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

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 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

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

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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)

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)

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)

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)