This course provides a broad introduction to architectural ideas, framed through the lenses of history, science and technology studies, visual culture, media studies, and philosophy. Each week, students will attend two lectures that explore a shared theme, followed by TA-led discussions in sections. These themes engage with abstract concepts fundamental to
architectural practice, such as “power,” “nature,” “measure,” “material,” and “labor.”

The lectures will emphasize historical thinking as a critical tool, helping us to contextualize architectural examples within their social and historical frameworks. We’ll investigate the relationships between various subjects, how they take form in the world, and how their interrelationships carry social and spatial significance.

Discussions in sections will focus on these themes, with teaching assistants guiding students through a detailed analysis of the assigned readings. These texts may deepen ideas introduced in lectures or challenge dominant perspectives by presenting alternative historical paths.

Description coming soon

The aims of this course are: to introduce students to some long-standing debates in architectural discourse that open a territory for “theory,” and to relate those debates to issues in contemporary society. The selected topics do not represent an exhaustive account of the theories produced through the history of modern architecture and some of the topics appear as debates only in retrospect. Lectures will focus on developments after the end of the 17th century, a period generally referred to as “modernity,” to explore how value was accorded to various forms of architectural production.

The didactic tool used to clarify the positions held by the historical figures presented in the course is an old one—opposition—where a dialectic is established between two seemingly irreconcilable positions. Sometimes that opposition is overcome (negated or sublimated), sometimes it is radicalized.

Centering on the reconstruction and transformation of a historic dam, this course introduces students to the cultures, methods, and techniques of architectural representation through two- and three-dimensional drawing and modeling in both analog and digital media.

The class begins with digital drawing and modeling exercises to reconstruct the stepped, gravity-arch St. Francis Dam from online sources. These measured studies form the basis for geometric experiments that reimagine the dam—transformed from a one-sided, impermeable wall into a self-supporting, semi-porous structure, experienced from both sides, and scaled to its original dimensions on a hypothetical flat site.

Over the quarter, students will develop printed drawings, images, and analog models while exploring formal properties and phenomena, including the interplay of plans and sections; distinctions between size and scale; constructive, descriptive geometric operations (solids, edges, centers, segments, tangents, chevrons, fillets, and controlled curvilinearity); purposeful and incidental profiles; and the dualities and entanglements of figure–ground relationships.

Prompts and suggestions for project development and output will be issued regularly, both verbally and in writing, after class and technical tutorial sessions.

With the advent of digital modeling interfaces through the last 30 years, we have seen a fundamental shift in describing the architectural object. For almost five centuries, orthographic projection has aided architects in their efforts to constitute the volumetric definitions of buildings.

Architects, using interrelated orthographic sets of views, were able to advance the projected architectural conditions. Plans and sections aided in developing the elevations, as well as axonometric views to enable the observation and study of the 3-dimensional conditions of buildings. Our ability to digitally model buildings completely reversed this process, as we generally work backwards from a digital architectural object towards the
extraction of orthographic information. This results in orthography not as projection but as appearance, as harvested data cut from a digital model. One might argue, given the current state of Building Information Modeling (BIM) technologies and emerging autonomous building techniques, architects no longer need to think through or even generate orthographic drawings in the efforts of construction. Yet, we still produce them, we still insist that they are essential part of architectural arguments and discourse, as they operate through a common notational language of abstraction, transcending disciplinary histories and futures.

What becomes clear in this paradigm is that orthographic mediations such as plans, sections and elevations can be fully divorced from the digital model in terms of how they are conceptualized, how they are generated and what they describe. The same can be claimed for the digital model, which in turn does not rely on the orthographic projection for its constitution but on rigorous application of geometric principles for tectonic, volumetric, surface, and textural definitions. By accepting the digital model and the orthographic set inherently separate domains of architectural mediation, this course will explore potentials of their autonomy in terms of what they can describe and how they can be described.

If the aforementioned is the argument at the core of understanding the contemporary function of mediation and representation—the assumption of autonomy existing between various modes of imaging, model making, and orthographics—then our occupation for this quarter is to precisely exploit this difference to interrogate the physical model and the orthographic and reciprocally implicate the orthographic with the model.

In the 411-core studio, you are working predominantly in plan, with section as the analytical device used to interrogate and represent formal plan-derivative outcomes. In this course, for the first half of the quarter, we’ll mobilize the third drawing mode. That is the isometric: it is not burdened by the plan’s pretensions to organize everyday life, nor the section's theatrical exposition of order in the vertical plane. It is neither orthographic nor exclusively architectural.

This lecture course studies the quintessential characteristics of American urban and suburban form as they developed historically and have been systemized by the design and planning professions since the late 19th century. The course is organized thematically around the grid, park, neighborhood, cityscape, sprawl, downtown, housing and environment, and asks how American republicanism and sentiments of anti-urbanism shaped American urbanism, as well as how disciplinary and professional boundaries between architecture, landscape planning, and urban planning were drawn, and in turn, gave rise to urban and environmental design. While drawing primarily from the histories of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, we will also situate their historical developments in transnational and global frameworks, extending beyond Europe to India, China, the Philippines, Iran, Nigeria, and Tanzania.

As a general theory of economics, theories of value have come and gone for nearly three hundred years, with no apparent agreement in sight. And yet, practices of valuation are firmly established in markets and culture. We constantly attempt to add, fix, measure, or express value in ways that are replicable and convincing to others. In this class we take a look at valuation not as a grand theory of economic production, allocation, or exchange, but as a shifting historical activity at the interface of abstraction and empirics—a conglomerate of practices where material operations of extracting, storing, producing, and distributing find their double in practices of predicting, visualizing, and analogizing.

Some general questions we hope to refine throughout the quarter include: How is “dead” money turned into capital and what does design have to do with it? What objects, techniques, and instruments come to the aid of valuation in processes defined by abstraction and impersonality? How is value fixed in things?

The seminar proceeds in three parts. Part one begins with the premise that speculative activity needs objects to speculate with: from chalkboards, tables, computers, and screens; to banks, warehouses, factories, and exchanges; to stock, insurance, futures, and derivatives. How do these objects of unlike scale, access, and function relate to each other and configure “the market”? Part two focuses on the actors: from idiosyncratic patrons, to anonymous corporations, to daring “projectors” or entrepreneurs. What are their histories, and how do they intersect with aesthetic objects and practice? Part three in turn delves into epistemologies of valuation as they bring into focus moral and political arguments about the role of aesthetics and science, hand and intellect, the passions and the interests, in fixing value. Through landmark readings and new literature, the goal of the seminar is to uncover the place of skill and artifice in rational processes of quantification.

What is research for design? Does it follow a method? In the university, the terms “research” and “method” have long been associated with the sciences, implying positivist, systematic approaches that often unfold in a lab following a set of protocols. But historians have recently shown that science is always messier. Likewise in architecture, there is little consensus on what an encompassing research method might be, or whether it is possible at all. The seminar takes this elusive nature of research methods as a chance to attend to the habits and rituals that have long shaped design tradition, including what count as criteria of evidence and value in architecture.

Across three broad themes—field, documentation, project—we will begin by studying the institutional and disciplinary lineages of research methods in design. We will then examine how these methods structure the visual media, representational techniques, and graphic styles we use to communicate our work, and explore new possibilities. A series of workshops throughout the quarter will test out a variety of methods—interpreting texts, invoking references, observing sites, writing briefs, creating diagrams, images, models, and telling stories. Students will curate an archive related to their studio, one that situates itself relative to the field and identifies relevant working methods.

Speculations on: iconography, media, difference & repetition, identity, cultural narratives, visual literacy.

This seminar is primarily concerned with three things.
1 Craft and construction
2 Visual literacy and comparative methods
3 Simulation and media systems

The diptych didn’t emerge out of aesthetic desire. It emerged out of utility. The first diptychs, wooden tablets covered with wax, were tools for writing and accounting in Greco-Roman antiquity. They were portable, re-writable, and durable. Folded shut, they protected the message inside. Opened, they created a dual surface of legible, symmetrical space. Think of them not as “art objects,” but as functional instruments of early literacy and administration.

This mirrored structure mimicked the symmetry of the human body (left and right), the book (spreads), and, more subtly, the structure of argument itself: premise and rebuttal, claim and evidence. Indeed, the form itself began to embed ideas and over time, diptychs evolved from tools to signs and from writing tablets to ideological notepads.

By Late Antiquity, diptychs began to show up as commemorative or liturgical panels which were made from ivory, and presented to consuls, bishops, and other elites. However, these were not instructional anymore; they were symbolic. Often presented with a figure on each side e.g. emperor and subject, saint and supplicant, Christ and Virgin, the panels created hierarchies of relation. Who is dominant? Who is passive? Who blesses, who receives? The symmetry here was deceptive. It looked balanced, but the meaning was often asymmetrical.

Thus, diptychs always had more than pictorial function. Indeed, they were moral arrangements where power, faith, narrative, and status were all embedded into the structure itself. The frame both contained and produced meaning.

This seminar explores how architecture can be conceived through design as an engagement with natural environments rather than as the production of autonomous objects. It asks how terrain and atmosphere such as deserts, rivers, forests, beaches, mountains, and beyond might be understood as tectonic conditions, generating spatial and material configurations that perform architecturally. By approaching design as the intensification of what is already present, the seminar proposes that architecture may emerge not through addition, but through the careful staging, amplification, and transformation of context.

To be clear: this is not about operating on landscape; it is about operating on context. Landscape implies a surface to be arranged, a scene to be composed. Context, instead, is the dynamic interplay of terrain, atmosphere, and condition, where meaning and form are already in flux. Design here is understood as the act of heightening those relations, making them visible, spatial, and architectural. It insists that context is not passive ground awaiting intervention, but an active field in which architecture is latent, waiting to be drawn out, reframed, and made legible through design.

The concept of Total Theatre is grounded in the idea that the stage itself functions as a narrative device. Originating from its early development as a workshop at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, Total Theatre seeks to synthesize various art forms into a cohesive, unified experience. Beyond merely challenging the conventions of naturalistic theatre, it aims to dissolve the boundaries between audience and performer. In this approach, the theatrical space is not just a backdrop for action but a dynamic, immersive environment designed to evoke profound emotional responses—enveloping the audience in a visceral, often overwhelming, sensory experience.

A notable example of Total Theatre can be found in Norman Bel Geddes’ unrealized stage design for The Divine Comedy. Proposed for Madison Square Garden, the project envisioned a monumental 40 x 50 meter stage composed of concentric steps of varying heights and slopes, evoking the ascending and descending topography of heaven and hell. This single, continuous stage was intended to traverse the entirety of the narrative, forming a unified spatial experience as actors moved through time. Elements such as light, sound, scale, and form were integral to achieving a heightened level of audience immersion. Although the design was never realized, its ambition and language deeply influenced the broader trajectory of performative space, extending its legacy into realms such as concerts, fashion shows, and exhibitions.

Today, this level of viceral immersion has become the norm within contemporary set design. Modern scenography possesses the capacity to transport audiences across imagined worlds, allowing them to lose themselves, disconnect from reality, and enter a singular, suspended moment. In these experiences, the individual identity of the viewer fades as they become part of a collective emotional consciousness, unified by the constructed world unfolding before them.

An architectural rendering is a simulation that allows us to assess a project before it is built. According to Oxford Dictionaries: It’s the processing of an outline image, “using color and shading in order to make it appear solid and three-dimensional”. Once produced with pencil or markers and paper, architectural renders have changed along with the technology available to us. The introduction of digital software afforded us the ability to incorporate ray tracing, depth maps, texture mapping, color correction. Today’s renders are constructed using a variety of software from Photoshop to V-Ray to Octane to Unreal Engine.

Most rendering software is and has been on a practically consistent trajectory towards photorealism, aiming as much as possible to emulate our reality as if it would be photographed. But the word photorealism is does not equate reality — the degree to which a photographic picture can be said to represent any given reality is entirely dependent on how one takes that picture and what one does with it in post production.

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 a variety of neural networks including Stable Diffusion, LoRA models, ControlNet, and Inpainting, to generate, alter, edit, and manipulate the representation of a simple screenshot taken from Rhino. Using a combination of softwares students will produce detailed rendered images and/or video of a simple Rhino massing. These renders might include facade, aerial, full, interior, medium, close, or extremely close shots. Students will research, test, and manipulate the inputs and versions of the models as well as use a variety 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.

Mood boards have long served as a tool for collecting and communicating aesthetic direction, yet their overuse in platforms such as Pinterest has rendered them more decorative than disciplinary. This course reclaims and redefines the mood board as a design engine - a generative and emergent instrument that produces, tests, and translates aesthetic logics into material form.

Students will move fluidly beween digital and physical workflows, beginning with the collection of references and datasets, progressing through generative AI (LoRA training in ComfyUI), and translating outputs into emergent geometries using Houdini, Grasshopper, and Blender Geometry Nodes. These digital studies will then be materialized through 3D printing, laser cutting, and CNC fabrication, forming hybrid boards that oscillate between image, model, and artifact.

By the end of the course, each student will have developed a personal design engine: a unique methodology and mood board system that can serve as a critical and practical tool throughout their degree and beyond.

This colloquium is the first of three required for MA and PhD students over the course of the academic year. Together, these courses introduce students to methods of scholarly inquiry and knowledge production in architecture. The teaching method is workshop-based, where research is tested in dialogue with the Critical Studies faculty and student cohorts. The fall quarter will focus on sources—texts, images, and things and architectural historiography.

The colloquium will proceed in two parts. In the first, three types of sources will be reviewed through writing techniques that have helped scholars make their claims. Rather than consider sources to be evidence-in-the-making (turning from raw to cooked), we will approach texts, images, and things as though they are already intended for transmission. In other words, this is not a class concerned primarily with “original sources,” “data,” “facts,” or “the archive” for that matter. Instead, we will focus on the layered processes of interreference implicit in the scholar’s use of the term “source.” Perhaps this is aligned to media-theories such as those of Gitelman and Latour, but we shall see.

The second half of the quarter will review these techniques as they have appeared in the discipline of architecture, particularly in its historiography in which scholars address the work of other scholars and develop a second order of interreference. Our discussion will focus on how historians have considered the work of architectural scholarship (and its sources) to be a discipline within the university and the world at large.

The assignments will also follow the two-part structure. First, students will select a medium through which a research project could be “sourced” and outline methods of interreference found in such a source. Second, they will build on architectural scholarship that incorporates that source to analyze its tendencies, assumptions, and legacies in the discipline. Final papers will be based on the research developed in the workshops, incorporating feedback from the Critical Studies community.

In architecture, the program is a powerful concept and tool. It sits squarely at the intersection of the discipline’s socio-cultural potential, the architect’s agency, and the building’s impact. To advance spatial justice as well as climate action, architects can begin with the program. Within architectural discourse, the concept of the program broadly ranges from building occupancy to project marketing, design process, and urban narrative. In practice, the program-as-tool is implicated in some of today’s most pressing concerns: gentrification, inequality, affordability, persistent segregation, gender identity, health, housing, and environmental issues, as well as questions about metrics, evidence-based outcomes, and building standards. This quarter we will advance conventional thinking about urban and building-scale programs, read theory that expands the program’s role in architecture, and gain insight into programming’s politics.

We will undertake a comprehensive look at the program, as well as an in-depth examination of the program as a means to advance health and wellbeing. Historically, urbanism and architecture’s roles in our wellbeing have been called out during epidemics: consider John Snow’s maps to track the mid-19th century cholera outbreak in London, W.E.B. Du Bois’ visualizations of Black health inequities and segregation in Philadelphia in the 1890s, or Colomina’s rereading of 20th century modernism and X-ray imagery through the lens of tuberculosis. More recently, space and wellbeing have been linked in myriad contexts: global warming and urban heat island effects, homelessness and lower life expectancy, obesity and the suburbs, inequitable access to parks, and of course, the spatial complications of the Covid-19 Pandemic, to name but a few. These examples call attention to the multifaceted implications of architectural programming in relation to health: Whose health is affected? What evidence is available? What is design’s impact?

The course will counter received wisdom about the program as a packaged statement about function that a client gives the architect or a list of square footages that the architect gives back. Instead, we will investigate the program’s conceptual production, and as importantly, its creative, formal potential. Our assumptions are that the program begins as narrative composed of text and image if it is to shape the built environment, and that it is deeply rooted in and consequential for everyday life. To engage these issues, we will explore theory about the program (through readings, lectures, and discussion), which is most provocative when taken in the context of practice (through architectural case studies and the quarter-long, programming-and-design term project).

Acknowledgements: Our teaching and learning takes place on stolen land and acknowledges the Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar, which we now know as the Los Angeles basin and south Channel Islands. As a land grant institution, we pay our respects to Honuukvetam, Ahiihirom, and Eyoohiinkem (ancestors, elders, and relatives/relations, respectively) past, present, and emerging.

This studio is primarily concerned with three things. The first is more important than the second, though the second greatly affects the first. The third is just always there.

1 The origins, lineage, and provenance of ideas (in all the arts, but here, as identified through the medium of architecture).
2 The use of image-making Generative AI tools in 2025.
3 Buildings as spatial and material artifacts and how we document them.

Concomitant to the radical shifts in contemporary social and political conditions in global society have been equally new and disruptive developments in technologies of all kinds. What is most striking about this is just how deeply connected and interwoven technologies and society really are. Social (people) Media (technology) is, in fact, one clearly labeled version of this type of relationship and a ubiquitous format that most of us use everyday. Technologies, to a large extent, dictate how other (less "social") realms operate, such as the government and the military-industrial complex. It goes without saying however, that no thing, no person, and no industry can escape the changes and effects wrought by advanced technologies.

Vis a vis this, for the last several years, my teaching has been focused on, in addition to other subject matter, the design process in architecture (school) as it relates to:

1 Technology (software & computation),
2 Procedures (precedent study, linear design, e.g. concept to detail, etc.)
3 Ideas and beliefs (why we do what we do).

We will investigate this via GenAI image making prompts and inputs, and make buildings that are novel and rigorously constructed, but have origins too.

Historically, cities and villages have relied on connective grounds such as piazzas, forums, monasteries, gardens, markets and bridges to organize themselves as more than collections of buildings. These grounds were never residual voids but active frameworks, staging encounters, negotiating boundaries, and absorbing the pressures of growth, ritual, and exchange. Their value did not rest in typological form but in their ability to articulate disparate elements into legible wholes, transforming dispersion into civic life.

This studio begins from that premise: that architecture today must be reconsidered less as autonomous object and more as a relational practice. The ground becomes a critical medium in this shift. Far from a neutral datum, it is an active register of topography and circulation, but also of symbolic weight; an infrastructure that receives and redistributes flows, aligns thresholds, and structures sequences of movement. In rural and historical contexts, this ground often operates discontinuously, broken into terraces, ridges, courtyards, and paths that demand reactivation. To treat the ground as active is to understand it as both ecological substrate and cultural stage, capable of sustaining new forms of continuity without erasing the complexity of difference.

Landscape reinforces this logic by introducing temporal and environmental intelligence. Slopes, groves, fields, and seasonal cycles provide orientations and rhythms that extend beyond architecture’s immediate frame. They embed spatial relations in longer durations of climate, cultivation, and memory. In this sense, landscape is not backdrop but operative force shaping alignments, modulating scale, and producing atmospheres that any architectural intervention must acknowledge and work through.

Within this field, the vernacular offers a further lens: not as style to be imitated, but as tectonic knowledge accumulated through necessity and repetition. Roof pitches, wall thicknesses, arcades, and pavements encode structural and material intelligence that responds to scarcity, durability, and ritual use. These details act as mediators between old and new, between functional demand and cultural resonance. Their calibration can intensify spatial dialogue across the site, producing atmospheres grounded in the material presence of stone, timber, and earth.

To foreground the vernacular in this way is not to immobilize it in nostalgia but to activate its logics as design resource. Heritage becomes operative when it is reinscribed through these tectonic relations, rather than preserved as static image. Architecture, then, emerges less as an act of addition than as a process of orchestration: drawing out alignments, overlaps, and thresholds latent in the site and transforming them into new frameworks for inhabitation.

Taken together, public space as connective medium, ground as interactive field, and vernacular as tectonic intelligence, these perspectives frame the studio’s work. The project is not reconstruction but reconfiguration: a search for architectures that operate through relations, material dialogues, and cultural resonance, producing continuity that is never fixed but always negotiated.

This studio launches the first phase of a Design-Build initiative in Boyle Heights, focused on creating forever housing: affordable-for-life homes that resist displacement, provide stability, and empower communities to remain in place for generations. The Studio engages with five real sites spread across Boyle Heights, each embedded in the cultural, social, and historical fabric of the neighborhood. Students will develop a flexible domestic framework for these sites—an infrastructure that can grow over time and adapt to each location, allowing successive cohorts of the Design Build Studio to implement, expand, and refine housing interventions. This is a real project with tangible outcomes, where students’ work will directly influence both the built environment of Boyle Heights and the lives of its residents.

The studio challenges students to reconceptualize the home not as a commodity but as a platform for possibility. Housing becomes a tool for human agency, not simply shelter: domestic units are designed to be incremental, flexible, and intergenerational, capable of evolving alongside their inhabitants. In doing so, students investigate the notion of extended housing—where each home functions as a node within a broader network of shared spaces, green areas, and neighborhood infrastructure. These networks collectively support life, care, and social interaction not only on the individual sites but across the wider community of Boyle Heights. By designing for flexibility, connection, and interdependence, students explore how private and collective spaces can coexist, and how the neighborhood itself can operate as an extended home. As Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher remind us:

“On the most general level we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”

Central to the studio is the concept of the City of Care, a framework that contrasts with the “City of Production,” which prioritizes work, efficiency, and profit. In the City of Care, urban design is oriented toward human needs in all their complexity: domestic life, caregiving, recreation, socialization, and cultural expression are treated as essential components of the built environment. Students will explore strategies to densify the five project sites thoughtfully, integrating new domestic units with existing structures to strengthen community bonds rather than displace residents. Each site is conceived as a node in an interconnected and interdependent network of domestic and communal services, creating ecosystems that support both individual and community life.

The studio encourages students to immerse themselves in the Boyle Heights community through listening, observing, and documenting. Drawing on their field experiences, students will develop a repertoire of Boyle Heights, capturing the community’s lived experiences through oral histories, interviews, archival research, and mapping of cultural practices and infrastructures.

This accumulated knowledge forms the foundation for design decisions and provides a lasting resource for future Design Build Studio cohorts, ensuring that new interventions remain deeply rooted in local knowledge, histories, and aspirations. Community voices are integrated throughout the design process, and students experiment with methods of representation that are interactive, accessible, and meaningful for non-academic audiences.

The studio will culminate in a collective exhibition, conceived not merely as a display of student work but as an interactive platform for dialogue with the community, local organizations, and university peers. Students will present the collective Boyle Heights repertoire alongside their proposals for forever housing frameworks on the real sites, including strategies for incremental growth and extended housing. Developed throughout the year in parallel with their design work, the exhibition will be fully curated and installed by the students at one of the five real sites. It serves as a tool for engagement, fostering community feedback, participation, and reflection, while also laying the groundwork for the future phases of the Design Build Studio.

Description coming soon

Description coming soon

Description coming soon

The conventional understanding of architecture is that it is fixed and immobile. Yet, if viewed along a different temporal axis, architecture can be seen as circulating and moving within society over long cycles. Materials are gathered from diverse locations, assembled, and eventually dismantled and disposed of after use. In this sense, architecture participates in a broader cycle of life, slowly but continuously in motion.

The “architecture of mobility”—exemplified by prefabrication technologies—demonstrates how buildings can adapt flexibly to changes in location and function while retaining both functional and resource value throughout the cycles of construction, transportation, and dismantling. Such adaptability is increasingly critical in an era of rapid change, scarce resources, labor shortages, and urgent environmental concerns.

Moreover, recent proposals by companies such as Toyota and Google for mobile architectures employing self-driving technologies highlight that we are already entering an era in which moving spaces will profoundly reshape cities and everyday life.

Since antiquity, architects and inventors have imagined forms of “architecture that moves.” They believed that mobilizing what is essentially immobile could make possible new ways of living that were previously unattainable. This research studio seeks to illuminate the diverse genealogies of “Architectures of Mobility,” to clarify their historical background, and, through processes of analysis and design, to explore the future possibilities that such architectures may open.

Los Angeles has so many different qualities, which makes it a deeply rich context to create new architectural possibilities. From urban districts to wildland neighborhoods, from impossible-to-make-up histories to pressing realities, from unbelievable landscapes to hardcore infrastructure, LA is a source of untapped architectural inspiration.

We will embrace LA’s paradoxical beauty to develop speculative architectural proposals. The three-term course will be structured into interdependent sequential parts. Research and projection (Fall), master plan proposal (Winter), and architectural proposal (Spring).

For Fall 2025: This term the research seminar will provide you with a conceptual framework and set of reference points for you to formulate and develop a speculative project. The conceptual framework here is Los Angeles, a subject matter and place, with a phenomenal present and past. Together, we will pick and choose events (real or fictional, present day or historical) to put together a unique take on LA. In this case, the set of reference points will be added elements to thicken the plot related to program, tectonics, and materials.

Here, speculative is meant as, to speculate or imagine what your take on LA will be like in the future. You’ll formulate a proposal for a master plan and a building(s) or a building-landscape for that future.

Fall Course Objectives

1. Formulate a unique point of view about LA urbanism
2. Provide cultural, urban design, and architectural examples to support that point of view
3. Develop a speculative project proposal

Architecture as built form is a clumsy medium to speculate on the "present." The slow pace of its becoming material, the inanimate nature of its gestalt, the convoluted manner of its mediums, the unmeasurable immaterial qualities it radiates, makes Architecture an insufficient tool to shape and counter the daily transformations of our world. The reality is that architectural imagination is perpetually stuck between its incapacity to effectively influence and frame rapidly evolving conditions of the present and the unpredictable context of future reality. Similarly, the speculations at the scale of the city operate between now and eventual, as one must presently consider the conditions of a distant future for the city to take hold, for the evolving social conditions to unfold. Our discipline is deeply anchored in the reality of speculation.

This research studio will ask students to collectively document speculative future histories of Los Angeles through the design of episodic instances. We will focus on strategies of representation which orient our disciplinary production towards broader constituents by exploring potential future documents to mediate architectural imagination?

The students, working as pairs through Fall, Winter and Spring Quarters, will be asked to choose an issue that currently pressures and influences the development of the city. The task is to document the state and impact of these issues towards the Year 2065, speculating on varying moments and outcomes. The site of implementation and transformation will be Los Angeles with all its possible ecologies and challenges. Our process through three quarters will deviate from a typical linear research sequence, where facts and histories typically establish the groundwork to validate the act of design to follow. Instead, our line of inquiries will constantly shift back and forth on the time scale between now and the future as we will simultaneously imagine, design, reposition, represent, and research.

This year, we’re pivoting the studio away from a narrow emphasis on filmmaking and toward a broader focus on speculative worldbuilding. The shift comes from a desire to put students in greater control of the design of their worlds - architecturally, environmentally, and culturally. By emphasizing world design over linear storytelling and production pipelines, we’re opening up space for deeper inquiry and a wider range of outcomes: from immersive websites to installations, publications, speculative apps, game environments, hybrid media ecologies, or films.

This pivot also reflects current shifts in the media landscape. With generative tools, and with the film industry itself in flux, this is a critical moment to foreground the architectural imagination and systemic thinking that designers bring to narrative environments. Worldbuilding is increasingly relevant not only in film and gaming but also in advertising, exhibition design, theater, curation, and broader storytelling. Expanding the studio’s scope also ensures that students graduate with a versatile, future-facing skill set that equips them to frame their ideas and technical abilities across disciplines and to articulate their design intelligence in ways that are both conceptual and technical.

In a time of accelerating ecological upheaval, social fragmentation, and technological overreach, the task of the designer, and the storyteller, is no longer just to design spaces and stories, but to imagine the worlds in which those spaces and stories might matter. Transitioning Worlds is our shared context and our call to action: an acknowledgment that the systems we inhabit are already transforming, and a provocation to engage that transformation deliberately. This studio is grounded in the belief that speculative worldbuilding is not escapism, but a form of critical design, and one that allows us to test futures, rethink systems, and rehearse alternative ways of living. Working at the edges of spatial design, cinema, science fiction, and environmental speculation, we treat media not just as a representational tool, but as a site of intervention.

Description coming soon

The yearlong research studio Towards Circular, Innovative Buildings for the Olympics: Reimagining Design and Construction through 3D Printing addresses one of the most urgent challenges in architecture today: reducing carbon emissions and material waste while rethinking how buildings are designed, constructed, and adapted for future needs. Using the Olympic Games as a case study, the studio investigates how large-scale global events—often characterized by rapid construction timelines and the risk of short-lived, unsustainable infrastructure—can instead serve as test beds for circular design and advanced technologies. By integrating modularity, disassembly, and material reuse, the studio envisions low-carbon building systems aligned with international sustainability commitments such as the AIA 2030 and SE 2050 targets, while also meeting the Olympic Games’ evolving environmental objectives. Students will explore computationally driven parametric design, Design for Manufacturing (DFM), and Design for Disassembly (DFD) principles to create adaptable buildings that can be easily assembled, dismantled, and repurposed, ensuring long-term urban utility beyond the games. Drawing inspiration from biomimicry, the research translates natural systems into innovative material logics, ecological intelligence, and performative design strategies, bridging aesthetics with sustainability. Advanced 3D printing technologies will enable the repurposing of existing materials, reducing embodied carbon and operational energy demands, while lifecycle assessments will evaluate the environmental footprint of proposed systems. Networking with industry leaders such as ICON, Branch Technology, Azure Printed Homes, and Yuan Mu, Computational Designer at Nike, provide the technical expertise and real-world grounding to push forward experimentation and application, positioning the Olympics as a catalyst for reimagining global construction practices and advancing the circular economy.

This is the first studio in a core sequence within the MArch program at UCLA. The core curriculum intends to expose students to how architecture is conceptualized, developed, and represented through a series of rigorous design methodologies rooted in continuous cultivation and evolution of architectural fundamentals.

The core studios consecutively expand in scope and complexity, building towards increasingly specialized research and experiments conducted in the last year of the program in the advanced topics and research studios. As the first in this sequence, this studio explores issues that are central to the discipline – space, form, and representation – encouraging students to begin to develop their own position and understanding of the fundamental methods, tools, concepts, and design strategies which will ultimately project beyond the first quarter.

The studio posits that architecture can transcend any specific program and its duration and, through the establishment of unique spatial and tectonic order, leads to the invention of new programs. Unlike subsequent studios, where an analysis of a given site or program may drive the design process, this studio inverts the sequence and begins with abstraction and the organizational and experiential capacity of form. As such, form will influence the program and context from within itself. Rooted in representational conventions, namely the orthographic projection, students will experiment with the creation of proto-architectural conditions, examining how their formal and representational approaches imply specific ways of inhabiting and experiencing space. Plan is the underlying subject of that interrogation not only for its organizational abilities but also, crucially, for its its spatial capacities. In the latter half of the studio, section will be the architectural device by which to test its efficacy.

It could be argued that the environment we live in, the buildings we inhabit, and the public spaces we gather in, are the most substantial results of our work as architects. However, a common refrain within our discipline is that we, as architects, do not make buildings. We make representations – images, drawings, models – which describe buildings through various processes of translation. It is often in this translation or loss thereof, across media, that new discoveries emerge, which when interrogated rigorously, enable innovative outcomes. In this context, architecture is understood as a profoundly iterative process and a form of mediation between its own discipline and the larger world beyond.

The work of the studio will unfold though three discrete phases, each one of which builds on the result of the previous. Unlike a napkin sketch, which typically originates during an isolated process of introspection, the two initial exercises – Part A and Part B – each begin with an artifact already found in the world. One is a three-dimensional physical object, the other is a two-dimensional digital image of an abstract drawing or pattern. The intent is to provoke inclusion of diverse ideas and contexts, evoking the multivalent and collaborative nature of architectural formation through re-purposing of visual media from sources both inside and outside architecture. This includes objects, such as common toys, which will be the subject of orthographic representation in Part A, or a wide array of plan drawings from significant architectural precedence as in Part B.

Los Angeles grapples continually with the environmental challenges intrinsic to its geographical location. These challenges encompass geological instability, a highly diverse topography, recurrent wildfires, extreme temperatures and a persistent scarcity of water resources. The city confronts an unrelenting demand to sustain its ever-expanding metropolitan existence, particularly as the compounding effects of climate change exacerbate its immediate environmental milieu. Accommodating the diverse communal habits of urban living necessitates extensive infrastructural undertakings and innovative solutions. In an epoch characterized by a shift toward more subtle and concealed infrastructures, Los Angeles continues to rely on extensive physical infrastructures to secure its natural resources, a prerequisite vital for its survival as a metropolis.

Amidst the backdrop of adverse climate change, characterized by arid conditions, reduced precipitation, and frequent droughts, the foremost concern in Los Angeles pertains to the procurement of natural water sources for the city. Historically, the supplying of water to this arid locale has been a monumental endeavor. An intricate network of infrastructure facilitates the delivery of water into the city, primarily sourced from the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range via surface aqueducts and tunnels.

Within the metropolitan boundaries, this water undergoes management via an expansive framework of dams, reservoirs, channels, and pumping stations, culminating in its delivery to individual faucets. The development of essential civic infrastructures has traditionally served as a marker of a civilization's advancement, aiding in the organization and facilitation of evolving communal needs and desires. Present-day urban centers rely on public/private institutions to oversee and maintain these infrastructures, serving as intermediaries between resource cultivation, distribution, and public consumption. In a field invested in the cultural impact of architectural interventions, the conspicuous absence of influence and participation in envisioning the integration of civic infrastructures, which fundamentally impact the equitable and just distribution of resources to the public, warrants profound consideration.

Architecture is culturally based. It both draws from the culture and contributes to the culture. Ancient Egyptian architecture, traditional Asian architecture, Western architecture, Mesoamerican architecture, and others, are reflections of, and contributors to, their cultures.

There is also a physical culture; Architecture is in the physical world. We build on Earth, which has a certain amount of gravity; the wind blows and the ground shakes. The sun rises and sets. Weather and atmosphere vary over a wide range from place to place and time to time. It rains and snows, and gets very hot or cold. The atmosphere has specific qualities as well. Architecture reflects these physical characteristics in many ways.

Structure is used to physically support architecture, to be sure. Occupied space is large enough that a means of support is needed. Much of the role of the engineer is to make sure that this is accomplished. But there's more. There are other aspects of structure that have direct architectural design issues, frequently founded in engineering issues but not limited to that. An understanding of this presents opportunities for the physical culture to contribute to design.

For example: Why are all the Greek columns three-part columns? There are Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, with numerous variations and even some combinations. But all have a base, a shaft, and a capital, three parts. Why? Was three the lucky number in Greece? (No) What about the Roman columns? Tuscan columns? Three parts - base, shaft, capital. What’s going on? How basic is this idea? How can we use ideas like these in our design? We’ll talk about this in class.

In most cases, vertical structure (columns, walls) can be organized in a variety of ways, subject to the programmatic desires. The spatial qualities of the project are hugely influenced by these choices. Vertical load design of these elements, columns, walls or hangers, are significant design opportunities. They play a pivotal role in organizing spaces and functions. How loads throughout the structure get down to the ground are central to structural design. And we will spend time studying that.

But *span***** – the horizontal members of the structure – has the most profound effect on the architectural design. These members redirect loads, bring loads from high in the building to vertical members and then down to the ground. We will take that apart and learn all the issues.

Span is a complicated issue. It involves issues of material selection and influences form. Depth of members is central to the issues involved. What are trusses about? How do they work? Why do wood 2x8's (set on the smaller edge) carry more load than 8x2's (laid flat) of the same material? Why are arches that particular shape? Are they all that shape? What is balance and what is equilibrium? Why and how do structures sometimes fail? What are the qualities of concrete, of steel, of wood and of carbon fibers? Connections are very important too.

How do we resist earthquakes, wind storms, rain storms, and the intensity of the sun? The list is long and detailed. All the solutions contribute to architectural design, not only at a functional level but at a conceptual level as well.

Historical development of profession; role of architect in contemporary society, current forms of practice and emerging trends. Contractual relationships, ethical responsibility, office management and promotion. Case studies of practical process.

Students will gain an understanding of important features of architectural practice, including the architect’s roles and responsibilities, contractual and professional relationships, and instruments of service. Today’s range of project delivery systems will be introduced, including emerging technologies and fabrication methods. Presentations and discussions will review graphic and textual conventions and standards, regulatory requirements and processes, and steps necessary to bring an architectural project to fruition. Students will learn about the path to licensure, and tools to help them manage a practice, coordinate consultant input, and mitigate exposure to risk.

AUD 495 is a seminar course that is intended to provide guidance and support to first-time (or potential first-time) Teaching Assistants (TAs) in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design (AUD). This course is required regardless of previous experience as a TA in another department or institution. This course will cover topics including teaching philosophies, teaching methodologies, assessment/evaluation/grading practices, facilitating inclusive learning environments, and developing professional practices specific to architecture in academia.