Form and Narrative: Painting Film Architecture ARCH 4129/6129 Jude LeBlanc
The focus of this study will be the human subject in relation to design, form, space and meaning as depicted in the still images of Johannes Vermeer paintings and the moving images of Alfred Hitchcock films. Architects, in contrast to most other artists, have a non-direct relation to their medium. As an architect, one does not typically craft a building directly. One makes propositions, explores alternatives and communicates to various audiences by means of other media, i.e.. three-dimensional model making, drawing, painting, photography, or computer imaging. The architect remains a generalist and it is prudent that she or he understand other media.
Architecture, Space and Culture: Architecture and Language; Syntaxes of Inhabited Space ARCH 4140/6352/8830 John Peponis
This course will investigate the social functions of architectural space and associated design choices across a variety of building types and scales of environmental design. It will be a research class with two aims. First, the course will introduce theories of architectural space and associated methods of spatial analysis that can be applied to model, benchmark, and evaluate designs and how they are occupied, applied, and actualized. Second, the class will pursue a particular research question, a different one each time the course is offered. This year's focus is on the description and depiction of the human functions of architecture through the lens of residential buildings.
History of Urban Form ARCH 4151/7151 Richard Dagenhart
Understanding cities, the largest and most complex artifacts in human history, is the core of urban design knowledge and is essential for the disciplines and practices of architecture, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning. The foundation of that knowledge – urban form and urban process --‐ is also intertwined with other disciplines, including civil and environmental engineering, law, economics, geography, political science and many more. This course is taught from historical vantage points across the globe, recognizing that urban form is shaped by many influences --‐ ecological, technological, cultural, political and economic.
Urban Ecological Design ARCH 4447/6447 Perry Yang
The course engages contemporary issues of urban ecology and its articulation to design in urban settings. The new commitment of the co-habitation of nature and built environment has drawn attentions of urban designers, city planners and architects. The discourses of urban sustainability have to move away from social sufficiency, ecological efficiency to systems compatibility by linking the urban forms and ecological flows in urban, industrial and natural systems. The climate challenges require design and planning professionals to deal with how cities and urban spaces are analyzed, designed, managed, evaluated, represented and changed to meet the goals of shaping ecological, sustainable and resilient urban future. Defined by two categories Forms and Flows, the course covers theories, methods, tools and case studies of ecologically sound urban systems design.
Evidence Based Design ARCH 4803/6243 Craig Zimring, David Cowan
On Growth and Form ARCH 4803/6352/8803 Lars Spuybroek
This Theory Elective is a combination of aesthetic theory, history, and digital design theory. Generally, the problem with digital design is that it is understood as either fully instrumental or as easy access to complicated forms. In contrast, this series of lectures and discussions we will trace digital design (or generative design) back to its roots in Romanticism. During this period architects and scientists were trying to understand how forms are “grown.” At first only natural forms of plants and animals, but later all forms—natural and artificial—were seen as generated by temporal processes. We will see how this idea of growing form becomes part of the aesthetics of the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival, advocated by the brilliant theories of John Ruskin and the beautiful designs of William Morris. Step by step we will move toward an ecological notion of aesthetics, which started around the 1770s with the German concept ofEinfühlung (“feeling-into”) and develop it into a broader notion of a “sympathy of things.”
Design. Develop. Build. Uganda. Design Workshop. ARCH 4803/8803 Daniel Baerlecken
Design.Develop.Build. focuses on architecture with limited resources as an investigation that realizes itself in construction through research and experimentation using integrated modes of making and computation. The DDB design workshop responds to a housing crisis for approximately 100 Ugandan orphans in the small village of Rwentobo in the rural Western Region of Uganda.
Green Infrastructure and Sustainable Communities ARCH 4803/8803 Richard Dagenhart, Thomas Debo, Jason Gregory
This course is an interdisciplinary design workshop involving seminars, case study presentations, and collaborative design projects focusing on the design green infrastructure. Green infrastructure is not only concerned with contemporary stormwater management practices and utility but also with site design of architecture.
Collage ARCH 4803/8803 George Johnston
This course will familiarize students with the intellectual history of collage, will examine related practices within allied arts— architecture, literature, visual arts, film—and will engage a series of intensive exercises in collage making in which landscapes at multiple scales will be examined for the generative lessons they hold for seeing, thinking, and making.
Mind and the Built Environment ARCH 4823/8823 Sonit Bafna
This course is about the reciprocity between the human mind and the built environment. It is framed around a single premise: that our perception, understanding, affective response, and ultimately behavior in a given setting is greatly shaped by what we carry of it in our minds. From this premise comes the proposition that our built environment is organized not just to fit human activity and patterns of life, but also the human mind; the limitations and particular propensities of the mind constrain the shape of the built environment as much as physical functional necessities do. The main purpose of the course is to explore this proposition.
Thick + Thin V.2 ARCH 4833/8833 Jonathan Dessi-Olive
The course will provide a base of appropriate structural design and analysis techniques for pursuing research as well as construction knowledge using select techniques. A 3-4 week series of lectures will be followed by workshop sessions with exercises including: theoretical design and analysis exercises using both manual and computational methods, construction methods, prototype construction, etc. Students will choose a course of research either based on personal or collective interest. They may also chose to extend past or on-going research on shell and spatial structures. Past topics have included tile vaulting, funicular structures in raw clay and lightweight concrete, mycelium-composite construction, and pneumatics. The goal is to develop new material logics for building shell and spatial structures. The deliverable will be one or several innovative structures built to be exhibited at the department of architecture End of Year Show.
The Connell Workshop: The Art of Drawing ARCH 4833/8833 Lane Duncan
This workshop will explore a wide range of these issues in hand drawing - tone, line, contour, gesture, composition, and the historic humanistic forces that shaped them. These drawing and critical thinking investigations can be divided into two general categories - those of perception and those of conception. Perception being the way in which we see the world, and conception being the way in which we attempt to order the world.
Windblades Workshop ARCH 4833/8833 Russell Gentry, Tristan Al-Haddad
This course explores the adaptive re-use of composite material structures and focuses on materials taken from decommissioned wind turbine blades. The emphasis is on re-use of the materials and structures, and not recycling, as the thermoset resins and glass and carbon fibers used to construct these structures are not economically separable. The course has two tracks: (1) materials and structures – “engineering” and (2) design and geometry – “architecture”. All of the students in the class will attend the lectures and participate in the laboratories and demonstrations. The class assignments will be different in the two tracks, but will converge at the end of the semester in a final project.
Robotic Operations ARCH 4833/8833 Keith Kaseman
Having gained substantial momentum within the past decade, advancements in the field of robotics in architecture continue to develop at an astonishing rate. Countless experiments, demonstrations and professional applications of automated assembly applications carried out in academic institutions and professional fields across the globe point to a host of inevitably transformative impacts within design professions and construction industries. It is evident that ever- widening access to robotic equipment provides architects with unique opportunities to extend their reach into fundamentally new modes of design, spatial operation and material production. This introductory course aims to serve as a point of entry into this wide field of potential and development, and is geared to be a hands-on working seminar centered on the Kuka robotic arm (KR 120 R2500 PRO) in the Digital Fabrication Laboratory (DFL).
REVIT ARCH 4833/8833 Geoffrey Maulion
Revit is not just a 3D modeling tool or a documentation tool. This course will demonstrate how Revit can facilitate the conception of a design from various points of genesis. This will then be contextualized in its applications in both the academic and the professional environment. Revit will be presented in relation to architectural concepts to understand why and how BIM can be used rather than just the functionality of the tool. Analytical, formal, and experimental processes will be integrated directly into the Revit learning tutorials. Case study "Show and Tells" will demonstrate real world applications of each subject in order to understand the reach of each exercise. Team projects will be assigned to understand the collaborative nature of Revit and BIM.
Computational Making: Inquiry, Theory and Applications ARCH 4833/8833 Vernelle Noel
This course focuses on computational making. We will consider the notion of computation broadly to include computing done by machine as well as computing done by hand. The craft currently being explored is wire-bending.
Building Simulation in Design Practice ARCH 6241 Godfried Augenbroe
Get familiar with mainstream simulation packages to support building design, audit and calibration at various levels of fidelity in the following domains: Solar, Energy, Air Flow and Ventilation, Lighting, Passive Design Software packages from which we will choose: Ecotect, EPC Calculator, EnergyPlus, CONTAM, IES-VE, Comfy, TAS and others.
Facades Engineering ARCH 8803 Jason Brown
This course focuses on detailed thermal energy flows through facades and their implications for macroscopic building envelope characteristics and overall building performance goals such as energy use. Topics include thermodynamics, basic graphical and numerical solutions for heat transfer and mass transfer, the impact of moisture transport, and facade analysis via simulation tools.
