This seminar is the second of the three-part Design Thesis sequence in the department of Interior Architecture. This course is designed to assist students in identifying a thesis topic and respective design project through discussions that include studies of precedents, site related issues, program, and regulations, all of which are specific to adaptive reuse. Through group discussion and individual interviews, outline proposals will be approved in principle, requiring each student to prepare a feasibility report for their proposed Design Thesis. This completed feasibility report will be submitted for evaluation at the end of the Fall semester. Approved proposals will proceed to the next course in the sequence, where the proposal will be further refined, culminating in the design phase that will take place during the following Spring semester.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Interior Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MDes Interior Studies

Choice of advanced design studios offered by the Department of Interior Architecture. Details & studio descriptions are made available to pre-registered students.

Estimated Cost of Materials: Varies depending on required studio course supplies or related travel. Anticipated costs will be provided in advance, and announced during the lottery studio presentations held in the department.

Open to Junior, Senior or Graduate Interior Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BFA, MDES, MA Interior Studies

In this course students will learn about the fundamental components of exhibitions, from theory to practice, from curatorial to design. Through a series of lectures, guest talks, workshops, class discussions, and short assignments, students will learn the principles of the art of exhibition making and what renders it unique. At the end of the course students will design and build a collaborative exhibition where each of them will create a display system for a personal belonging of their choice. Students will have to curate and design the individual display setting and write labels for their selected item. Additionally, the class will work together to structure a cohesive narrative of the final exhibit made by a series of personal belongings which will be juxtaposed in the gallery space to tell the layered and fragmentary story of their lives.

Estimated Materials Cost: $50.00

Elective

Choice of advanced design studios offered by the Department of Interior Architecture. Details & studio descriptions are made available to pre-registered students.

Estimated Cost of Materials: Varies depending on required studio course supplies or related travel. Anticipated costs will be provided in advance, and announced during the lottery studio presentations held in the department.

Open to Junior, Senior or Graduate Interior Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BFA, MDes, MA Interior Studies

The course focuses on understanding the origin of museums and recognizing the influence that certain dominant design aesthetics, approaches, and narratives had on exhibitions. The museum
architectural space and its interior exhibition design are never 'neutral' and the study of its
history, codification, and exploitation are essential to rebalance and subvert the structural
inequalities between Trouillot's agents (museums/institution), actors (curators/exhibit
designers), and subject of museum narratives (artifacts/art/belongings). Through lectures,
readings, and class debate, students will be encouraged to question how aesthetics impregnate
exhibition environments through materials, light, colors, forms, and meanings; to acknowledge that
architecture and exhibition design aesthetics are always politicized and that in the tiniest details
of their morphology and their organization, museums have the power to validate, the power to
corroborate , the power to include, and the deliberate power to silence. 

Major Elective: MDes ENE