There is an inescapable pairing between architecture and textiles, yet in contemporary construction, textiles are often confined to the role of surface, applied at the building’s completion. This course repositions that relationship, proposing a reciprocal exchange between the two disciplines—one that operates not as application but as integration. Today’s building culture privileges rigid, hard-to-hard connections (nailed, screwed, poured, and glued), producing inflexibility, tolerance gaps, and irreversible assembly. Textile construction begins with the connection (entanglement of yarn), where structure and connection emerge simultaneously, yet the design stops at the scale of the swatch, leaving the larger final form to be determined by others. Interlacing Form challenges these conventions by asking: How might principles of textile construction (knitting, weaving, knotting, lashing) inform new logics of architectural assembly? And conversely, how can textile processes be rethought through the architectural lens. So much so, we begin to blur the lines between what is architecture and what is a textile.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $20.00 - $100.00

Elective

This class is a dedicated time and space for drawing from observation. Instead of writing and discussing ideas that are brought forth from reading, we will draw and discuss thoughts that come forth from observing. Therefore, the "reading"; and discussion of each other's work and experience of drawing is an important component of the class. Each class will be an exercise of observation with a provided subject from life. The given subject and prompt will provoke avenues of observation and material/process resistance. The outcome of the drawing and observation process will be discussed as well as the continued individual projects initiated outside of class.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $20.00 - $100.00

Elective

This 3-credit seminar will focus on the potential of sunlight and other forms of ambient energy to explore artistic forms of solar technology in our built environment. We will look at an array of emerging solid-state technologies and explore the positively and negatively charged layers of silicon and other semiconductor materials, which can be crystallized, cut, deposited, scored, into and onto multiple substrates. This accessible technology can easily be deployed. The very small compositions and patterns of these layers have the potential for radically different effects at different scales. The world of the microscope and the telescope, the minute and far away, will serve as guides and tools. We will also explore the spatial potential of electronic outputs like light and sound to produce a changed state.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $30.00 - $50.00

Elective

Introduction to technical building systems - Structure, Environmental and Enclosure - and their integration with an emphasis on quantifying performance and increasing sustainability. Content includes survey of these three system types - typical components, basis of performance, and analysis of performance - and introduction to related conventions of construction and architectural detailing to realize them.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to first-year MArch (3yr) Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

Comprehensive design of building enclosures - integrated consideration of structural design, tolerance, detailing, thermal transmission, air transmission, and moisture transmission. Introduce typical and atypical systems of enclosure with emphasis on relative advantages of different systems depending on location, intended performance, and design intent.

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

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

Comprehensive design of building enclosures - integrated consideration of structural design, tolerance, detailing, thermal transmission, air transmission, and moisture transmission. Introduce typical and atypical systems of enclosure with emphasis on relative advantages of different systems depending on location, intended performance, and design intent.

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

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

Anyone following contemporary debates in architecture knows that there are as many definitions of architecture's disciplinarity as there are people who attempt to define it. In the current spate of publications on this topic, Mark Jarzombek declares architecture to be a failed discipline; Jane Rendell claims that architecture is a 'subject' subsuming several disciplines; Mark Wigley ruminates upon the prosthetic nature of the discipline to the sciences; Bob Somol and Sarah Whiting attempt to recover a Foucaultian disciplinarity in which norms, principles and traditions are supplanted by performative practice; Akos Moravansky argues that the disciplinarity of architecture resists the discursive approach embodied in post-1968 theory; Keller Easterling seeks the trapdoor into another habit of mind" by eschewing narrow categories of thought for more inclusive ones; Sylvia Lavin uses the analogy of the 'kiss' between an installation and the architecture that houses it as a model of architectural inter-disciplinarity as media interaction; and Hal Foster and Michael Speaks face off on the relative merits of design intelligence and critical distance. How can a student of architecture ever gain a foothold in this complex and confusing debate? At stake in the debates over disciplinarity is the question: how can we identify architecture's categories of knowledge, and how did the categorization of knowledge become a priority? This Disciplinarity seminar will historically situate the circumstances of architecture's emerging disciplinarity, and thematize it through three seemingly disparate but operatively identical lenses: the aesthetic, the historic, and the technological. Although the debates cited above appear unruly at first blush, fundamentally they aggregate around the relative merits of defining disciplinary categories of knowledge either too narrowly or too broadly, focusing either on architecture's autonomy or its extra-disciplinary appropriations. In addition to architecture's various categories of knowledge, the seminar will consider the influence of disciplinarity on our practices, considering how various classifications of architectural knowledge affect its techniques, standards, and formats of dissemination. From its Foucaultian framing to its current incarnations, Disciplinarity will unpack the construction of architecture's disciplinarity, and shed some much-needed light on what it means for architects to be disciplinary.

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

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

Separated at Birth (Textile & Paper Applications in Architecture) operates between the interwoven histories and shared tectonic vocabulary of paper fabrication, textile production, and architectural design. The course opens ways for student experimentation in material behavior as a driver of decision-making of an architectural project.

Paper and textiles share basic structural principles; both are essentially the entanglement of fibers into thin, pliable surfaces. In their simplest states, both perform well under tension and fail quickly in compression. They have undergone similar periods of industrial development, have tangential inter-applications, and share the potential for architectural ramifications. Their respective material processes act as productive foils to architectural making, highlighting and differentiating certain qualities. 

The course is anchored by material production in paper and in textile through collaborative construction projections. These built events establish a shared material experience, a common fast-and-loose attitude toward production, and an opportunity for collective critical reflection.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

It's no coincidence that some of the most timeless pieces of furniture were designed by Architects. Iconic designs by mid-century architects like Charles Eames, Alvar Aalto, and Eero Saarinen are still in production today with originals valued well into the thousands of dollars. But what makes these pieces so timeless? This winter-session course will begin with a brief survey of American mid-century design with a focus on material, form, and construction techniques. Students will then choose one mid-century design and present their own critical analysis. Building on their exploration, students will be asked to develop their own designs through conceptual sketches, CAD, digital modeling and rapid prototyping. Students will then create shop drawings from which a full-scale piece of furniture will be created.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

Elective

This history of architecture course, co-taught by an architectural historian and an architect, introduces key ideas, forces, and techniques that have shaped world architecture through the ages prior to the modern period. The course is based on critical categories, ranging from indigenous and vernacular architecture, to technology, culture, and representation. The lectures and discussions present systems of thought, practice and organization, emphasizing both historical and global interconnectedness, and critical architectural differences and anomalies. Each topic will be presented through case studies accompanied by relevant texts. The students will be expected to engage in the discussion groups, prepare material for these discussions, write about, and be examined on the topics.

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

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture, MArch: Architecture (3yr)

This history of architecture course, co-taught by an architectural historian and an architect, introduces key ideas, forces, and techniques that have shaped world architecture through the ages prior to the modern period. The course is based on critical categories, ranging from indigenous and vernacular architecture, to technology, culture, and representation. The lectures and discussions present systems of thought, practice and organization, emphasizing both historical and global interconnectedness, and critical architectural differences and anomalies. Each topic will be presented through case studies accompanied by relevant texts. The students will be expected to engage in the discussion groups, prepare material for these discussions, write about, and be examined on the topics.

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

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture, MArch: Architecture (3yr)