histories and theories, this course recognizes that the forms of representation within the discipline of architecture have the capacity to affect the discipline of architecture and are not fixed. Students in this course will be expected to build upon their previous architectural education through a series of directed projects aimed at advancing architectural theories, ideas and methods. Some of the questions that students will be expected to address are: What are the practical, theoretical, and creative implications of a drawing that functions as architecture? How do architects change the way we make and think thanks to digital media? How do architects represent and model natural forces? How do architects express political or social agendas? What is the nature of an architectural contribution to interdisciplinary discourse? How can representation enable new kinds of artistic and research-based practices for architecture? Students will be expected to self-direct their process while framing their work intellectually in a seminar environment.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

This course is limited to first-year MArch (2yr) Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (2yr)

Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year students.

Major Requirement | BFA, BArch, MArch (3yr)

Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year students.

Major Requirement | BFA, BArch, MArch (3yr)

Studio: Design promotes multidisciplinary studio experimentation across an array of media and processes. Students explore the organization of visual and other sensory elements in order to understand perceptual attributes and the production of meaning. Using various methods of expression, students may create objects, spaces, and experiences that demonstrate their analysis of composition, color, narrative, motion, systems, and cultural signification. Assignments allow for inquiries into scientific, social, cultural, historical, philosophical, technological, and political topics. Critical and experimental utilization of design principles, which underpin all of the arts, are emphasized. Students are guided through progressive investigations, in which the act of seeing is amplified by the study of physiological and cognitive factors that generate perception. Examined subjects are taken through stages of representation, abstraction, and/or symbolic interpretation to reveal essential communicative properties.

Enrollment is limited to first-year students.

Major Requirement | BFA, BArch, MArch (3yr)

Studio: Design promotes multidisciplinary studio experimentation across an array of media and processes. Students explore the organization of visual and other sensory elements in order to understand perceptual attributes and the production of meaning. Using various methods of expression, students may create objects, spaces, and experiences that demonstrate their analysis of composition, color, narrative, motion, systems, and cultural signification. Assignments allow for inquiries into scientific, social, cultural, historical, philosophical, technological, and political topics. Critical and experimental utilization of design principles, which underpin all of the arts, are emphasized. Students are guided through progressive investigations, in which the act of seeing is amplified by the study of physiological and cognitive factors that generate perception. Examined subjects are taken through stages of representation, abstraction, and/or symbolic interpretation to reveal essential communicative properties.

Enrollment is limited to first-year students.

Major Requirement | BFA, BArch, MArch (3yr)