Graduate Design Studio III
Emphasis on architectural programming and the design of buildings incorporating technologies of materials and various architectural systems.
Designing (and eventually building) is a physical task. Involving both intellect and the manual operation of making thought manifest, the process of design invokes the full body. To that end, the beginning of a design education can quickly become overwhelming given the range of necessary skills and their careful and controlled orchestration. This studio, Haptic Space (the material world of design) will be spent developing spaces via material, structural, and site concerns. In order for architecture to materialize, materials, structure, and a site, must exist.
This semester you begin to focus your education as an architect, “one whose profession it is to design buildings and superintend their construction.” In order to be successful in this venture, you must gain control of the physical tools of your trade. You must learn how they can be strong and supportive (structure), protective, iconographic, and environmental (skin), sensory, atmospheric, emotional, expressive, programmatic, and connotative (intent). In conjunction with initiating the development of your material skills, you also must continue to develop your skills for analyzing site and function (program) and develop their relationships/integration to the assembly of building. This semester the objective is to begin this acquisition of material knowledge; to build an alphabet and start to use it to design and to create space, to investigate how material languages give meaning to space (haptic) and to investigate material means of assembly. The more diligently you pursue material knowledge, the more versatile and fluent with the tools of your trade you become (yes, practice makes perfect), the more skilled you will be as a “maker of space.” The architects we remember, the buildings that last, were made well by those who mastered the language of materials.