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Introduction
Spring 2022
Fall 2021
Spring 2022
Spring 2022
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Spring 2022
Spring 2022
Fall 2021
Spring 2022
Spring 2022
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Fall 2021
Spring 2022
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Spring 2022
Spring 2022
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Fall 2021
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Fall 2021
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 2022
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 2021
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.
Students: Farah Ahmed, Kiaron Aiken, Tashania Akemah, Hanouf AlFehaid, Christopher Armstrong, Lucy Baird, Maria Berger, Marberd Bernard, Nicole Biewenga, Olivia Braun, Lauren Brown, Sarah Bruce-Eisen, Zackary Bryson, Ian Callender, Willy Cao, Carmen Chan, Andrew Chee, Shujing Chen
, Lula Chou,
Teonna Cooksey,
Maura Costello,
Christopher Deegan,
Maria Doku,
Marika Falco,
Ken Farris,
Adam Fried,
Haoge Gan,
Omer Gorashi,
Isaiah Graham,
Katerina Gregoriou,
Caining Gu,
Eric Hagerman,
Anais Halftermeyer,
Autumn Harvey,
Kelly He,
Mohamed Ismail,
Kelsey Jackson,
Mariam Jacob,
Maithili Jain,
Genevieve Jones,
Meghan Jones,
Ali Kamal,
Jillian Katz,
Angela Keele,
Emilie Kern,
Gio Kim,
Abdelaziz Mikha Kossir,
Chris Kumaradjaja,
Kelvin Lee,
Daniel Li,
Jason Li,
Rachael Li,
Rilka Li,
Isabella Libassi,
Xinyi Lin,
Yichun Liu,
Brianna Love,
Shiyu Lyu,
Anoushka Mariwala,
Hunter McKenzie,
Jamon Zixuan Mok,
Allon Morgan,
Laurin Moseley,
Erisa Nakamura,
Jared Orellana,
Taha Ozturk,
Kayla Parsons,
Han Qin,
Dori Renelus,
EunJin Shin,
Syeeda Simmons,
Rebecca Siqueiros,
Sophia Strabo,
Sherry Aine Te,
Rajvardhan Thorat,
Duncan Tomlin,
Burcu Yasemin Turkay,
Julia Vais,
Frederic Verrier-Paquette,
Hanna Wiegers,
Juliana Yang,
David Zhang,
Xavier Zhapan-Sullivan
Spring 2022
Virtual Architecture: World Building & Virtual Reality
This workshop borrowed tools and workflows from the gaming and virtual reality industries to explore architectural production through the lens of speculative physics, causality, and interaction.
Spring 2022
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 2021, Spring 2022
Methods in Spatial Research
This course introduced the critical use of geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial methods for urban humanities research. Maps and geographic analysis are key tools for interpreting the built environment and its social conditions. However, maps are never just representations. They are always active 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, and subjectivity embedded in spatial data and its uses. Students repurposed existing spatial datasets, collected data about a spatial phenomenon in their everyday surroundings, digitized historical maps to produce alternative narratives, mapped change over time with Landsat satellite imagery, and used aerial photographs to tell a story through repetition.
Students: Vinay Agrawal,
Abriannah Aiken,
Shreya Arora,
Shannon Binns,
Graham Drennan,
Rae Harris,
Dmitri Johnson,
Isidore Karten,
Arissa Lahr,
Camille Lanier,
Rae Lei,
Eugene Massey,
Vanessa Mendoza,
Lindsay Papke,
Elena Peeples,
Mauricio Rada Orellana,
Sara Reed,
James Rice,
Sabah Usmani,
Luiza Vianna de Mello Franco,
Lucy Zakharova
Fall 2021
Spring 2022
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Re-Thinking BIM
This course provided foundational knowledge of building information modeling (BIM) practices, as well as relevant options for alternative design-platform interoperability and integration. Sessions included case-study review and discussion, critical analysis of design and design-technology strategies, and overall exposure to diverse approaches to industry design practices. Guest lecturers introduced industry-proven examples of platform integrations, and demonstrated methodologies for students to consider for their design problem. The guest lectures each took a different lens of informed design interventions and interoperability, including computational and iterative design, advanced interoperability for design optimization, performance-based strategies to address energy and environmental design considerations, and cloud-BIM strategies to iterate at the detail level of building articulation.
Fall 2021 Students: Ata Gün Aksu, Daniela Beraun, Ralph Cheng, Shikang Ding, Ruben Gomez Ganan, Ana Hernandez Derbez, Jason Young Kim, Han Kuo, Vasco Li, Yiruo Li, Richard Sa, Xinan Tan, Yusuf Urlu, Ke Zhai, Yingying Zhou
Fall 2021
Spring 2022
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Techniques of the Ultrareal
The use of perspective and rendering is often an afterthought within the design process. The abundance of 3D modeling software and the ability to see every angle of a project instantaneously has confined these techniques to a last-minute tool for representation—a required by‐product of the expectations of architectural presentation. This class challenged the participants to not only think of rendering and perspective as a method of presentation but also a tool for design, implemented early and often within the design process. In addition to learning techniques for creating photorealistic renderings, students developed a workflow that encourages early exploration. The class focused on color, light, material, context, reflection, and opacity throughout the entire design.
Fall 2021 Students: Santiago Alvarez Santibanez,
Omar Badriek,
Aahana Banker,
Rourke Brakeville,
Max Cai,
Ece Cetin,
Kurt Cheang,
Wei-Chun Chou,
Erxiao Chu,
Yutong Deng,
Francesca Doumet,
Yefei Guo,
Jiamin Huang,
Yuchen Huang,
Wanqi Jiang,
Yuening Jiang,
Mu Dong Jung,
Radha Devang Kamdar,
Daniel Kim,
Vasco Li,
Yufei Liu,
Zida Liu,
Malvina Mathioudaki,
Risa Mimura,
Aikaterini Papoutsa,
Sujin Shim,
Qiwei Sun,
Zihan Sun,
Anthea Viloria,
Siyu Xiao,
Haoran Xu,
Shelly Xu,
Danlei Yang,
Haozhen Yang,
Jiazheng Zhang,
Yingying Zhou
Fall 2021
Spring 2022
Spring 2022
Graphic Architecture Project I: Design and Typography
The Graphic Architecture Project explored the intersection of the flat and the deep. This class examined 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 a general typographic fluency, students considered the visual tone of how messages are conveyed and explored ways to appropriately control and manipulate that tone through typography.
Spring 2022
Datamining the City I
The ubiquity of digital technologies embedded in cities and urban-dwellers makes urban data an integral part of the design and planning of cities. Urban analytics provide an opportunity to design cities that are responsive to the needs of their constituents. This course focused on the application of data tools to model, analyze, and simulate the urban environment. Students developed a critical understanding of data science concepts and urban data models as well as technical skills in data processing, analytical simulations, and visualization. This course explored new creative methods to better understand the dynamics between urban systems and create more insightful decisions for future cities.
Fall 2021
Unorthodox Arch Practices
The seminar provided a committed view of the present through a series of heterodox projects in the history of architecture. It intended not to retrieve singular works from the history of architecture that might be described as visionary, but rather to understand the critical attitude that their authors adopted in the face of a moment of crisis. Throughout the semester, each student completed an in-depth study of a project, exploring its historical, technological, and conceptual context as part of the author’s oeuvre as a whole.
Students: Daniela Beraun,
Nick Chapman,
Rocio Crosetto Brizzio,
Leon Duval,
Malavika Madhuraj,
Maria Ramirez
Spring 2022
Model Fictions
In this course, Model Fictions: The Technologies of Film and Production Design in Architecture, students engaged the skills, ideas, and technologies shared between the practices of production design (for film) and architecture, considering three topics around which this overlap occurs: the methodological, the conceptual, and the technical. Methodologically, students studied the scale model as a medium for expressing and developing a moving, complex design idea. Conceptually, they discussed the role of designers as storytellers and authors of unique environments in which characters live and actions occur. Technically, they utilized the tools of the GSAPP shops (and those of their design) to stage, animate, and capture new forms of representation of these stories, worlds, and ideas in motion.
Spring 2022
Conflict Urbanism
Conflict Urbanism as a term designates not simply that conflict that take place in cities, but also that conflict is a structuring principle of cities, as a way of inhabiting and creating urban space. The theme is topical in light of the increasing urbanization of warfare and the policing and surveillance of everyday life, however, conflict is not limited to war and violence. Cities are not only destroyed but also built through conflict. This seminar looks at the ways in which cities have long been arenas of friction, difference, and dissidence, as well as the ways in which their irreducibly conflictual character manifests itself in everything from neighborhood borders, to differences of opinion and status, to ordinary encounters on the street. Student work in Conflict Urbanism takes place through a single city or by comparing a series of cities examining the role conflicts of all sorts play in the making and remaking of cities around the world. Conflicts can (and should) be investigated with maps and data, but they often turn out to be propelled or propagated by them as well. Bringing humanistic inquiry together with spatial data and basic mapping techniques will allow us to produce powerful representations as well as challenge conventional narratives of cities and conflict today. Cities are “seen” through a number of lenses including: mass incarceration, infrapolitics, urbanization of war, language ecology, migration(political, economic and climate), debt, algorithms and surveillance.
Redefining Homogeneity: Marriage Migration in Rural South Korea
Once a country known for its homogeneity, South Korea’s population is no longer homogeneous. Over...
Power, Politics, And Contestation In Dharavi Slums, Mumbai: A Counter-Map
Dharavi, at the heart of Mumbai, India, is at the frontline of oppositional practices confronting...
Street-Level Surveillance: Public Space into Police State
Today, cities across the world are developing under an unprecedented scale and sophistication of ...
Urban Baboon: No More Monkey Business
As Cape Town expanded, habitat along its perimeter began to diminish. The chacma baboons, once re...
Carceral Keynesianism: Spatializing Prison Construction as Rural Development Policy in Mario Cuomo’s New York, 1983-1994
Urbanization of The Rural
The following research strives to understand the past, present, and future urbanization patterns ...
Camp Urbanism
Migration at large - whether forced or voluntary - physically manifests in what one might term ca...
Toward an Infrapolitics of Borders and People: Deterritorializing and Reterritorializing in Haifa, Palestine and Mahikeng, South Africa
This project examines different claims to space and how they are made. We focus on specific citie...
This project studies the New York City subway system through two analytical frameworks: invisi...
Riding Through the Advertising Landscapes of NYC
We set out to explore and document what riders of the R train encounter throughout the cars and s...
Amazon: A Question of Distribution
The following study is divided into three sections. First, we introduce the mechanics of the conf...
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
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. To guide their study, students 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 one’s design processes?
Students: Qingning Cao,
Xin Chen,
Lianghao Cheng,
Erxiao Chu,
Stella Dai,
Jialu Deng,
Ningyuan Deng,
Yutong Deng,
Ken Farris,
Yefei Guo,
Lamisa Haque,
Yaxin Jiang,
Yasmine Katkhuda,
Angela Keele,
Minsung Kim,
Spenser Krut,
Talia Li,
Taha Ozturk,
Sydnee Sampson,
Kaeli Streeter,
John Tiernan,
Lichong Tong,
Can Yang,
Xiangru Zhao,
Yanan Zhou
Fall 2021
Spring 2022
Fall 2021
Make
This course served as a workshop to MAKE—to produce work that is experimental, personal, difficult, ugly, dirty, weird, and investigative, rather than definitive in presenting evidence and conclusions. It also served as a workshop to produce work that is physical, fabricated within the precise constraint of a 12”x12”x12” volume through the UPCYCLING of 5 materials: plastic, metal, concrete, wood, and fabric. Students searched for materials in their closest environment, engaging directly with domestic and urban leftovers, to reflect on the potential of waste and reframe its visual and cultural significance. The workshop looked at art as architecture and architecture as art. It set up a critical and supportive place of personal discoveries and “uncoveries.”
Students: Ryan Alexander,
Oliver Bradley,
Mark-Henry Decrausaz,
Graham Drennan,
Kassandra Lee,
Roderick Macfarlane,
Roushni Panneer Selvam,
Aaron Sage
Spring 2022
Mapping For Architecture Urbanism and Humanities
This course provided an introduction to cartography, its history, and its relationship with humanities. As such, it aimed at creating a space (or a place?) for critical reflection on the mechanisms to produce and interpret spatial information. Simultaneously, the class collectively developed the necessary skills to posit spatial questions and use relevant datasets to produce answers. In other words, the course illustrated the relevance of maps in different forms of intellectual inquiry. Through a series of individual exercises, students investigated theoretical and practical questions about the use of geographical information systems (GIS), the challenges of spatial representation, and the problems and possibilities embedded in new platforms for digital cartography.
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Generative Design I
This course introduced students to the basic concepts of generative design and taught them to create complex models that can be controlled and evaluated by an automated search algorithm. The Python programming language was introduced as a way to amplify the generative complexity of parametric models in Grasshopper. The class also covered techniques for evaluating designs including using third-party Grasshopper plugins for structural and environmental analysis.
Students: Ata Aksu, Max Cai, Ece Cetin, Xuanyi Chen, Eric Chyou, Ningyuan Deng, Shikang Ding, Novak Djogo, Francesca Doumet, Anoushae Eirabie, Yunlong Fan, Zhanhao Fan, Adrianna Fransz, Xiucong Han, Chuqi Huang, SeokHyun Kim, Sunghyun Kim, Yining Lai, Junho Lee, Juno Lee, Kyounghwa Lee, Yumeng Liu, Xueyin Lu, Hunter McKenzie, Risa Mimura, Alonso Ortega, Jiaying Qu, Shulong Ren, Allison Shahidi, Zihan Sun, Yukun Tian, Lichong Tong, Frederic Verrier-Paquette, Leo Wan, Bingyu Xia, Haotong Xia, Duo Xu, Hyosil Yang, Hao Zheng, Hao Zhong, Gejin Zhu
Fall 2021
Spring 2022
Spring 2022
Points Unknown: Cartographic Narratives
Points Unknown provided the opportunity to explore new forms of investigation and communication. Under the direction of a practicing journalist, students produced a map-based feature story, reporting on topics ranging from the census to Covid-19 to climate change. The course focused on covering core spatial concepts from projections to symbology and classification. Students learned techniques critical to working with spatial data, allowing them to perform tasks such as network analysis, pattern analysis, and spatial association—techniques that both informed their reporting and defined their graphics. They also learned about satellite imagery and how to work with remotely sensed data both for reporting and for communication. Finally, they learned how to build interactive displays highlighting their work.
Spring 2022
Seminar of Section
While most commonly deployed as a retroactive tool to describe constructional requirements or (in the context of the contemporary design studio) an automatic side effect of the digital model, this seminar re-conceived the section as an instrumental and projective device. The goal was to provide students with techniques through which they developed their own approaches to section as a vital analytical and design tool. The seminar also investigated the section to raise broader questions regarding the representational techniques that architects deploy and the complex interrelationship between delineation, ideation, and materialization.
Life In-between Death
Life is surrounded by death, predictable and also unpredictable, tangible and also intangible, sl...
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Architectural Photography
The first segment of the class 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. It addressed themes beyond the presentation of a finished building or a rendering. The second half focused on photographing various constructed spaces, both exterior and interior. The class discussed approaches to photography from “objective” to “ expressive” and explored notions of the iconic, the narrative, and digression in architectural photography.
Students: Sarah Abouelkhair,
Tamim Aljefri,
Luz Auyon,
Aahana Banker,
Olivia Braun,
Junfan Chen,
Yunha Choi,
Hallie Chuba,
Benjamin Diller-Schatz,
Kristen Fitzpatrick,
Zhichen Gong,
Iris Hong,
Wanqi Jiang,
Sophia Le,
Yiruo Li,
Minghan Lin,
Enfeng Xie,
Luxi Yang,
Qingyang Yu,
Jiazheng Zhang,
Yanan Zhou
Fall 2021
Spring 2022
Fall 2021
Measuring the Great Indoors
This course explored techniques for working with data from the physical world with the aim of understanding and manipulating dynamic, interactive environments. Students used hardware (sensors, microprocessors, and computer vision cameras), software (IFTTT and Processing), and their powers of observation to characterize and design phenomenological aspects of “the great indoors.
Fall 2021, Spring 2022
X Information Modeling I
For this course, students worked with and generated geo-spatial data at multiple scales: city, neighborhood, and buildings. They integrated urban data exploration and environmental performance and derived their own data within a computational design workflow.
Students: Vinay Agrawal, Farah Ahmed, Nayef Alsabhan, Willy Cao, Xumin Chen, Yuning Feng, Zhichen Gong, Siyun Ji, Junho Lee, Mauricio Rada Orellana, Yining Shen, Bisher Tabbaa, An Wang, Qingfan Wu, Xiangru Zhao
Fall 2021
Data Visualization for Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities
This class introduced students to key concepts in the design of information visualization (and interactivity). Students put theory to practice in discussions that critically engaged with the visualizations. They also produced visualizations by hand and by code that were interactive, public-facing, and live on the web. Specifically, they learned and used the javascript library D3.
Students: Michelle Chen,
Anays Gonzalez Sanchez,
Takashi Honzawa,
Jisoo Kim,
Spenser Krut,
Dhruva Lakshminarayanan,
Shuhua Li,
Shinan Liu,
Yixuan Ouyang,
Rongxin Tang,
Kenny Zhou
