Form and Narrative: Painting

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.

History of Urban Form

Cities, the largest and most complex artifacts in human history, are the settings of everyday life for more than half the population of the globe and more than two-thirds within the next three decades. Although history is never destiny, the past millennia of cities inform, if at times only as ghosts, our present debates about desires and visions for the future – where almost all of us will reside. The knowledge of these urban artifacts – urban form as well as urban process - is intertwined with many disciplines – engineering, economics, law, geography, politics to name only a few. And that knowledge is at the very core of the professions of urban design, architecture, landscape architecture and city planning. All of us are all participants, in many ways, in the design and building of cities across the globe – we live in cities created by a thousand designers – us.

Traditions of Architectural Practice 

It is the intention of this course to creatively explore the design principles inherent in the makeup of the natural world through the art of drawing. Since the beginning of recorded history, the theories and the techniques of drawing have been of primary importance to our understanding of that world. The ancient concept of linear circumscription or outline, tone, value and color has been the basis upon which we visually describe our perceptions and define our intentions.

On Growth and Form

This Theory Elective is a combination of aesthetic theory, history, and digital design theory. Generally speaking, 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.

Mind and the Built Environment 

Our perception, understanding, affective response, and ultimately behavior in a given setting is greatly shaped by what we carry of it in our minds. It follows then, that our built environment has to be organized not just to fit human activity and patterns of life, but also the human mind, and that the limitations and particular propensities of the mind constrain the shape of the built environment as much as physical functional requirements do. The main purpose of the course is to give students an introduction to selected topics within psychology and cognitive science that help us understand how we shape buildings and are in turn shaped by them.

The Connell Workshop: The Art of Drawing

The ancient story of Parrhasius, the famous Greek painter, expounding on the virtues of drawing to Socrates, the classic Greek Philosopher, is a timeless standard for our critical thinking today. Parrhasius considered the ability of the artist to make initial freehand drawings to be the true measure of his worth. Those drawings required not only a deft handling of the depictions of the external world, but an ability to translate complex and often competing internal ideas onto paper.

Computation + Repair in Design

This course will examine and present the fields of craft and computation as fields of scholarly and creative inquiry to expand the scope of design practice and critically engage with technological change. Advocating for exploratory, experimental, and improvisational processes of inquiry, the course seeks to renegotiate designing and making as new and exciting sites of creative, sociotechnical inquiry that imaginatively and materially reconfigures practices and theories of craft, computation, and technology in design.

Representing Renovation

This workshop will focus on methods of representing intervention projects—projects in which old buildings are used to make new designs. We will begin with a survey of different intervention projects, focusing on the tools the architects chose to represent them, including drawings, models, and other media. We will look at new high-tech tools including 3D scanning, augmented reality, and projection which are used as supplementary methods for representing layers of building history.

Spatial Revolution @ Emory

Using Soviet architecture and cities as primary material evidence, this seminar will utilize maps and plans, original texts, scholarly writings, excerpts from works of literature, and period films to immerse students in a series of socialist built environments. We will study temporary agitational structures, house-communes, workers’ clubs, and socialist cities of varying types and geographies, each of which will allow us to explore and analyze the complex relationship between space and socio-political ideology.