Corsets have a long and complex history that evolved from early forms in the 16th century to the Victorian era to Jean Paul Gaultier's iconic designs. Corsets were primarily associated with and worn by women, however men also used them for support and shaping, particularly in the military and dandy fashion. This course is designed to introduce students to a variety of techniques for the making and designing of a corset. Offering students foundational instruction in apparel design techniques including design process, basic sewing (hand and machine), pattern making, draping on the dress form and comprehension of the relationship between textiles and the body. The main objective of this course is to enhance student comprehension of both material properties and principal elements of clothing construction, which can be applied in other experimental and engineering projects in the fine arts and product design. Students are encouraged to bring personal allurement and intention to this vigorous, technical and creative class that concludes with the final project and presentation.

Elective

The North American Cowboy Boot is an iconic symbol of cultural individualism and strength of character that bridges design, making, function, and fashion. The boot itself is at heart a functional object, a work tool, whose construction techniques have remained unchanged since the late 1800s. This complex and sophisticated traditional art is kept current largely by artisanal apprenticeships and a patterning template system that circumvents the highly technical footwear pattern making more typical in industry footwear production.

In this course students will measure their own feet, adapt boot lasts to their measurements – the forms around which we build boots - draft/cut/sew uppers, and then join all the components together and sole the boots. This is a complex, labor-intensive hands-on process requiring dedicated attendance and out-of-class work. The result will be a pair of bespoke, one-of-a-kind leather boots individualized to the students’ size and design.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $85.00

Elective

This studio-elective course will follow a series of twelve lectures given at the South Kensington Museum as published in P.L. Simmonds, Animal Products. This seminal work served as a compilation of the trade exhibition collections from the 1851 Crystal Palace exposition that eventually served as the seed for the collections of the South Kensington Museum and finally the Branch Museum of the Department at Bethnal Green. These collections laid the foundation for much of the Victoria and Albert Museum collections (V&A) that in turn influenced the creation of RISD and the RISD Museum in 1877. This course will examine design and fashion, naturalist journals, and literature as a means to develop the students design vocabulary and materials palate. Students will compare the tastes and techniques of the Victorian era to contemporary design practices, with case studies of designers utilizing the natural world as a resource and source for design. Weekly lectures will introduce students to artists and designers of the 19th century and compare them to contemporary artists and designers. These introductory lectures will be paired each week with a specific material examination and hand-on exploration via materials demonstrations and a sample notebook. We will engage in readings, group discussions, critique of student Naturalist Journals, materials demonstrations, and examine historic and contemporary Museum objects within each theme material. Field trips to the RISD Museum will be augmented by visits to the Edna W. Lawrence Nature Lab, RISD Materials library, The Providence Athenaeum, The Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University, The New Bedford Whaling Museum, and The Museum of Natural History, Roger Williams Park.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $20.00

Elective

WHO WEARS THE PANTS? is a studio course covering the fundamental history and principles of making trousers, i.e., "split-leg garments" – starting with an overview of their cultural contexts and historical development, then moving into pattern development, basic construction, and fitting of a standard size pant sloper. You will then learn how to design and execute custom-made trousers by recording and calculating key body measurements to draft, construct and fit a basic pants sloper.

Students will acquire the skills to manipulate the basic pant sloper into a variety of styles through pattern drafting exercises integrating trousers shapes|silhouettes, pockets, waistbands, openings, and design details. Classes and individual tutorials will cover the development of trousers from concept to execution. You will gain a better understanding of the apparel and creative-problem processes, pattern drafting techniques, laying out and cutting fabric, constructing a basic trouser, fitting diverse body types, constructing a fly front opening and pockets; including tutorials focused on resolving individual trouser designs.

Elective

Dressed bodies, is a course conceived to expose students from external departments across RISD campus to a variety of making practices stemming from traditional apparel design practices. Students are expected to bring their current skill set and their apparel related curiosity with the aims of developing a personal project or enhancing apparel related skills. Clothing development, brand, soft-goods development, principles for creating 3 dimensional works around the body from 2 dimensional sketches and patterns as well as basic sewing skills will be covered throughout the body of this course. Principles learned here may be applied to a variety of fine arts processes as well as product design. Students will be encouraged to develop a better understanding of materials and construction techniques while exploring deeper relationships between 2D shape and 3D form. This dynamic, technical and creative class; supports students further understanding of sewing construction and how it directly relates to- and impacts any creative or technical project, ultimately broadening the students understanding of both material properties and essential technical components of fabric construction.

*Components of this class are seminar and self-directed.

Elective

Dressed bodies, is a course conceived to expose students from external departments across RISD campus to a variety of making practices stemming from traditional apparel design practices. Students are expected to bring their current skill set and their apparel related curiosity with the aims of developing a personal project or enhancing apparel related skills. Clothing development, brand, soft-goods development, principles for creating 3 dimensional works around the body from 2 dimensional sketches and patterns as well as basic sewing skills will be covered throughout the body of this course. Principles learned here may be applied to a variety of fine arts processes as well as product design. Students will be encouraged to develop a better understanding of materials and construction techniques while exploring deeper relationships between 2D shape and 3D form. This dynamic, technical and creative class; supports students further understanding of sewing construction and how it directly relates to- and impacts any creative or technical project, ultimately broadening the students understanding of both material properties and essential technical components of fabric construction.

*Components of this class are seminar and self-directed.

Elective

Building on basic techniques taught first semester, students proceed to more complex cuts for bodices, sleeves, skirts and pants through techniques of draping, drafting and construction. One finished garment is required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $125.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for Sophomore Apparel Design Students. 

Major Requirement | BFA Apparel Design

The design course builds on design process skills from the first semester through assignments that focus on research and its application, conceptual development, and team dynamics. Varied facets of apparel design are explored through lectures, museum research, classroom discussion, and creative exploration.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for Sophomore Apparel Design Students. 

Major Requirement | BFA Apparel Design

Students focus on tailoring techniques and the design of tailored apparel. Drafting and classic tailoring techniques are taught and students explore shape and structure through experimentation on the form and creative pattern making. During this process, students use these technical skills to design and execute a jacket and companion piece.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $400.00
 

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Junior Apparel Design Students. 

Major Requirement | BFA Apparel Design

The class explores fashion and gender representations and aims to emphasize content and context in students' design work. Students focus on silhouette, form and proportion as they explore the structural possibilities inherent in the art of tailoring. They will sculpt the torso with original shapes, by inventing either a bolero, a caraco, a coat, a jacket, a manteau, a suit, a tuxedo, or an hybridation, an extrapolation, or a re-invention of these classic tailored garments, thereby creating a piece that defies sartorial codes or costume classification.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $200.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Junior Apparel Design Students. 

Major Requirement | BFA Apparel Design

This senior level course focuses on the design of unique interpretation of apparel design. The senior collections are a culmination of their skills and an exploration of their design vision. Originality, problem solving, and an organized design process are defined as essential elements of a successful degree project collection. Seniors refine and build their portfolios. Projects are aimed at enabling students to express a diverse but cohesive design vision.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $1,000.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Senior Apparel Design Students. 

Major Requirement | BFA Apparel Design

Building upon the research, explorations and discourses that began during the fall, students are prepared to be resourceful, feeling thinkers who use fashion/clothing as a platform for diverse cultural dialogue. They refine and execute a series of works that demonstrate their philosophy, vision, and establishes their authentic design language and identity. As they develop the capacity to express their mission and concepts in their fullest form/s, they are better equipped to communicate their ideas to their intended audience, and potential collaborators. The two semesters culminate in a portfolio, lookbook, film short and written essay. Students also have the opportunity to collaborate with International Flavors and Fragrances on the scent of their collection. Classes are navigated through group work, tutorial-based sessions, cross-disciplinary prompts and critiques.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Senior Apparel Design Students. 

Major Requirement | BFA Apparel Design

The second core studio addresses the agency of the building to simultaneously construct new spatial, social, and material orders in the context of the contemporary city. The second core studio situates architecture as the strategic interplay of spatial and constructive concepts towards specific aesthetic, social, and performative ends. The studio seeks to create a productive friction between abstract orders (form, pattern, organization), technical systems (structure, envelope), and the contingencies of real-world conditions (site, climate, politics). The studio asks students to link disciplinary methods to extra-disciplinary issues, with concentrated forays into the realms of structure, material, and critical preservation. Students iteratively develop architectural concepts, ethical positions, and experimental working methods through a series of focused architectural design projects with increasing degrees of complexity, culminating in the design of a mid-scale public building in an urban context.

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

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

The second core studio addresses the agency of the building to simultaneously construct new spatial, social, and material orders in the context of the contemporary city. The second core studio situates architecture as the strategic interplay of spatial and constructive concepts towards specific aesthetic, social, and performative ends. The studio seeks to create a productive friction between abstract orders (form, pattern, organization), technical systems (structure, envelope), and the contingencies of real-world conditions (site, climate, politics). The studio asks students to link disciplinary methods to extra-disciplinary issues, with concentrated forays into the realms of structure, material, and critical preservation. Students iteratively develop architectural concepts, ethical positions, and experimental working methods through a series of focused architectural design projects with increasing degrees of complexity, culminating in the design of a mid-scale public building in an urban context.

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

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

The second core studio addresses the agency of the building to simultaneously construct new spatial, social, and material orders in the context of the contemporary city. The second core studio situates architecture as the strategic interplay of spatial and constructive concepts towards specific aesthetic, social, and performative ends. The studio seeks to create a productive friction between abstract orders (form, pattern, organization), technical systems (structure, envelope), and the contingencies of real-world conditions (site, climate, politics). The studio asks students to link disciplinary methods to extra-disciplinary issues, with concentrated forays into the realms of structure, material, and critical preservation. Students iteratively develop architectural concepts, ethical positions, and experimental working methods through a series of focused architectural design projects with increasing degrees of complexity, culminating in the design of a mid-scale public building in an urban context.

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

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

The traditional people of Ghana’s Ashanti region had a time-worn tradition of collective sculptural plastering on buildings. This is one of the most unique cultures of relief sculpture with earth in the world, developed over hundreds of years – a creative practice quickened during the intimate community experiences of maternity (pregnancy and child-rearing). Despite their cultural importance, however, pregnancy and child-rearing are serious risk-taking activities, especially in rural villages, due to the lack of maternity health clinics and other basic infrastructures that allow mothers to access health care education and services when necessary. 

What is the experience of maternity in a modernized Ghana? Is it still collective, culturally rich, and creative? Is this not the most creative time in the collective lives of women – as they prepare for childbirth? Has the influence of the Modern International Style – and the systematic replacement of rich local materials and traditions with poor quality imported materials and construction methods negatively impacted the local experience of maternity? What might be the best practice in designing and constructing future maternity health clinics in rural villages while applying vernacular wisdom and tradition with contemporary knowledge?              

Earthen construction and the manipulation of clay have been one of the most direct forms of creative expression in vernacular cultures all around the world. This is especially the case with relief sculpture. Building with the earth also – despite the false stigma propagated by modern Euro-centric development work is one of the healthiest materials in the built environment. Concrete and steel cannot boast the same thermally self-regulating, humidity-modulating, and bio-climatically optimal material for construction. Where earth – and bio-climatic design – result in optimal human comfort and habitation patterns, modern materials often lead to poor health from thermal dysregulation, mold growth, and toxic materials in the home.

Should a modern maternity clinic not be an example of a new “vernacular material modernism”? This Wintersession proto-design studio will grapple with what this means for the women of modern, post-colonial Ghana. Students will work with the village community and local women – both those expressing the need for a modern maternity clinic – and those who still practice the dying art of clay plastering.

Can the deep material intelligence of the earth and of the vernacular building technologies be brought to bear on the modern experience of maternity in Ghana? What is the modern exchange passed from mother to daughter that can suggest a way forward for a participatory, owner-driven conception of the maternity clinic and ward?

The course will draw on expertise in earthen heritage and tangible knowledge from a variety of sources working in this region, including the International Center for Earthen Construction (CRAterre), UNESCO World Heritages Sites Commission (WHEAP), and the World Monuments Fund.

During the trip, students will visit traditional and modern buildings in the coastal and inland areas, conduct soil tests in fields, study and develop a catalog of local building materials and methods, and produce proto-designs for a future maternity health clinic.

This is a co-requisite course. Students must also register for LDAR 1520 - *GHANA: VERNACULAR MATERIAL MODERNISM - DESIGN RESEARCH IN GHANA.

Registration is not available in Workday. All students are required to remain in good academic standing in order to participate in the Wintersession travel course/studio. A minimum GPA of 2.50 is required. Failure to remain in good academic standing can lead to removal from the course, either before or during the course. Also in cases where Wintersession travel courses and studios do not reach student capacity, the course may be cancelled after the last day of Wintersession travel course registration. As such, all students are advised not to purchase flights for participation in Wintersession travel courses until the course is confirmed to run, which happens within the week after the final Wintersession travel course registration period.

Elective

As over half the world's population has come to live in cities, urbanization has moved to the center of the environmental debate. This course will provide an interdisciplinary engagement between Sociology and Architecture to reflect on the past, present and future of ecological urbanism. Co-taught by professors from Architecture and Liberal Arts, the seminar will interrogate the ways in which green urban design has been conceptualized to date. It will explore cutting edge contemporary debates around the future of the green urban project and ask students to think forward into the future.

Elective

In this studio, we will draw from Impressionism to develop architectural model-making techniques. Architectural models and drawings are specific and precise, scaled-down representations of real life. In contrast, Impressionists painted what they saw, usually on-site, and used quick brush strokes to capture fleeting moments like onions being peeled, a dress being adjusted, or a chair off-kilter. Their ‘impressions’ evoke emotional reactions to ephemeral conditions.

For a discipline so tied to the sensorial experience of space, architecture can learn much from the impressionist attitude. Engaging with the book ‘The Impressionists at Home’ by Pamela Todd, we will embark on a series of physical explorations. Using simple materials like cardboard, paper, and foam, we will reimagine ‘paint’ by ripping, etching, folding, etc. We will model selected paintings in three-dimensions, exploring the implications of spatializing skewed, incomplete representations.

These investigations will lead to accidental intersections of space, furniture, and behaviors. We will work through the chaos to develop our own language, and use it to create a series of spatial artifacts that study the eight chapters of the book. We will be ‘Impressionists at Home’, leaving the course with our own places to meet, escape, eat, work, play, paint, refresh, and rest.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $30.00 - $100.00

Elective

An introduction to the principles of architectural design beginning with a close examination of materials, forces and the human body. The examination will progressively widen in scope to include issues of form, space, structure, program and site. This condensed architectural studio is intended for freshmen and students outside the Division of Architecture and Design.

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)