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

ReAssembly, is a workshop based seminar, rooted in hands-on research, centered around  material-specific methodologies and multivalent modes of production. At the intersection of architecture, art, and fabrication – we will develop digital, automated, and manual workflows to investigate tectonic possibilities and novel design outcomes. Existing precedents will be closely studied to reimagine and refabricate various assemblies within architecture and other material-based practices. Further prototyping exercises will leverage tools and techniques from woodworking, CNC milling, castings, and other means of digital fabrication, building foundational knowledge of formal and material constraints. We will study the potential outputs of serial operations across different softwares and platforms, exploring how diverse methodologies can inform the design process. Stemming from this research and application model, students will move towards independent and small group design proposals of reassembled prototypes. This workshop aims to build skills and language around compositional, tectonic, formal and spatial explorations of contemporary architectural fabrication.

Open to Junior, Senior, Fifth-year or Graduate Architecture Students.

Elective

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)

These studios, three of which are required for graduation, are offered by individual instructors to students who have successfully completed the core curriculum. They are assigned by lottery. Once assigned to an advanced studio, a student may not drop studio.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $200.00

Fee: Some advanced studio sections have a fee for course supplies or field trips. The fee is announced during the registration lottery held in the department.

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

Major Requirement | BArch, MArch (3yr), MArch (2yr): Architecture