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.

This is the first studio quarter in the senior year of the BA/Architectural Studies program

Course Objective: To develop conceptual and formal understandings of architectural space making through design experimentation. The course will move intensively through three progressive exercises that will synthesize 3d, plan, and section thinking through the manipulation of volumes, surfaces, and mass.

This will be carried out through the framework of two houses in one building. The two houses will remain discrete programmatic entities with points of overlap. In addition to the two houses, you will create outdoor spaces, which you are encouraged to explore along the spectrum of open to the sky above to thermally enclosed.

Two groups of a multigenerational family will each live in one house. You may decide upon the composition of the two sets of people, with no less than 2 and no more than 4 people to a house (nuclear family, grandparents, non-biological family, etc.).

The aims of this course are: 1) to introduce students to some long-standing debates in architectural discourse that have opened a territory for “theory” and 2) to relate those debates to issues in contemporary society. The selected topics do not represent an exhaustive account of theories in 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 various forms of architectural production. The tool used to clarify the positions held by the historical figures presented in each lecture is opposition—where a dialectic is established between two seemingly irreconcilable positions. Sometimes that opposition will be overcome (negated or sublimated), sometimes it will be radicalized.

What defined architecture before theory? How do ideas such as “practice,” or “knowledge” depend on theory? Who produces a theory? How have theories of architecture changed over time? How have theories helped form a discipline? What is “critical” theory and how does it apply to architecture? What has become of theory lately? Has architecture entered a post-theory age?

This class will consider how theories can explain architecture’s history in the modern period; this coincides with the rise of capitalism, a process that interweaves with colonialism. Therefore, this history is necessarily global, charting the expansion of a world market through colonial domination. We will explore theoretical techniques to position architecture within this historical background.

This is the first quarter Technology Seminar in the junior year of the BA/Architectural Studies program

This Technology Seminar introduces students to the cultures, methods, and techniques of architectural representation through two- and three-dimensional drawing and modeling in analog and digital media in order to achieve literacy and fluency in architectural communication. This year’s edition draws inspiration from the body of work of the late artist Channa Horwitz, particularly her sustained engagement with the number eight and the discipline of the 1⁄8”-cell grid. Her work will provide a parallel point of departure—not as a formal model to reproduce, but as a generative system in which simple operations produce increasingly complex organizations.

The course begins with a geometric analysis of Filippo Brunelleschi’s Santa Maria degli Angeli, examining how a simple premise can generate a complex spatial organization. We will pay particular attention to how its central figure establishes a radial order, and how repetition, rotation, proportion, and aggregation produce a coherent whole.

From this analysis, we will multiply the original plan eight times to construct a single octagonal planimetric array. Over the quarter, the array will evolve through repetition, translation, rotation, connection, and variation, explored through 2D and 3D drawing and modeling. Each step will reveal new spatial and geometric possibilities, with the drawings recording the operations through which the array develops.

Throughout array development, we will track the evolution of its underlying rules and test how those rules can produce depth, structure, and spatial relationships. Through formal analysis, selected readings, and study of Horwitz’s broader body of work, we will build a vocabulary for understanding how systems can be transformed without losing their internal logic.

The final stage will translate the developed array into a scalable two- and three-dimensional construct that is both a seat and a parliament. In sum, the work will be developed and documented through architectural projections and digital and analog models that explore formal and chromatic properties and phenomena, including the interplay of plan and section; the distinction between size and scale; the elaboration of profiles; and the shifting relationships between figure and ground, foreground and background.

Quoting Sanford Quinter: “The new materialism may well be a new expressionism.”

While images can evoke moods, atmospheres, or alternative realities, the isometric operates in a distinctly analytical mode. It merges multiple planar projections into a unified depiction, offering a layered understanding of a three-dimensional composition.

The isometric describes the relationships between assembled parts, the interplay of solid and void, and the thresholds where interior and exterior meet. Beyond simply measuring or illustrating space, it simultaneously collapses attributes of plan and section, which define the material and spatial realities of the composition.

This exercise expands the scope of isometric representation, incorporating light, shadow, and even texture as tools for analysis. Shadows, whether cast on surfaces or projected into surrounding spaces, provide a vital means of understanding form, depth, and orientation. These qualities, alongside attributes like mass, surface, and volume, are rendered through a careful balance of precision and abstraction.

The aim is to go beyond technical representation, transforming the isometric into a medium of inquiry and expression. Students are challenged to engage critically with their compositions, using the isometric not only to reveal the tectonic logic of their arrangements but also to craft a narrative-one that uncovers hidden relationships and reimagines the objects’ spatial and material possibilities.

We begin with a drawing and end, again, with a model.

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.

What is research for design? How can we activate archives to enrich our design methods? In architecture schools, the last two decades have witnessed a growing number of research labs that study phenomena ranging from computational geometry to the just city to material systems. Whether conducted in a lab or in studio, there is little consensus in architecture around the role of research in design, whether it has an encompassing method, or how designers might approach the archive. The seminar takes this elusive nature of design research as a chance to attend to the habits and rituals that have long shaped architectural pedagogy and practice, including what count as criteria of value in architecture. In a sense, it posits that design research is also process of research design.

Across three parts—field, archive, project—we will begin by studying the institutional and disciplinary lineages of research in design. We will then position our work relative to these lineages to identify how our conceptual frameworks and methodological inquiries are formed in conversation with the field. A series of workshops throughout the quarter will explore a set of research methods—invoking references, taking positions, interpreting documents, classifying archives, assembling things, and telling stories. Starting with one object from Core Samples, students will curate an archive related to a design problem of interest, one that situates itself in dialog with the field and identifies relevant working methods.

A central concept in postwar development aid, aided self-help housing embodies a host of associated values regarding the self-made individual, and by extension, the social relations and forms of society made in their image.

Taking this as our point of departure, the seminar opens the concept of “self help” to a broader investigation regarding the kinds of selves promoters of the concept have assumed, and the kinds of subjectivities self-help as an ideology and practice interpellated. Since the US became the hegemonic exporter of self-help housing in the post-war era, we’ll consider the term primarily in the context of American liberalism, where the concept has been used both as a mode of capitalist subjugation, and as a tool of resistance and activism.

As we shall see from this history, questions of the “self” are equally embedded in ideas about society and the state: we will explore the kinds of society imagined through the concept of self-help, specifically in terms of the relationship and set of responsibilities between individuals and the state. We will consider the concept in conjunction with related social configurations that are sometimes subsumed, and at times stand in opposition or outside of the state, such as community, cooperatives, mutualism, and humanitarianism. Grounding this in architectural and urban history, we will consider how the above relations were articulated in the interplay between formal and informal design, as well as the related concepts of DIY and appropriate technology.

Hunting our discussions will be the ongoing “housing question” that encapsulates the unresolved status of housing as either state responsibility or the fruits of one own’s labor.

We live inside a peculiar fold of time. I realize this sounds like the first line in a Sci-Fi voice over intro or a description of the cover of an album of space-music, but formerly conceptual ideas of time like compression, distortion, dissipation now seem all too real. I call it the Age of Temporal Collapse: the increasing tendency of past, present, and hypothetical futures to appear on the same visual plane, with equal claims to legibility and equal degrees of doubt. A photograph from 1961, a satellite image from this morning, and a render generated last night now move through the same feed, at the same resolution, addressed to the same eye. The eye (us), for its part, has stopped asking where an image came from. It asks only whether the image is convincing in some way, judged by our arbitrary metrics.

This wasn't aways the case. Documentary practice once assumed a kind of responsibility to the world, then an image owed its authority to having been in the presence of its subject for some length of time. That responsibility is slowly being abrogated, and largely uncontested I should say. An image can now be persuasive without ever having been present to anything. It can depict a building that no longer exists, assembled from data drawn from other images of other buildings, filtered through a system trained on millions of structures that were never its own, and the result can look, to most eyes, indistinguishable from a photograph taken the week before demolition.

The French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard called this the precession of simulacra — the map preceding the territory, the copy arriving before, and eventually instead of, the original. He proposed four stages an image passes through on its way to full simulation: it reflects a basic reality; it masks and perverts that reality; it masks the absence of a basic reality; and finally it bears no relation to any reality at all, becoming its own pure simulacrum. Move an AI-generated render of a demolished building through that sequence and the passage is uncomfortably fast. The first renders Mid Journey & I made were built from photographs of buildings I knew from the inside out. But hand the same system a building with little online documentation, some isolated image, and it will still output something, referring to nothing that ever existed in that particular configuration. LLM's do not know it has made a stage four image. It has no stages. It produces, at every step, an equally convincing picture.

None of this is offered as a cautionary tale delivered by a Boomer Professor who sees more authenticity in analog life. I have no interest in defending some prior, more innocent regime of seeing that never quite existed anyway — every image has always been an argument, not an automatic window into truth. What interests me is narrower and more practical: if the old test for a documentary image, was the camera there, no longer sorts anything reliably, what replaces it? I want to propose one, provisionally, for the purposes of this book: an image earns documentary standing not by its causal history but by the depth of specific knowledge behind its making.

The machine does not know the building. The person operating it does. That asymmetry, let's call it authored simulation, is where I think documentary authority is now operative.

In the studios preceding this one, I tested exactly this asymmetry: injecting the LLM with images of projects I know from the inside, buildings whose sections I could draw from memory, and asking what the machine would propose once given that specificity rather than a generic prompt. What came back was never the building. It was always a hypothesis about the building, produced by a system with no consciousness. Our job, at least with these present tools, has been to supply the critical judgment and visual acumen necessary to assign value to any image.

This course will utilize the framework of the Barnsdall 100 competition to develop a design methodology that prioritizes fabrication and experimentation as the leading force behind design development. Process, material, and technique will inform the designs produced throughout the quarter while CAD and orthographics will retroactively support those explorations. In service of the competition, this course will focus primarily on wood construction, and students will learn how to manipulate, process, and materialize wood structures through weekly workshops, tutorials, and assignments. The class will be split into two groups; each group will submit a final proposal for the competition. Our early explorations will be to develop a thorough understanding of the use of lumber in its most common forms: Sticks and Sheets. We will use simple and known fabrication methods to develop novel techniques and learn from each other's material explorations.

The value of cinema lies not in the continuous stream of images that pass before our eyes but in the feelings it evokes within our souls. Similarly, architecture has the ability to draw our attention beyond itself, allowing us to experience gravity, time, and ultimately ourselves in a more profound and meaningful way. There exists an inherent connection between architecture and cinema, as they both share a link to the visual and physical worlds. This is evident in how their psychic images amplify the physical environment, heightening the surface, frame, light, and depth of the physical cosmos. Through its constant buzz of change, cinematic architecture confronts the stable with the temporal, seeking to either solve or expose the concept of a static material world.

Both architecture and film exhibit their constructive forces by delving into individual and collective memory, employing physical tools, interactions, and assemblages to express their mythopoetic inspiration. Cinema serves as a quintessential example of how architecture physically constructs space. It is only when we delve into the depths of personal and collective memory that the constructive force of architecture and cinema is revealed, particularly in connection to mnemonic clues. The production of images by cinema represents the epitome of the physical construction of space by architecture.

In this seminar, students will be tasked with addressing the connection between cinema and architecture through a solo performance. Each student will be asked to dissect, discern, and understand a specific director, documenting their narrative tropes, sound, cinematic mood, compositional techniques, lighting devices, and sequencing. Through this research, students will form groups, creating cinematic teams consisting of actors, directors, and cinematographers. These teams will then begin constructing a short narrative and storyboard, projecting the moods and emotions found within their chosen director’s work onto the set designs they construct.

The final output will be a 2-minute film animated in either Unreal Engine or Cinema 4D using Redshift. The students’ animations will consist of a 3D-designed film set, a rigged and animated character, and a developed narrative. These cinematic vignettes will function as emotional amplifiers for the audience, enhancing their viewing experience and understanding of the constructed space.

Each week we will have a series of in-class intensive workshops focusing on Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, Adobe Premier, DaVinci Resolve, and asset creation. Sessions will take place in person at Perloff Hall. Ultimately, students will hone their skills in producing and animating hyper-real visualizations while also developing and broadening their background and understanding of composition, lighting, motion capture and narrative development, applicable to practical uses in the field.

Generative models have made complex mesh geometry nearly free. What they actually produce, though, is not form but images of illuminated things, lit according to conventions inherited from photography. Form arrives as a side effect of light. This seminar takes that condition seriously. The perfect object for students to tackle is then the light fixture: the lamp, the chandelier, the luminaire; that which gives “real” space its illumination. Students work between two poles: “artificial” weeks, in which light and form are generated through a ComfyUI workflow moving between 2D and 3D, and “real” weeks, in which parts are fabricated and the proposal meets material, tolerance, and adhesive. The binary is the subject, not the frame.

Following Timothy Morton, "nature" is treated as a category that was always already constructed, and the mesh is claimed in both senses at once: the geometry the student edits, and the web of relations they are working inside. The more the illumination augments a space, the more successful the project. Though generative models have made complex mesh geometry nearly free, the process of subdividing and deciding the tectonics of a thing is not yet so free. Thus, the design problem is subdivision. When a single mass can be generated instantly, the discipline moves to where it breaks. Building on Edward R. Ford's argument that the detail can reveal, conceal, exaggerate, or contradict construction, each student adopts an attitude toward the seam where things are subdivided — hidden, expressive, sly, satirical, mischievous, deadpan, devout, wounded — and holds it consistently across a family of furniture objects.

Each student will design and fabricate a full-scale luminous object: a lamp, luminaire, or piece of illuminated furniture whose geometry, subdivision, material assembly, and spatial effect are developed through the Artificial/Real workflow.

The seminar is organized around three primary problems:

1. Light. What conventions of illumination are embedded in generative image models? How can qualities produced through generative tools be translated into the real world?
2. The Mesh. What happens when an image becomes geometry and geometry becomes an image again?
3. The Seam. If mass can be generated almost instantly, where does architectural authorship move?

The first of three colloquia required for MA and PhD students. Taking up the interreferential nature of the source, we will begin by examining how claims of knowledge and perception circulate across linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary worlds. How do translations construct authority, expand audiences, and produce consent? How have different media—linguistic, visual, or material—been appropriated as objects of translation to support rival epistemological and aesthetic frames? We will then turn to investigate how translation’s search for equivalence across difference is tied up with projects of fixity, stability, and universalism. In what ways do translations both build and unsettle hegemonic narratives of architectural history?

Program in architecture and urban design is a wide-ranging concept and a powerful creative tool. This quarter we bring a new structure to this required course to focus on architecture’s crucial concern with housing, and the design in multifamily housing of typically underdeveloped collective space. Our focus on affordable housing addresses not only Los Angeles’ current crisis, but one that plagues cities across the globe. While housing is a very specific building type, the methods of analysis and programming concepts explored this term will stand in for other building types where architects can go beyond predetermined requirements to become agents of change. The course counters 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 can shape the built environment, and that it is deeply rooted in and consequential for everyday life. To engage these issues, we will explore an integration of history and theory relevant to the program (through readings, lectures, and discussion), with design practice (through site visits, workshops, and projects). We are fortunate to have some excellent examples of affordable housing design in Los Angeles, and we will visit projects by four architects who have given much thought to program, livability, and community.

Your project this quarter is to design the Rhône Thermal Commons (Communes Thermales du Rhône), a multi-zoned environmental refuge that bridges the Rhône River in Lyon, France.

It is primarily designed for extreme heat. The problems and concepts embedded in this project are what follows.

A society doesn't only get better at building what it already has; every so often it invents a category that didn't exist, and once climate stops being a performance target and becomes the reason for the category itself, then architecture has a chance to not just catch up, but also lead the way. It then became a question about this project: what's the type this moment requires, and do we already have a building for it?

To explore this, let's take the Greek theater as an example, since it's an extremely clean case. It wasn't an improved anything; there was no earlier structure it was optimizing against. It answered a problem the Greeks hadn't had a building for yet: how do you seat several thousand people so that all of them can hear one voice and watch one body move at the same time? The bowl cut into a hillside, the orchestra at its center, the sightlines radiating out from a single point. That's why the type still exists today, and why the same geometry still gets used every time someone needs to organize a crowd to look at one thing at once: a stadium, a lecture hall, a courtroom gallery, etc.

Climate is now the reason for that kind of invention. Not because climate change is new as a subject — it's been an increasingly foregrounded issue of architectural discourse for two decades — but because the terms of the problem have shifted. You already have the distinction from the preface: optimization tightens what exists, invention makes something that didn't. For most of the last twenty years architecture has gotten remarkably good at the first job: reduce loads, tighten the envelope, add PV's. That work has been incredibly important, but isn't necessarily this studio's main job, it's a corollary task. The primary task in front of us is to invent the next civic technical object, the one this specific historical moment requires.

Before we can ask what that object looks like, though, we have to answer a more uncomfortable question first: why build anything physical at all?

The studio positions the ground as the primary medium of architecture. It precedes the building as a physical and temporal structure, carrying the accumulated effects of geology, water, gravity, extraction, cultivation, construction, and erosion. What appears as terrain is therefore already the result of operations. Topography records force; strata record time; infrastructure records intervention. The ground is a material archive whose organization continues to change.

This position requires a shift in the architectural understanding of site. Site is commonly represented as a bounded field of information: contours, coordinates, orientation, access, vegetation. The studio instead approaches ground as an active system whose forces remain operative. A terrace is the consequence of sediment and water; an acequia is the consequence of hydraulic necessity and human labor; a retaining wall is a response to gravity; a vineyard is an agricultural apparatus calibrated to differences in soil, exposure, drainage, and elevation. Each is simultaneously material condition and spatial intelligence. Landform is therefore understood as a form of architectural knowledge. The fold of a terrace, the cut of a channel, the accumulation of an alluvial fan, and the long descent of a slope each encode relationships between matter, force, and time.

To read them is to identify the operations through which the ground has been produced and continues to transform. The distinction between natural formation and human construction becomes unstable at this level of reading. An acequia behaves as a constructed riverbed; a terrace wall reorganizes geological forces; cultivation extends the hydraulic and material organization of the valley. Ground and infrastructure become different expressions of the same fundamental condition: the continuous organization of matter.

Architecture enters this field as another operation. Its agency resides in its capacity to intercept existing forces, redirect them, intensify them, expose them, or establish new relationships between them. Cutting, excavation, displacement, compression, consolidation, and void become architectural operations through which the project can participate in the transformation of ground.

The building is consequently understood through what it does to matter as much as through the spaces it encloses. Michael Heizer's work provides a radical formulation of this position. By cutting into earth, removing mass, displacing material, and constructing void at the scale of landform, Heizer collapses the distinction between landscape and architectural production. The earth becomes medium, structure, boundary, and subject simultaneously. In Double Negative, for example, the spatial condition is produced through the removal of approximately 240,000 tons of rhyolite and sandstone. The resulting void is inseparable from the geological mass displaced to produce it. The work makes the cut itself architectural: excavation becomes form, and the ground becomes the instrument through which space is constructed. The studio takes this operation as a method rather than an aesthetic precedent.

A cut is a way of reading as well as a way of making. Excavation reveals strata. Displacement establishes new relationships between mass and void. A change in level can reorganize movement. The removal of material can produce both spatial volume and construction material. Architecture can therefore emerge through transformations of the ground itself.

Austrian architect Martin Rauch extends this proposition into material and tectonic practice. His work treats earth as a structural substance whose architectural potential derives from its physical origin, composition, density, and transformation. Excavated material can return to the project as wall, mass, and structure. Material intelligence becomes inseparable from site intelligence: the architecture carries the geological properties of the ground into its construction.

The studio operates between these two positions. Heizer establishes the ground as a field of architectural operations; Rauch establishes material transformation as a continuation of those operations. Together they suggest an architecture in which site, structure, material, and form are understood through a common physical logic. This logic also establishes a particular understanding of time. Geological processes operate across deep time; hydraulic infrastructure operates across agricultural time; architecture operates through construction, occupation, maintenance, and weathering. These temporalities overlap within the same ground. The architectural project therefore enters a process already underway. Its task is to identify where intervention can become consequential within that process.

The studio's interest in ground operations emerges from this condition. Architecture is approached through its capacity to act upon matter and to establish relationships between existing forces. Material intelligence describes the corresponding capacity to allow those operations to remain legible in construction.

Ground and material become two registers of the same architectural problem: how the physical conditions of a place can become active determinants of architectural form.

Project Site I: The Argentinean Countryside, The Cordillera de los Andes and its
Grounds
The Uco Valley in Mendoza, on the western side of Argentina, is a geological condition still in formation. Millions of years of rock, sediment, and water shed from the Andes have accumulated across the valley, producing a landscape whose present form is the temporary result of processes that exceed any architectural conception of site. The desert operates according to strict physical terms: thin soils, extreme diurnal temperature variations, limited water, seismic instability, and the continuous movement of sediment. Agriculture enters this condition through an extensive system of operations that reorganizes these forces without eliminating them.

The acequia network is one of the valley's primary instruments of transformation. It redirects water across the alluvial plain, establishing an artificial hydraulic structure within the geological one. Windbreaks modify the movement of air and reduce erosion; roads, terraces, cultivation, and irrigation establish additional lines of organization. Together, these systems constitute an infrastructural ground layered over the geological ground. The cultivated landscape is therefore produced through the continuous negotiation between environmental constraint and human intervention.

The Andes establish another order of scale. Their mass determines the valley's larger geometry, while the processes of erosion, deposition, and sediment transport translate that vertical mass into foothills, alluvial fans, and finally the horizontal plain. The valley can be read as a sequence of transformations in section: vertical, diagonal, horizontal. Each geometry records a different relationship between mass, gravity, water, and time. The ground therefore contains multiple systems operating simultaneously: geological, hydraulic, agricultural, infrastructural. None exists as a fixed condition. Each modifies the others, producing a landscape whose apparent stability conceals continuous transformation.

What the studio inherits is this active ground, a territory already organized by forces, materials, and human operations, within which architecture enters as another operation. The project begins from the recognition that intervention occurs within this ongoing process. The question is how architecture can read the existing systems with sufficient precision to act upon them: where to cut, where to excavate, where to consolidate, where to expose, where to redirect, and where to allow existing processes to continue. The valley is therefore understood as a field of operations already underway, providing the physical and conceptual ground from which the architectural project begins.

Six decades ago, architecture became open-ended. Buildings would change and grow, architects argued, not unlike cities. Architects embraced impermanence, promoted flexibility, timed obsolescence, and welcomed uncertainty, just as Umberto Eco proclaimed the birth of the open work, and Roland Barthes pronounced the death of the author. Architects also questioned authorship. Many would no longer strive to prescribe outcomes, let alone to inscribe meanings. Against the backdrop of modern masters and modern monuments, and as a result of cultural, social, political, and technological developments, buildings became systems. Paradoxically, architects would pioneer new building types, in unprecedented ways, by openly disregarding program.

Design theories for open-ended buildings differed, but they all implied, almost invariably, free plans and modular units, as well as building components discriminated by their rate of renewal: frame versus clip-on, core versus capsule, structure versus envelope. By the mid-sixties, just a few years after speculation on openness had begun in earnest, several projects materialized. Over the following years, many changed: some according to plan, some according to no plan. Others did not. Some were demolished against the architect's will, some preserved against the building's principles. Today, some stand for the arguments they promoted, some for the doctrines they attacked.

This studio will address a building that intersected the debate on open-endedness, namely: the ATC Building in Buenos Aires by Manteola, Sánchez Gómez, Santos, Solsona, and Viñoly. The studio brief is straightforward. You will join a team, and be asked to double the building area. Do you endorse openness, and observe, refine, or swerve the original script? Do you argue against it, and swerve the existing object? The studio question is to design in conversation with, and take position on, a building and the arguments it advanced, and to tackle a longstanding question within the field, again, six decades later.

What is a house? Who lives in one? And how? These are strange things to ask, insofar as the naivete of the questions implies an open field of possibility without a corresponding answer that emanates from the norms of propriety, family, and form that shaped the development of the American single-family home in the 20th century. This studio will expand this notion (in scale) to include not just “house” but to explore a less familiar territory of houses, in proximity, forming a new kind of neighborhood. This neighborhood may live on multiple lots, but it could also live on one lot. It represents an “ad hoc” banding together of individuals with aligned ambitions to afford a version of the “American Dream,” which I might paraphrase here as both the desire to live autonomously, free from shared walls in multi-family containers, and the desire to own one’s symbolic piece of nature, as that is now increasingly the commodity.

The shared wall is not a drywall partition between apartments; rather, it is a shared piece of infrastructure, often tasked with several functions: retaining soil, demarcating one edge of a pool, and holding shared infrastructures, which could be anything from driveways, pools, utilities, access, parking, sewers, irrigation pipes, and erosion control to all manner of topographic features, not limited to hills, fields, or caves, to name a few. Opportunities for invention are prevalent as semi-formal public spaces are locked between adjacent parcels and unrealized developments in unstable sloped hillside areas.

The quarter will be organized in three phases, around three workshops, which use combinations of model making, drawing, and imaging reciprocally as a way to think through proposals from the top down: from a new kind of neighborhood, to a building mass, a room, and finally, a construction detail. Each student will design a single work of architecture on a site of their own choosing from a catalogue of pre-selected sites, each representing a unique massing, organizational, and topographic problem. Student projects will be cooperative live/work buildings for an audience bigger than a family but smaller—and more personally entangled—than an apartment complex, for a non-traditional form of family. Where the building is a hollow body, a pure spatial container capable of sponsoring new kinds of inhabitation and familial configurations.

Here, building has the capacity to both organize the physics of architecture—i.e., tectonic and structural relationships—and physical relationships as simple programmatic and organizational characteristics. We are proposing small collections of buildings with a capacity to organize and contain the shifting and increasingly unordinary and ever-evolving nature of what constitutes the contemporary family, as the logical expansion of the work of California contemporaries such as Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, who proposed a similar thesis; however, their work was confined to the single-family home, which is now arguably a contemporary fiction; scarcely achievable in an ever-inflated LA housing market, where density may be seen more as an economic conceit rather than an ambition of government policy and the result of failed planning initiatives.

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.

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.

The MSAUD program’s Architectural Intelligence Studio scrutinizes the heavily mediated interplay between form, image, and data within the media-saturated human experience. Through the lens of Artificial Intelligence and automation, and with an acute focus on innovation and provocation, students explore the fusion of architectural design with media art and technology, challenging the way we perceive, experience, and interact with buildings, cities and online social platforms. We imagine environments that are created through a cyberphysical fusion between materials and media, focusing on the meaning and impact of envisioning architecture as a construction of ideas through vision, sensation, and presence.

On Automated Abundance: Architecture has long occupied the threshold between utopian imagination and material governance. From the visionary housing blocks of postwar modernism to the spectacular promises of domestic automation in mid-century expositions, architecture has served as both symbol and system: a field where technological desire collides with political economy. Today, this tension is intensified by the crises of housing affordability, the loneliness epidemic, climate precarity, and the expanding presence of automation in everyday life. Automated Abundance: Architecture Between Technology and Governance takes housing as the critical site where these contradictions become architectural. We will examine how architecture is not simply a decorative layer or symbolic code, but a system of invention and applied intelligence, a world-building “technology of the self and the collective.”

Architecture externalizes memory, constructs subjectivity, and designs the cultural interfaces through which societies understand themselves.

On Housing as Technology: The studio frames multi-unit housing as both the locus of scarcity and the laboratory of abundance. Historically, projects like Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation or the mass-housing schemes of the welfare state proposed housing as a utopian solution to social and economic crisis. Yet, the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe revealed how such visions devolve into dystopia when architecture is severed from governance, policy, and care. Simultaneously, automation has shifted from grand spectacle — the RCA Miracle Kitchen, the Nixon–Khrushchev Kitchen Debate, Monsanto’s House of the Future — to the mundane ubiquity of Roombas, Nest thermostats, and Alexa assistants. Once framed as liberation from labor, domestic automation now participates in surveillance capitalism (Zuboff), turning private life into data streams. Architecture must now reckon with its role as a code/ space (Kitchin & Dodge), where digital infrastructures shape spatial experience.

The first quarter of a year-long research studio

The conventional understanding is that architecture is fixed and immobile. Yet seen from a different temporal axis, architecture can be understood as circulating and moving within society over long cycles. Materials are gathered from various places, assembled, and eventually dismantled and discarded once their use is complete. In this sense, architecture participates in a larger cycle of life, moving slowly but continuously. “Architecture of Mobility”—exemplified by prefabrication technology—demonstrates that a building can flexibly adapt to changes in location and function while maintaining both its functional and resource value throughout the entire cycle of construction, transportation, and dismantling. This kind of adaptability is becoming increasingly important in an era of rapid change, scarce resources and labor, and urgent environmental challenges. Moreover, the fact that companies such as Toyota and Google are proposing mobility architecture that leverages autonomous-driving technology shows that we are already entering an era in which the movement of architectural space itself will radically transform cities and people’s ways of life.

In the Phase 1 research (2025–26), we built, from this perspective of “Architecture of Mobility,” a taxonomy of five modes (257 cases) focused on the scale of a single building, and carried the work through to a collective-housing design proposal for the Altadena district. In this second phase, the studio “City of Mobility” extends that perspective from the scale of a single building to the full scope of urban activity.

As its specific subject, the studio takes up the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games. In one of the largest events in the world, mobility takes many different forms across the city. During the Games, Los Angeles will, in addition to its everyday urban activity, accommodate a large, temporary, mobile population of spectators, who will move among competition venues scattered throughout the city to watch events — a “mobility of people.” At the same time, facilities built for a temporary, large-scale sports and entertainment event will be absorbed back into everyday urban activity afterward — a “mobility of architecture.” And the experience of movement itself will be given a value of its own — a “mobility of experience.” These are among the forms of mobility this studio will examine.

This studio aims to research and design what new possibilities can be found for the city and its architecture by applying the concept of Architecture of Mobility to the heightened urban mobility brought about by the Olympics.

The first quarter of a year-long research studio

The studio will explore the potential of the ‘local.’

We typically think of locally specific buildings as ones in small cities and rural areas where the building is rooted to its context. Its sense of place comes from a connection to the site through scale, materials, type of construction, and vernacular references.

This year, we’ll bring the idea of local to architecture in an urban setting. We’ll expand upon the definition of local to see how buildings can be rooted to its urban context, be connected to the immediate environment, without leaning on the tropes of regionalism. A recently released book called Out There: Architecture Across America (2026) features buildings away from the coasts set in beautiful surroundings. It really struck a chord. They seem so relatable. Genuine. Whole. Like they fulfilled a longing for simpler conditions, where buildings are designed with greater latitude, without having to negotiate the innumerable demands of an urban project: the stringent zoning, building safety, environmental, stakeholder, and disaster risk requirements; the internet’s scrutiny of each step in the process; the client’s continuous recalculations of risk versus reward in the face of the setbacks these variables create.

The conceit is that in the absence of big city complexity there is room to shape a meaningful local architecture. Without the overwhelming amount of human and data input, it’s possible to establish an architectural expression more directly connected to a building’s locale.

The studio will ask if that premise is flawed. The studio hypothesis will be that it is possible to cut through the multitude of obligations and distractions that come with working in a city. We’ll develop proposals grounded in their location, environment, and community.

Fall Course Objectives

1. Formulate a unique point of view about the term ‘local’ in the urban context of Los Angeles
2. Provide cultural, urban design, and architectural examples to support that point of view
3. Develop a speculative project proposal

The first quarter of a year-long research studio

A mission or vision statement articulates the unique competence of an organization and the planned measurable goals when this competence is applied in the world.

The Fall and Winter quarters of the research studio will focus on the formation of critical architectural concepts with clearly articulate measurable consequences. The disciplined skills of problem formation, value decisions, radical editing, profundity, and extreme unambiguous communication will be applied to the studio. During these quarters you will not create digital models, drawings, physical models, forms, shapes, patterns, or diagrams. You will craft concepts and define deliverables through compact and impactful mission and vision statements. There will be no constraints to help you other than your previous work, your predilection for selecting the most relevant precedent to your own skills, and candid feedback from your peers.

The Spring quarter of the research studio everyone will share a common site where a building design will be executed with comprehension with each of your personal Mission and Vision statements guiding your design decisions.

COURSE OBJECTIVES
To end the year as cultural leaders whose ambitions are well calibrated to your capabilities and to the challenges that each of you personally feels most relevant to your career.

To end the year capable of clearly communicating with citizens outside the field of architecture as to motivate them to value architectural agency as more than designing a handsome building in reaction to constraints of location, budget, use, etc...

Each student will craft a personal mission statement using one of the supplied precedents of historical designers. The role of a mission statement is to objectively define the core competency of an individual or organization. A vision statement defines the predicted outcomes and necessary requirements for the application of said core competencies. The content and actions of a vision statement precipitate from the goals defined in a clear mission statement applied to culture. Each student will craft a personal vision statement that will critically guide their creative strategy from the most detailed to their most ambitious of decisions.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS
During the Fall Quarter, each student will be responsible for writing four sentences, selecting four images, and writing four captions in twenty weeks. The process is collective, and all conversations are vetted for clarity and unambiguousness and then supported by the entire group. Each student will select an architect from a given list based on their interest in their work. They will define the core competency in a one sentence mission statement; a visual argument using two images; and a factual caption for each image. Each of your mission statements will be the basis of locating your agency on the wheel of Carl Jung’s twelve archetypes.

The first quarter of a year-long research studio

The yearlong research studio investigates how emerging fabrication technologies can transform architectural design, material systems, and construction processes. Rather than treating 3D printing simply as a method of automated fabrication, the studio approaches it as a design methodology, exploring new relationships between geometry, material behavior, structure, craft, and architectural scale. The studio places equal emphasis on clay, earthen materials and biodegradable PLA for large-scale FDM 3D printing. Using large scale 3D printing as a primary fabrication platform, students will investigate digitally controlled extrusion to develop architectural components, surfaces, structures, and spatial installations. In parallel, clay 3D printing will explore the material qualities of earth and ceramics, including plasticity, glazing, layering, drying, firing, texture, and structural behavior.

Students will explore computationally driven parametric design, algorithmic form generation, computational form-finding, and Design for Manufacturing (DFM), treating fabrication parameters as active generators of architectural form. Particular attention will be given to cylindrical and conical geometries and vase-mode printing, using continuous single-wall extrusion to reduce material use and maximize fabrication efficiency while testing relationships between geometry, stability, and printability. Comparative experiments with PLA and clay will investigate different possibilities for structure, surface, porosity, assembly, and scale.

Drawing inspiration from natural growth systems, biological structures, geological formations, textiles, and processes of aggregation, folding, and layering, the studio translates organizational principles found in nature into computational and material strategies. Iterative workflows will move between digital modeling, material experimentation and physical prototyping. In the spring quarter, students will apply this research to a one- to two-story building typology, with the explicit goal of investigating how a building can be constructed through additive manufacturing itself. Rather than translating a 3D-printed design into conventional concrete or steel construction, students will address the actual requirements of printed architecture, including structural systems, openings, connections, roofs, services, material quantities, and fabrication sequences. Relevant precedents include JK3D’s Cactus Homes, a winning ICON Initiative 99 competition entry, and current digital fabrication research with terra cotta clay at Amman Design Week in Jordan.

The first quarter of a year-long research studio

This Research Studio launches the first year of a Design-Build initiative in Boyle Heights, focused on creating affordable-for-life homes that resist displacement, provide stability, and empower communities to remain in place for generations. The studio engages with two real sites located along 1st Street, each embedded in the cultural, social, and historical fabric of the neighborhood. Working in teams, 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 will 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 will 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 thoughtfully densify the two project sites, integrating new domestic units with existing structures to strengthen community bonds rather than displace residents.

Each site is conceived as a node within 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 the mapping of cultural practices and infrastructures. This accumulated knowledge will form the foundation for design decisions and provide a lasting resource for future Design-Build Studio cohorts, ensuring that new interventions remain deeply rooted in local knowledge, histories, and aspirations. Community voices will be integrated throughout the design process, and students will experiment with methods of representation that are interactive, accessible, and meaningful for non-academic audiences.

Throughout the year, students will engage with residents, consultants, and clients through a series of workshops. These moments of exchange serve as tools for engagement, fostering dialogue, participation, and reflection while creating opportunities for feedback and collaboration throughout the design process. Building on the collective knowledge developed through research, documentation, and community engagement, the studio will culminate in the Spring with the development of a comprehensive design proposal and a permit/construction set ready to initiate the permitting process with the City. Conceived as the first phase of a multi-year Design-Build initiative, the project is intended to move beyond speculation and toward implementation. Once permitted, future cohorts of the Design-Build Studio will participate in the construction of the project, transforming the ideas developed in this studio into a built reality.

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.

This research seminar runs alongside the year-long MSAUD Architectural Intelligence Research Studio “Automated Abundance: Architecture Between Technology & Governance.”

This is the third quarter in the first-year 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.

The studio posits that architecture can transcend any specific program and its duration, and can establish spatial and tectonic order that can lead to the invention of new programs during the life of a building. Unlike subsequent studios, during which an analysis of a given site or program may drive the design process, this studio reverses the sequence and instead begins with the organizational and experiential capacity of form. As such, form will inform the program and context within which it is situated. 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.

It could be argued that the environment we live in, the buildings we inhabit, and the public spaces we gather around, are the most substantial results of our work as architects. As many have pointed out before, however, as architects we do not make buildings. We make representations – images, drawings, models – which then lead to buildings through various processes of translation. It is often in this translation across media that possible discoveries emerge and innovation takes place. In this context, architecture is understood as a form of mediation between its discipline and the larger world beyond.

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 3-dimensional physical object, the other is a 2-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 shared authorship, repurposing, and ubiquity of visual media present today. It will be crucial for students to properly credit their sources and document their process throughout the entire quarter.

The studio project centers our attention to the orthographic space of the plan drawing and the possibilities it offers during the formation of an architectural project. The plan is a synthetic artifact in which specificities of structure, habitation, scale, narrative, notation, and even materiality are implicit, though not fully literal, as much as it is an abstract construct open to interpretation and multiple readings. It is both projective - imagining the future inhabitation and construction of what is yet to come and analytical – focusing our attention to certain aspects of architecture. Plans are much more than simple horizontal cuts through a building. They are two-dimensional artifacts encoding activity and physical presence, and as such define how we use three-dimensional space.

We will reverse the more typical design sequence, during which site and program inform the development of space and form, and consider the spatial and organizational potential of the plan first. Programmatic and climatic context, tectonics, and materiality will be informed by the potentialities of the plan, and subsequently developed during the design process. To explore and harness the potential of plan-making, the task is to design a three-dimensional proto-building which will be primarily developed and ultimately represented through specific drawings and models of the interior spaces and the roofscape geometry above.

Fundamental architectural questions will be unavoidable – What is the building’s size and shape? How thick are the walls? What is the location of thresholds? How does their configuration impact activity, social relations, and environmental performance? How do floor edges or ceiling modulations impact the way space is inhabited? Of particular interest will be how to explore and construct an argument through drawing, and more specifically, how the orthographic plan becomes a place of speculation that ultimately ties to ideas of inhabiting three-dimensional space.

Each student will work individually through the entirety of the quarter. However, group pin-ups, workshops, and reviews will be an integral part of the studio, and as such students will be encouraged to position their work within a larger collective endeavor utilizing clear verbal and visual communication.

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.

It is against this contextual backdrop that the studio puts forth the prompt to examine the agency of architecture in engaging with and speculating on its relationship to larger systems. The ongoing transformation of open-air water reservoirs in Los Angeles is driven by contamination issues that have compromised the quality of the city's drinking water supply. This transformation results from two new regulations enacted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, aimed at mitigating microbiological contamination and averting risks associated with microbial pathogens and disinfectant byproducts (as stipulated in the EPA Stage 2 Disinfectants and Disinfection By-Products Rule and the federal Long-Term 2 Surface Water Treatment Rule (LT2)). Contaminants encompass a spectrum of sources, including animal waste, runoff drainage, algae, and human influence. Notably, Silver Lake and Ivanhoe Reservoirs have been decommissioned, paving the way for their conversion into new recreational spaces for the public. Several other reservoirs, such as Upper Stone Canyon, Santa Ynez, Eagle Rock, Lower Franklin, Elysian, and Green Verdugo Reservoirs, have been equipped with floating covers to prevent contamination. While covering existing reservoirs represents a cost-
effective solution, it falls short in fostering a high-quality environment conducive to thriving public recreational spaces. Moreover, it does not address the need for increased capacity through the
construction of new reservoirs.

To offset the loss of volume resulting from the decommissioning of Silver Lake and Ivanhoe Reservoirs, the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) initiated the construction of two new reservoirs situated to the north of Griffith Park, denominated as Headworks East and Headworks West. These reservoirs are conceived as substantial subterranean concrete structures concealed beneath the grounds of a forthcoming recreational park area, representing a convergence of concealed infrastructure and artificial landscapes into a public park setting. Headworks East has already reached completion, while Headworks West approaches its final stages. Within this context, we find an opportune juncture to intercede, exploring alternative potentialities that transcend the conventional paradigms of infrastructure design.

In light of the multifaceted challenges posed by the environment and the imperatives of sustainability, architecture's agency in reimagining the deployment of natural resource infrastructures in Los Angeles emerges as a pivotal discourse. The convergence of environmental constraints, regulatory directives, and the inherent potential for architectural innovation necessitates a concerted examination of architecture's role in the recalibration of infrastructural paradigms to ensure equitable access to vital resources within the urban context. The transformation of water reservoirs, as exemplified by the Headworks initiative, offers a compelling vantage point to scrutinize the evolving role of architecture in forging resilient, resource-efficient and public-centric imaginaries that meaningfully engage the urban fabric.

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.