Architecture

Studio Descriptions

From the undergraduate course catalog.

Foundation Design Studio Courses

The design studio sequence in the first and second years of study, for both architecture and interior design students, are structured as laboratories in order to encourage an engaged and exploratory studio culture. The learning environment of the design studio actively promotes and supports the progressive development of design thinking and making through iterative design practices, discourse, and critical thinking skills. Throughout the sequence, direct engagement with the means, materials, and methods of design serves as a basis for increasingly more abstract and complex design operations. These courses combine graphic, modeling, digital and verbal visualization techniques and skills in 2D and 3D space across multiple mediums and scales. The design laboratory studio sequence supports the incremental development of student’s creative and critical thinking practices. These practices address design in the various contexts and scales of human experience, encompassing hand and body, building and structure, room and street, as well as city and context. 

Advanced Architectural Design Studio Courses

The advanced studio sequence in the third and fourth years of study engages students in the wider and more detailed field of architectural inquiry and the complexity of the design process. The teaching-learning environment of the design studio fosters dialog and discovery through collaboration, individual inquiry + production, and critical discourse. Design decisions are set within, and influenced by, a larger cultural and natural perspective as well as an evolving architectural discourse or polemic. Design, in this context, brings a diversity of resources, voices, and allied disciplines to the table while addressing the potential and design of human environments. Design projects explore a variety of issues and programs including the differences and tensions between the local and global, the cultural and natural, the urban and exurban, as well as between the technical and philosophical. Throughout the advanced studio sequence, students are progressively challenged to employ creative design thinking, further refining their own design processes and critical inquiries while producing increasingly sophisticated presentations of building design concepts and proposals.

Professional (MArch) Program Design Studio Courses

The professional studio sequence in the fifth and sixth years––leading to our professional accredited MArch2 degree––engages students in a focused study of building assembly and technology as they direct and inform architectural inquiry and the design process. The teaching-learning environment of the design studio fosters individual inquiry + collective discourse. Throughout the professional studio sequence, students are progressively challenged to employ critical design thinking and iterative development throughout all phases of a building design project from conceptual and precedent studies through design development and production documentation. Individual inquiry and design process is informed by the growing understanding of building systems and assemblies, as well as building technology and design theory. Students produce increasingly technical solutions and sophisticated presentations of building design systems and assemblies as they are informed by design thinking and methodologies.

Advanced Interior Design Studio Courses

As students move into fully interiors-focused design studios in their third and fourth years, prior investigations are built upon–they are not lost. The teaching-learning environment of the design studio fosters dialog and discovery through collaboration, individual inquiry + production, and critical discourse. Interior spaces are shaped by multiple forces; how they function is critical. Evidence-based design, case-study analysis, and building systems + codes are all facets of a comprehensive design solution. Design projects explore a variety of user groups with specific programming needs, both commercial and residential, as well as contexts in which they occur. Communication is critical to student success; students are expected to develop thoughtful concepts and to share their ‘story’ as part of presenting their design proposal. Throughout the advanced studio sequence, students are progressively challenged to employ creative design thinking, further refining their own design processes and critical inquiries while producing increasingly sophisticated presentations of design proposals. 

Director's Statement

The Studio

The studio is understood as being a course of study, a cabinet of wonder, a community, and an ecosystem. We believe that it is a place of critical encounter where a diversity of voices and allied disciplines are brought to the table, considered, and productively engaged. It fosters collaboration as well as individual inquiry and production, broadens students’ awareness of the interconnections between things, stirs the imagination, and supports creative inquiry, critical thinking, and reflective discourse. The studio is both a place of work and dialogue. Lectures, presentations, discussions and reviews should enhance the learning environment while being balanced with adequate time for productive work.

Artifacts

The artifact––whether the product of students’ investigations (things, models, and representations) or supporting faculty-led discussions (examples, presentations, references)––is the center and focus of the studio environment. Artifacts are understood to ground discourse, to provoke thought, and to offer connections or lessons. Collected artifacts support students’ ability to think conceptually, form conjectures, and find inspiration. Together, they support the notion of the studio as a cabinet of wonder.

Expectations

• Students are active, not passive, learners. Students are also teachers who bring their experience, discoveries, questions, and conjectures to the table. Throughout the design process, students are encouraged to fully engage the teaching-learning environment, each other, the instructors, and the assignments, through the iterative practice of making, thinking, and remaking.
• It is the Faculty’s responsibility to broadcast––to extend or broaden the dialog and the design process–– suggesting connections between things and between things and ideas, by introducing a diverse range of ideas, precedents, examples, prompts, and resources.
• Within the design studio, students and faculty share in the responsibility of contributing to a community that is respectful of individuals and their creative abilities.  
• The studio should be an environment in which multiple facets of the student’s formal education are brought into discourse with one another.
• Our Design programs recognize the need to allocate adequate time and resources for students and faculty to commit to investigating the inherent issues and complexities of design projects.
• Students are encouraged to view the entire faculty, not simply their individual studio instructors, as resources and learned guides in pursuit of a varied education. Interactions between students in separate studios and year levels are likewise encouraged in the belief that students have much to learn from one another and that everyone can be a teacher.
• Design education requires students to think, form opinions, and make sound judgments that can be well demonstrated in the student’s abilities to write, discuss, represent, and produce relative to design convictions.
• Students are expected to maintain an open-minded attitude toward constructive criticism and guidance from instructors. This said, students should discipline themselves to work hard, give great attention to the quality of their work, and to adapt to different studio atmospheres and faculty teaching methods.
• Students and faculty should recognize that the values of decisions that emerge during the design process are as important as the judgments regarding final products coming out of studios. Failures from which one learns lead inevitably to success.
• Every student’s work has the capacity to rise to an innovative level of influencing the ever-evolving development of the discipline and the design professions. Engaged in high ideas as a student, it is our intention and hope that a trajectory of inquiry and commitment to quality professionalism (established while attending University) will be sustained by its graduates over the course of their lives.