This course reinforces the fundamentals of environmental systems- thermal, light, ventilation, acoustics-and teaches design strategies to evaluate and optimize building concepts based on these systems. The lab component will include hands-on testing (e.g. data-loggers for thermal and HDR imaging for daylighting) and an emphasis on digital simulations (e.g. Rhino plug-ins for thermal and lighting analysis). The Simulation Game is an in-class activity where students compete to make the most energy-efficient conceptual building massing using an energy modeling program in Rhino/Grasshopper. The course will culminate in a case study project in which students apply design strategies to a specific building design problem.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Preference is given to Junior Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture

Capstone architectural technology design class focusing on the integration of Structural, Environmental, Enclosure, and Circulation systems. Course to be semester long group design project with labs/workshops using related quantitative analysis and design tools to design systems for a complete building in detail. Special consideration for egress, accessibility, life safety, general code requirements (construction type and zoning), and documentation standards.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Fifth-year Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | B.Arch: Architecture

This seminar will utilize the content, topic, and conceit of measure as a pinhole through which to see the world of Directed Design Research. Directed Design Research is an alternative to Thesis, which lays out a specific territory of inquiry and encourages students to identify the topic and scope of their work, emanating from this specific point of departure. The seminar will lay out a series of methods, techniques, and exercises related to the exploration of measure, asking each student to then define a territory of inquiry within this delimited field. The deliverables for the Scope Seminar include a thoughtfully delimited and actionable statement of the intended design research, the documentation of a minimum of three methodologies or approaches to be utilized in the design research, and a well-wrought syllabus that includes: a weekly breakdown of tasks and deliverables, relevant references and precedents properly cited, and a concise text (3 pages maximum) describing the research activities to be undertaken.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Fifth-year Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture (Directed Research Track)

The course is, effectively, a studio congruent with a seminar, and its ambition is to provide rigorous methodological framing and provocative content scaffolding for the design research activities within the studio. While the studio component will focus on the advancing of the design research questions framed in the fall seminar, the seminar component will consider the best formats and vehicles for the dissemination of the design research. The deliverables for this course will be twofold: a thoroughly researched, documented, and delineated design project; and a textual 'exit document' in which students articulate their research methods, techniques, formats, and outcomes.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch, MArch (3yr), MArch (2yr): Architecture

There is an inescapable pairing between architecture and textiles, yet in contemporary construction, textiles are often confined to the role of surface, applied at the building’s completion. This course repositions that relationship, proposing a reciprocal exchange between the two disciplines—one that operates not as application but as integration. Today’s building culture privileges rigid, hard-to-hard connections (nailed, screwed, poured, and glued), producing inflexibility, tolerance gaps, and irreversible assembly. Textile construction begins with the connection (entanglement of yarn), where structure and connection emerge simultaneously, yet the design stops at the scale of the swatch, leaving the larger final form to be determined by others. Interlacing Form challenges these conventions by asking: How might principles of textile construction (knitting, weaving, knotting, lashing) inform new logics of architectural assembly? And conversely, how can textile processes be rethought through the architectural lens. So much so, we begin to blur the lines between what is architecture and what is a textile.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $20.00 - $100.00

Elective

This class is a dedicated time and space for drawing from observation. Instead of writing and discussing ideas that are brought forth from reading, we will draw and discuss thoughts that come forth from observing. Therefore, the "reading"; and discussion of each other's work and experience of drawing is an important component of the class. Each class will be an exercise of observation with a provided subject from life. The given subject and prompt will provoke avenues of observation and material/process resistance. The outcome of the drawing and observation process will be discussed as well as the continued individual projects initiated outside of class.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $20.00 - $100.00

Elective

This advanced theory seminar explores how architecture participates in the production and contestation of urban facts. Leveraging frameworks from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Media Studies, and Contemporary Art Practices, students will examine how architects use representational tools to construct evidence, mobilize publics, and facilitate change. Through historical and contemporary case studies, students will investigate architecture’s complicity—and thereby its agency—in the demonstration and proliferation of new facts and truth claims. With an interest in visual cultures and digital processes, the seminar endeavors to advance our disciplinary understanding of architecture’s role within increasingly divisive political and urban contexts.

Elective

Icon Mashup introduces students to fundamental principles of construction through the architectural wall section. Organized around three progressive exercises, the course begins with the analysis of canonical precedents, moves through speculative hybridization across structural systems, and concludes with adaptive redesign under real-world constraints. Emphasizing technical precision and conceptual clarity, students produce large-scale orthographic drawings and physical models while engaging in iterative critiques and red-line sessions. The course balances historical knowledge with contemporary practice, featuring guest lectures from experts in masonry, timber, steel, and concrete systems, and encourages students to reconcile design ambition with structural logic and environmental performance.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $30.00 - $50.00

Elective

This 3-credit seminar will focus on the potential of sunlight and other forms of ambient energy to explore artistic forms of solar technology in our built environment. We will look at an array of emerging solid-state technologies and explore the positively and negatively charged layers of silicon and other semiconductor materials, which can be crystallized, cut, deposited, scored, into and onto multiple substrates. This accessible technology can easily be deployed. The very small compositions and patterns of these layers have the potential for radically different effects at different scales. The world of the microscope and the telescope, the minute and far away, will serve as guides and tools. We will also explore the spatial potential of electronic outputs like light and sound to produce a changed state.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $30.00 - $50.00

Elective

In the course of modernity, fiber has been overlooked—or more accurately put—rejected, as a contemporary building material. In fact, the metric used to determine poverty in the global south or African continent by the radically successful non-profit Give Directly is by evaluating roofs of dwellings. If you have a thatch or other non-modernized (and extractive) roof assembly, you are eligible to be evaluated for direct cash contributions. This studio elective asks students to challenge the assumption of thatch and heterogenous fiber constructions as “folksy,” “antiquated,” or “impoverished” by making “fiber-forms” and their representations. Students will develop research around formal architectural thatch and fiber-assemblies, and iteratively develop fiber-form assemblies leading to large-scaled mock-ups and prototypes. In parallel, students will also develop representational and drawing techniques that reflect fiber’s contemporary resurrection. Even though this appears to be architecture-specific, all majors are welcome.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

As artists and designers our understanding of the physical universe can be a fundamental part of our engagement with our context and in production of our creative work. This course includes an introduction to selected fundamentals of physics: momentum, thermodynamics, and waves and optics - all part of the basis for Architectural Technology. These fundamental phenomena are to be considered both through their mathematical application and expression as concepts in contemporary art. Content to be examined through mathematical problem solving, critical reading, and lab sessions using both physical measurement and digital simulation in Python programming language.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

Introduction to technical building systems - Structure, Environmental and Enclosure - and their integration with an emphasis on quantifying performance and increasing sustainability. Content includes survey of these three system types - typical components, basis of performance, and analysis of performance - and introduction to related conventions of construction and architectural detailing to realize them.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to first-year MArch (3yr) Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

Structural Design with timber, steel and concrete (allowable stress, plastic, and composite design respectively). Students will develop understanding and application of quantitative methods of structural design for conventional structural components and systems - beams, columns, trusses, frames, walls, etc. in multiple materials. Introduces the conventions of detailing structural systems in these materials. Introduces systems and requirements for building foundation, gravity superstructure, and lateral superstructure.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for second-year MArch (3yr) Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

Comprehensive design of building enclosures - integrated consideration of structural design, tolerance, detailing, thermal transmission, air transmission, and moisture transmission. Introduce typical and atypical systems of enclosure with emphasis on relative advantages of different systems depending on location, intended performance, and design intent.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

Comprehensive design of building enclosures - integrated consideration of structural design, tolerance, detailing, thermal transmission, air transmission, and moisture transmission. Introduce typical and atypical systems of enclosure with emphasis on relative advantages of different systems depending on location, intended performance, and design intent.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

This course reinforces the fundamentals of environmental systems- thermal, light, ventilation, acoustics-and teaches design strategies to evaluate and optimize building concepts based on these systems. The lab component will include hands-on testing (e.g. data-loggers for thermal and HDR imaging for daylighting) and an emphasis on digital simulations (e.g. Rhino plug-ins for thermal and lighting analysis). The Simulation Game is an in-class activity where students compete to make the most energy-efficient conceptual building massing using an energy modeling program in Rhino/Grasshopper. The course will culminate in a case study project in which students apply design strategies to a specific building design problem.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for first-year MArch (3yr) Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

Capstone architectural technology design class focusing on the integration of Structural, Environmental, Enclosure, and Circulation systems. Course to be semester long group design project with labs/workshops using related quantitative analysis and design tools to design systems for a complete building in detail. Special consideration for egress, accessibility, life safety, general code requirements (construction type and zoning), and documentation standards.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for second-year MArch (2yr) and third-year MArch (3yr) Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

Capstone architectural technology design class focusing on the integration of Structural, Environmental, Enclosure, and Circulation systems. Course to be semester long group design project with labs/workshops using related quantitative analysis and design tools to design systems for a complete building in detail. Special consideration for egress, accessibility, life safety, general code requirements (construction type and zoning), and documentation standards.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for second-year MArch (2yr) and third-year MArch (3yr) Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

Anyone following contemporary debates in architecture knows that there are as many definitions of architecture's disciplinarity as there are people who attempt to define it. In the current spate of publications on this topic, Mark Jarzombek declares architecture to be a failed discipline; Jane Rendell claims that architecture is a 'subject' subsuming several disciplines; Mark Wigley ruminates upon the prosthetic nature of the discipline to the sciences; Bob Somol and Sarah Whiting attempt to recover a Foucaultian disciplinarity in which norms, principles and traditions are supplanted by performative practice; Akos Moravansky argues that the disciplinarity of architecture resists the discursive approach embodied in post-1968 theory; Keller Easterling seeks the trapdoor into another habit of mind" by eschewing narrow categories of thought for more inclusive ones; Sylvia Lavin uses the analogy of the 'kiss' between an installation and the architecture that houses it as a model of architectural inter-disciplinarity as media interaction; and Hal Foster and Michael Speaks face off on the relative merits of design intelligence and critical distance. How can a student of architecture ever gain a foothold in this complex and confusing debate? At stake in the debates over disciplinarity is the question: how can we identify architecture's categories of knowledge, and how did the categorization of knowledge become a priority? This Disciplinarity seminar will historically situate the circumstances of architecture's emerging disciplinarity, and thematize it through three seemingly disparate but operatively identical lenses: the aesthetic, the historic, and the technological. Although the debates cited above appear unruly at first blush, fundamentally they aggregate around the relative merits of defining disciplinary categories of knowledge either too narrowly or too broadly, focusing either on architecture's autonomy or its extra-disciplinary appropriations. In addition to architecture's various categories of knowledge, the seminar will consider the influence of disciplinarity on our practices, considering how various classifications of architectural knowledge affect its techniques, standards, and formats of dissemination. From its Foucaultian framing to its current incarnations, Disciplinarity will unpack the construction of architecture's disciplinarity, and shed some much-needed light on what it means for architects to be disciplinary.

Students are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (3yr)

This is a theoretical seminar course that will be concerned with ideas and architectural knowledge that may be cultivated and tested through discourse. The course discussions will focus on an expansive role of architectural tools. While acknowledging a wealth of disciplinary conventions, histories and theories, this course recognizes that the forms of representation within the discipline of architecture have the capacity to affect the discipline of architecture and are not fixed. Students in this course will be expected to build upon their previous architectural education through a series of directed projects aimed at advancing architectural theories, ideas and methods. Some of the questions that students will be expected to address are: What are the practical, theoretical, and creative implications of a drawing that functions as architecture? How do architects change the way we make and think thanks to digital media? How do architects represent and model natural forces? How do architects express political or social agendas? What is the nature of an architectural contribution to interdisciplinary discourse? How can representation enable new kinds of artistic and research-based practices for architecture? Students will be expected to self-direct their process while framing their work intellectually in a seminar environment.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

This course is limited to first-year MArch (2yr) Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch: Architecture (2yr)