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.

Description coming soon

This course functions as an anthology of housing histories from the 1850s to the present. As such, itoffers a comprehensive albeit necessarily incomplete bibliography dealing with relevant case studiesfrom 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 actors, techniques, pedagogies, and ideologies—has interacted with these processes. Through situated examples andrelated literature we will ask: Which professional and disciplinary arrangements in architecture havedelivered what types of contributions to the history of housing? What technical or bureaucraticframeworks have either facilitated or hindered these programs? Who has gained and who has lost fromthe multiplicity of processes amalgamated under the word “housing”? Rather than treating housing as acategory belonging unilaterally to architecture, we will scrutinize the contingent role of architecture inthe broader aggregate of agencies building (or un-building) housing.

“Instrument” derives from the Latin instruere, meaning to construct, to build, to arrange. Buildings are inconceivable without the analytical and projective capacities of instruments. Instruments not only allow us to measure and survey the material conditions of our site, but also to visualize and communicate our designs. The seminar views this technical and epistemological pairing as the crux of the design process. How do the measuring devices we use to survey the landscape underpin how we view and intervene in it? How do drawing instruments guide the technical and material conditions of possibility for design? And how, in turn, do they shape us as both designers and citizens of the built environment?

Instrumentalities plays on the operative capacity of instruments as a means to a design end, alongside their cognitive dimensions, the mentalities they ask us to inhabit in order to get there. Part one of the seminar guides students in assembling an analytical mapping that describes a given site. To inform the analysis, we will study archaic measuring instruments like river gauges, wind vanes, sundials, observatories, and seismoscopes. We assume instruments are best visualized in section to expose the anatomy of their interlinked parts. In part two, we will design our own building-instrument: a research station that measures one specific environmental, climactic, topographical, or hydrological condition on site. As we design these artifacts, we will refine the vocabulary we use to describe them — instrument, tool, device, apparatus, machine, contrivance — to specify how they operate on site.

The disciplinary architectural production is fundamentally situated between the imaginary and the eventual artifact. While the general assumption is that this artifact is a building, the reality of architectural output and its daily labor is more often dedicated to the generation of architectural mediations such as drawings, models, and images. Even though the realized architecture as building is the physical manifestation of the spatial imaginary, this reality alone is not the only verification of architectural sensibility and intellect. Our expanding disciplinary vault is full of projects which only live and thrive as drawings, models, and images, representing the architectural ideas held within them.

It is usually this material that challenges the norms and defines new frontiers of our discipline through speculative ideas regarding our built environment; it is usually through this material that we stake theoretical positions to construct new agendas; it is usually this material that allows us to contemplate competing discursive trajectories; it is usually through this material that we delve into new aesthetics; it is usually this material around which we engage one another for collective and diverse intellectual growth.

As architects, our everyday labor does not include the act of building. However, we sketch, draw, model, make models, render, animate, simulate, write, and talk to communicate our architectural positions. We engage fellow architects, academics, engineers, private and public clients, donors, community boards, the broader public, building departments, contractors, fabricators, and manufacturers for various purposes and with varying agendas. Our ideas, whether they are conceptual, technical, or descriptive, are mediated through a number of tools to communicate our intentions. Architecture is a multi-medium effort that requires expertise from a broad range of technologies and channels of mediation.

The conceptual rigor and the critical skill sets one needs to possess within the paradigm of ever-evolving technologies of mediation are paramount in one’s learning and growth in the discipline of architecture. This sequence of three required courses in the first year of the Master of Architecture program aims to focus solely on the development of conceptual depth, aesthetic sensibilities, and the fundamental skill sets to engage conventional and emerging technologies toward the mastery of architectural mediations.

This seminar examines the relationship between architecture, resources, and territory in 20th century modernization projects in the USA, Latin America, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Africa. We will explore the conditions in which architecture became a tool of development (a concept which we will address critically), and the functions it assumed in the ordering and managing of labor, natural resources and industry. While modernization projects are usually considered in terms of engineering and large-scale infrastructure, architecture will offer a lens for a nuanced analysis of the epistemological assumptions and value systems that undergird these projects. We will examine the role architecture played in the consolidation of “development thinking” in the shift from late colonial projects to the Cold War, specifically in reformulating the colonial relations between resource extraction and production, and the new emphasis placed on the maintaining of the “smallness” of small scale societies in terms of village habitation, and their low-tech means of livelihood, either in agriculture or in craft-based industries.

This seminar will investigate the relationships between architecture, climate, and cognition. Our inquiry will follow two lines. The first line will trace the evolution of indoor climate technology. We will analyze architecture as an instrument of respiratory health and thermal control, revealing how this infrastructure serves human homeostasis while recasting the environment in its image. In the 19th and 20th centuries, engineers gradually offloaded homeostatic functions to artificial devices, making outdoor climate irrelevant to indoor life and freeing the conscious mind to do other work. Profound consequences for the climate system and public health emerged, however, from thermal modernization as it proceeded to rewirehow people relate to the environment. Whereas past cultures had little choice but to conform to natural climate patterns, most affluent people today can power through them, barely registering them as salient. This detachment is not just somatic but deeply psychological, making construing climate breakdown all the more problematic. The second line of inquiry will probe the cognitive aspects of this predicament. We will explore how dovetailing sensing technologies with the neurophysiology of pleasure and emotion might promote alternative thermal practices. Students will develop experimental proposals, exploring how to make climate salient to everyday cognitive life.

All disciplines have quibbles with form. In law there are quarrels between legal formalists, which relish the abstraction of a well-crafted law based on principle, and realists for whom judicial decisions are not shielded from the contingencies of life, like a bad breakfast sitting uncomfortably in a judge’s stomach, for example. For architects, the trouble with form lies usually in the source of its authority. Unlike the life sciences, which investigate living forms as they exist in the world, architecture often faces the problem of the blank page (or the empty lot). Which is why simple questions such as why one uses which forms—let alone how, where, and when—have haunted architecture for millennia. This has led architects to rely on the relative authority of concepts like nature, style, precedent, function, invention, place, technique, and so on.

In the West, the issue has been further complicated with the arrival of the different “formalisms” at the beginning of the last century, predicated as they have been (not unlike law) on an old duality originated in Greek thought: form as a principle or idea, and therefore above the imperfections of phenomena; and form as matter, and as such belonging fully in the realm of experience. Historians have dwelled on theobvious connections between this dualism and Christian cosmology, which has privileged the (immortal) immaterial over the imperfections of the (perishable) material world. With exceptions, formalisttraditions—in both architectural scholarship and practice—have largely honored this divide, wideningthe gap between idealists focused on form-as-content, and materialists who see form as the expressionof ideology.

The course revisits the concept of form in search of definitions that may help designers and scholars narrow the distance between these poles. When considered both as metaphor and noun—concept and thing—form has offered insights into abstract problems of order, rhythm, composition, organization, and structure; but it has also given concrete clues for tracing connections between the actors, practices, techniques, and systems of belief, power, and knowledge involved in the production of these concepts.

In the seminar we will consider all of the above as the stuff of form. We will read landmark texts on formal analysis, overlapping them with recent, more relational understandings of form that, as a writer in the syllabus suggest, “don’t allow any assumption of a divorce between aesthetics and material aims.”

Despite the promise of rapid prototyping technologies, casting continues to produce three-dimensional copies more quickly, economically, and durably than rapid prototyping. Beyond the known advantages of serial production - such as the interchangeability of standardized parts and the durability of continuous surfaces - casting, and its required tooling, have received little academic attention despite their central roles in the production of seriality. Tooling refers to the mold used to produce copies of components or objects. When reconsidered in light of computation, the mold offers opportunities to rethink seriality through the introduction of plasticity.

This seminar will examine the problem of the mold in vessel production, challenging traditional slip casting techniques with the introduction of rapid prototyping and a desire for variable seriality. Here the vessel is neither a high volume, identically reproduced object nor a singular, handcrafted artifact. Instead, we will approach the vessel with plasticity in mind. Plasticity refers to the capacity of a form to reflect the myriad of conditions under which it takes shape. Students will design the mold alongside proposals for a series of vessels. Static molds will be reconceived as responsive molds, capable of adaptation and variation due to the use of a flexible or reconfigurable mold or through the rearrangement of components into multiple forms. The resulting cast objects will creatively circumnavigate the rigidity and identical repetition associated with the mold.

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 aim is to explore how these thermal knots can obviate mechanical systems while reframing how architecture can support climate adaptation this century. The course has four episodes, each with a lecture, workshop, and experiment, helping students develop their proposals in measured stages.

Infrastructure grounds architecture and is, itself, a form of architecture. This course begins with the premise that rather than a hidden, neutral technology outside the domain of designers, infrastructure is both a material thing and a political category with a long history. Through it, the modern world and its dominant systems of knowledge were built and sustained. Infrastructural acts, therefore, shift our focus from infrastructure as technical artifact to the infrastructural as descriptive quality. After examining different methodological frameworks that foreground the infrastructural, we will explore its acts—surveying terrain, building systems, ordering cities, shaping time, extracting resources, changing climate—all while attending to the organisms caught up in these acts of design. Lectures will be thematic and roughly chronological.

In this seminar, students will work together to reconstruct a digital version of an iconic 12-minute short film. To accomplish this, students will first form smaller teams, each tasked with reconstructing a 2-minute segment of the film. These segments will then be edited together to create a single cinematic composition. The goal is for the recreation of this film to be a hyper-realistic duplicate, meticulously replicating every detail from the physical realm and faithfully mirroring its cinematic composition in the virtual world. The objective is to recreate the entire short film.

In groups, students will be tasked with analyzing, discerning, and understanding their assigned scene, documenting its cinematic mood, props, compositional techniques, lighting devices, focal lengths, camera movements, and sequencing.

Ultimately, the outcome will be a collection of hyper-realistic duplicates. The final output will be a 12-minute film animated in Unreal Engine. The students’ animations will consist of a 3D-designed film set, a series of highly detailed props, animated characters, and dynamic sets. Through this exercise, students will gain a deeper understanding of how to create cinema within the digital sphere. This level of process and articulation will ultimately influence their own future projects.

“The purpose of a system is what it does.” - Stafford Beer

This seminar explores augmented reality as a dynamic technological system of perception andmediation, investigating how computational overlays transform our engagement with materialenvironments. Drawing on cybernetic principles and technological philosophies, students willdevelop Unity-based AR applications that reimagine sensing not as mere data collection, but asa recursive process of environmental interpretation and feedback.

Students will develop Unity-based AR applications that extend human sensing capabilities, cre-ating interactive diagnostic interfaces that reveal hidden infrastructural narratives and systemicrelationships. By designing computational layers that annotate, analyze, and reframe spatialinformation, participants will learn to craft technologies that don’t merely represent the world,but actively reconfigure our cognitive engagement with material and technological systems.

The course blends technical skill-building in AR development with theoretical investigationsinto how digital interfaces can restructure perception, maintenance practices, and our funda-mental comprehension of complex environments

This seminar will focus on generating architectural models. These models will jettison many crutches that most models have to submit; site, program, scale, budget, client, stakeholders, and so forth. Instead, students will be asked to consider the objects they design and their qualities as they relate to aesthetics. Positing that from these aesthetics can arise new architectures and thus new potentials for the discipline and the practice. We will be designing the models using a variety of generative machine learning techniques and then construct these large-scale models using additive fabrication techniques. The seminar will focus on design techniques in both the digital and analog. Much of the seminar will go over techniques that enable a designer to work with both and switch between the two with agility.

Like architecture, with its double capacity to represent and mediate, paper too functions both as a substrate for inscription, and an active agent in determining its meaning. In this colloquium, we explore paper’s ubiquitous mediatic capacity by looking not only at its contents, but also the conditions through which it becomes a document through its formatting, circulation, handling, and storage. What is the relationship between these operations and the contents of the documents? How do these operations produce effects of authority, epistemic or other? How do graphic artifacts mediate perception and recording in the production of knowledge? How is value attached or contested through documents? This seminar explores documents’ discursive effects in the production of selves (scientific, political, geopolitical, gendered) and publics, through a discussion of their agency in governance, law, medicine, architecture, the building industry, and land regimes of property.

Workshops:
Your essay will focus on a paper object (can be two or three dimensional) and investigate the relationship between its mediatic and representational capacities. The first workshop will explore the material dimensions (formatting, circulation, handling, storage) of paper objects, their possible relations with the contents represented, and the claims of authority they produce. The second workshop will consider the public effects of these operations in terms of legislation, scientific research, or institutional formation.

Description coming soon

The increased level of uncertainty of the resilience of food supplies as a consequence of climate instability has a significant impact on agriculture, one of the largest and most consequential industries in the State of California.

Long recognized as a primary initiative of the University of California, agricultural research has been supported by a network of Agricultural and Natural Resources research stations located in each of the primary climate zones of the State. While the research focus at these Centers has historically been directed to optimization of yield and economies of production, food scientists, natural resources specialists and environmental scientists have redirected efforts to address viability of established plant hybrids and agricultural practices to address unpredictable agricultural production due to extreme weather conditions.

The program will be developed at two of the eleven sites managed by the University of California ANR across the state with the expectation that research in each of the distinct biomes will be generalizable to similar climates globally. The Centers, and the surrounding agricultural facilities will be capable of supporting research by scientists globally, who then will share strategies and solutions at the conference facilities.

The first site, in the eastern Sierras at Mammoth Lakes, is a cold arid climate characterized by significant annual runoff. The second site, in the Imperial Valley near the Mexican border, is an arid desert climate. Much of the annual rainfall occurs in late summer monsoons. Decades of overuse of pesticides and fertilizer have altered water and soil quality, rendering the region representative of intensively used agricultural areas across the globe.

The landscape morphology of each of the sites is a result of significant geologic and weather events: the basin surrounding the Mammoth Lakes site is a sunken volcanic caldera. The Imperial Valley site, adjacent to the Salton Sea, is one of the largest inland bodies of water in the state and was formed following catastrophic flood of the Colorado River in 1905.

The program is divided into two components: individual residential units for scholars in residence and conference facilities including dining, meeting, and work spaces. This program will be developed twice over the quarter, first in the hot arid site in the Imperial Valley, second in the cold high-altitude Sierra site. The same program will be deployed on each of the sites with the expectation that climate factors and environmental performance will be significant determinants of form.

Working in pairs, teams will plan their proposed compound for the first site in Holtville, CA. Each team member will then work individually to develop either the housing or the conference space program for a final review at the midterm.

The project will be located on the alternate site in the eastern Sierras for the second half of the quarter. Teams will be expected to produce an architectural counterargument to the first project by reconsidering fundamental assumptions of orientation, engagement with the landscape, ratio of floor area to areas of envelope.

In an increasingly globalized world, where architectural aesthetics and values are often dominated by international styles and homogenized design languages, it is essential to explore what architecture and design can contribute to a post-global reality. Critical regionalism, as articulated by theorists like Kenneth Frampton, provides a framework for resisting the uniformity of global modernism by emphasizing the importance of place, climate, and historical context. However, its principles have frequently been expressed through a modernist aesthetic lens. This course does not align strictly with either school of thought; instead, it seeks to draw insights from both, working toward a new authenticity in architectural expression.

Armenia offers a compelling context for such exploration. Its architectural landscape reflects a rich interplay of traditional vernacular forms and modernist influences, shaped by the country’s unique historical, cultural, and geographical conditions.

Through travel to Armenia, this course aims to develop hybrid strategies that merge hyper-local and universal precedents. The focus will be on revitalizing a largely dilapidated historic market in the city of Gyumri (formerly Leninakan), transforming it into a vibrant culinary ecosystem. In doing so, the course will foster deeply rooted discussions centered on distinct tectonic and ordering systems - particularly those involving sticks and stones. This elemental focus not only harks back to the basics of architectural form but also seeks to uncover fundamental strategies for design synthesis.

This studio focuses on designing innovative, steel-framed, open-air vertical structures comprising five five-a-side Futsal fields and a cooling center to support Angelenos during extreme heatwaves. Using the framework of the annual ACSA Steel Design Competition, the studio will begin by exploring various tower configurations, ranging from straight vertical forms to terraced assemblies, while concurrently conducting climatological, structural, and programmatic research.

The design process will be Darwinian and collaborative, emphasizing informed decision-making that balances empiricism and lyricism. The goal is to produce dynamic, passively cooled, shaded social condensers that enliven the metropolitan skyline. The proposed building will encompass approximately 80,000 square feet across five stories, including a covered rooftop field. It will be located in the northern section of Athens Park in South Los Angeles. Each field, excluding perimeter circulation and gathering areas, will measure approximately 11,000 gross square feet. Floor-to-floor and total heights will be determined through initial research and sectional studies.

One field will be located at or near ground level, with the remaining four above. These fields will also serve as passively cooled components of the cooling center and may function as flexible event spaces for non-Futsal-related activities, depending on the floor assemblies. Additionally, an actively cooled hall and essential support spaces—including restrooms, an elevator core, and areas for electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems (dimensions to be determined)—will be located at grade or subgrade.

In this studio, you are not just architects—you are worldbuilders. The room is your canvas, the space where your story takes root. Let the world unfold through the room, layer by layer, frame by frame.

As we navigate this year, the room will act as your gateway—a carefully crafted space that reflects the world around it. Whether through subtle, mundane changes or dramatic shifts, the room will evolve. Your challenge is not just to design the room, but to craft a world through that space, to think about what the room says about the people, technologies, and cultures that shaped it. The room will act as a mirror, showing us both the world inside its walls and the world outside, shifting across time. The success of your worldbuild lies in its ability to support the narrative while simultaneously revealing the depth of the world beyond.

Worldbuilding is the subtle, intricate act of designing the environment in which a story lives. It is a craft that defines the space where narratives unfold, the backdrop against which characters breathe, struggle, and exist. A successful worldbuild creates coherence—a bond between the space and the story—so that the environment feels lived-in, integral, and essential to the narrative it holds.

When the world doesn’t fit the story, the fabric unravels, and the immersive power dissolves. Every single element within that world becomes a cue, a guide to the audience's understanding of the narrative: the atmosphere, the objects, the colors, the quality of light, the passage of time, the sounds, the texture of materials, and even the way a breeze drifts in from a window.

This year, we are turning our attention to a single room as the locus for an entire universe of stories. A room, on the surface, seems limited—a static space with four walls. But within those boundaries lies the potential for an infinite array of narratives. The room is not just a container; it’s a reflection of the world beyond it. It is the way we come to understand time, space, and the lives lived within it. The objects that populate the room, the marks left behind, the shadows cast at different times of day, all create a dialogue with the outside world. Through this room, we will see the world, and through its design, we will define the narratives that take place within it.

Worldbuilding is more than set dressing. It’s about creating a cohesive language between the space and the story it tells. The architecture of the room, the way the light falls across the floor, the view through the window—these are not just background elements; they are as crucial to the narrative as the characters who move through the space. The room will speak to the world it inhabits, telling us about the society that built it, the technologies that shaped it, the people who lived and worked within it, and the cultures that evolved through it. A well-designed room allows the audience to feel the presence of time, the layering of experiences, and the evolution of the world outside its walls.

The MSAUD Technology Studio scrutinizes the heavily mediated interplay between form, image, and language within the media-saturated human experience. 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.

The 2024-25 topic Temporal/Spectral builds upon the ongoing research of the Studio to 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.

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.

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 second 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.

Description coming soon

The second quarter in the year-long 403.81 Research Studio

The second quarter in the year-long 403.82 Research Studio

The seminar will provide students with the opportunity to develop a disciplinary position and strategy. Selecting from one of the practices below, each person will formulate a position statement to differentiate the practice from all others in the field. Based on the statement, each student will create a strategy for the practice to thrive. For the purposes of the course, ‘strategy’ will be defined as: the creative alignment of available resources to achieve an intended outcome.

This is the second quarter of the first-year core studio sequence within the MArch program at UCLA AUD. The core studios consecutively expand in scope and complexity, building towards more personalized explorations and experiments conducted in the last year of the program in the advanced and research studios.

The 412 Building Design Studio focuses on the relation of structure to architectural design, examining techniques of structural form-finding and expression. The studio oscillates between notions of structure as a response to the external forces that act on a building (gravity first among these), and spatial order. That is, we will think of structure doing two kinds of work. First, it responds to the conditions of physics by managing a set of vertical, lateral, and torsional forces. Second, structure organizes matter and space through its spacing, repetition, sizing, and, at times, through discrete and idiosyncratic gestures. Mediating between these two roles, the aesthetic expression of structure is the point where the presence of mostly invisible forces begins to merge with the design of architecture’s visible presence. In particular, this occurs through ornament and its longstanding role as the locus where the physically performative parts of architecture start to communicate with\ an audience through an expanded register of optical and spatial effects.

Students design a house for plants: an arboretum with a specific intent to conserve and, as such, educate the public on conservation on a fictitious urban site in Los Angeles to produce a new building typology which appropriates the program for a dense urban condition with tectonic aspects supporting a fully planted out urban conservationist landscape. Our building proposal will serve as the enclosure to preserve and grow plants that would not otherwise be able to survive in the prevailing climactic conditions of Los Angeles. In addition to plant growth, the building will house the ancillary functions of research, and public engagement. Not only does structure regulate the basic properties of a building like span, height, and volume, but it is highly correlated to the kinds of decisions that will need to be made as the building attempts to serve various audiences: structures can be cellular or open, light or heavy, dense or aerated, and can move between these conditions. The ambition is to produce a more synthetic relationship between environmental and structural agendas; however, structure governs here.

This blended nature of the program will require projects to simultaneously attend to the demands of plant growth (with great specificity for the requirements of plant species) alongside the requirement for human habitation. In both function and expression, then the building will level the proverbial playing field between the space of plants and the place of humans. The physical and spatial properties of structure are an ideal frame within which to consider this flattening of hierarchy between our building’s human and non-human constituencies. Program is a supporting character, a productive contaminant to structural order which defines a simple boundary or limit of a system. Program has the capacity to mediate as specific elements may be assigned to either the ground or fly as elements related to overhead structure in order to meet the restrictive constraints of the building footprint and envelope.

This is the second quarter of the second-year core studio sequence within the MArch program at UCLA AUD. The core studios consecutively expand in scope and complexity, building towards more personalized explorations and experiments conducted in the last year of the program in the advanced and research studios.

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 II, AUD 432, is the second 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.

Structures II continues the understanding of span from Structures I. How span works is central to what is built. Both opportunities and limitations are found here. Columns and walls play a similar role, but to a lesser degree. We look first at columns this quarter and then we look at wood as a building material, as a spanning material, a material that is undergoing profound changes as we move away from solid-sawn members and more to engineered members. Mass Timber is expanding these changes. Many of the ideas discussed are similar to those of steel, many are different. The course will also look at an introduction to lateral load design, a topic more fully addressed in Structures III.

Description coming soon

This course will introduce the design of Building Systems for buildings. The following will be discussed:

Comfort Control for Occupants
Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning
Plumbing System Design
Electrical System Design
Lighting Design
Building Acoustics
Fire and Life Safety
Vertical Transportation
Building System Integration

Objectives:

To teach students the fundamental issues of mechanical, plumbing, and electrical systems in buildings

To teach students how mechanical, plumbing, and electrical systems impact achitectural
design and how to integrate these systems into architecture

To expose students to the practical issues relating to mechanical, plumbing, and electrical systems, which arise during the design, construction, and commissioning of a building

To provide students with a useful set of references which can be used in future work and in design studios

To expose students to the concepts of integrated design team working

To outline the relevant codes which govern building design

To expose students to the array of available tools, systems, and equipment used in professional engineering practice