Course Outline

studio process

1: Gardening Space  4 weeks long

Whoever knows how to design a park well will have no difficulty in tracing the plan for the building of a city according to its given area and situation.  There must be regularity and fantasy, relationships and oppositions, and casual, unexpected elements that vary the scene; great order in the details, confusion, uproar, and tumult in the whole.

Abbé Laugier in Observations sur l’Architecture (1765)

We’ll start in an Italian Renaissance garden.  These gardens are pure formal, spatial, and sequential plays. They are totally superfluous and unprogrammed tectonic pleasure promenades laden with thick layers of spatial sequence and narrative potential.  Some call them models of cities or earthly diagrams of paradise.  Some call them lovely stage sets for the theaters of promenade that play out within them.  We’ll explore these meanings, measure the situation in the garden, and specify a drawn and modeled description thorough enough to make the garden dissolve away revealing a beautiful narrative of form, space, and sequence that transcends the artifact from which we began. 

2: Boxing Space 2 weeks long

This is the record of a box man.  I am beginning this account in a box.  A cardboard box that reaches just to my hips when I put it over my head.  That is to say, at this juncture the box man is me.  A box man, in his box, is recording the chronicle of a box man.

Kobo Abé in The Box Man (1974)

Then we’ll site the garden’s narrative, a story free of its Italian sources, into a variety of boxes: boxes of space, boxes of form, and everything we can imagine in between.  To box the narrative we’ll work through some operative techniques of formal and spatial design such as: folding, compressing, sectioning, and scaling.  At the end of all this pushing and shoving we’ll have a graphical and modeled description of way that the garden’s narrative is structured within the generic form/space modulations of the box.

3: Situating Space 2 weeks long

Art and architecture are practices, not sciences. The constructions of science aspire to universal application. Pictures and buildings need only work where they are.

Dave Hickey in Practice : Architecture (1996)

In this phase we’ll move the work back towards a specificity by putting it somewhere, giving it context, situation, and surroundings as well as returning the work to a particular scalar and enveloping relationship to the human body.

4: Constructing Space 5 weeks long

Construction not only determines form but is form itself.  Where authentic construction encounters authentic contents, authentic works result:  works genuine and intrinsic.  And they are necessary.  Necessary in themselves and also as members of a genuine order.             

Mies van der Rohe in “With Infinite Slowness Arises the Great Form” (1928)

The last thing we’ll do will be the most important part.  We’ll take the generic operative world of the narrated box described in part 2 and surrounded in part 3 and completely eradicate any remaining generic qualities of it.  We’ll make it architectonically specific by translating it through a constructive vocabulary of normative building components such as beam, column, stairs, slab, wall, trim, rail, panel, frame, ramp, and base.

methods of assessment

Studio 2 is a performance class.  You perform a given project in a process broken down for you into autonomous, additive, and assessable exercises.  Craft is tantamount to caring which is curiosity.  Through craft you demonstrate learning in the assessable products of your performance.  The primary design tool for the semester will be typologies, physical models (foam, chipboard, and piano wire), drafted diagrams, projection drawings, and planimetrics.

Studio teaching is accomplished in intensive making based study.  Daily assignments are given and checked.  On time submission of daily work is expected and will be rewarded in assessment.  Daily review and critique of submitted work will occur and suggestions will be offered for improvement but formal assessment of the design project will happen only three times in the semester.

A major submission of project work will occur at the end of each of the four parts of the project- after the section reviews.  The instructor will generate a written assessment for each student in the section outlining strengths and weaknesses in design, analysis, and representational skill.

evaluation & grading criteria


Students who make A’s in this course will be curious about ideas, will make iterations of things over and over again, will be facile with and eager to explore graphical techniques, and will find a way to channel these base level studies into a simple but sophisticated questioning of architectural production.  You will be evaluated at least indirectly at every class meeting.

You can complete every assignment on-time, completed correctly, and fail this course.  Finishing is simply a basis for assessment, as in any class.  Demonstrating the issues of the course through your performance is how you pass the course.

No extra credit, make-ups, or late submissions are allowed in this course.   Each studio submission will require presentation and pick-up of the work by designated times.  Submission dates require submissions.  If a student cannot be present on a submission date they are expected to see that their work is accepted beforehand or that a classmate submits the work for them on the due date. 

The semester’s grade is measured in a 100 point system: 
30 project points for gardening space review  
15 project points for boxing space review  
15 project points for siting space review
40 project points for constructing space review 

100 studio points