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Introduction
Spring 2023
Fall 2022
Spring 2023
Spring 2023
Spring 2023
Fall 2022
Fall 2022, Spring 2023
Spring 2023
Fall 2022
Fall 2022
Fall 2022
Spring 2023
Spring 2023
Fall 2022
Fall 2022
Fall 2022
Spring 2023
Spring 2023
Spring 2023
Spring 2023
Fall 2022, Spring 2023
Spring 2023
Spring 2023
Spring 2023
Introduction
Visual Studies
The Visual Studies sequence brings together a series of courses which link analogue drawing, digital drawing, computational design, data analysis, and visualization, with a series of tools, methods, and media for design and the built environment. Uses of visual methods in design—like hand drawing, data visualization, sensors and data analysis, simulation, optimization, procedural modeling, rendering, video, app design, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Building Information Management (BIM)—are embedded in much of what architects, urbanists, and designers do. Yet simply training students to use and think with these technologies is insufficient. The uses of design methods and tools - analogue and digital - are most successful when their limits and their contexts—technical, social, political, aesthetic, and ethical—are confronted and surpassed to show us multiple ways of imagining and creating space. The tools, data, and technology we deploy in the design process are never neutral. Faculty in the sequence take on discrete parts of this array and expose students to technical, critical, and creative ways to transform and develop their processes of design.
Spring 2023
Architectural Drawing & Representation II
Representation serves as a primary medium for architects. They draw, visualize, represent, and render new possibilities, new futures, new kinds of spaces, new imaginations. Architectural Drawing and Representation II centered on drawing and representation and, also, centered on thinking about drawing and representation. This course incubated students’ relationship with drawing, representation, and architecture by considering drawing as a practice. Students developed their own style and invented their own drawing tools and representational processes. ADR II provided the opportunity to play, explore new methods of representation, consider diverse points of view, test alternative outcomes, and experiment with how methods of representation shape one’s relationship to architecture.
Fall 2022
Architectural Drawing & Representation I
ADR I investigated the current concepts, techniques, and working methods of computer-aided ‘drawings’ in architecture. The course focused on the construction of architectural representations. However, rather than just experimenting with technique, it encouraged one to define how these new operative techniques are changing the role of drawing in architecture.
Spring 2023
Virtual Architecture: World Building and Virtual Reality Workshop
Our built environment represents the limits of our physics and material properties. What types of architecture will emerge out of an exploration of alternative physical constraints? If cause and effect could be re-imagined, what would be the new modes of interaction with one’s environment? Using the unique affordances enabled by Game Engines, this course wishes to explore speculative architectures, adapted to alternative physics, materials, and casualties. Starting from the articulation and design of a behavior, interaction or rule, students will expand the scale and detail of their environment throughout the semester. Through lectures, demonstrations, and workshops, students will be provided with the conceptual framing and technical knowledge to assist them in the creation of a rich and interactive environment, pushing the boundaries of architectural imagination.
Spring 2023
Points Unknown: Cartographic Narratives
If what Toni Morrison says is true — that we move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom — what does a critical practice of data representation look like? What does it account for? Where do maps — or in the case of this course, “cartographic narratives” — fall on that Morrisonian progression? What does the “controlled wilderness” of literary fiction have to say to the field of data journalism? Where does wisdom appear? What might the critical geography of computational journalistic practice look like? Points Unknown will train data journalism and architecture students in fundamental mapping techniques, allowing them to both create and critique their own attempts at visualizing data. Students will learn frameworks critical to working with spatial information and be introduced to various modalities of spatial analysis – all with the goal of telling more compelling stories in the public interest. This course will be taught using open-source tools, and will primarily rely on web platforms such as Mapbox, Github, Google, and Glitch to host our experiments. We will use a mix of Python and Processing, in addition to visualization libraries and old-fashioned HTML/CSS. Those who are so inclined may also use Adobe Premiere.
Pregnant Silences
This project explores the use of sound to visualize harmful spatial data. Specifically, as countl...
High Life/Low Tax: A Property Tax Exposé
The New York City property tax system has been a subject of criticism, with many people expressin...
Fresh Off the Boat
Fresh off the Boat is a cartographic storytelling project that explores the experiences of imm...
New York After the Glacier
This project seeks out quotidian stories for hilly sites across New York City. 70,000 years ag...
Surfacing Buczacz
This project is an attempt to explore the poetics of topography and the terrain of history. It...
Spring 2023
Power Tools
This course aimed to leverage collective and DIY knowledge building as a representational technique and a tool of power. This course engaged a tripartite structure of research, design, and implementation. First, students looked at an array of historical and contemporary DIY formats such as the zine, meme, catalog, almanac, instructional video, cookbook, hotline, and how-to-manual as transformative models of self-education. During the second part of the semester, seminar participants used visual representation techniques to organize, design, and develop antiracist content. In the latter part of the semester, students worked in groups to design physical and/or digital delivery methods for their chosen campus or community; hacking formats such as the bulletin, newsstand, billboard, monument, or a method of their invention.
Fall 2022
Drawing to Gather
This seminar studied and designed the design workshop. During the first half of the semester, students examined precedents of visual tools and processes for participatory mapping, building consensus, participant observation, and design ethnography among others. Students investigated the historical uses of these methods in urban processes and interrogated the social and political contexts in which they were developed. Students built a vocabulary for how people, space, time, props, and images can be used within the medium of the facilitated conversation. After the midterm, participants built on this vocabulary to develop instruments to facilitate conversation. Through iterative critique and investigation, props and processes were developed to deploy: from game boards to furniture for engaging debate, to collaborative maps, and facilitation guides. The semester culminated in the publication of a collective manual of the tools researched and designed.
Fall 2022, Spring 2023
Re-Thinking BIM
Different assumptions exist for BIM, which stands for Building Information Modeling. Most people will tell you it equates to Revit. Others correlate it more closely with parametric design. Rethinking BIM will challenge its participants to explore different methods of leveraging BIM to enhance all processes within our industry. One of the critical drivers of success is our ability to collaborate with other members of the development, architecture, engineering, and construction (DAEC) industry. Therefore, this course examines how these related disciplines function. Concurrently, students develop processes to better understand and communicate with each other. The course also takes inspiration from outside the industry from areas like tech and manufacturing. Finally, it leverages drawing and diagramming to visualize and explain these collaborative processes. Throughout the semester, projects and thinking function at two scales — macro (urban scale or building scale) and micro (program scale or detail scale). The goal of the class is to leverage new BIM processes to drive better-informed design, so all projects must develop a process that leads to a concrete design idea.
Hudson Yards Transit Hub
This project is about designing a pedestrian-friendly mixed-used transit hub in Hudson Yards by p...
Spring 2023
Graphic Architecture Project I: Design and Typography
Architecture starts and ends as graphic design. The Graphic Architecture Project (GAP) is a way of thinking about the intersection of the flat and the deep. This class examines the visual rhetoric employed to convey design concepts. Typography is fundamentally the procedure of arranging type, but it can also be the particular art of traversing meaning with form. In addition to developing general typographic fluency, it considers the visual tone of how messages are conveyed and explores ways to appropriately control and manipulate that tone through typography. It also investigates conceptual issues through a series of extremely practical assignments drawing on historical standards as well as contemporary examples of graphic design. The ultimate goal is to establish a shared verbal and visual lexicon with which we can create, and critique, graphic work and to align conceptual intent with visual results.
Fall 2022
Graphic Architecture Project III: Design Seminar
In its most recent rhetorical incarnations, “storytelling” has been overplayed and commodified into pure marketing speak, but not without reason: everyone has an innate understanding of the power of a good story. This course aimed to present and arm students with the tools of narrative. Students worked through observing, discussing, and critiquing work in and around the disciplines of the visual arts, most prominently through film, to understand that framing work is an act of design itself. Each student was tasked with creating a series of short films throughout the semester and testing a diverse set of narrative structures to organize their ideas. Though each student developed and presented their own individual work, the course was highly collaborative where peers are also charged with developing prompts for one another – rules, obstacles, content – intended to remove students from typical modes of production and push into new territories of storytelling. The course aimed to highlight the direct connection between how we talk about architectural design projects with new means to think and communicate effectively and coherently.
Fall 2022
Techniques of the Ultrareal
The use of perspective and rendering is often an afterthought. With the abundance of 3D modeling software and the ability to see every angle of a project instantaneously, renderings are often thought of as a last-minute tool for representation. This course challenged students to not only think of rendering as a method of presentation but also as a tool for design. In addition to learning techniques for creating ultra-realistic images, the course encouraged the use of perspective and rendering early and often in the design process and focused on a workflow that facilitated early exploration. It focused on color, light, material, context, reflection, and opacity throughout the course of the entire design project. Students looked for inspiration in many places, including art, photography, and cinematography. The class used V-Ray 5.0 for 3D Studio Max 2022 as the main engine for exploration but also encouraged the use of other modeling applications, post-processing software, and third-party plug-ins.
Fall 2022
Environments Animals Technologies
In the Age of the Anthropocene, how can creative technology rescript our proximity to, understanding of, and interactions with non-human animals? This course explored the intersection of art, technology, animals, and their environments from a multidisciplinary perspective. What do we find so compelling about so-called natural systems? How can we use artistic practices, storytelling, and observations to learn more about features of the world that ordinarily exist beyond human perception? This course operated at the intersection of creative science, and technology. It combined hands-on practice, case studies, readings, and research. It explored different projects that use design, art, and technology to reveal, translate, and communicate the unseen world of non-human animals to humans. Through a series of creative experiments and assignments, students work with augmented reality (AR), sound, code, data visualization, and more, to design interventions and creative projects that explore these themes. The class drew attention to the unintended consequences of not designing spaces with shared habitats of multiple in mind. This class was for students eager to develop projects that raise awareness, transform perceptions, inspire change around an environmental justice issue, tell a story, or engage a community.
Spring 2023
Unorthodox Arch Practices
Architectural practice is being affected by important changes. Offices, one of the architect’s core activities, are diversifying from the unipersonal orthodox model to open formats. At the same time, different emerging practices show that the commission-project-construction procedure is only one aspect of architects’ work. Now is the moment to explore and identify new ways of being an architect, where the architectural office and practice are the “starting projects”: engines that drive their engagements and creativity. At the same time, there is a growing phenomenon of architects who are not specifically or exclusively dedicated to building practice, but that are proposing professional practices that broaden the current scope of working as negotiators, activists, analysts, politicians, advisors, strategists, communicators, researchers, etc.
Spring 2023
Coding for Spatial Practices
This course introduced students to web design and development as a means of representation, speculation, and communication. Students learned the foundational, front-end languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create work for the web browser. They explored questions such as: What is the relationship between architecture and the World Wide Web? What parallels can be drawn between the development process and our own design processes?
Fall 2022
Make
The premise of this workshop was to produce work that is experimental, personal, difficult, ugly, dirty, weird and investigative, rather than definitive in presenting conclusions. The seminar was about MAKING, and the work is physical, a 12”x12”x12” volume repeated through the basic materials of architecture: concrete, plastic, metal, glass, masonry, and wood. Through MAKING students explored and questioned obsessions. The material is an opportunity and a constraint; the material is malleable and rigid; the material is vague—students choose their own. In 12 weeks, students produced six models: six volumes each responding to one of six materials.
Fall 2022
Virtual Disruption
Virtual Disruption aimed to combine a meta-disciplinary approach to representation with a radical rethinking of architecture’s visual possibilities through the appropriation of 3D scanning technologies and VFX tools to critically engage with the built environment. The challenge was to disrupt 3D-scanned simulated environments to explain spatial phenomena at chosen sites of conflict in race, gender, sexuality, security, and power in New York City. This created a more complex system of disciplinary obligations outside of the quantifying of space. Intentional misuse of the software challenged notions of “correctness” influencing students to reconsider “who spaces are for” and the ways in which spatial resistance births new typologies foreign to the canon of architecture. By harnessing the power of 3D-scanning, photogrammetry, and volumetric capture to blend the physical world with the digital one, students were encouraged to peel back the historical and material layers of the city through a series of forensic investigations. The class experimented with new forms of representation that challenge the existing status quo in architecture’s obsession with the measured and was concerned with the future artistic ecosystems emerging today in devising new approaches to advanced technologies and activism.
Fall 2022
Geographic Information Systems
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) include the tools and techniques for managing, describing, analyzing, and representing information about relationships between ‘what happens’ and ‘where it happens.’ This course introduced core concepts of digital mapping and map-based analyses, as well as the technical skills crucial for working within urban environments, with specific attention to the materiality of spatial data and the material impacts of map production. Through a combination of lectures and focused lab sessions, students will learn critical approaches to spatial analysis and visualization and embed these techniques within larger design workflows and longer representational and technological histories. By creating and analyzing diverse types of spatial data within complex maps, students were challenged to build arguments, construct geospatial narratives, and question the arguments and narratives that have come before.
Migrant Support Systems in Sanctuary Cities: Analyzing Select Destinations of Governor Abbott’s Refugee Removal Program
Are certain destinations of Governor Abbott’s refugee removal program better alternatives for the...
COMPATIBILITY VS. DENSITY: A CASE FOR HOUSING DENSITY IN AUSTIN, TEXAS
Spring 2023
Generative Design I
In this course, students studied applications of computer programming in design and used coding to modify design tools and create custom workflows that embedded more intelligence into a design process. This course was structured around several hands-on exercises that demonstrated a variety of computational approaches and strategies for solving design problems through code. The class focused on building real applications while covering enough theory and case studies to ground the work we will be doing and expose some of the larger possibilities.
Spring 2023
Construction Ecologies in the Anthropocene
How should designers understand their complicities and capabilities in the complex and contested present of the Anthropocene? Is it possible to reconsider our disciplinary roles and processes within a climatically relevant time frame? How might we envision a world worthy of the matter and energy borrowed from it? This course navigates histories, theories, technologies, ecologies, and processes of construction while seeking myriad opportunities for revitalized architectural enchantment commensurate with the existential narratives of the Anthropocene.
Spring 2023
Metatool I
Metatool is an ongoing series of classes on tools since 2013. The core thesis of Metatool is: to design critically, intentionally, intelligently, and playfully, designers must have the ability to design new critical/experimental/playful design tools. Metatool: Tools for Improvisation is a course on creating technological design tools that enable an improvisational approach to design. Over the course of the semester, you will be answering the question: How do we non-improvisationally create design tools or mediums that allow us to improvise? You will be answering this question in any fashion.
Spring 2023
Seminar of Section
Building on the recent publication, Manual of Section, the seminar explored and expanded a discourse surrounding the section in architecture. Generating a set of provisional structures, terms, and taxonomies, it sought to understand the role of the section, its historical development, contemporary transformations, and possible futures. The goal of the seminar was to provide students, through lectures, discussions, and design research, the techniques through which they can develop their own approaches to section as a vital analytical and design tool. The seminar also used the investigation of the section to raise broader questions regarding the representational techniques that architects deploy and the complex interrelationship between delineation, ideation, and materialization.
Fall 2022, Spring 2023
Architectural Photography: From the Models to the Built World
Architecture and photography have a symbiotic yet sometimes problematic relationship. It could be asserted that the majority of the buildings we see today are seen through looking at photographs. Photography is very good at conveying certain qualities of architecture while it is completely inept at depicting other forms of experience. The course began focusing on photographing various constructed spaces both exterior and interior. It discussed approaches to photography from “objective” to “expressive” and explored notions of the iconic, the narrative, and digression in architectural photography. It then looked at various ways of photographing architectural models from standard depictions in which the images are meant to closely resemble a full-scale construction to alternate approaches that play with what the architectural model can communicate. Student attempted to address themes beyond the presentation of a finished building or a rendering.
Spring 2023
Methods in Spatial Research
This course provides an introduction to the critical use of geographic information systems (GIS) and the use of spatial methods for urban humanities research. Maps and geographic analysis are key tools for interpreting the built environment and the social conditions it contains. GIS methods allow for the analysis of geographic features together with attributes (environmental, social, demographic, political) of those places. The thoughtful use of spatial data can reveal previously unseen patterns, changing the way we see and engage with our world. However, maps are never just representations, they are nearly always active agents in shaping the worlds they describe. With this in mind, students were introduced to a range of approaches for creating and manipulating spatial data with a focus on the forms of authorship, design, subjectivity embedded in spatial data, and its uses. This course was structured through hands-on exercises and weekly assignments where participants developed basic fluency with an open-source mapping software, QGIS, methods of data collection and creation, and approaches and concepts in critical spatial analysis and map design.
Spring 2023
Measuring the Great Indoors
This course investigated the spatial and tangible potential of web connectivity through the emerging field of embodied computing. Connection to the physical world and each other can be heightened by designing digital interactions beyond the screen using social experiences over user experiences and spatial interfaces over user interfaces. By bringing technology beyond the screen, interactions can engage the five senses in all three dimensions. This course interrogated methods from embodied computing and user experience using hardware (sensors, microprocessors, computer vision cameras, smart home products) and software (IFTTT and Processing).
Spring 2023
X Information Modeling I
Data is the language of cities. This data is inherently spatial. Designers and planners are uniquely suited to leverage it for informed decision-making. Accordingly, this course introduces students to computational design through a unique data-driven workflow using Rhino, Grasshopper, and other platforms for visual exploration of design and data. Building Information Modeling has become pervasive throughout the design industry. This class expands the imagination and scope of the model to include geospatial data at multiple scales — cities, neighborhoods, and buildings — to capture the nuances of urban dwelling. Through a combination of technical boot camps, readings, and projects, students will develop technical skills alongside a critical understanding of computational design.
