With our return to in-person teaching and learning, today more than ever we realize the extent to which built environment affect our life and health. We spend more than 90% of our lives within architectural spaces, designed to create situated interactions between people, the environment, and the materials that surround them. As David Benjamin writes in his editorial book “Embodied Energy and Design” (page 13), buildings are ideas made physical and they carry with them silent histories of the extractions, labor, and supply chains that are then manifested into an operational structure with dynamically moving parts. With emerging global challenges of social and environmental equity that arise from resource scarcity and public health emergencies, this sequence takes a strong position to forwarding novel approaches to making buildings more resource-efficient, comfortable (dare we say, pleasurable?), and affordable for all.

At the heart of this sequence are the required AT1-AT5 courses that take new stance in threading climate considerations in existing buildings and social responsibilities for occupant health and labor practices. Additionally, an array of elective courses are geared towards creating novel and radical experimental forms of technology, while celebrating the tactile interaction between people, materials, structures, and the built environments. The Tech electives cover a range of topics, from fabrication technologies and emerging healthy assemblies, through supply chain mechanisms of low-carbon and readily available building materials, to net zero and passive housing. This course selection not only provides software tools for performance analysis, but also cultivates radical interventions to crafting new ways of understanding and imagining resource justice, anti-racist vernacular, construction slowness, recovery and wellbeing.

AT1 introduced building technology responses for energy conservation and natural conditioning, human comfort, and the site-specific dynamics of climate and environments. State-of-the-art environmental design and passive heating and cooling technologies were presented in lectures and supported by software tutorials, readings and assignments. To illuminate the significance of architectural design decision-making on energy consumption and comfort, design specifications and modifications were explored for a residential building. Students were expected to integrate an understanding of the basic laws of comfort and heat flow with the variables of the local environment to create design adaptations for their own work. An overview of world energy consumption in buildings and energy rating systems were introduced by lectures on building energy and emerging responsibilities for a broader definition of sustainability. The course ended with a critical and explorative visual communications exercise of environmental considerations that integrated natural and passive systems as well as potentially dynamic interfaces of mechanical systems.

ATII Structures in Architecture provides students with an understanding of what structural design means and how it’s carried out. Students gain familiarity with basic elemental forms, structural assemblies and systems, and new and emerging materials. Through project-based and hands-on work, students gain an understanding of structure, empowering them to integrate their newfound technical knowledge including load-resisting systems into architectural concepts.

AT3 Materials and Assemblies introduced students to the technical design of structural and building envelope systems. The course was divided into two modules, each taught by a specialist in that subject. The first module focused on structural systems and was taught by Thomas Reiner and the material was based on the structural concepts first introduced in AT2. This module covered structural design criteria and building structural design and discussed common structural systems and materials. The students learned how to develop and detail preliminary designs of structural systems based on the strength and properties of different materials, as well as the geometry of their building designs. The second module focused on building envelopes and was taught by Gabrielle Brainard. Starting with envelope design principles and system typologies to performance criteria, documentation strategies, and project execution considerations, this module covered the tools and methods of facade design and prepared students to design advanced enclosure systems.

The construction of a building is essentially a part-to-whole problem, as it involves the integration of multiple building components, systems, and processes into a whole. In successful building projects, architects, engineers, fabricators, and erectors work together to develop each respective part. Within this process, architects hold a critical role in ensuring the successful synthesis of these multiple parts, all while keeping the design intention intact. Through a better understanding of the different building systems and the constraints associated with them, architects can integrate systems more completely with greater economy, elegance, and efficiency. A well-integrated building is an efficient one, an elegant one, and most importantly, a well-integrated building gets built. The intent of the course is an intensive introduction to the application of technical systems through design development. The course objectives are to establish an understanding of the technical aspects of architecture and how they participate in reinforcing and supporting the design intentions, such as beauty, sustainability, functionality, and integration with the surroundings. Structural form, environmental systems, materials, construction methods, and fire protection elements are developed systematically and integrated. This course takes a fresh look at the primary systems within a building. What are their key drivers, requirements, and intentions around each system? What are techniques to rapidly iterate around design ideas and strategies?

This class followed an analytical approach of dissection to gain an in depth understanding of select building conditions. Through dissection of building conditions, students gained a comprehensive understanding of material geographies, the environmental and social life cycles, cost analysis, interrelationships, construction sequencing, and project management. Students used their studio project as developed within Revit in Tech 3+4 to produce a supply chain and life cycle assessment, followed by construction shop drawings. As a final deliverable, students produced a physical mock of a selected detail, while making sensitive choices on the materials, and fabrication for assembly/disassembly.

The histories of art and cities are intertwined in multiple ways, showing that art poses the power to either duplicate and reproduce existing power relations or to subvert them, enhance distinctions and boundaries, or undermine them. Similarly, technology has always been part of the progress of cities, and it poses resembling powers. The combination of both can become a powerful tool to elicit social change in innovative ways. This course targets the question of distinctions and boundaries through how a building interacts with its immediate physical and social surroundings. Using the combination of art, data, and technology, students will engage with the societal and political challenges of the urban arena. Students will acquire analytical and theoretical knowledge and the opportunity to intervene and affect the building they learn in – the GSAPP Avery Building and the urban environment surrounding it – Harlem Neighborhood. The course is based on a dual format of a seminar and a workshop. The seminar format, lectures, readings, and site visits introduce the theoretical and critical aspects of technology-driven artistic interventions. Students will examine past and present precedents of collaborative and participatory art projects that use advanced technology and big data to engage communities in shaping their environments. Through the workshop format, students will develop a suggestion for an artistic intervention to analyze, criticize, understand, and create better connections between GSAPP and the city. In the mid-term presentation, each team will propose a technology-driven artistic intervention, and through a peer-review process, we will select one of the proposals to be built onsite. Then, throughout the second half of the semester, we will collaboratively work on the final assignment: developing, building, and installing the selected proposal: a prototype version on a 1:1 scale, on-site.

In the context of the climate crisis, there has never been a more important moment to think clearly and critically about the footprint of architecture. Carbon footprint is the most famous—and most urgent—the impact of buildings, but it is interconnected with other footprints such as energy, water, labor, fairness, and biodiversity. Each footprint links individual design decisions to global consequences. This seminar and workshop will conduct research into carbon accounting, examine the history and relationships between various systems of environmental measurement, invent new forms of visualizing the footprint of architecture, and develop strategies for designing low-carbon buildings and cities. This course will explore carbon and design through the dual formats of a seminar and workshop. The seminar format will involve a close study of the history of environmental measurement, and it will include guest presentations by leading figures on the topic of carbon footprint in architecture. Students will review case studies and engage in critical analysis of concepts and applications. They will gain experience measuring the carbon footprint of architecture, and at the same time, they will explore the complexities of designing with this kind of metric. They will engage in related issues such as labor, social equity, environmental justice, biodiversity, and species extinction. And they will develop a position about designing the footprint of architecture, rather than merely measuring it. Each student will select an individual topic, make a presentation to the class, and lead a group discussion. The workshop format will involve hands-on design. Students will develop a project that involves designing in the context of architectural footprints. (Using a project from your design studio is encouraged.) Low-carbon strategies to be investigated may include material selection, lifecycle analysis, building codes, government regulation, alternative business models, renovation and adaptive reuse, and design for disassembly

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.

Industrialism changed human civilization and the surface of the Earth in unimaginable ways. While it has exponentially increased human awareness and prosperity, it has initiated the Earth’s 6th Great Extinction Era. It’s both promising and terrifying. So what is next? That is unclear. But one thing is for certain, a transformed Industrial ecosystem needs to be at the center of any solution where human civilization as we understand it today survives this mass extinction event. In light of this reality, this course examines past, present and future strategies of meeting the growing industrial and infrastructural demands of human civilization. The goal is to expose students to emerging post-industrial relationships between people, industry, and ecology that have the potential to define how human civilization can thrive globally within the planet’s biospheric constraints. Through lectures, field explorations, and self-directed research, each student gains a broad understanding of the means and methods that industrialized communities use to support societal needs. During the semester, the class visits both industrial and post industrial sites of material extraction, refinement, production, distribution, and sequestration. Students produce writings and drawings analyzing and re-imagining the potential futures of global community structures and networks. The course is structured as a think-tank and students are encouraged to use their personal interests to identify unlikely post-industrial relationships between community, environment, and industry. On a broader level, this course is designed to be a means for each student to develop a personal manifesto for how urban planners and architects can influence the necessary change in how we structure global habitation.

The Outside in Project Seminar is an initiative by the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) to research, test for design, and build a sustainable temporary pavilion to be erected by the students in the Spring semester of 2024. This year aims to expand the focus of the next iteration to the use of innovative and sustainable technologies and bio-based/upcycled construction materials. The elective Seminar’s focus will be to research bio-based and upcycled materials for the upcoming iteration of this class. Students will investigate, document, design, engineer, and build mock-ups of a temporary pavilion that could be used as a charging station. This seminar includes design, hands-on building, budgeting, and calculations for the engineering components such as structure and wind load safety, solar power, and environmental impact. Just like in practice, we will be consulting with structural, electrical, and solar engineers throughout the semester to ensure the design’s compliance with the New York Building Code and Columbia University regulations. The seminar instructors were supported by consulting engineers, including Hubert Chang from Silman Structural Engineers. The seminar will begin by researching bio-based and upcycled materials, fabrication processes, and precedents for temporary pavilions, then progress into the design, feasibility study, structural review, project management, budget management, and construction of mock-ups.

In the history of architecture there are few forms which engender thoughts of the Platonic Ideal. We think of the perfect architectural form: a combination of an efficient use of a material and labor at hand, an intelligent encapsulation of space for a particular use, and a structurally precise concept. In the past these goals have been met by architects, engineers, and designers of a particular ilk. Our current ability, (or inability), to deal with our physical environments could benefit from an appreciation of this type of design. There is no better summary of this way of working than in understanding shells. The semester project is the construction of a shell, and the consideration of its theoretical form, the techniques of its fabrication, and the materials of its construction.

As digital fabrication processes continue to advance, our comprehension and command of these construction methodologies is critical in capturing the full potential they offer to the built environment and how we design. This course focuses on advanced detailing, fabrication, and assembly techniques. Participants challenge the conventional illustrative mode of architectural detailing by using 1:1 material exploration to facilitate design ideation and spatial speculation. The course encourages curious fabrication, rogue detailing and imaginative research into new potentials for building assemblies. Participants iteratively build a totem, a remixed and on the fly response to the default wall mock-up. Shifting through scales of a building, they track the spatial and technical trajectory of detailing custom hardware, new wall typologies, structural abnormalities and fully customized building skins. The course oscillates between detailing and fabricating these spatial constructs, always building off of the previous week’s iteration to facilitate new and unimagined component adjacencies. The totem, which should be thought of as a living prototype, should fill a 2’x2’x5’ volume.

Human-centric design today requires a recalibration of design methodologies toward connection, empathy, and agency. Subject_Object will explore the tectonic and poetic potential of materials to express and connect disparate agents/ environments through fabrication methodologies that are site-specific and sustainable. The latent sensory and emotional potential of materials, and their combined Neuroaesthetic effects, will be a focus of the exploration of the course. Participants will be asked to identify three disparate or different spaces/ places they would like to connect. They will isolate three found objects, one from each space or place, and work with a fourth connective, sustainable material to connect the three objects. Connective fabrication typologies will be explored to express unexploited adjacencies and create a new unified form, based on the materials identified by each participant. Exploring the logic of difference and unity through material connection, the resulting works will be assembled in a unified installation created by the class. The course will encourage research into sculptural fabrication techniques and will progress from documentation and ideation through design and detailing to fabrication of the newly found object.

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. Architectural impressions of the Anthropocene and climate change are today entangled by rifts between human determination and technological determinism stemming from the scale and severity of the environmental harm caused by design professions, and concurrent appeals for sustainable transformation requested of them. This contemporary entanglement of practices and pedagogies is engendered by a prevailing perception of buildings as autonomous objects whose a priori form-making obscures their terrestrial substrates of matter, energy, and labor that acts of design and construction presuppose but seldom engage. This obfuscation will be tested through the thermodynamics of the energy hierarchy, movements of matter and labor, and historical as well as contemporary case studies. The course offers students a chance to explore quantitative and qualitative inquiries of energy, emergy, carbon, capital, care, repair, labor, time, value, and equity. Ultimately, this course asks students to pose questions about how and why built environments appear and disappear from the world, which people and places touch and are touched by their construction practices, and how the lives of those people and the crust of the earth are changed in the process.

This course is intended for students wanting to focus and excel in the technical execution of custom curtain wall enclosures. It provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the concepts, process, and skills necessary to design, detail, specify, and administer the construction of a custom curtain wall. The primary focus of the course is the intensive, semester-long Technical Studio Design Project. Students design their own unique custom curtain wall, developing detail drawings and preparing outline specifications. The seminar lectures introduce key concepts to understand the first-principles of façade enclosure design and key performance features of unitized curtain wall systems. The lectures further explore the many material and aesthetic possibilities of curtain walls, explain design documentation methods and strategies, and review the various phases of the process through which custom curtain walls are designed, engineered, and built. This includes discussions on contract documentation, forms of contract, the bid process, review of fabricator’s submittals and shop drawings, full-scale performance prototype testing, and fabrication and installation processes.

Modern artworks and architectures are typically defined in opposition to nature: they are products of culture. And yet, nature has always been present: as a muse, as a model, and, importantly, as material. This course will focus on material as the natural foundation of artistic and architectural practices—and, indeed, of a larger set of technological techniques. Materials are embedded in ecological, economic, and political matrices. The artistic or architectural uses of materials can mask or reveal these networks. In this class, students will explore the meaning of materials: their origins, sourcing and extraction, networks of exchange, and the impacts of these networks on human and non-human lifeworlds. Working singly or in pairs, students will pick a single material to explore over the course of the semester: ideally a material or resource they interact with or use–directly or indirectly–on a daily basis. Concrete, natural gas, brick, glass, steel, petrochemical plastic, wood, and lithium, are all examples. Each student or pair will examine this material from several points of view, to understand its natural origins, industrial or technological processing, role as a commodity, and disposal. The students will then interrogate the effects of its extraction, use, and trade on local and global communities and examine its environmental impacts at each stage of the material’s life cycle.

With the dawning of the carbon-based period of modernity and the realization of the environmental costs associated with it, biological agents and materials have received a major upgrade in public recognition. Being it for substitution of carbon-based building materials or fuels, being it as a means to clean up the petromodern mess, or being it as the basis for entirely new regimes of nutrition, transport, and living, nowadays’ future scenarios are full of visions for newly envisioned uses of or, rather, collaborations with microorganisms. This course aimed to theoretically and practically investigate and reveal these mutual relationships and multispecies collaborations across all scales. Students interrogated different approaches of industrial production, conceptualized and materialized objects that propose alternative approaches and situate these artifacts within the speculative frameworks and future developments. Participants designed prototypes for interfacing with biological systems in the form of grown materials, bioreactors, sampling instruments, or bio-receptive substrates. Students had the chance to present work-in-progress prototypes and scenarios in a public forum at the project space 1014 within the framework of a series of workshops to embody and imagine life in a post-carbon society.