UCLA Architecture and Urban Design

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This studio is concerned with the boundaries and limits of architecture. By imagining two buildings nested one inside the other, the studio interrogates not only the threshold between the building and the world, but the many thresholds that reside within the architectural object itself. The current indeterminacy between living and working brought about both by crisis and our increasingly “seamless” and “interconnected” work-anywhere and live-everywhere model, has radically altered our understanding of these boundaries. Binary distinctions between living and working, inside and outside, private and public, individual and collective, have become difficult to pin down. Arguably, adjudicating spatial boundaries is architecture’s most fundamental role; how then has this blurring problematized our understanding of space?

Project by Jacob Dunsmore [BA '22], Fall 2021

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Over the quarter, students will geometrize, transform, and multiply two alphabetic characters (student initials in Mies van der Rohe's typeface) to create two distinct shade structures: one post-and-beam and the other volumetric. With their definitive boundaries established early in the quarter, the two structures will develop simultaneously and dialogically.

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In this course we will be using generative AI to construct synthetic architectural representation. In the realm of artificial intelligence, the creation of an image is an intricate and complicated interweaving of algorithms and data, that, while devoid of a ‘real’ origin, can be strikingly ‘photorealistic’. This AI-generated image, a simulacrum, is a mirror held up to a reality that doesn’t exist, reflecting back an illusion of authenticity. It encapsulates a carefully curated identity — an identity that we hope to control as another tool in our arsenal for design and representation.

The quarter-long project will focus on leveraging various machine learning models to generate, alter, edit, and manipulate the representation of a simple screenshot taken from Rhino. Using a combination of software students will produce detailed rendered images and/or video of a simple Rhino massing. Students will research, test, and manipulate the inputs and versions of the models as well as use a variety of control techniques to produce the desired output. Each student will aim to control, edit, and understand, the workflow of editing and generating each layer of the produced image.

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There is an intriguing school deep in the Himalayan Mountains. The school is called Jhamtse Gatsal. The name means the place of love and compassion. It’s a home and school for children. The orphanage is also a school for them. This school is in one of the most remote areas in India yet known to have extremely high-quality education. The school is 500 km away from the city deep in a mountain. While the school allows them to choose diverse profession, 95 percent of the children go to university. That is unusual in India, where only 20 percent goes to university. They achieved the unique quality with unusual method. The education is based on sharing. As their orphanage is made to share every aspect of their life, they share knowledge each other. The knowledge turns into wisdom. While knowledge belongs to each person, wisdom is the attitude and method to bind people together. In the school knowledge is not the measurement to compete each other. Knowledge is nothing more than a piece to share with others. I found the most advanced education in the most remote place of the planet.

I want you to design a school to share knowledge. The school is not a place to train children. There is no competition. There is a big difference between teaching and learning. The teaching is to give knowledge to children, but learning is the process for children to take spontaneously. The class is not going to be divided into age groups. Architecture is not a thing but a situation. The school needs to be the place to provide opportunities. There will be children having different learning speed. The children know when they are ready to learn. The school is not only about STEAM. That needs to be the place to share and help each other. The rule of the school is only love and compassion There will be about 100 children from age 3 to 18. Please find a way to put them together.

Description coming soon

Ceremony, which exists in various forms worldwide, is an interesting architectural phenomenon in which space and human action are intimately connected and extend beyond materiality into spirituality. While many ceremonies are strongly linked to religion, the tea ceremony, one of the most essential rituals in Japanese culture, is unique in that it is non-religious yet strongly connected to spirituality and has spread globally through the activities of Urasenke.
However, the current tea house and its associated rituals are still strongly dominated by the traditional Japanese form of sitting. They still need to be fully integrated into the many multicultural standing forms. In this studio, we will study the tea ceremony in a non-Japanese cultural context, and through the process of designing and studying its transformation, we will attempt to treat space, tectonics, tools, human action, and spirituality as one continuous design.

Fall Quarter (October-December): Research about Tea Experience
In the fall quarter, students will learn about the history of Japanese architecture, teahouse architecture, and the tea ceremony through seminars by various experts. Also, they initiate case studies of teahouses and the tea ceremony rituals performed in them, as well as other ceremonies held around the world and their relationship to the place of the ceremony, and discuss each's uniqueness and commonality.

Trip To Kyoto (December, after Fall final)
The students will visit teahouse architecture and experience tea ceremony in Kyoto with the cooperation of the Urasenke as well as the visit to traditional architecture and gardens.

Dec16 (Mon) Ura sennke tour( yuu-in, Konnichi-ann)
Dec17 (Tue) Katura Rikyu, Tai-ann,
Dec18 (Wed) Kennninnji(Zazen), Daitokuji (Kohou ann),
Dec19 (Thu) Free
Dec20 (Fri) Final review @ ?

Winter Quarter (January-March): Design of the Tea Ceremony
In the winter quarter, the meaning of wellness in contemporary society, its relationship to ritual, and its role in achieving it will be studied. Based on the knowledge gained in the previous quarter, the students will also design scenarios of how the tea ceremony could be interpreted, translated, and performed in contemporary non-Japanese cultures, in what form, at what place, and with what utensils and food, and design a space in which the ritual could take place. Also, they will create a design brief of the place of the ceremony based on the scenario.

Spring Quarter (March-June): Design of the Tea house
The students will design a contemporary teahouse based on the scenarios and design briefs designed in the previous quarter. The exhibition and the symposium will be held as a culmination of the initiative.

In collaboration with Reijiro Izumi (Urasenke), Tohru Horiguchi (Kindai University, Japan), Michelle Liu Carrigar (TFT, UCLA), Yusuke Tsugawa (David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA), and Ken Tadashi Oshima (Architectural historian, University of Washington)

Year-long studio

This research studio involves the engineered ecology and resultant aesthetic implications of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s Dust Mitigation Project at Owens Lake, a large site in eastern California of major environmental, historical, political, and infrastructural significance. Until very recently the largest single source of dust pollution in the U.S., the studio examines control methods developed by LADWP to manage this difficult landscape: a complex synthesis of fields, pools, plants, animals, microorganisms, chemicals, minerals, roads, berms, dams, plumbing, power lines, grading, gravel, roads, sensors, and salt that is only partially visible to the human eye. The effects of these re-workings of the landscape are striking, inevitably aesthetic in their expression. Our work imagines a near-future evolution of this infrastructure toward strange new landscapes, turning radically empirical environmental engineering techniques toward a more expansive, aesthetic dimension. The design problem imagines arguments, in the form of visual albums and design projections for the creation of a new national monument for this gigantic Anthropogenic landscape.

Year-long studio

A mission or vision statement is not a vague platitude. These are articulations of unique competence and measurable goals.

For three years in the MSAUD program, Professor Greg Lynn taught a two-quarter seminar that used corporate brand defining tools as a critical instrument for historical and cultural research. For the last two years, Lynn's MArch Research Studio used those tools as design method. The experience with goal setting and defining personal criteria for success can assist in team building and studio culture alignment in future professional practice.

The Fall 2024 and Winter 2025 quarters of Professor Lynn's 2024-2025 year-long Research Studio will focus on the formation of critical architectural concepts with clear measurable consequences. The disciplined skills of problem formation, value decisions, radical editing, profundity, and extreme clarity of communication will be applied to the studio. You will define your own design brief during these two quarters. During the Spring 2025 quarter of the research studio, everyone will share a site where a building design will be executed with relevant comprehension guided by personal Mission and Vision statements.

To define individual criteria for success, the studio requires a calibration of ambitions with design skills and conceptual competence. This culminating studio pedagogy has been crafted specifically for the third year graduate Research Studio at UCLA. The focus on studio culture requires: listening and trust in peers’ feedback; self-awareness of personal strengths and limitations; and clarity of communication that is actionable and intelligible by others without ambiguity. This studio will disappoint if you are seeking one last new method or experiment before you graduate. The studio is a good place to articulate exactly what it is that you do well before you graduate.

Year-long studio, with precedent in 2022-2023's and 2023-2024's "Fit for the Future" studio

Wearables protect us from the climatic conditions, they provide privacy, comfort and they also reflect our style and personality. Building facades in the same way, provide protection from the weather, comfort, privacy and showcase typology and style. The link between architecture and fashion is a perceptible phenomenon in both theory and practice through many contemporary pioneers including Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, Coco Chanel, and Joseph Hoffmann. Designing the architectural surface was frequently understood as being similar to designing a garment. The foundation of this connection between textiles or dresses and architecture had been laid in the mid-19th century by architect Gottfried Semper’s “Principle of Dressing.”

Students check out work from Prof. Koerner's 2022-2023 "Fit for the Future" studio

This year-long research studio, in its third cycle, will investigate the relationship of fashion and building skins, and research how buildings of the future can have skins that are performative and are 3D-printed with innovative sustainable materials. Across the world, temperature extremities are rising into previously unimagined realms and summers are developing to record setting heat. Extreme heat affects health and wellbeing and it affects how we occupy and use buildings. Climate change is experienced across the world in changing weather conditions such as more frequent fires, droughts, storms and flash floods. Ground-up construction will diminish in urban environments and increasingly be replaced with retrofits. Within the studio we will rethink how to design retrofits of existing buildings, providing them a new wearable skin, and one that responds to extreme climatic conditions.

Surge in use of 3D printers in the construction industry for making precise final products, developing prototypes while lowering the production and materials cost and increase in adoption of green buildings and structure drive the growth of the global 3D printing construction market. The market across North America held the largest share in 2021, accounting for nearly two-fifths of the market. The path towards a sustainable future requires a transition from the current linear, extractive, toxic construction practices, towards circular, bio-based, renewable materials and methods. This shift has the potential to dramatically reduce the natural resource needs and carbon footprint of growing cities and infrastructure, and is critical to deliver on the Glasgow Climate Pact.

Description coming soon

First-year MArch core studio; description coming soon

Second-year MArch core studio; description coming soon

Structures I, AUD 431, is the first part of a year-long, three-part exploration into structural thinking. Structure is certainly used to support architecture, but, is also space defining, form generating, and aesthetically engaging as well. The Golden Gate Bridge has majestic structural towers and fluid structural cables. They support the roadway. But they then define the architecture, the roadway being almost structurally incidental. The dome of the Pantheon encloses a wonderful, large circular space. But the architecture is certainly in the presence of the dome itself.

Structures 2 continues the understanding of span from Structures 1. How span works is central to what is built. Both opportunities and limitations are found here. Columns and walls play a similar role, but to a lesser degree. We look first at columns this quarter and then we look at wood as a building material, as a spanning material, a material that is undergoing profound changes as we move away from solid-sawn members and more to engineered members. Mass Timber is expanding these changes. Many of the ideas discussed are similar to those of steel, many are different. The course will also look at an introduction to lateral load design, a topic more fully addressed in Structures 3.

Description coming soon

Academics

Fall 2024 Courses

Fall 2024 Courses and Studios, in brief