Architecture is the product of social, cultural, religious, technological, and political forces. Great cultures and civilizations have existed all over the world, producing not only great monuments but robust vernacular architectural traditions, closely tied to the environment and their local context, which resonate even today. As such, this course presents architecture and urban design as objects of study for understanding and analyzing cultures and their respective histories over time. This survey, part 1 of 2, begins with the earliest known prehistoric structures and then ends at the beginning of the era of colonial expansion. 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. Assigned readings will expand on themes introduced in the lectures. Weekly discussion section meetings provide further opportunity for discussion and interpretation

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

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 represents the conceptual root of our work in this course, except that our site is downtown Los Angeles, and the moment is now. As such, this studio is focused on the adaptive re-use of commercial buildings for newly designed co-living arrangements. 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. The fitting of these plans into a “blank” gives dimensional and formal specificity to our more general problem of fitting new arrangements of people into old buildings.

This course functions as an anthology of housing histories from the 1850s to the present. As such, it offers a comprehensive albeit necessarily incomplete bibliography dealing with relevant case studies from around the world. Technology, finance, property, law, morals, labor, class, identity—there is virtually no aspect or controversy tied to modernization that hasn’t acquired form in the category “housing” since the popularization of the word in the nineteenth century.

With an eye on the present, the purpose of the course is to identify ways in which architecture—including its objects, actors, theories, and pedagogies—has interacted with these processes. Through situated examples and related literature we will ask: Which professional and disciplinary arrangements in architecture have delivered what types of contributions to the history of housing? What technical or bureaucratic frameworks have either facilitated or hindered these programs? Who has gained and who has lost from the multiplicity of processes amalgamated under the word “housing”? Rather than treating housing as a category belonging unilaterally to architecture, we will scrutinize the contingent role of architecture in the broader aggregate of agencies building (or un-building) housing.

This is the final studio quarter in the junior year of the BA/Architectural Studies program

Architecture that does not stage life is complicit in its disappearance. This course begins from the premise that theatrical expression and ritual are essential to a connected human experience, and that public space must function as the spatial apparatus that enables these practices. Students design a theater for the courtyard at Perloff Hall, transforming an underperforming site into a platform for new and evolving rituals. The goal is to construct an architecture that reintroduces play, performance, and collective meaning into the everyday life of AUD. As Bernard Tschumi argues, architecture is defined not only by its physical boundaries but by the events it hosts. Students produce conditions for events and encounter through which architecture becomes urgent, contingent, and lived. The courtyard is reconceived as a site of scenic presentation, where students, faculty, and visitors assume roles and engage in forms of ‘playacting’.

This course is the second in a three-part required Architectural Mediation sequence in the first year of the MArch program. The sequence centers on architecture’s core modes of production, including drawings, models, and images, as critical sites where architectural ideas are conceived, tested, and communicated. Building on the conceptual and technical foundations established in the preceding course, “Architectural Mediation 2A: Crease, Cusp, and Corner” focuses on advancing students’ capacity to spatialize geometry and to model complex three-dimensional form through both digital and physical means. Emphasis is placed on the development of formal rigor, representational intelligence, and critical judgment across multiple media, reinforcing mediation as a fundamental architectural practice and intellectual framework.

Through thoughtful and persistent iteration, students must produce a hybrid architectural document in which drawing and physical model are combined into a single artifact. The final deliverable is a Composite Cutaway Isometric, consisting of a cutaway isometric drawing into which a 3D-printed sectional fragment is embedded. Rather than functioning as a separate object, the printed fragment is fully integrated into the drawing and adheres to the same isometric projection and cutaway logic. Students are expected to develop mastery in three core skills: spatializing complex three-dimensional geometry, modeling it effectively, and critically analyzing its formal and representational consequences.

Crease, cusp, and corner describe distinct geometric conditions through which continuity, directionality, and change are registered within form. Crease is a line along which a surface folds while remaining continuous, operating as a controlled hinge where curvature bends without breaking. Smooth yet sharply articulated, crease may take the form of any line type, including a curve or a polyline. Cusp is a point at which curvature tightens and reverses direction, registering as a localized condition of maximum intensity that appears as a pinch or dimple. Cusp occurs where two branches of a curve meet at a single point with a shared tangent, concentrating geometric tension into a compact zone. Corner is an intersection formed by edges or surfaces meeting at an angle. It establishes threshold, enclosure, boundary, or change in orientation between planes, anchoring the geometry or clarifying the extents of a space.

The course takes stock of the omnipresence of “spectacle” in contemporary life by tracing its antecedents in early modern and modern Europe. Distraction, spectacle, audiences, leisure, free time, entertainment—what exactly is meant when we use these words? How do nature, technique, and society need to interweave for these categories to mean something? And how does spectacle shape (and conversely, how is it shaped by) particular systems of power, belief, and knowledge? Through the optic of the crowd—spectacle’s preferred constituency—we will examine artifacts that have come to embody this continuously shifting concept since the seventeenth century—from the rolling press to the stock exchange, from the circus to the morgue—variously turning entertainment into the site of artistic, economic, scientific, and political speculation. The purpose of the class is to make this overly familiar word strange, and therefore analyzable, so as to better understand its function in the present.

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 for 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's own labor.

This seminar develops a new approach to environmental design. Students will use thermal science and polycontinuous geometry to configure architectural space in a 'thermal knot.' A thermal knot is a sequence of spaces that produces stable buoyancy flow while recycling heat through shared surfaces. The idea is to explore how these thermal knots can obviate mechanical systems while reframing how architecture can support climate adaptation this century. The course is organized in four parts, each with a lecture, workshop, and design experiment, helping student teams develop their proposals in stages while exploring different characteristics and affordances of the thermal knot schema. This year we will focus on building physical intuition in the first two parts and experimenting with generative AI in the last two parts.

Architecture is essentially a structure created using specific materials and construction methods to provide a specific vessel for a specific people to act a specific function in a specific location. Therefore, it is greatly influenced by the context of the place in which it is built. Similarly, architects who design buildings are greatly influenced by the context, such as the culture, climate, materials, and construction methods of the location where they work. They construct the uniqueness of their designs and gain recognition within that context. However, many architects today are active on a global scale because the individuality of their designs, which are based on the uniqueness of a particular place, is recognized and valued in a multicultural context that transcends that context. In this technology seminar, we examine Japanese architects, learn their design concepts, and conduct exercises to adapt them to the California context. Through this process, we examine the relationship between architecture and its surrounding context we are surrounded within.

In this seminar, students will explore the production of tableaux through digitally rendered images. A tableau is a still artwork, often a painting or photograph, in which characters, sets, and props are carefully arranged to create a dramatic or picturesque effect. These works often recreate the past, reconstructing history through composition, lighting, effects, and set design.

Described as “living pictures,” tableaux freeze seemingly perfect moments in time. Within a tableau, the environment and characters appear completely unaware of the viewer. These carefully staged works capture an amplified dramatic presence, drawing the viewer into a space where they can dissect each carefully portrayed fragment. For the artist, the tableau creates a contemplative space without the constraints of the fleeting snapshot.

Photographers such as Jeff Wall, Allan Sekula, Seamus Nicolson, and Sarah Jones have embraced the tableau as a mode of Pictorialism. These artists meticulously craft images through staged environments where every detail is considered, planned, and articulated. In Jeff Wall’s case, he often uses historic paintings as his initial point of reference. His work A Sudden Gust of Wind, for example, is a photographic reconstruction of Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga.

In this seminar, students will design and construct their own tableaux through digital rendering. Working individually, each student will choose a historic image or artwork as the basis for reconstruction. Following Wall’s approach of dissecting historic references to create a framework for reconstruction, students will analyze the composition, lighting, materials, and set design of their chosen works as a foundation for their digital transformations.

Students will then reconstruct their sets in the virtual sphere, modeling, texturing, and rigging stages, characters, and lighting in Cinema 4D or Unreal Engine. Photogrammetry will serve as the primary method for asset generation, allowing students to create highly detailed assets from real-world objects. Sets will be rendered as iterative stills throughout the quarter, evolving up until the final review.

Each week, the class will participate in intensive in-person workshops covering Cinema 4D, Redshift, Unreal Engine, and asset creation. These sessions will explore various aspects of the production pipeline, including photogrammetry, polygon modeling, digital sculpting, and texturing.

By the end of the seminar, students will have honed their skills in producing hyper-real visualizations while developing a deeper understanding of set design, composition, lighting, and narrative development applicable to professional practice in the field.

The contemporary pop-up has evolved beyond its origins as guerrilla retail strategy to become a privileged site for testing new modes of spatial encounter—where brand identity, algorithmic aesthetics, and experiential architecture collapse into temporary infrastructures of desire. This seminar examines the pop-up exhibition as both cultural phenomenon and design methodology, treating ephemeral installations like Gentle Monster’s surrealist retail theaters and CJ Hendry’s floral assemblages not merely as Instagram fodder, but as prototypes for post-digital placemaking.

Students will develop comprehensive pop-up proposals that synthesize AI-generated visual worlds with AR spatial interventions, producing pitch decks that speak the dual languages of venture capital and critical theory, character mascots that function as memetic ambassadors, and physical prototypes that anchor digital speculation in material reality. Through a curriculum that treats generative AI as a design collaborator rather than a rendering service, participants will construct fictional yet implementable exhibition frameworks that interrogate how synthetic media reshapes our relationship to presence, authenticity, and cultural value. The course positions the pop-up not as marketing gimmick but as experimental format—a compressed timeline for rehearsing futures, where the metrics of virality and the aesthetics of criticality need not be oppositional. Students emerge equipped to navigate the intersections of computational design, spatial storytelling, and brand world-building, producing work that operates simultaneously as commercial proposition and speculative intervention into the attention economy’s evolving architectures.

The quarter-long project will focus on leveraging a variety of AI models including, LLMs, Image Generation, and Image to Mesh models in Fuser as well as other platforms as well as designing and representing their pop-ups in AR using Unity 3D. Students will get a basic understanding of curating a pop-up exhibition for a specific client, designing a mascot or branding, and designing a pitch deck for the experience. Each student will aim to control, edit, and understand, the workflow of editing and generating each layer of the produced pop-up exhibition.

Interpolated Ecologies examines ecological design through the concept of the edge—understood not as a line of separation, but as a zone of material, spatial, and epistemic negotiation. The course positions the Los Angeles River as a paradigmatic site in which modern engineering, urbanization, and ecological systems collide, producing a continuous field of unresolved adjacencies. The river’s concrete channel operates as a spatial scar: a patchwork intervention that exposes the limits of modernity’s attempt to stabilize natural processes through abstraction, containment, and control.

While the Los Angeles River predates postmodern theories of collage, its edge condition mirrors the logic of collage itself—where disparate elements are joined without fully reconciling their differences. Like the pasted image that never fully dissolves into its ground, the river’s boundaries remain visibly strained, revealing ecology as something managed rather than understood.

The course situates this condition within a longer architectural lineage of ecological and material thinking. Early investigations such as Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s geological studies of Mont Blanc demonstrate a proto-ecological approach to architecture—one attentive to sedimentation, structural formation, and material logic across deep time. Similarly, the work of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux foregrounds architecture’s capacity to mediate between social order, material expression, and environmental context.

The studio extends these historical precedents into contemporary debates by foregrounding material science, hydrology, and material intelligence as active drivers of design. Students will investigate how sediment, concrete, soil, water, vegetation, and infrastructural materials behave, interact, and transform—using these properties to speculate on new relationships between river and city. Design proposals may reroute, hybridize, or reconstitute the river, not as a singular object, but as an evolving material system.

The course also engages speculative urban theories such as Archizoom Associati’s No-Stop City and Superstudio’s The Continuous Monument, treating them as critical precedents for thinking continuous, infrastructural, and planetary-scale systems. These projects frame the city as an uninterrupted field—anticipating contemporary questions about ecological continuity, infrastructural excess, and systemic indifference.

Within this context, the studio introduces machine intelligence and generative AI as a contemporary mode of interpolation—distinct from traditional collage. Rather than assembling discrete parts through juxtaposition, generative systems interpolate across datasets, producing hybrid conditions that appear seamless while remaining fundamentally composite. Students will critically deploy these tools not as stylistic devices, but as methods for synthesizing ecological, material, and urban information into speculative design frameworks.

Ultimately, Interpolated Ecologies reframes ecological design as a practice of working within edges—material, conceptual, and territorial—where architecture participates in ongoing environmental processes rather than resolving them. The course culminates in proposals for a one-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River that treat design as an act of negotiation, interpolation, and ecological attunement between city and landscape.

The second of three colloquia required for MA and PhD students, the winter quarter will focus on the problem of translation and the writing of history. While the fall quarter considered 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?

The first workshop will identify an epistemic unit—a word, idea, image, or artifact—around which multiple translations and mistranslations have coalesced, and trace its transformations across time. The second workshop will situate that unit within an historiographical debate and intervene in it to highlight what is at stake for the scholar. Considering translation as a method for writing history, the colloquium grapples with the problem of disciplinary anxiety, the threat and promise of crossing institutional boundaries.

The studio will examine two strategies in the design of housing addressing housing density through reconsideration of low scale commercial development, the suburban office complex. While commercial to residential conversion remains part of the current conversation regarding housing availability, single building solutions inevitably have limited impact. By focusing on an established developments that have exceeded their “best by” date, the studio looks to establish a scalable series of precedents for increasing housing availability.

The first involves reconsideration of a ubiquitous urban form: the low rise corporate office complex. Hidden in plain sight, these office parks are largely the product of formulaic 1980s development practices and reflected the demand for “back of house” space of American businesses at the time. Their ubiquity, normative construction, proximity to adjacent housing, and their declining value as reliable sources of commercial rental income warrants reconsideration. This aging building stock represents a significant carbon investment in foundations and primary structure, one that can be recaptured through transformative renovation instead of demolition.

The studio will adopt a prototypical single building in an existing office complex as a development site. Part 1 is a transformational premise, challenging teams of two designers to adapt and modify the existing three dimensional grid of steel framing to incorporate the seriality, modularity, and aggregation typical of residential space planning. This requires a two-step process: identifying and testing strategies to modify frame and envelope, then developing a tectonic system to adapt the modified shell for use as housing.

The second half of the quarter is the development of new housing typologies, companion additions to the renovated building. After compiling an inventory of case studies in new forms of housing, teams will expand the work of Part 1 to demonstrate capacity to scale site-wide housing solutions.

“And so Los Angeles finds itself playing the role of bellwether once again, this time heralding the arrival of climate-change perma-risk and what we might think of as go-it-alone, left-to-our-own-devices urbanism.” (Christopher Hawthorne)

Architecture: In the aftermath of the fires, experts believe the best response is to turn to architecture. Making buildings ignition resistant can significantly help to prevent major devastation. Before, the belief was that battling wildfires and managing fuel were the go-to means to prevent loss of property and lives. Last year’s events showed we’re entering a new era of intense fires combined with high winds that jump from wildlands into neighborhoods and spread from house to house. Minimizing the effects of these fire events will involve retrofitting our mindset about fires - and retrofitting our idea of the single family home.

Affordability: Some houses went viral after the fires. They were hailed as fire resistant. They had metal roofs, roof and property sprinkler systems, concrete property walls, ember-proof gutters, and passive house envelopes. All of this is expensive. People who built their homes with these measures stood better chances for sure. But that’s not what most people can afford. Fire protecting existing homes with affordable modifications is critical right now. We learned that fires can happen in many more places than previously assumed. The sheer number of homes vulnerable to fire requires not just rebuilding fire resistant homes in the areas that burned, but retrofitting many more existing homes far beyond the wildlands borders. We’ve seen that recovery in LA County entails homeowners to basically go it alone. Many people are trying to help those impacted by the fires but movement is slow. And because there’s no way right now for local agencies to fund retrofitting, affordability is key for people to take things into their own hands to establish some level of fire protection.

Retrofit: Just as seismic retrofitting homes (reinforcing structure, bracing water heaters, installing auto gas shutoffs) vastly improved our earthquake preparedness, retrofitting homes to prevent fire ignition greatly improves our fire preparedness. Retrofitting the single family dwelling also means retrofitting the typology with ideas that will make it relevant in the future. Despite density upzoning, we’re particularly fond of the single family dwelling. While LA is famous for having 70% of its footprint zoned for single family use, other major US cities have a higher percentage. The house isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Context: Los Angeles will host the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, bringing global attention to a city already recognized as one of the world’s cultural capitals for healthy living, recreation, and athleisure. Yet LA simultaneously ranks among the lowest major cities in the United States in park acreage per capita, while suffering from deep urban fragmentation. Exasperating the irony is the city of free movement suffers from mobility gridlock where peak-hour vehicular traffic often crawls at 20 mph or less, making bicycles and micro-mobility just as fast—if not faster—than cars.

Problem Statement: Los Angeles’ freeway network—especially the 405 and the 10—represents one of the largest contiguous public land holdings in the region, yet behaves today as high-noise, high-pollution, single-use corridors that inefficiently move people and cut neighborhoods apart. How can these freeways be reimagined as a new kind of civic armature—a city-wide recreational mobility corridor that reconnects communities and enables new forms of movement, culture, health, and public life?

At the same time, how can solutions be considered that are not just sweeping utopian gestures, but practical local solutions? Rather than proposing a continuous megastructure (to which history has been unkind) can we consider solutions that patch, heal, and bridge local communities?

This studio reimagines Los Angeles as a connected, athletic, contextual city by exploring a higher use of its most infamous feature.

Studio Proposition: Students will work in teams to design ‘social infrastructure’ in the form of programmatic bridges across specific segments of the 405, 10, or 110 freeway. Program includes spaces for recreation, gathering, living. Teams will also reallocate lanes of mobility along the freeway corridor. Students will examine historical megastructures, explore mobility futures, consider urban integration of mixed use structures, and produce detailed architectural proposals grounded in Los Angeles’ contextual 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.

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.

Towards A Possible World | Winter & Spring 2026 | Project 2

This second project builds directly on Relic Futures from Fall 2025. Where the fall quarter asked you to imagine a world from a single fragment, this long-form project expands the frame: from relic to reality, from trace to terrain. You will scale up your inquiry into a fully realized world designed in detail.

This project takes place in a world under pressure, ecologically, infrastructurally, culturally, and spatially. These transitions are fertile ground for design. Through this lens, you will imagine systems of adaptation, resistance, care, extraction, or transformation. Whether rethinking the collective rituals of an energy-scarce society or mapping the evolution of hybrid urban-ecological corridors, your work should use the instability of the present to construct alternate futures with depth, clarity, and consequence.

Transition is treated not as rupture, but as the unstable foundation from which something new might emerge. Each student or team will construct a richly layered world grounded in a specific condition, moment, or shift. Projects may range from speculative ecologies to social architectures, from intimate rituals to territorial frameworks. The outputs should move fluidly across narrative and spatial media—culminating in a comprehensive World Book and a constellation of designed artifacts, images, systems, or experiences. The goal is to propose futures that are not simply imaginable, but inhabitable—defined by coherence, tension, and the possibility of repair.

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 yearlong research studio Towards Circular, Innovative Buildings for the Olympics: Reimagining Design and Construction through 3D Printing addresses one of the most urgent challenges in architecture today: reducing carbon emissions and material waste while rethinking how buildings are designed, constructed, and adapted for future needs. Using the Olympic Games as a case study, the studio investigates how large-scale global events—often characterized by rapid construction timelines and the risk of short-lived, unsustainable infrastructure—can instead serve as test beds for circular design and advanced technologies. By integrating modularity, disassembly, and material reuse, the studio envisions low-carbon building systems aligned with international sustainability commitments such as the AIA 2030 and SE 2050 targets, while also meeting the Olympic Games’ evolving environmental objectives.

Students will explore computationally driven parametric design, Design for Manufacturing (DFM), and Design for Disassembly (DFD) principles to create adaptable buildings that can be easily assembled, dismantled, and repurposed, ensuring long-term urban utility beyond the games. Drawing inspiration from biomimicry, the research translates natural systems into innovative material logics, ecological intelligence, and performative design strategies, bridging aesthetics with sustainability. Advanced 3D printing technologies will enable the repurposing of existing materials, reducing embodied carbon and operational energy demands, while lifecycle assessments will evaluate the environmental footprint of proposed systems. Networking with industry leaders such as ICON, Branch Technology, Azure Printed Homes, and Yuan Mu, Computational Designer at Nike, provide the technical expertise and real-world grounding to push forward experimentation and application, positioning the Olympics as a catalyst for reimagining global construction practices and advancing the circular economy.

The architecture industry faces a pressing need to reduce carbon emissions and material waste, especially as buildings continue to be a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. This research aims to explore how 3D printing and circular design principles can provide sustainable solutions for retrofitting and constructing new buildings, with a focus on creating adaptable structures for major global events like the Olympics. By focusing on modularity, disassembly, and material reuse, the research studio will develop low-carbon building systems that align with global sustainability goals, such as the AIA 2030 Commitment, SE 2050 Challenge, and the Olympic Games’ sustainability objectives.

Olympic Games host cities have a unique challenge: they need to build large-scale infrastructure quickly but must also ensure that these structures remain long after the event. This research explores how the Olympics, as an event that requires rapid but sustainable development, can serve as a testing ground for innovative construction methods like 3D printing. By creating buildings designed for reuse, disassembly, and adaptation, this studio will investigate how these structures can serve as temporary yet long lasting venues that leave a
positive legacy for future generations.

Incorporating Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and Design for Disassembly (DFD) principles, this studio will focus on buildings that are easy to assemble, disassemble, and repurpose. This approach allows for material recovery and reuse, crucial for the temporary but sustainable nature of Olympic venues. Drawing inspiration from how wearables allow us to adapt to environmental and functional needs, students will develop designs for adaptable buildings that respond to both the demands of the event and long-term urban needs, aligning with the growing emphasis on circular economy principles.

Through the use of advanced 3D printing technologies, students will explore how materials from existing buildings or temporary structures can be repurposed for new projects, reducing waste and embodied carbon. Computational design tools will drive the development of parametric building systems that respond to specific environmental conditions, maximizing performance and energy efficiency and ultimately operational carbon. Designs will be evaluated through lifecycle assessments, measuring the long-term sustainability and carbon footprint.

Further, we will explore the connections between biomimicry and architecture by analyzing and
Translating natural systems into design strategies that bridge scale and mimic material logics and aesthetics. Biomimicry is a way to fuse ecological intelligence with digital innovation—creating designs that are not only visually compelling but also performative and sustainable.

The research will use the Olympics as a case study to test how circular building practices can be applied on a global scale, demonstrating the potential for innovative technologies in large-scale, high-impact construction projects. By utilizing 3D printing and circular design, this research will not only address the environmental challenges of major events like the Olympics but also contribute to creating buildings that are adaptive, sustainable, and leave a lasting legacy of responsible construction practices.

The third quarter of a year-long research studio

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

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

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

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

The third quarter of a year-long research studio

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

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

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

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

The third quarter of a year-long research studio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This research seminar runs alongside the year-long MSAUD Material Innovations Research Studio “Towards Circular, Innovative Buildings for the Olympics: Reimagining Design and Construction through 3D Printing.”

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.

This housing-focused, year-long studio frames Los Angeles not simply as a site of housing shortage, but as a site of typological invention. The question is no longer whether density can be achieved, but how it can be achieved without sacrificing livability, community, or resilience. The studio asks students how architecture can move beyond the detached house without abandoning the qualities that made domestic life in Los Angeles desirable in the first place: access to light and air, contact with landscape, gradations between public and private life, between inside and outside, and the possibility of individuality within a larger collective order. In that sense, the studio reads Los Angeles housing history not as a sequence of obsolete artifacts, but as an open repertoire of spatial strategies capable of adaptation and re-composition, whose social and architectural potential remains open.

This studio challenges the students to develop a position in engaging an existing building/site and to imagine a highly specific and detailed project for its next cycle towards an alternative future. The measurable and undeniable realities of climate change, finite resources of building materials, and environmentally detrimental building practices make us all pause and reconsider how we as architects, as a discipline, as individuals, and as society should rethink the ways we responsibly reimagine and inhabit the future of our built environment. More than any other next generation of architects, this rising next generation of architects will be deeply engaged in imagining the next cycle of existing building stock, sites, grounds, cities and territories. As we contemplate architectural value for spaces that were made for other needs at other times; as we decide what to salvage, what to reappropriate, what to reconfigure, what and how to add to; and as we try to make sensible new tectonics for a culture that evolves rapidly, our framing of the problem begins to shift from the territory of responsible environmental ethics towards the territory of potential emergent aesthetics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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