This design studio focuses on equipping students with a command of the arrangement and manipulation of elemental architectural formal, spatial, and ordering devices by first learning from select Caravanserai plans and subsequently developing hypothetical two-story sections and vertical circulation elements.

This Technology Seminar focuses on mobile/dynamic exterior and interstitial non-structural elements and components of building envelopes (solar screens, doors, windows, guardrails, and balconies.) Projects derive from invertive transformations of stacked and/or extruded medieval castle plans as 5-story, freestanding urban residential tower blocks whose solar exposure demands the interplay of architectural elements with environmental concerns (shading and cooling by modulating breezes through a layered facade system.)

The primary material is terracotta (baked earth), with a supporting cast of glass and metal frames and meshes.

Module 1: Narration, Isometrics

What is the work of the isometric drawing? If the work of the image is to represent affect, atmosphere, perhaps to project an alternate “reality”; the work of the cutaway isometric is descriptive. Much like the orthographic mode from last quarter, the Isometric graphically describes the spatial and physical attributes of an object by combining 3 planar projections to comprise a hybrid and composite understanding of the 3-dimensional whole. In this sense, it has the capacity to support a particular narrative—a means to describe the relationships of physical stuff, a format which both disguises and reveals relationships set up by simple tectonics, assemblies of things, as well as continuous solid objects. While the isometric purports to reveal a measure of space as the residuum of the stuff inside, between, and in-between the physical matter of architecture, it may also misdirect, redirect, or otherwise lie.

The work of the isometric, therefore, is not only to assign a numerical value or unit of measure to a 3-dimensional composition, but also to quantify relationships of interiority and exteriority and the hidden thickness in-between. In this case the unit of measure might include light and shadow, as a means of describing attributes of the object such as mass, volume, surface, and composition. Shadow refers to both the shadows on objects caused by the angles of the planes facing away from the light source, and shadows cast by the object onto the ground or onto another object.

How these features are measured and reproduced through means of representation is the content of this exercise. But moreover, it is the stories we tell both verbally and through the deployment of these techniques that concerns us as the subject of this exercise.

Module 2: Parafiction & Place

In the field of architectural visualization, realism has long been lauded for its ability to realize projects with clarity and perceived physical presence. Now it finds itself at a crossroads. The 'architectural render,' once a cornerstone of “realism”, has become ubiquitous to the point of saturation. Critically regarded within the architectural community, it faces scrutiny for its oversimplified, formulaic representations, echoing a broader sentiment of disenchantment with conventional modes of expression.

This course seeks not just to acknowledge this critique, but to actively respond to it. We recognize that the architectural render, in its current form, is still an effective tool, yet has reached a juncture where re-interpretation is not just desirable but necessary. It asks for a shift in context to a more relevant conveyance, one that resonates with the contemporary moment and its complex media landscape.

In this course, we reinterpret “realism” in architectural renderings, merging reality with fiction to evolve these visualizations into vehicles of narrative storytelling. By softening the distinctions between real and imagined, students will employ renders as tools to envision alternate futures and new cultural projections, moving past the conventional uses of architectural renders. These narratives, enriched by parafictional strategies and woven into modern communication mediums for greater authenticity, will engage with wider concepts and the relational networks of their locations, enabling architecture to extend beyond its physical site and connect with the broader cultural contexts surrounding it.

When we speak of “architectural practices,” we mean both the organizational forms by which we work together (in an office, a firm, a studio, a collaboration) and the methods that organize our work (site observations, precedent analysis, programming studies, client meetings). Latent in each is the embodied, yet often under-acknowledged and therefore critically unchallenged, practice of research - which we collectively take for granted. This quarter, we will recenter the potential for architectural research in practice, showing how methods can be systematic, humanistic, and rigorous, and specifically tailored for architectural work within and beyond conventional sites. Our fundamental questions will be: How can we organize our architectural efforts in order to advance a social agenda? Are there architectural practices, or methods, that embed a commitment to spatial justice?

We will collectively formulate a set of specific architectural research questions that deal with a fragment of the current housing crisis: innovative affordable housing typologies, in the context of California’s community college system. Our questions will set up studies to be undertaken individually or in groups, for which ethics and rigor will be critical guides. Investigations can take multiple forms including archival, fieldwork-based, ethnographic, historical, or cartographic. Students will gain skills to better grasp the nuances of the socio-physical environment and the people it will accommodate. Together our studies will build materials for an exhibition.

Before architecture is land. This seminar begins with the premise that land is not an object—it is a set of social and political-economic relations, a way of defining our relationship to one another and to our nonhuman neighbors. Against a modernist notion of land as an empty, dividable surface upon which to place architectural forms, the seminar views land as a living cultural inscription that constantly registers these changing relationships on the ground. Land’s long and contested past reveals how struggles over its ownership, use, management, and meaning have arguably been, and continue to be, the most decisive factor in the making of our modern world.

The seminar posits that the way we read land—our land literacy—not only shapes the way we interpret and design it, but reflects how we live with one other. After cultivating our land literacy through frameworks of technology, law, and labor, we will examine tools and techniques of inscription—enclosure and property; border and settlement; survey and empire; soil and agriculture; grid and planning; infrastructure and extraction. We conclude by considering how landmarks and the stories they embody shape ideas about our collective past and future as we live on increasingly unstable land.

Description coming soon

Description coming soon

With Kurt Pelzer and Sarp Tanridag

This lecture course studies the quintessential characteristics of American urban and suburban form as they developed historically and have been systemized by the design and planning professions since the late 19th century. The course is organized thematically around the grid, park, neighborhood, cityscape, sprawl, downtown, housing and environment, and asks how American republicanism and sentiments of anti-urbanism shaped American urbanism, as well as how disciplinary and professional boundaries between architecture, landscape planning, and urban planning were drawn, and in turn, gave rise to urban and environmental design.

While drawing primarily from the histories of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, we will also situate their historical developments in transnational and global frameworks, extending beyond Europe to India, China, the Philippines, Iran, Nigeria and Tanzania.

Across visual media today, the boundary between real and unreal has become barely detectable. Spaces (and characters) depicted across cinema, games, advertising, and social media are increasingly assembled through a mix of techniques that work between physical (photographic) capture and digital rendering. The ‘Phygital’ refers to the interdependency and interaction of physical and digital systems and environments.

This fall, the Entertainment Studio’s tech seminar extends research into phygital processes prototyped during our winter 2022 seminar. Working in small teams, we will examine and prototype eight workflows using the latest tools that merge physical and digital technologies within the emerging field of virtual production. Including compositing, structure from motion, data-driven interactive art, real-time camera tracking, dynamic virtual landscapes, metahumans + motion capture, live action cinematography and AI image/model generation, we will create volume II of a user manual for deploying these technologies customized to the equipment and knowledge we have at UCLA IDEAS.

The IDEAS IDEO Studio is a collaboration between AUD's MSAUD program and the global design company IDEO

In the IDEAS IDEO Tech Seminar, students will be asked to create vignettes of near-futures that speculate on labor. These vignettes will be composed with the aid of text to image machine learning tools. As the tools architects use become further automated and altered, so too will the practices and dynamics of labor itself. Pairing the subject matter of the class, with the aid of text-to-image machine learning tools, will complicate, automate, augment, and alter any preconceived notion we as designers and architects might have biases towards. Similar anxieties and opportunities presented themselves in Europe during the industrial era, giving rise to various art movements, including that of the Impressionists. As the air grew thick with soot, so too did the thickness of and viscosity of Monet’s paint strokes. As the displacement of normative gender roles, societal hierarchies and long held traditions accelerated, the subjects in Manet’s paintings reflect the alienating and disillusioning world they confronted. As the exploding trade in Europe made artist’s tools cheap and plentiful, the quantity and pace of works increased as well which aided and helped generate new techniques and aesthetics.

Our present is confronted with such opportunities and issues, that of an exponentially different maginituate. Students will create impressions to comment on issues surrounding automation, representation and tools. Topics include that of biases, in representation, practice, and automation; new disciplines and expertise that will emerge to confront global warming, the refugee crisis, and the lingering residue of colonialism and imperialism; critiques towards the trajectory of current neoliberalism economics and politics; the design and art disciplines in relation to extended reality, machine learning, craft, expertise and technique.

Description forthcoming.

This course introduces students to a generative approach to digital design and robotic making with the goal of unifying design and production within the creative process. Students will develop skills and experience in visual programming, robot motion planning, as well working be with materials such as clay and concrete. Students will work in teams and will pick one of the proposed design options, paired with a selected process, either robotic clay extrusion or robotic stamping.

Each team will follow a number of assignments that require the consideration of, material behaviour, structural performance along with robotic production constraints. The course will explore design as the outcome of materially formative processes of computation and production. The primary goal of this course is to help students formulate an informed research proposal for their culminating urban design studio.
The first part of the semester is organized as a sequence of tutorials and exercises, and covers all the techniques necessary to pass this course successfully. In parallel to completing these exercises, students are expected to research and test related material ideas. These parallel explorations will inform the final project executed in the second part of the semester.

Description coming soon

Description coming soon

Description coming soon

Tijuana is possibly the best example of a mutant city, where architecture and urban design can be hardly found as symbols of permanence. Instead, what remains and might strengthen the city's form is its territory.

The studio will focus on the last section of Alamar Stream in Tijuana, Mexico, recently channelized with a concrete streambed in an attempt to prevent floods. This area has become a contested part of the city as different groups have advocated for its conservation, while maquilas and irregular settlements occupy the land.

It is a fact that water quality is very compromised. The stream is seen as a dump rather than as a backbone capable of structuring the future growth of Tijuana.

Students will focus their work in the section defined by Bonanza Av. and the intersection with the Tijuana River. This 5.7-mile segment will be divided into several subparts, according to a series of topics from which students will have a chance to pick and that will serve as guidelines to develop a project that creates an ecosystem for the river and the city by responding to some of its most pressing socio-cultural issues. We will design the urban-rural system that will permit Alamar Stream to continue flowing, shaping the north east of Tijuana. Projects will determine a permanent structure that will have to adjust to its impermanent migrant population and mutant urbanization.

Tijuana is the short name of Tia Juana, a ranch established in the basin of the river that today holds the same name. Originally, its population of 200 people depended on the larger town of San Diego. It started transforming right after the US-Mexico war in 1848, when the border between the two countries was drawn adjacent to the ranch. It took some more years for it to be recognized as a town, in 1889, when Don Santiago Argüello and Agustín Olvera celebrated a contract to develop a city.

Tijuana started growing in the early XX century, during the Prohibition era. The small town became a tourist attraction for thousands coming from the north, where they had the possibility to develop activities otherwise banned in the US. Tijuana took this chance as a spin to become a city. Soon after, several schools, universities and cultural centers were established by groups of Mexican entrepreneurs, mainly moving from Sonora to the border town, taking advantage of the opportunities this new city had to offer.

At the same time, during the 1940’s, as a consequence of the need for working hands in the US caused by WWII, many migrated from all around Mexico to the US, looking for better opportunities. Tijuana became an important cross point. This condition has strengthened as decades go by. Today, the city is the most crossed border in the world, with approximately 19 million commutes around the year.

The next decades have only seen Tijuana grow as a distinct urban entity, with a dened culture and character, coming from strong and diverse forces: migration, irregular topography, hard border town, transitioning urban form, violence resulting from drug cartels, booming economy, and its adjacency to the ocean. These conditions have shaped, in less than 100 years, a 1.8 million city, where more than 80% of its built area is informal and fragile, structured and restructured as different groups pass by.

Tijuana lies in between the Tijuana and the Alamar rivers, in the Tijuana River Basin. It holds several running streams that flow from San Pedro Martyr Mountain Range. However, fast urbanization processes have forced the transformation of the rivers and several streams into concrete channels. The challenge lies in recovering the power of these landmarks as systems capable of shaping the XXI century ever-transforming city.

The studio will explore how the playground can reclaim its function as a creative laboratory for learning about and experiencing our physical world, and how play can open up novel ways of thinking about ecology, community and public space. More specifically, we will look at two different ideas of play and space-making: one – based on Isamu Noguchi’s playground proposals – is about ground modulation, subtle shifts in topography, gradients, openness and continuity; the other – based on Aldo van Eyck’s urban playgrounds – is about repetitive elements, barriers and obstacles that one climbs over and passes through.

The project is to design a new hybrid of exterior and interior playgrounds and a childcare/community center located in Stamford, Connecticut, along the recently naturalized Mill River waterfront. Careful consideration will be given to the integration of all aspects of the architecture – its volume, program, circulation, egress, structure, envelope, contexts, and landscape.

Of particular interest will be the development of a porous building typology and its relationship to the ground. Spaces in-between will be equally important as spaces within. In disciplinary terms, the plan will be the primary modus operandi through which we will experiment and search for novel and unexpected ways of inhabiting space, where exteriors are interiorized, boundaries become fuzzy, and permeable thresholds link the building with the surrounding environment. In short, we will work on the project via ‘The Leaky Plan’.

Course Objectives and Outcomes: This Advanced Topics Studio aims to expose students to critical disciplinary skills and their conceptual, historical and theoretical contexts, in order to guide the students through clear design methodologies that lead to the development of their project. Of particular interest is how to explore and construct an argument through drawing, and more specifically, how the orthographic plan drawing becomes a place of speculation that ultimately ties to ideas of inhabiting three-dimensional space. Questions of community, ecology, tectonics, and aesthetics are investigated through precise and intentional articulation of form and materiality, with each team’s intentions conveyed in a few specific representational artifacts. The hope is for each student to formulate their own critical position and research agenda through the project’s design, and in doing so outline their own design agency in the world.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote about a “certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which all manner of incongruous things were held. The imagination of such a framework is analogous to language itself: it allows us to hold these various, incommensurate ideas, and can be useful as a model for architecture.

We can understand architecture as an act of sorting, grouping, gathering, bundling, and categorizing. Imagining programmatic adjacencies, aligning and distributing structural loads, classifying window types and door schedules–these are some of the many ways that ideas of order get encoded in buildings. But as Foucault writes in The Order of Things, order is not only given intrinsically by the things that are being organized; order is also given extrinsically by the rubric or framework that places them in particular relationships.

In this studio, we will focus on the order and organization of a building for plants—their development, preservation, and study. In taking on the particularities of such a program, we are also turning our attention to the order of things more generally. As we move away from the conventions that govern human-centered architecture, making a building for plants and humans (as well as their will as their supporting ecologies) necessarily challenges many of our underlying organizational assumptions.

The studio will proceed in two parts. In Part 1 we will identify and extract the organizational logics of several paradigmatic projects, paying particular attention to stuff: What constitutes stuff or the contents of a building? How is it organized? And what are the architectural elements that instantiate these ideas? We will then generate a series of structural models to explore how architectural elements can organize space and its contents. We will consider the ways columns, walls, arches, vaults, and long-span structures can define and reinforce, or conversely multiply and problematize, these ideas of architectural order.

We will use these models as a launching off point for Part 2 of the project: the design of a building for plants that have been identified by the IIUCN as “Extinct in the Wild,” those species that can no longer exist outside of human care due to total habitat loss. In other words, these plants require buildings to exist–and with a projected 40 percent of the world’s species at risk for extinction, there is a pressing need to consider the relationship between buildings and plants. The building will be composed of a greenhouse, herbarium, and seed vault, as well as research and exhibition programs, asking students to consider the ways they might organize and structure the relationships between big things and small things, between light and dark zones, between highly controlled environments and more loosely defined spaces. Students will be working on a tight urban site adjacent to the rehabilitated fragment of the Los Angeles River in Frogtown at the nexus of residential, industrial, recreational, and infrastructural fabric. In this way the site will require students to imagine the kind and the degree of engagement their projects might have with a varied cast of users both locally and in the city as a whole.

In all, the studio will use the term “Extinct in the Wild” as a conceit to question the imagined binaries between architecture and the natural world, to situate our work in the realities of our current moment, and in so doing to return to perennial epistemic questions that underscore our work.

Description coming soon

What is today’s vision of the future living environment? Pre-industrial revolution, activities of work and activities of life all revolved around the same space – the home. If the separation of domestic and work space into discrete zones informed the ethos of modern architecture and urban planning in the 20th century, the 21st century is characterized by the fluidity and flexibility of spaces and lifestyles. In this time when domestic space and workspaces are reunified and these types of environments become ubiquitous, the functions of the space will be less prescribed and the activities and experiences of daily life will transcend the structures that contain them – becoming more fluid, interconnected, and seamless than ever before. The logic that structures the practice of architecture will need to shift as a result.

At the forefront of this shift are numerous co-working/living spaces that have appeared in the past few years. A Cambrian explosion of niche co-working/living spaces has emerged to serve specific industries, interests, and communities. During this time of critical evaluation and experimentation, co-working/living becomes an indicator of the broader shifts brought about by developments in technology, changes in lifestyle, and the rise of the sharing economy. This shift has become a lens to understand how our present moment may impact the future of architecture.

However, as most of the species from the Cambrian explosion terminated due the sudden change in their environment, newly emerged co-working/living spaces have been struggling in a new situation triggered by a global pandemic, shift to remote work and rise of Metaverse. Most likely, the species that survive through this challenge will become dominant elements in the future living environment. If the generation marked by the rise of WeWork and similar coworking spaces has been concluded by the pandemic, we need to understand the new generation emerging from these changes.

Under this hypothesis, WorkHouse 3.0 research studio will explore what the phenomenon of co-work/living after years of the pandemic means for architecture, and how it can serve as a catalyst for a series of mutually beneficial, thoughtfully coordinated programmatic relationships. We believe that this approach will lead us to a series of new building types which will help us to envision the future of our living environment today.

The following key questions are asked:

• What is the role of architecture in contemporary collective life? How can architecture catalyze programmatic relationships that produce value and respond to changing ideals of society? How can it respond to new conditions that are arising under the pressures of global pandemic, rise of Metaverse?

• How can we critically engage the economies of architecture? How do sharing economies and changing patterns of habitation impact the way we consider space use and ownership?

• What is the value of spatial proximity when decentralized communication allows work and life to happen anywhere? How can we address the fragmentation of physical spaces and the emergence of new types of communities?

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 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 it has been a summer of record setting heat. Extreme heat affects health and wellbeing and it effects how we occupy and use buildings. Ground-up construction will diminish in urban environments and increasingly be replaced with retrofits. Within the studio we will rethink how to design retrofit of existing buildings, providing them a new wearable skin, and one that responds to extreme climatic conditions. The research studio will consider disenfranchised communities which are often the densest and lowest performing, and therefore the most impacted.

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 critical to deliver on the Glasgow Climate Pact.

Description coming soon

Today’s rooms, more than the rooms of any other time and generation, contain technologies that are the gateways to an almost infinite number of narratives and mediated worlds. Every single room today operates exactly like the cupboard in Narnia. Every object has the capacity to tell its own story, whether it is the history of the hands that have held it, or whether it reveals to us the entire narrative of its manufacturing, distribution and use, in short, the story of the entire global supply chain. Our rooms are universes of information and narratives.  

The Entertainment Studio frames the way we collectively think about, design, build, and tell stories about the world. This year, our starting point will be the room, and it will be the gateway into your world. Whether a film, a game, an installation or mixed reality experience, you will worldbuild from within the room to speculate on alternate realities derived from the world around you.

The room will act as a gateway in countless ways this year. It will be a space, much like Jeff Wall’s A View From an Apartment designed and lived to portray a moment in time, it will be a room, like Hitchcock’s Rear Window from which we look out to speculate at the unfolding narratives beyond, or as in Spike Jonze’s film Her, a space in which we fall in love to a being that is simultaneously in the room with us, and in thousands, if not millions of other rooms. It may be a room, like the bedroom in Chris Nolan’s Interstellar that we travel to the ends of the universe just to get back inside, or it may be the room that travels with us as we move across the country looking for work in an Amazon fulfillment center as in Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland. In Andy Warhol’s room, The Factory, the room was a space of cultural production, the output of which was as much the art as it was celebrity. This year, you decide where your room takes you, what media it opens into, and how it draws in your audience.

The IDEAS IDEO Studio is a collaboration between AUD's MSAUD program and the global design company IDEO.

In the IDEAS IDEO Research Studio, students build to think, engaging in dialogue with the many non-architecture based design disciplines at IDEO, tackling design challenges from various points of view. These complex challenges ground themselves in research observations and studies of how we live today, in order to reimagine the way we live in the future. Focusing on reconciling the digital with the physical, this studio explores the constraints and possibilities of architecture in its relationship to emerging technologies across multiple disciplines, scales, and timeframes, always designing towards urban implications, not necessarily urban scale.

Los Angeles is in progress today. Spike Jonze’s Her and Dennis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 show two possibilities for Los Angeles’s urban future, each a spectrum between preposterous and probable. Through design fiction, rapid prototyping, and video game technology, a plurality of future LAs will come to life, focusing on the physical and digital implications of design outcomes at the neighborhood scale. As we increasingly dive into virtual and augmented worlds and leave the physical world behind, what is the role of architecture and the relevance of place left behind?

In the IDEAS IDEO Tech Seminar, students will be asked to create vignettes of near-futures that speculate on labor. These vignettes will be composed with the aid of text to image machine learning tools. As the tools architects use become further automated and altered, so too will the practices and dynamics of labor itself. Pairing the subject matter of the class, with the aid of text-to-image machine learning tools, will complicate, automate, augment, and alter any preconceived notion we as designers and architects might have biases towards. Similar anxieties and opportunities presented themselves in Europe during the industrial era, giving rise to various art movements, including that of the Impressionists. As the air grew thick with soot, so too did the thickness of and viscosity of Monet’s paint strokes. As the displacement of normative gender roles, societal hierarchies and long held traditions accelerated, the subjects in Manet’s paintings reflect the alienating and disillusioning world they confronted. As the exploding trade in Europe made artist’s tools cheap and plentiful, the quantity and pace of works increased as well which aided and helped generate new techniques and aesthetics.

Our present is confronted with such opportunities and issues, that of an exponentially different maginituate. Students will create impressions to comment on issues surrounding automation, representation and tools. Topics include that of biases, in representation, practice, and automation; new disciplines and expertise that will emerge to confront global warming, the refugee crisis, and the lingering residue of colonialism and imperialism; critiques towards the trajectory of current neoliberalism economics and politics; the design and art disciplines in relation to extended reality, machine learning, craft, expertise and technique.

Description coming soon

2035 will be an auspicious year for the Golden State.

It’ll be the end of the line for the combustion engine car. Gas-powered vehicles will no longer be sold. EVs will be the main form of automobile transportation. In the City of LA there are nearly 570 gas stations. The City is interested in developing a grand plan that reinvents these sites all together to create the greatest possible positive impact. Given their high-visibility, prime locations in communities, this poses an opportunity to transform the urban landscape of the city. #gasstationsnearme #mobility

Baby Boomers will be in full retirement mode. They aren’t going to spend their sunset years in retirement homes. They are the first cohort to be raised on mass advertising and see themselves as informed consumers who will define their later years their own way. With far more wealth than any other generation (over $65 trillion as of 2020), they will have the spending power to buy the life and environments they want. In 2035, the design of cities and architecture will be skewed to the wishes of a category-defying set of seniors. #grandfluencers #coastalgrandmother #theoldgays

By that time California will be entering peak climate change. It’s predicted that we’ll experience extreme weather conditions: higher temperatures and long periods of severe drought. They will contribute to a greater frequency of large and fast moving wildfires. A new addition will be the megastorm, which is anticipated to drop 16 inches of atmospheric river carried rain in a month, compromising the integrity of dams, aqueducts, reservoirs, and flood canals. California’s infrastructure will be due for an upgrade. #megafire #megastorm

The mindset of the studio is to not see these as problems to solve (vacant lots, aging, climate), but as the premise to apply creative thinking and ingenious technologies to envision a Los Angeles that will improve the lives of its future inhabitants. #ministryofthefuture

California’s leadership in design, technology, and sustainability are big reasons why the state is the fifth largest economy in the world (right behind Germany and ahead of India). Over the year-long course, we will tap into these three realms of knowledge to develop a 2035 statewide vision plan and a city plan for LA, and then zooming in to design a master plan and building.

The studio will integrate video animation, predictive learning-based mapping, and 3d printing into the analysis and design of project proposals.

Description coming soon

An introduction to construction systems and techniques as practiced in progressive architecture, past and present, through lectures, site visits, and case studies. Intended for students without a prior degree in architecture, coursework focuses on prevalent physical principles of construction, materials, methods and associated professional practices essential to the making of architecture.

Course objectives include:

• Understand the process of construction, its elements, and the full life cycle of building materials and systems.
• Recognize construction delivery systems, procedures, and assembly details as an integral part of the design process. Review the short- and long-term environmental impacts associated with construction and design decisions.
• Explore the production of architecture through visits to construction sites of various building types.
• Apply this understanding towards explaining an existing building through the production of a detailed case study.

The course themes proceed as such:

• Introduction – Construction Activity
• Site Work / Foundations
• Masonry
• Concrete
• Wood
• Framing
• Steel
• Envelopes
• Glass, Windows, and Doors
• Case Study Final Presentations

Description coming soon