This course presents architecture and urban design as objects of study for understanding and analyzing cultures and their respective histories over time. This survey begins with the earliest known prehistoric structures and then ends at the beginning of the era of colonial expansion. We will examine architecture through various lenses, including the political, economic, religious, and technological, as well as the evolution of architecture as a field through the development of the figure of the architect and architectural ideas.

Lectures will include a broad range of architectural objects, including both built and planned works, as well as texts set within the broader context of theoretical, philosophical and socio-political positions. Each lecture is organized thematically in an approximate chronological sequence. Assigned readings will expand on themes introduced in the lectures. Weekly section meetings will provide further opportunity for discussion and interpretation.

In 1930 the Swiss Foundation directed the team of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret the project of solving the problem of the accommodation of Swiss students, traditionally housed in poor quality studios in the Latin Quarter of Paris. This project would not only provide access to decent housing and food at reasonable prices, but also the working, cultural and sports facilities of the emerging International City University of Paris (CIUP).

This project represents the conceptual root of our work throughout the quarter, except that our site is downtown Los Angeles, and the moment is now, with universities including, among others: UCLA, USC and the University of Arizona who are rapidly acquiring and repurposing existing real estate.

As such, this studio is focused on the adaptive re-use of commercial buildings for newly designed co-living arrangements. It is organized around a problem: how to fit new arrangements of people into old buildings? Cohabitation is defined simply as: The state or fact of living or existing at the same time or in the same place.

Our work will begin with precedent analysis, a common model underlying many architectural projects. We will carefully analyze existing, seminal cases, which can be hybridized or combined to achieve better co-living outcomes. These experiments – mostly in plan - will be fit to an existing commercial building, which for our purposes will be treated as a “blank,” stripped of the building envelope and all its significations, leaving only a highly ordered tectonic stack. Our site is a hypothetical urban infill lot consisting of an existing 6-story concrete building with two flanking neighbors of equal or higher size and a zero lot-setback to the front and rear. The intended program is a 60,000 square foot cooperative living dormitory and learning facility for an off-campus UCLA Art School expansion, with approximately 200 beds—roughly 30% is designated as communal space.

The fitting of these plans into the blank will give dimensional and formal specificity to our more general problem of fitting new arrangements of people into old buildings. Simply put, the plans won’t fit. Spatial bays will be too big or too small. The structural assumptions of the precedents will collide with the realities of the existing steel frame. And the depth of the existing building’s floorplate will be far too deep to allow sufficient light and air into the interior. To solve this problem of fit, we’ll work on making relationships between the section and elevation. This allows for the possibility of rethinking the urban edge not as a barrier between conventional internal organizations and isolated interior voids, but rather opens the possibility of a specific reciprocal relationship to ground squeezing out at the level of entry and street and the possibility to imagine new ways of occupying the entire edge of buildings from the limits of elevation deep into the core of section.

We will follow a linear process grounded in techniques of representation. We will move between model, drawing, and back again to model to simultaneously produce the compositional framework of a drawing as well as the supporting graphic features necessary to represent and simultaneously interrogate architecture – i.e., this necessitates a non-hierarchical, reciprocal thinking around representation. The conventional orthographic drawing is both derivative of this process as well as playing a generative role in the final outcome of the project. We’re going to be using orthographics as a means to graft the precedent onto an existing, found problem, as a productive mash-up of sorts. The result may be strange, even appear misshapen; however, interrogated against the values and disciplinary conventions of architecture, it fits the bill: ambitious and blind to associations of style and classification among the previously existing.

The metropolitan world we inhabit reveals much about the culture, the historical moment, and the actions of architects and urbanists; it uplifts some of the lives in the city and represses others; it welcomes as well as excludes; for some it is joyous and for others, a struggle. Such conditions are evident across time, geography, landscapes, politics, and schools of thought, as well as in popular media that swamps our grasp of the cities around us. The climate crisis is a force that impacts all of us, but to differing degrees.

Environmental migration, for example, has created a new refugee class whether mobilized by sea level rise or fire devastation. In response to crises, designers help shape the city, seeking to make changes that will enhance everyday life and work toward the common good. To do so implies an operative ethical principle of spatial justice, some idea of the urban public or publics, and an understanding of the way injustices are perpetuated. The varied histories, cultures, and geographies of cities serve as material demonstrations, which when made legible, open new perspectives on buildings, infrastructures, urban plans, and modern projects.

Whether we are looking at ancient city walls in Xi’an, contemporary freeways in Los Angeles, or
bungalows in Altadena, the urban artifact has a story to tell. But there are narratives that are less visible – the legislated boundaries and property laws that underpin who owns the city and why that constitutes such a powerful racial history in America. Claims on land through processes of colonization, settlement, resource extraction, and decolonization are violent, and leave violent scars behind. These are traces that provide evidence of structures of power, of a commons and to whom it belongs, or of borders that restrict or protect, to name but a few. As well, there are silent and buried archives in every city, where more rigorous and empathic engagement may reveal marginalized and fragile spaces. Seeing cities as spatial justice geographies offers designers not only a robust lens but a site for ethical action.

In this course, we will bring together two lines of critical thinking. First, we will make close readings of material conditions in global cities, with a special focus on Los Angeles and our experiences here. And second, we will consider the agency of designers within the urban condition by looking at past actions of architects and imagining our own potential actions in the future.

Description coming soon.

Architecture as built form is a slow medium. The bureaucracy that governs design, coordination, review, approval, and construction of building process’ are slow, complex, and unpredictable. The economic, political, and social circumstances of the zeitgeist which governs our reading, synthesis, and response to it through the architectural imaginary, might very well come, pass, and completely evolve into other circumstances by the time the architectural efforts are manifested in building form. Architecture in many ways is always a speculation made for another moment and it is always imagined from a present position to define the future reality of our environment. Its nature can only be a speculation. Its future can only be simulated.

In every speculation with regards to the future, arises the questions of prediction & performance. How will architecture perform as it gets subjected to changing conditions of the environment, material decay, shifts in programmatic needs, changes in its context, regulations? How will architectural design predict changes which might instigate these shifting parameters? There are an abundance of protocols built in architectural-engineering software which simulate performance through parametric input within time-based scenarios. Generally, these tend to work towards the measure and registry of optimum efficiency. These simulation protocols can yield projections on various trajectories; there are environmental simulations which might suggest the optimum siting and orientation for sun exposure and passive cooling of a building in a particular geo-location; there are earthquake simulations which would govern structural design; there are flow and movement simulations which might govern ventilation and hygiene requirements; there are material endurance simulations which might influence the appearance of the façade; there are overall building energy simulations which create a financial outlook for operating costs... More and more, data driven simulation protocols are built in BIM software to verify each design decision at every stage of a project’s maturation, as well as within the lifespan of the eventual building.

It is not too difficult to predict the formulaic architectural outcomes of these increasingly automated interfaces which will ultimately take the path of least resistance, utmost efficiency, and maximum profit. While these are important, useful tools and protocols to control the metrics of a project, and enable robust capacity to handle complexity, they alone cannot deliver a better architecture or a better environment. What emerges as a critical question at this juncture is: How do we cultivate a collaborative and creative human agency that institutes a subjective engagement within a data driven simulation software paradigm? As the 3rd course in the series of 3 required Architectural Mediation courses in the first year core sequence of Master of Architecture program, this episode will explore the potentials of simulation interfaces as projective and speculative mediation experiments.

This course will consider the role of industry in architecture’s history. Each session will be
thematic and roughly chronological. The aim of the class is to consider the persistent gap between two forms of knowledge—industrial and architectural—as itself having history. Therefore, the course assumes a skeptical attitude toward a synthesis of architecture and industry. Nevertheless, the more industrial culture establishes work as the ubiquitous experience of modern life, the more it becomes the core motivator for defining future forms of architecture.

It is common knowledge that the world is becoming more and more urban. According to the U.N. “today, more than half of the global population lives in urban areas, up from around one-third in 1950 and projected to increase to around two-thirds in 2050.” The design professions, along with historians and social scientists have focused on the urban and its related processes as the privileged sites of historical change. Very few, such as Rem Koolhaas in a recent exhibition at the Guggenheim (Countryside, The Future, 2020) or the EU Ruralization project, have turned a spotlight to the other half: the rural. Should we consider it simply an extension of the urban, a space eaten-up to become part of a planetary interior? Or should we consider it as an irreducible category, one that holds its own set of characteristics and conditions, and demands scrutiny on its own terms? This course offers an historical perspective to answer this question. We will explore how the “rural” has been an important site of design interventions (including social and infrastructural) in Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa in the last two centuries. More specifically, we will consider the rural through the triad of land, labor and production, as part of its transformation through relationship to capitalism and market economy, and we will pay particular attention to terminology (such as the difference between “peasant” and “farmer”, or the “rural” and the ”countryside”). What kinds of relations did these concepts produce in terms of techniques, landscapes and political imaginaries, and what were their implications on politics, economy, food production and the environment?

As with most “late periods” in historiography, late modernism has been explained above all as a
transitional period—in architecture, as the transition between two salvage operations: on one
hand, the European modernist project, with its attempt at rescuing architecture from capitalism by putting it at the forefront of the social and economic processes; on the other, the many variants of postmodernism where salvage appeared to take the form of a withdrawal from reality into the intestines of “pure architecture.” Caught between the epic built around these two moments—one heroic, one tragic—the years between the end of WWII and the surge of neoliberalism in the 1970s are usually regarded as decades of shock and revision, with the lates (modernism) and neos (brutalism, rationalism, avant-gardes), opening the way for the arrival of the posts (postmodernism, poststructuralism, and so on). Centered on disciplinary survival, however, this prefix excess has been premised on monolithic renditions of modernization and its architectural outputs, bypassing the plurality of contexts that came to articulate architectural production globally in these years.

In this course we will trace architecture’s shifting role in the various “world orders” emerged since the end of WWII and the beginnings of decolonization. The course will address the debates, documents, and buildings of this period through three different yet overlapping rubrics—style, state, and trade. Where style will frame architecture’s internal struggle for disciplinary identity, state will deal with its many variants—national, welfare, colonial, postcolonial—as the backdrop against which architecture’s many social, technical, and aesthetic programs will be introduced in the twentieth century; a function increasingly disputed by trade through the advent of corporate culture, global finance, and the institutions devised for their support.

The AUD technology seminar is charged with providing a deep dive into specific emerging technologies of relevance for architectural design and theory. Artificial intelligence (AI) must surely be seen to be one such technology, though most of its implications (for architecture and otherwise) remain unclear. Seen in this context this course is an experimental foray into image-making using AI tools and procedures. The subject of our work - the lens through which we generate new images as well as the images themselves - is landscape painting, an artistic genre as old as painting itself. While landscape painting owes its origins and traditions to fine art rather than architecture, its relevance to our discipline is longstanding, especially regarding the depiction of nature and landscape in architectural rendering.

Verisimilitude refers to the quality of seeming true or real, the appearance or semblance of truth in a work of fiction. This concept is crucial in storytelling (usually in art or literature) as it helps create an immersive experience for the audience by making the narrative feel authentic and consistent within its own universe. Verisimilitude does not require factual accuracy but rather to be plausible and believable according to audience experience or the genre’s conventions. Verisimilitude is not the same as realism, though the two terms are related. The former aims to create the appearance of reality within a fictional context, and it is this term that guides our approach to AI imaging. The latter, on the other hand, refers to the depiction of things as they truly exist, grounded in actual reality and striving for accuracy and authenticity in portraying the real world. Verisimilitude is essential for creating a believable experience that captivates audiences, deepens emotional involvement, and builds trust in Owens Lake’s strange new world.

This seminar marks the inaugural convergence of the MArch I, MSAUD, and the newly established Public Architecture programs in a shared applied research platform. Under the auspices of AUD’s Public Architecture initiative, Professor Dana Cuff, Gus Wendel, and Carrie Gammell, Senior Research Associates at cityLAB-UCLA, we propose expanding Los Angeles’ R-1 zoning code to include a new, resilient typology for freestanding single and two-family dwellings expressed through varied morphologies with greater distances between buildings than is current.

In the wake of the recent devastating wildfires and related urban conflagrations, it has become abundantly clear that our collective imperative is to rebuild and to reimagine future construction with fire and other resiliences at its core. Fireproofing and landscape management terms and practices once reserved for the periphery — home hardening, fuel modification, defensible space — now permeate the discourse and best practices of urban residential rebuilding and future development.

Utilizing the City’s technical and regulatory literature on planning and building of homes, duplexes, and accessory dwellings, we will design engaging grounds for new publics using a range of fire-safe distances between buildings, and rethinking shared relationships and activities across expanded rear and side yards as gifts to a new neighborhood. The sites will be (i) a hypothetical block comprising twenty back-to-back lots (ten north-facing and ten south-facing, each measuring 50’ x 100’), and (ii) as above with a 15’-0” alley running east to west. If common sense dictates that spacing buildings farther apart mitigates fire risk, we will demonstrate how wider gaps can bring us closer together and that an American Arcadia In Urbis is within reach, but it must behave, look, and encourage us to act ..... just a little differently.

Throughout history, architecture has functioned as a critical medium for cultural exchange, particularly within the context of expositions and exhibitions that have showcased technological advancements. These events have not only served as platforms for the dissemination of technical innovations but have also played a pivotal role in shaping cultural discourse, setting precedents, and challenging conventional paradigms. The spatial organization and sequencing of information within these architectural settings facilitate a structured engagement with complex ideas, rendering them more accessible to diverse audiences. In doing so, architecture not only reflects but also actively contributes to the evolution of design, technology, and cultural development.

We will explore the role architecture plays in organizing and displaying information, emphasizing how spatial design can simultaneously shape memory and knowledge dissemination. Through the development of digital pavilions, students will investigate how architectural space serves as a medium for exhibiting recent discoveries and breakthroughs. Drawing inspiration from historical world expos, where pavilions have functioned as stages for technological and cultural advancements, this course examines how architecture frames public engagement. Students will engage with contemporary digital visualization pipelines used in game design and visual effects, utilizing Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) to create real-time, interactive experiences.

• The course will cover techniques for spatializing information, rendering strategies through non-destructive workflows, and the broader implications of immersive environments in knowledge representation. Throughout the quarter, students will work in teams to select a recent discovery of interest and design a virtual pavilion that contextualizes and exhibits this information in an interactive digital space. By the end of the course, students will have gained practical skills in real-time visualization while developing a deeper understanding of the intersection between architecture, information design, and memory.

Since the 1960s, American photographer Lewis Baltz created imagery that embodied photographic modernity. As an image maker, he faced the world head-on, always positioning his 35mm camera parallel to the world. His images were never taken at odd angles, and every detail was carefully considered. Baltz chose his distance and positioning to minimize optical distortions, ensuring a balanced relationship between the depicted surfaces and the final print. While his images sometimes played with dramatic forms of perspective, the process of developing the photographs often dissolved any sense of depth, evoking a stark sense of reality. Baltz’s work was so straightforward and unadorned that it transformed the subject matter into an almost empty stage set. It was as if the images were cut from a film scene, consisting only of shots that might remain if the actors were removed.

In this seminar, students will use Baltz’s images from The New Industrial Parks series as backdrops, imposing their own narratives on these sets through rendering. The goal is for students to recreate Baltz’s photographic language through digital adaptation. His camera techniques, such as ISO, aperture, shutter speed, and framing, will be replicated in the digital sphere. Students will treat the viewport as another means of holding a physical camera, with the digital space being treated as if it were analog.

Ultimately, these static sets will be transformed into dynamic ones through animation, challenging the boundary between seeing and understanding by projecting possible narratives onto these worlds, giving new meaning to Baltz’s frames.

In groups, students will choose one image from The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine series and recreate it as a digital maquette. These digital reconstructions will be modeled, lit, textured, framed, and composed with meticulous detail. The final output will include a framed still render printed on 6x9 silver gelatin paper, the same medium Baltz used, as well as a 1- to 2-minute animation produced in Unreal Engine. The still render will frame your set, while the animation will serve as the “play” button for your world.

This seminar will primarily use Unreal Engine to construct visuals, along with photogrammetry to produce highly detailed assets. We will have a series of workshops focused on image-making, asset production, and color grading. Additionally, students will deepen their understanding of analog photographic techniques and explore how to apply them within digital toolsets.

Architecture has historically privileged sight over the other senses. This tech seminar will shift the focus to the acoustical aspects of architectural space by considering sound as a design medium. Digital technology has provided new opportunities to explore the relationship between sound and space. For this course, we will consider how digital technology can be used to influence space. How can sound contribute to the phenomenological experience of architecture? How can audio technology be employed to evoke emotions or memories associated with a place (or create new ones)?

This course promotes the leaps in the perception of what design can be by asking participants to think beyond a retinal approach to architecture, inviting them to explore the aural dimensions of space.

In the wake of the devastating Eaton and Palisades fire it became starkly clear that we are ill prepared to deal with the next century. Architecture and urban planning is at the crux of being the cause and solution to these disasters. Poor design and planning lead to a multitude of cascading breakdowns in the very systems that are meant to protect our cities and us. These events underscore the immediate threat that a changing and warming globe will have in our immediate future. As architects and urban designers, it is our task to not sit idly by but to be evermore aggressive in the fight to protect and change our beloved cities.

California is the most regulated place to build on the planet. Often the subject of critique, environmental reviews enable a larger pool of stakeholders to have say in a project. This system has become a spectre of what it once was. Often used to delay or cancel public projects the environmental review process has ballooned the cost of building. Despite being the subject review of many professionals and experts, it is clear that our communities still face an immediate threat.

This class gives students the tools and background to design in a fire-prone future. Students will learn to analyze and document the fires using spatial analysis raster tools and in person visits to the aftermath. Using their observations and knowledge, students will work both at the scale of a detail and at the scale of the neighborhood to help develop strategies to do the following:

● Design communities that are more ecologically sensitive, able to withstand urban wildfires while also being sensitive to the community and design housing that is affordable and plentiful.
● Develop construction techniques to enable a more rapid deployment of housing that are also less wasteful and enable more function, not less.
● Develop architecture details that can be deployed on existing structures as well as new construction that are fire resistant.
● Research and develop a sensitive and unique approach towards “rewilding”

In the discipline of architecture, material expression has always been bound by both physical constraints and cultural expectations. We recognize wood as wood, steel as steel, glass as glass—each with its associated properties, techniques, and meanings. What happens when these boundaries begin to dissolve? When materials migrate across domains, carrying qualities from one world into another? Artificial intelligence offers us a unique pathway to explore this question. By training machine learning models on photographs from diverse sources, we can extract specific material and formal qualities, separating them from their original contexts. These extracted qualities—textures, patterns, surface treatments, mechanical articulations—become a kind of "material knowledge" that can be transferred to architectural elements, creating hybrids that challenge our conventional understanding of what architecture can look and feel like.

This seminar applies this methodology of material migration to furniture elements, using them as an accessible scale for investigating architectural tectonics. The furniture scale serves not as an end in itself, but as an ideal laboratory for exploring joinery systems that parallel architectural assembly. Through careful training of custom LoRA models and systematic transformation of furniture fragments, students will create material transfers that operate through extraction rather than reference, enabling unexpected juxtapositions and new tectonic possibilities.

The resulting elements exist in a productive tension between their original identity and their new material expression—simultaneously familiar and estranged, recognizable and alien. This tension creates rich possibilities for architectural imagination—a space where material migrations can occur across domains, producing new tectonic possibilities that are both rigorous and fantastical.

In this colloquium we will focus on the case as a unit of analysis in scholarship. Cases require
attention to both ideas and things, description and interpretation, norms and exceptions. They
also encourage distinctions between facts and evidence, the micro and the macro scale, the short and the long term. Yet the explanatory power of cases seems to differ from discipline to discipline: it is one thing to rely on cases in the social sciences, another to do so in the
humanities. How do we use cases in the historical disciplines? Are the cases of the judge similar to those of the historian or the scientist? How do cases build their epistemic authority?

Traditionally used in medicine, law, and religion, cases are often used but rarely theorized in architectural history. Our goal is to gain familiarity with uses, histories, and theories of the case as a way of self-consciously discuss the way in which we produce historical arguments for a broader community of inquiry to agree upon, interrogate, or contest.

The goal of the first workshop will be to write history from a case, using the latter as a quarry to generate historical research. Here, legal cases will be useful to identify convergences and bifurcations between history, law, ethnography, anthropology, etc. In the second half the focus will be on the way historians have drawn cases from history, dealing with evidence but also, and necessarily, with inferences, suggestions, and conjectures. This—making a case—will be the goal of the second workshop.

This is the first-year studio in the core sequence for Master of Architecture candidates

For decades, the single-family home has been synonymous with the California dream: architectural innovation, cultural aspiration, and economic opportunity. However, soaring housing costs and limited supply exclude most Angelenos from this dream. This Los Angeles Paradox gave rise back in 1945 to the case study houses project where architects were tasked with designing single houses for mass production by rethinking architectural form, structure, and materials. This project failed and left Angelenos today, 80 years later, with a new focus: shifting from the dominance of single-family homes to a more diverse housing landscape that addresses affordability, density, and community needs. With this studio we explore the history of experiments in densification through thorough studies of housing typologies that are endemic to
Los Angeles: bungalow courts, dingbats, Townhouses, Duplex/Fourplex, Tract Homes/Cottages, and courtyard apartments.

The American Dream of homeownership, once a cornerstone of economic opportunity and stable communities, now stands fractured. The housing market collapse and economic shifts exposed the inherent limitations of this dream, revealing the many who were excluded. Los Angeles exemplifies this struggle. Soaring home prices shut out most residents, while exorbitant rents far exceed recommended income to rent ratios. This has fueled gentrification and displacement, eroding not just the economic prospects of Angelenos but also the city's vibrant social and cultural fabric. Recognizing this, city and state officials are pushing for change. New policies aim to increase affordability and curb urban sprawl's negative environmental impact.

Recent legislation even allows for building up to four units on single-family zoned lots. However, these efforts face economic headwinds. Even single-family homes now exceed $800,000 on average, with low-income options barely better at $500,000 per unit. The high cost of land, especially in urban centers, is a major factor. To address affordability, this shift from the single-family "house" to broader "housing" solutions sees density as a key strategy for creating a more accessible Los Angeles.

This studio dives deep into the challenges of Los Angeles housing. We move beyond traditional design, exploring how architecture can create new ways of living in the city. Examining social, cultural, and economic factors shaping housing, we'll study existing models and spatial arrangements to develop innovative designs that address affordability, community, and a sense of place. Inspired by Robin Evans' "Figures, Doors, and Passages," we'll delve into seemingly ordinary aspects of housing, exploring the balance between private and public space, individual versus collective living, and the transition between indoors and outdoors. Through this exploration, we'll analyze existing housing models and their spatial arrangements, learning from the past while pushing boundaries towards innovative and fresh solutions for social interaction, aesthetics, and economic feasibility within LA's living communities

The second quarter in the year-long 403.1 Research Studio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The second quarter in the year-long 403.2 Research Studio

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

The second quarter in the year-long 403.3 Research Studio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The third quarter in the year-long 403.80 Research Studio

In this course, students will explore the evolution of image-making technologies and their profound effects on society, culture, and politics. From ancient cave paintings to AI-generated images, the class will analyze how these technologies not only change the way we create and view images but also shape the world around us. Students will investigate the ways in which image-making tools influence movements—whether at personal, national, or global scales.

Throughout the course, students will contribute to a collaborative timeline and produce individual research booklets that catalog key image-making technologies and their impacts, creating a comprehensive atlas of how these innovations have affected our understanding of the world. The course encourages critical engagement with the ideological and cultural power behind the creation of images and how these tools have transported ideas across time.

The Technology Studio explores architecture at the conversion of material systems, media technologies, and data-driven design. It focuses on the transformation of built environments into cyber-physical spaces, where material form is shaped not only by structure and climate but also by information, sensation, and mediated experience. In the 2024-2025 cycle, the studio is titled Arid, Architecture of Absence and Abundance. It centers on the desert as a context for radical experimentation technologically, materially, and culturally.

Rooted in the legacy of California desert modernism, the studio revisits the experimental ethos of figures such as John Lautner, Richard Neutra, and Albert Frey, whose buildings responded inventively to the desert’s extreme conditions. These mid-century architects viewed the desert as a blank canvas–an isolated space for redefining modern life through spatial innovation and environmental responsiveness. This historical lineage is extended through the lens of broader desert utopianism, including Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti and contemporary cultural events like Burning Man and Coachella. These examples position the desert as a continuing site of convergence between human creativity, environmental constraint, and technological mediation.

At the core of the studio is the design of a touristic compound in Joshua Tree. The project must operate off-grid, producing its own energy, harvesting water, and managing waste, requiring students to integrate sustainable systems, advanced fabrication strategies, and site-specific material logics. The remote location becomes a framework for exploring autonomy, resilience, and digital connectivity. Isolation is treated not as a limitation, but as a spatial condition that allows for rethinking modes of living, working, and interacting at a distance.

Generative AI is a key instrument in the design workflow. Students employ AI to explore architectural form, test sustainable strategies, and generate simulations, renderings, and experiential narratives. These tools allow students to visualize atmosphere, model system performance, and iterate rapidly, positioning AI as an active collaborator in design thinking and representation. In parallel, the studio engages digital technologies such as telepresence, XR platforms, and real-time data systems to create environments that are physically remote yet globally connected. These tools are not peripheral—they are embedded into the architecture to support daily life, creativity, and social exchange.

Smart systems and IoT technologies are also integrated to create responsive, adaptive environments. Students investigate how embedded sensors and networked devices can enable spatial feedback loops, adjusting lighting, climate, or resource use based on human behavior and environmental inputs. These systems support not only sustainability but also a redefinition of what it means to inhabit technologically saturated space.

Finally, the studio foregrounds new material and fabrication techniques suited to remote context; composite panels, modular systems, and 3D printing- enabling lightweight, prefabricated components for rapid on-site assembly. The compound becomes a prototype for a self-sufficient, technologically enriched mode of habitation.

Through this lens, the studio positions architecture as a speculative, media-driven, and ecologically attuned practice. Students are encouraged to merge critical inquiry with technical fluency, designing environments that are materially grounded, digitally connected, and culturally resonant.

The studio course will explore contemporary issues in urban design and architecture, specifically the development of proposals responding to climate change. The aim will be to inspire public interest in our physical environment through inventive design and regenerative strategies.

Since many kinds of interventions will be needed to slow climate change, one contemporary role of architecture is to excite designers, engineers, and inventors to think up and realize all kinds of imaginative measures to contribute to the most important challenge of our lifetime. The climate crisis won’t be solved by one idea or technology: the more approaches there are, the better. Architecture can instill a collective spirit of experimentation to accomplish this end.

The project site is Sea Ranch, the legendary 7,000 acre community in Northern California begun in the 1960s. Master planned by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, the coastal community is best known for its design ethos to harmoniously integrate architecture with nature. Buildings are nested in the natural landscape, situated to highlight the overall beauty of the Sonoma County ecology over individual buildings.

Along its 10-mile long stretch, buildings are set back from the oceanside cliffs to further accentuate the landscape features of the master plan. Trees and marine grasslands dominate the terrain with common buildings and homes built close to tree rows so as to maintain as much open land as possible. As a result of climate change, Sea Ranch must now rethink its iconic landscape. The defining logic of the master plan puts it in peril of destruction. Experiencing increasingly high temperatures, this forested coastal environment is now vulnerable to wildfires. The original guidelines to situate buildings close to nature increase the risk of fire, since the closer buildings are to vegetation, the greater the likelihood of ignition.

The studio will ask, How does a community integrate architecture and landscape while mitigating wildfires? How does a place best known for knitting together buildings do so when that is a fire risk?

Vegetation + Buildings = Ignition. This preventative logic of distancing buildings from nature is reinforced by California’s fire hardening requirements. Like the rest of the Golden State, Sea Ranch’s buildings must not have landscape immediately around them.

The studio will propose a new master plan for Sea Ranch that adapts the environment to our climate reality by lowering the chances of wildfire. More importantly, we will attempt to allow Sea Ranch to thrive - to bridge together humans and nature in its next evolution, as the region experiences extreme weather during future decades this century.

This is the second-year studio in the core sequence for Master of Architecture candidates

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.

Structures III, AUD 433, is the third part of a year-long, three-part exploration into structural thinking. Structure is certainly used to support architecture, but, is also space defining, form generating, and aesthetically engaging as well. The Golden Gate Bridge has majestic structural towers and fluid structural cables. They support the roadway. But they then define the architecture, the roadway being almost structurally incidental. The dome of the Pantheon encloses a wonderful, large circular space. But the architecture is certainly in the presence of the dome itself.

Course Objectives:

Part 1

1. Understand how concrete can be used as a structural material.
2. Understand the design characteristics of concrete construction.
3. Understand the implications of having a "mixed" material, concrete and steel combined.
4. Understand how concrete beams, slabs and columns work; and how the spanning members are devices that resist shear and moment.
5. Understand how columns and walls resist compression and buckling.
6. Understand non-linear architectural forms.
7. Understand the economics of concrete construction and its influence on Architectural design.
8. Students should be able to proceed from an architectural design, use loading diagrams through shear and moment diagrams, to concrete beams, slabs and columns.

Part II

1. Understand the nature of lateral loads, as typically caused by wind and earthquakes.
2. Understand how buildings are stabilized in three dimensions and how equilibrium is achieved for lateral loads. How do buildings behave?
3. Understand how dynamic and static analyses are performed for seismic and wind conditions.
4. Understand looking at Lateral Load resistance from the point of view of energy rather than strength.
5. Understand the design and economic implications of the issues above.

Since this is the last of three quarters making up the Structures Course, significant reference to earlier work will occur. The goal is to conclude this quarter with a full course review. Connections between Architectural and Structural design are fundamental.

This course surveys normative and advanced construction systems and techniques with a focus on digital fabrication and material systems and applications. Rather than an encyclopedic survey it is intended as a resource in your design thinking and a means of building a tectonic imagination to support the conceptual development of your studio work. This course builds upon and expands on the fundamental construction logic, basic systems, and detailing principles which are part of AUD 436 - Introduction to Building Construction. Further, the course elaborates on contemporary methods of design integration, digital fabrication, and assembly associated with professional practice and research in architecture through lectures, site visits and case studies.

Description coming soon