“People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.”
–Paola Antonelli

The act of creating and evaluating the architectural spaces in which we spend more than 90% of our lives, is a mixture of design and science. With emerging global challenges of social and environmental equity that arise from resource scarcity and public health emergencies, novel approaches to making buildings more resource-efficient, comfortable, and affordable for all, are critical.

To this end, the Core and Elective courses at the Building Science and Technology sequence provide students with thinking tools and strategies for actualizing their design ideas. The sequence covers a range of topics, from fabrication technologies and innovative healthy assemblies, through supply chain analysis of low-carbon and readily available building materials, to energy modeling and environmental simulations. The sequence not only provides tools for performance analysis, but also crafts new ways of understanding and imagining socially equitable and environmentally sound futures. It supports the current approaches of student-based pedagogy by converging scientific knowledge on building materials, envelope systems, and fabrication technologies, with the complex act of design.

The selection of student projects below represents the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 courses in the Building Science and Technology sequence. The sequence proudly equips the next generation graduates of GSAPP with critical skill sets for the field. This work selection represents the explorative, experimental, yet pragmatic nature of the sequence. It recognizes that grand design should be rationalized and actualized within an interdisciplinary and collaborative discourse.

This course puts forth the challenge for students to develop robust data-driven methodologies and computational frameworks for creative iteration and validating design solutions through analysis, automation, simulation, optimization, representation, and so forth. The course is intended to provide foundational knowledge of relevant modeling software and visual programming interfaces, while also discussing contemporary applications of these tools in the industry.

This course is cross-listed in the Visual Studies Sequence.

This design-build seminar is a collaborative initiative to design, build, and program a temporary pavilion structure that was erected by the students in the area between Avery, Fayerweather and Schermerhorn Halls during the Spring semester of 2021. The pavilion is being programmed for events outside of GSAPP beginning with 2021 graduation for both on-site and remote event participation.

Follow @avery.spot on Instagram for updates!

Human and environmental health are central to the architectural design process. This course addresses how to overcome the negative health outcomes that are caused by toxics in building products. Students will explore the relationships between building materials, chemical toxicity, and environmental exposures and how they directly impact human health and particularly vulnerable populations.

We will look at current practice to see how leading firms are designing and constructing healthier buildings using these lessons learned to inform design decisions and develop methodologies to select healthier products. Student groups will choose one of eight common building product categories, comparing and analyzing currently available options for health and environmental impacts. Each group will make a recommendation for the healthiest option to be installed on a given project.

The goal is to empower students to transform architectural practice with the knowledge that healthier buildings lead to healthier lives.

For this course, students work with and generate geo-spatial data at multiple scales: city, neighborhood and buildings. They integrate urban data exploration, environmental performance, and derive their own data within a computational design workflow.

This course is cross-listed in the Visual Studies Sequence.