Examine the critical role of materials and methods for the design and construction of buildings. The primary focus is on materials and systems, their properties and connections, and their intrinsic relationship to structural systems and environmental performance.
Students will develop a fundamental understanding of: the relationship of materiality to construction systems and techniques, how building materials are manufactured, and how a material’s modular form, dimensions and intrinsic qualities influence the design process. Students will learn about various building systems, and how these systems assist in the expression of a design concept, through an examination of precedent projects whose design concepts were generated by material logics and systems. Students will work hands-on with building materials (concrete, wood, metal, etc.) to get an understanding of each material’s properties.
Introduction to principles and processes; sequence of exercises emphasizing development of basic skills, ideas, and techniques used in the design of simplified architectural projects.
Prerequisite: ARCH 102aL.
The first course in a series of seminars comprising the Bachelor of Science in Architecture + Inventive Technologies major, this class is intended to offer students a basic understanding of the history and theory of architecture and architectural product design. This is an introductory history and theory course regarding both the history of modern architecture and the inventive technologies that have shaped it, as well as the theoretical positions that have informed its present condition and potential trajectories. Technology and innovation will be explored as operative agents that have shaped the history of architecture and associated design disciplines, and as instrumental to the production of social, political, economic, and environmental conditions mediated by the built environment. Students will examine significant innovations and new technologies within architecture and the impact they have had on the profession, as well as on associated fields of design, construction, heritage conservation, building science, landscape architecture, and urbanism. Theoretical constructs framing the development of design technologies and their cultural situations will orient the topics explored in this course.
Key to an understanding of architecture is an ability to move between aesthetics and geometry, spatial concept and materiality, art practice and technical production. This course will introduce basic drawing, digital and physical modelmaking, and post-processing skills and encourage experimentation with these diverse methods of working, providing students with opportunities to build and expand an understanding of what constitutes architectural representation. By iteratively working through various types of representation techniques, students will not only enhance their ability to communicate both visually and verbally, but also improve the final output of their studio projects.
This course embarks on an exploration of computational design's rich history, its ascension to prominence, and its indelible imprint on the architectural profession. Students will be introduced to the basic techniques of Grasshopper. By the end of the semester, students will also have a holistic understanding of where parametric design sits within the broader architectural narrative and why it remains an indispensable skill in contemporary architectural discourse.
This seminar will track the process of taking a product from an idea all the way to market. It will examine the importance of innovation, concepts of feasibility, designing, prototyping, bringing in investors, marketing and other aspects of entrepreneurship. This course will also examine the history and theory of ideas and concepts which influenced architecture and surrounding disciplines and examine the cultural impact of these influential ideas, products, inventions, etc. in our communities. The course will end with a look at technology and innovation in this field, with this idea of predicting what this field will look like in the near future.
Architecture is visible. Architecture is willful. Architecture is disciplinary, specific to a medium.
Architecture exhibits or expresses order. Architecture is real, embodied.
This course will introduce students to concepts and principles that are the distinguishing
attributes of the discourse. Students will experience these core, intrinsic principles within the
larger context of design, through a series of exercises and examples from a wide selection of
disciplines. Study of relevant design precedents will hone conceptual understanding, while
experience doing and making will develop judgment.
The Workshop will introduce students to the range of skills essential to the design process.
Prescribed themes and processes are intended to advance those technical skills, sharpen
awareness of spatial conventions, and stimulate critical thinking and creativity.
Students will build on the techniques and methodologies gained in the first-year program, while adding to them a comprehensive idea about site as a cultural and physical generator of architectural form. Students will be introduced to methods of site analysis and research, new generative drawing techniques, as well as the architectural and disciplinary conventions associated with site work.
Prerequisite: ARCH 102bL.
This studio introduces materiality in architecture. Projects explore the conceptual and technical implications of different material systems. Consideration is given to both conventional and unconventional methods of assembly.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
This course offers a foundational introduction to material considerations in architectural design, specifically:
1. properties and characteristics of material systems;
2. methods of material assembly;
3. techniques of drawing and modeling architectural materials.
This course will help the student comprehend the nature of order in our surroundings, and to create an appreciation and understanding of how and why these systems are established. Projects will focus on the intrinsic properties of materials applied in structural and conceptual expression. The primary objective is to expose students to current issues related to design in architecture, and to teach the intrinsic nature of architecture developed through principles based on the design and construction process.
This first course introduces fundamental design concepts, current issues of influence, and value systems to elevate design and critical thinking skills of undergraduate engineering students. Students will explore basic principles of 2 and 3 dimensional compositions though a series of design exercises, discussions, and critiques; focusing on the intrinsic properties of materials applied in structural and conceptual expression. Students will be challenged to contend with actual dynamic forces, haptic and contextual dimensions on life-size physical and material structures on real-world sites. Emphasis is placed on design as a creative, conceptually driven, iterative process. Attention is given to theories of context, unity, order, proportion, shape, balance, form, and space as they apply to abstract composition and structural design. Expression of ideas and values present in physical form are explored through observation, analysis, transformation, and synthesis. Students develop and document projects using a variety of means, including model making, RHINO, ADOBE Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign and/or OTHER software programs, sketching, drawing, and photography. Project craft and execution (IRL or digitally) are emphasized.
This is the second semester for a foundation studio course in an interdisciplinary program with the School of Engineering that first was established in the 1970’s. This three-year interdisciplinary program is based in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Studies. This program will familiarize the student with architecture, landscape architecture, planning, structural, mechanical, and electrical engineering and the related issues that contribute to the built environment for our society. It introduces the process of coordinating all of these aspects for the engineering student.
This course will continue to develop the student’s comprehension on the nature of contextual and organizational principles that order our surroundings, and to create an appreciation and understanding of how and why these systems are established. The objective is to expose the student to current issues related to design in architecture, and to teach the intrinsic nature of architecture developed through principles based on the design & construction process. These topics are indications of the various value systems that come into play in the contemporary field of architecture. Understanding this and becoming aware that design is a synthetic process that is a balance of many concerns is a major objective of the course.
This course will explore contextual research and analysis introduced in ARCH 205aL in more depth, and architectural program and space planning for a modest, but spatially complex building within an urban context. These projects will continue to emphasize the design process from the initial design concept to the final building proposition. Though precedent studies, design exercises, lectures, and critiques; emphasis is placed on design as a creative, conceptually driven, iterative process; all working within the defined limits of project budgets and schedules.
Prerequisite: ARCH 205aL
Overview of parametric strategies and use of software types including Rhino3D and Grasshopper.
Basic considerations and design implications of the problem of determination of the materials and the construction details and processes for buildings.
Examine the critical role of materials and methods for the design and construction of buildings. The primary focus is on materials and systems, their properties and connections, and their intrinsic relationship to structural systems and environmental performance.
Students will develop a fundamental understanding of: the relationship of materiality to construction systems and techniques, how building materials are manufactured, and how a material’s modular form, dimensions and intrinsic qualities influence the design process.
Students will learn about various building systems, and how these systems assist in the expression of a design concept, through an examination of precedent projects whose design concepts were generated by material logics and systems. Students will work hands-on with building materials (concrete, wood, metal, etc.) to get an understanding of each material’s properties.
Prerequisite(s): PHYS 125 and MATH 108
Structure defines form and space and supports gravity, lateral, and thermal loads. The course introduces the four S’s required for architectural structures: Synergy, Strength, Stiffness, and Stability. Synergy, a system greater the sum of its parts, reinforces architectural objectives; strength resists breaking; stiffness resists deformation; and stability resists collapse. Structures must also resist bending, shear, tension, compression, thermal stress and strain. Learn the historic evolution, material, and system of structures, as well as the basic design and analysis tools for conceptual design.
Required text
Structure and Design: https://titles.cognella.com/structure-and-design-9781516522989
Detailed information is posted at http://uscarch.com/structures/
Prerequisite(s): ARCH 213a or equivalent course
Learn the design of basic structural systems: arch, vault, dome, truss, space truss, Vierendeel, suspended and stayed structures, moment frame, braced frame, shear wall, framed tube, bundled tube, and suspended high-rise. Structure selection and optimization is based on environmental conditions, available resources and technology. Explore how the design of these systems accounts for gravity, lateral wind, seismic load, and thermal stress and strain. Learn about seismic design and failure, as well as schematic design based on the global bending and shear concept. Students will design structures and build a structural model including small, medium, and large spaces.
Required text
Structure and Design: https://titles.cognella.com/structure-and-design-9781516522989
Detailed information is posted at http://uscarch.com/structures/
Architecture is the product of social, cultural, religious, and political forces. Great cultures and civilizations have existed all over the world, producing not only great monuments but robust vernacular architectural traditions, closely tied to the environment and their local context, which resonate even today.
This course examines the history of architecture from the Prehistoric period through the 16th century from a global perspective.
Fueled by population growth, within the next twenty years - according to Architecture 2030 - the global built environment will be redesigned, added to, or remade, adding an area equal to 3.5 times the existing buildings of the United States (900 billion square feet). In the process, energy patterns will be locked in for our cities, and as a result for our planet, for the following 50 years.
If Climate Change is to be manageable and not catastrophic, future development must be defined by an awareness and a commitment to high performance, deep energy efficiency, and even carbon neutral design. During the past century, the architectural profession has moved, by and large, away from a centuries old awareness of the environment, a deeper understanding of local climates, and a knowledge of how to maintain balance between building and environment.
As a result, deeper dependencies on mechanized heating and cooling, especially when buildings were designed with ingrained inefficiencies, became the norm and the solution to any problem. Energy use in buildings skyrocketed as a result, fueling the need for more power plants to supply energy for inefficient buildings and cities. For generations, this energy has been provided, by and large, by fossil fuel fired power plants, leading to increased CO2 emissions. Recently, there has been a professional awakening around the role architects play in contributing to the problem of climate change. In the October, 2003 edition of Metropolis, Ed Mazria called out the profession pointing out that, “Architects Pollute”. In the immediate aftermath, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) brought focus to energy efficiency and sustainability - both of which are now core doctrines for the AIA. Architects see problems and solve problems. This is critically important when it comes to energy dependence and climate change.
We are are living through a time when the profession is in transition. Designing without understanding the impacts for energy, water and resource consumption is no longer possible. State and National Energy Codes now place limits on the amount of energy that can be used by buildings. This is a time of great challenge for architects (and future architects). It is also a time of great opportunity. This course will discuss Climate Change and the critical role architects play in the discussion in the context of understanding and designing for the thermal environment of buildings.
Through the semester, students will discuss and review basic concepts of sustainability, gaining an understanding of climate appropriate design, passive heating and cooling, and renewable energy systems. At the same time, through weekly readings and assignments, students will use tools to help them understand, measure and design better buildings. They will be exposed to and will learn the international language of sustainability. During the semester, students will explore concepts and test ideas, building a single building (design and climate assigned by the instructor) to test passive energy features, evaluate daylighting, and ultimately to design a Zero Net Energy Building.
The focus of this seminar will be on sustainability and resilient design strategies. The effects of climate change and their effects on the built environment will be studied both from the level of examining how architecture, design, and the building industry impacts the global climate and also looking at what can be done to build/design to resist these effects. Topics may include urban ecology, global warming, resilience to extreme weather, sea level rise, and wildfires, Net Zero design, passive heating and cooling strategies, etc. Students will learn about what can be done to make the building industry have a lessened effect on the environment and how to build in a way that is more sensitive to the environment that a piece of architecture is placed in. Students will also learn about what design strategies can be taken to retrofit or remodel the existing built environment in a way that can have a net positive impact on our environment. Students will examine existing opportunities through products, materials, design choices, and design strategies at the level of a product or a furnishing in or on a building up to the level of urban design at the neighborhood or city. Students will have the opportunity to explore sustainable and resilient solutions through design at a variety of levels throughout this course. Sustainability and resiliency in business practices will also be studied -- students will examine the opportunities in creating businesses devoted to sustainability or resiliency through design and will posit what opportunities in this area of design may exist in the near future.
The first two workshops will lay down the foundation for the study of design, from architecture to graphic design to design at the level of products or furnishings. Students will focus on the fundamentals of design (color theory, form, principles of composition, studies of materiality, and visual analysis), moving from 2D to 2.5D design to 3D design. Essential design theories and ideas, like figure/ground relationships, scale, field conditions, etc. will be taught along the way, along with the historical and social movements from which these ideas and theories were derived. Particular focus will be on the scale of the human body and how it informs, interferes or interacts with furniture, goods and furnishing for the interior or the exterior, for the workplace or the home. The intent is to give students a background level of knowledge of how to design in all the scales, materials, and methods they will be asked to design throughout this course of study.
Architectural scale ranges from small to large and can be debatable, but most would agree that it is defined by human occupation. In many ways, the inhabitation of the human body and the interaction of parts of the body that distinctly separate it from other portable consumer products. At the smallest scale, these elements are furniture-like, conforming to the body, while the largest can be complete dwellings or pre-fab structures. This course interrogates the smallest unit albeit a piece of furniture, playground piece or building element. How that same unit connects to the adjacent space, program, function, economics and culture that surrounds it in what we call context plays an important role in the validity of this project.
Students will look at diverse precedents and will be encouraged to design responsibly for planet wellness, human wellness and equity.
This seminar explores the intersection between the urban form and the social life of cities, identifying a range of common problems common to urban societies as well as a number of key design solutions offered by designers to solve these systemic issues.
The primary focus of this course is on understanding the American city, in a global context. This course structure is comprised of four parts: Part One (Weeks 2, 3, 4) work to orientate the students to the major forces which have defined urban development between 1850 to 1950, then 1950 to the present, focusing on certain demographic shifts in where people live in relation to each other and the city. Part Two (Weeks 5, 6, 7) look at three additional “environments” which define the social life of cities in addition to housing – parks, transportation, and work environments. Part Three (Weeks 9, 10, 11) look at the question “Whose City Is It?” – focusing specifically on the role of the city in providing spaces of protest and to live out alternative social identities, as well as the role of the city in not accommodating those other “others” - beings without a voice or are not involved in the production of capital (children and nature). Part Four (Weeks 12, 13, 14) bring us up to the present time fully and engage in contemporary social environments such as new communication technologies that address social life of cities, the social life of cities during/after a pandemic, as well as the social life of online environments.
This studio sequence focuses on design at an occupiable scale -- from tents and pavilions to single units. Standards of architectural drawings (plans, sections, elevations, orthographic projections, etc.) will be covered. Course introduces issues of materiality, accessibility, constructability, etc. of basic shelters (ADU, refugee housing, homeless constructs, etc.). Portability, durability, pre-fab construction and self assembly are some topics that will be addressed.
Since Vitruvius, architects have sought to distill and outline key ideas and techniques for designing. In modernity, housing became the primary typology in which these ideas were explored. Beginning with Le Corbusier’s Maison Domino and his Five Points of a New Architecture, architects have sought to redefine a new way that housing can be designed and constructed. Cultural aesthetics, economic constraints, and means of construction are a few of the various aspects of reality that were considered by the modernists. Like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and others, successful modernists considered prototypical housing at multiple scales, from the single family dwelling to multi-unit aggregations. While modernists successfully reinvented housing in many regards, in other ways their prototypes were substantially criticized in retrospect by post-modernists who argued that modernity ignored various domains of reality that are culturally required for successful architecture.
Today, the problem of housing is far more complex. Issues of sustainability in response to climate change cannot be ignored. Every aspect of housing, from material transport to sustainable systems, must be explored as part of the total design process. Further, as climate change creates natural disasters that displace people for decades, destroy arable land, reduce fresh water supplies, and destabilize local economies, emergency housing has become a necessary complement to our existing housing stock of today.
Students will develop prototypical housing techniques that can be applied to the following
applications:
Emergency Relief Shelter (approx. 250 sf)
Accessory Dwelling Unit (approx. 800 sf)
Students will develop their own points of a new architecture (written), prototypical housing techniques and components, i.e. kitchens, bathrooms, living areas, bedrooms (drawn and written), and prototypical applications in the form of an emergency relief shelter (drawn and modeled) and an accessory dwelling unit (drawn and modeled). Each student will compile their work in an 8.5”x11” portfolio that will have text, drawings, renderings, and model photographs that will serve as an architectural manifesto for your idea of a new sailing architecture.
The integration of architectural design with building systems, both material (structure and enclosure) and experiential (circulation and environment), is the focus of this final core sequence studio. The comprehensive design project requires students to implement all the knowledge and skills previously accumulated, to extend the depth and breadth of their understanding of design issues, and to deal definitively with the interaction of the formal, experiential, regulatory, and technical requirements of architectural design. Projects will provide for structural integrity, for ventilation, heating and cooling (both natural and mechanical), for natural and artificial lighting, and for acoustic amenity. Students must build into their designs life-safety, egress, and accessibility requirements as embodied in model building codes. Developing a portion of each project in detail and extrapolating those tectonics, students will be responsible for integrating program, site and formal analyses, comprehending the ways in which decisions made in each sphere inform the others.
“We shape our buildings: thereafter they shape us.” Sir Winston Churchill
This course asks a seemingly simple question – what is shelter? The answer however, is quite complex.
Understanding shelter involves untangling many important and influential contextual factors, which we will study throughout the semester.
It is typically thought that people design domestic shelter based on physical opportunities and constraints
(i.e. climate, materials, construction, etc). However, reliance on physical factors alone to create shelter is a gross oversimplification. Humans are social beings, operating within complex belief systems, family
structures, social classes, gender relationships, etc. This course posits that it is these powerful social and
cultural factors, rather than the physical factors, which truly drive the creation of shelter and provide a
framework for value and order.
This seminar focuses on innovative technologies that have been developed and the interest of cultures to keep pursuing more. Lagging behind the vehicular and medical industries, the field of architecture is ready for new technologies that can be informed by biomimicry, smart materials, nano-technology, digital controls, artificial intelligence and more.
Students will learn about historic forms of experimental architecture and the impact these architectures had on the way we design and build today. Then students will get an overview of various types of experimental architectures occurring today — architectures looking to solve problems in our society, the way we build, or sustainability and architectures that make use of emerging technologies to invent new forms of architecture, new materials to build with, or new methods of construction — with the intent for these students to be critically positioned to inform new waves of experimental architecture which have the potential to change architecture for the better upon their graduation.
Students will delve into developing their own novel Product Design and working prototype in this workshop. Having been exposed to the myriad of Environmental Products, ideas, and principles through this program, the students in the course will be choosing and developing a novel architectural environmental product into a functioning prototype. Product Design might expand on existing concepts and continue to focus on projects that solve wicked problems with design and cladding, while others are more about techniques and methodologies rather than the specific material per se.
Students will learn about and explore some of the latest advancements in material research of our time, addressing issues of locality, globalization, and sustainability. Students will be exposed to a multitude of outside resources, depending on the material or idea involved. Students involved with metal will work with contacts at Zahner Metals of Kansas City, one of the premier architectural metal fabricators in the world. Composite plastics will be working with contacts at Kreysler & Associates, one of the main fiber reinforced plastic companies. Wood products will be working with contacts at the Wood Institute and The American Wood Council (AWC) is the industry’s signature program for development of design tools, and guidelines for wood construction that allow for the appropriate and responsible manufacture and use of wood products.
Students will also learn about the digital side of product design — including design of digital products, like apps, programs, or modeling software and digital means by which to develop products, like using 3D printing for creation of simple prototypes or mockups used in the iteration process. Solidworks will be introduced as an option for 3D modeling as it is more tailored to the design, development, and prototyping of certain types of products.
Some of the principles of this workshop will be to choose carefully something that is small and manageable, make sure the product is somewhat novel, does not duplicate existing products, search the web for possible competitors, sell us on your idea, tell us why existing products do not do the job, convince us that nothing exists that will fill the need you have identified.
Product Design in the architecture community seems to be becoming a rarity. Where historical practices such as Charles and Ray Eames developed a multitude of products ranging from tableware to prefab architecture, current practices tend to seem to subjugate themselves into the non-descript tableware, or one-off prototyping for specific facades. Conversely, many architecture products have not evolved from their initial concept and fabrication, often to the chagrin of addressing any sustainable concept. While the business community has been waking up to the need and opportunity presented by the current interest in sustainability, most executives, and students – lack a basic understanding of the issues surrounding sustainability and the tools and methods that enable “sustainable design thinking”. This course is an intentional, focused effort to help prepare you to lead positive and productive change in global industries and companies; to open up your thinking to ‘design for sustainability’. Tolerance for design thinking and rapid prototyping; ambiguity, creativity and holistic thinking – will be needed in class, and inherent in the process of Product Design.
This seminar focuses on the entrepreneurial creation of innovative architectural products that advance the utility, beauty, health, and safety of the built environment. Lagging behind the vehicular and medical industries, the field of architecture is ready for new technologies that can be informed by biomimicry, smart materials, nano-technology, digital controls, artificial intelligence and more. Students will analyze the artistic, technological, and entrepreneurial factors and address the conceptual, ethical, and logistical issues that are involved in entrepreneurship in architecture and inventive technologies.
The purpose of this course is to encourage students to get some work experience while still in school. Students who register for the course must be employed in an architecture, design, architectural products, product design, furniture design, or similar firm. Seminar discussions, bibliography, and preparation of a short paper on the practice are designed to assist the students to better comprehend the practical requirements of a creative practice.
For the most part, students will work independently to fulfill course requirements. There will be one kickoff meeting with all students and during this meeting the content of this syllabus will be reviewed. In the course of the students’ work experiences during the term, principles of the firms in which they are employed will advise them. At the end of the course, a “comparative practices'' paper will be submitted and there will be one final class meeting during which the content of these papers is discussed.
A collection can be a lot of things, in fashion and design, it suggests a family resemblance between a series of objects, either acquired or designed over an extended period of time. A collection has a temporal relationship with space and time, it can reflect a variety of styles, and set predictions for upcoming social and cultural trends. A collection offers unique organizational, generative potentialities, as well as, spatial adaptive qualities. The studio seeks to investigate and re-interpret furniture collections as generative aggregate systems of growth that can define space. How can an “Urban furniture collection” generate a spatial framework that can multiply/grow/morph/change in reaction to future social and cultural occupations?
Prerequisite(s): ARCH 302bL
Selected areas of specialization; three projects chosen with advisement from a variety of studio offerings that concentrate on different areas of vital concern.
Prerequisite(s): ARCH 402aL
Our material world is primarily produced by a method in which design, analysis, representation, fabrication and assembly is a seamless process - with the glaring exception of the building industry. Until recently, the building industry has rejected this methodology and instead relied upon a traditional project delivery method- a method that has increasingly separated the architect from the building process. This separation thus necessitated the production of two-dimensional representations by the architect in order to communicate the design intent to a third party builder. Whether by tradition or necessity, the notational limitations of the plan/section/elevation representation has remained the primary method by which the architect communicates design. But as architects are increasingly exploring more complex forms, it has become crucial to find design and production methodologies to realize these projects in the built environment without incurring the information loss inherent in traditional design representations.
Essential to this course is an understanding of how the increased efficiencies of software and emerging fabrication techniques are changing the way built projects can potentially be realized. This is a fundamental shift away from utilizing the computer as a visualization/documenting tool, and moving toward recognizing the computer as a generative tool. This course will utilize CAD/CAM technologies for the design, visualization, and production of components and fixtures. As a point of reference, we will explore product design and related industries as a microcosm of the larger issues facing the production of architectural assemblies. Lectures on these topics are accompanied by software and machine demos, in-class exercises and assignments that introduce both the digital as well as the fabrication environments. Lastly, students are encouraged to explore design communication techniques that move away from hyper-realistic rendering and toward the formation of an individual style.
Prerequisites: ARCH 207 and ARCH 307, CADD studio or department/faculty approval.
What does the architecture of buildings and cities tell us about systematic oppression and political control? What options for resistance exist in deeply entrenched spaces and structures of domination and dispossession? In this course, we will explore how the design of the built environment is shaped by social hierarchies and political agendas. In addition, we will examine how occupation and resistance are in constant flux, and how the dispossessed manage to find ways to act politically and resist strategies of domination through their everyday spatial practices and tactics.
The course aims to:
- demonstrate the relevance of architecture and planning perspectives to the study of power and resistance in modern society;
- signify the design of the built environment as not only a technical process, but also as a product of political motivations and social hierarchies;
- introduce tools needed to decipher social beliefs systems and political agendas underlying various architectural and planning schemes.
Coming Soon...
This course provides a foundation into computer programming as well as an understanding of how to analyze and manipulate data in both Python and C#. The course looks at data structures and studies algorithms as it applies to architecture and design. We will utilize Rhino3D, Grasshopper, and Microsoft Visual Studio to explore procedural techniques, then move toward Object-Oriented programming (OOP) in
computation.
Conceived of as a lecture-seminar-workshop, this course will expose students to current under-exploited and emerging forms of visual expression related to architecture, insisting that architectural “representation” is in fact a genre of architecture -- one that can generate architecture and architectural ideas.
The course is primarily structured around four areas of visual representation: Architectural Photography, Animated Props, Strange Models and Moving Images.
Registration Restriction: Not open to students with Freshman/Sophomore standing.
Does not require D-Clearance.
Registration restriction: Not open to students with Freshman/Sophomore standing.
This seminar examines light, color and the character of material as a collection of medium for making worlds. Through linking various arts and design disciplines as a departure and overview for the course subject, Arch 423 exposes students to a spectrum of approaches in theory and application, drawing influences from nature, technology, and the vernacular. Class exercises aim to develop a number of visual concerns across object-oriented analysis to atmospheric and environmental construction. In the course of employing digital and analogue techniques, students will synthesize a repertoire of advanced graphic experiments for weekly progress and learning.
This course focuses on materials science topics relevant to the application of nonconventional materials in design and engineering. This course addresses the broad range of nonconventional materials falling into three categories: i) advanced engineering materials; ii) ‘traditional’ and vernacular materials such as earth-based materials and bamboo; and, iii) historic materials.
This intensive pre-term course prepares students for their academic career in landscape architecture with a particular focus on familiarizing students with (1) the region’s ecological and cultural context; and (2) tools and techniques for seeing and representing landscape. It is structured in two parts with the first focused on field studies: both exploring the ecological and cultural landscapes of the Los Angeles region and developing field-drawing skills – perspective, depth of field, texture, tonality, sequence (etc). The second part is dedicated to developing media techniques for reading, representing and designing landscape as a dynamic medium. Particular software platforms will be stressed in order to facilitate ease of entry into the design studio curriculum (Adobe Creative Suite, Autocad, Rhinoceros, GIS).
Upon visiting Los Angeles in 1963, Marcel Duchamp described Los Angeles as a place that did not exist. Describing his frustrations that the city lacked wayfinding devices to help orient himself, Duchamp’s quote reveals a moment in urban history when LA was regarded as a city that nobody thought they could see. What Duchamp failed to notice was the city’s rich history of domestic architecture produced figures from Frank Lloyd Wright to the architects who participated in the Case Study House Program. The course will situate a range projects within the broader historical shifts taking place in Los Angeles and alongside key disciplinary developments taking place in the history of domestic architecture.
Contrary to Duchamp’s perception of Los Angeles, this course introduces students to the significance of Los Angeles architecture by way of a close examination of homes designed by prominent architects—each who practiced in Southern California in the early to mid-twentieth century. In lieu of site visits to individual houses, we will instead view a series of documentary films to supplement the selected readings presented and discussed in seminar.
Students will be expected to write short evaluations about three out of the total houses/architects they study. The short essays will include the student’s understanding of the project in conjunction with or contrast to the architects stated intentions. A 10-page research paper can be substituted for one of the evaluation papers. For this paper, the student must select a research topic approved by the instructor related to materials covered in the course.
This course is an introduction to the critical study of Asian architecture in China and Japan. We will also be looking at the importance of understanding architecture in the context of urban phenomena, and within this context, how it can evolve over time and reacted to forces of change. The development of contemporary architecture in China is, without a doubt, in continual flux which parallels its economic growth and globalization. On the other hand, Japan has been an integral part of the modern movement since post-World War II modernization and economic development. Japanese modern architecture hit the international scene with its inception of Metabolism, and has been a part of the global dialog of modernism since that time.
It is no secret that “the environment” is a complex object—so complex as to be elude definition: what do we mean when we say “environment”? What assumptions, subject-positions, habits, and methods of knowledge underlie our conceptualizations of the environment? This course considers the environment not as an object or assemblage so much as a set of methods for organizing, understanding, and representing the world’s complexity and thereby situating human and non-human practices within it. The major goal of the course is to understand how different ways of ordering and organizing environmental complexity have particular effects on the politics of humans and nature. Through class discussions, lectures, and take-home assignments, students are asked to consider how designed buildings, landscapes, and infrastructures rest on particular notions of the environment, and how environmental rectitude—or reparations—are to be considered in light of conflicting interests, complex interdependencies, and entrenches systems of power.
Global histories and anthropologies of architectures and infrastructures are studied through questions of equitability, enfranchisement, and political agency. Discussions are supplemented by
visual material.
This is a broad-based survey course focused on façade system technology and explores the potent leverage of the building skin in the realization of intelligent and sustainable buildings and urban habitat.
INSTRUCTORS: Mic Patterson, Sanjeev Tankha
This course will follow the “flipped classroom” format, based on lectures delivered by outside luminaries in the broad field of the built environment. Students will view and attend lectures delivered by guest lecturers from the school’s lecture series and other invited experts as part of their homework assignment while in-class exercises comprise of a combination of conversations and workshops on the topic of the expanded role of the architect. As a group, we will contemplate and challenge the role of the architect in a format first started during the Renaissance period called the Salon that is best described by Justine Kolata in her essay for The European. This course will follow a similar format, open to all students and all ideas or positions. Students will be required to complete the assigned readings and attend a weekly lecture prior to class and complete an Interrogative Exercise each week. At the end of the semester, they will compile their semester findings in a one-page Reflective Essay. Various faculty guests with specific expertise may be invited to participate in the discussions each week to add another level to the discussion.
The National Parks are truly one of America’s best ideas. Our National Parks are much more than simply recreational lands. The parks offer opportunities for learning and engagement in the sciences, arts, environmental design, leadership, culture, heritage, law, and policy. This course will provide an integrated multi-disciplinary overview of our national parks from the unique perspectives of the teaching and research of the combined expertise of a broad coalition of more than 20 faculty members from the University of Southern California, plus topic experts from the National Park Service.
It all starts with an idea. That idea is brought to life with exterior lighting design, starting with the story and unfolds the plot, the characters, and highlights through illumination. While interior lighting can be bound within walls, exterior lighting knows no limit of impact to the surrounding environment or the effect on the humans that inhabit those spaces. In this class, we will explore fundamental lighting vocabulary and functions, then dive into the various types of spaces and applications that demand an enhanced understanding of lighting quality through mood, illuminance, layering, focus, and contrast. These guides will help students determine fixture choice, lumen output, color, and placement. This course will utilize lectures, assignments, projects, and live demonstrations, to help students discover how lighting intersects with crucial building systems, landscape architecture, and planning, as well as local and statewide recommendations and codes.
Selected areas of specialization; projects chosen from a variety of studio offerings, all with an emphasis on the comprehensive design of buildings. Prerequisite: 402abL. Corequisite: ARCH 501.
Related News: Fifth-Year Students Explore Heavy & Mass Timber Building Techniques
The final comprehensive architectural project under the guidance of a faculty adviser to demonstrate architectural knowledge, skills, and professional interests and goals.
Pre-requisites: ARCH-500A and ARCH-501.
A general introduction to architectural principles, intended to develop design and critical thinking skills and proficiency to communicate those ideas effectively. Open to graduate architecture majors only.
Introduction to building systems and site design principles. Open to graduate architecture majors only.
This course is a broad overview of multiple fabrication and construction techniques used in the production of architecture, furniture, and industrial design.
This course will be a combination of lecture and lab. Lectures will cover three primary categories of industrial process (Additive, Subtractive, and Transformative) along with materials research (Plastics, Composites, Wood, and Metals). We will engage a series of discovery‐ based, hands‐ on workshops where students will begin small scale material and fabrication prototypes, utilizing various digital fabrication technologies (CNC milling, 3D printing, Laser Cutting, etc). In the second half of the course, students will further develop their initial material-based discoveries into refined, small‐ scale projects that exhibit a high degree of material awareness and craft.
Studies of construction system development within the architectural design context; processes and issues of selection, evaluation, optimization, integration, design control, and innovation, Departmental approval required.
Prerequisite(s): ARCH 211 or 511L This design research seminar examines both disciplinary and extra-disciplinary technologies, techniques, and theories for the use of Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) composite material systems in the design and construction of architecture.
Students will gain a basic understanding of the engineering principles behind these material systems and establish a background in the architectural applications for FRP, both historic and contemporary. Students will also study FRP composites through selected extra-disciplinary precedents, such as racing sailboats, contemporary aircraft, and wind turbines.
Students will examine the advantages and disadvantages of FRP composite systems, critically considering how FRP materials perform in relation to conventional building systems, technically and aesthetically. Students will explore performance-based FRP design by reimagining existing precedents as new architectural building systems.
Students will be required to consider formal surface geometries, spatial opportunities, structure, life-safety, fabrication, transport, and assembly as some of the factors impacting architectural performance. Students will create a research-based design project, including original writing, drawings, diagrams, and models, speculating about the possibilities for use of FRP composite building systems in contemporary architectural design.
This seminar emphasizes the study of horizontal structures, with a focus on the integration of building systems and exploring the fit and synergy of form and structure. Develop informed intuition for structures, their response to natural forces (gravity, seismic, thermal, wind), and how structure interacts with other design issues. Identify strategies and explore issues and problems in the development of building structure systems such as design criteria, system selection, design development, optimization, and system integration. Seismic design and seismic failure will also be introduced. Learn the basics of Multiframe and LDG (Lateral Design Graph) to design for lateral wind and seismic load.
Required text:
Structure and Design: https://titles.cognella.com/structure-and-design-9781516522989
Detailed information is posted at http://uscarch.com/structures/
A historical survey of global architecture, analyzed as a product of social, cultural, religious and political forces: 4500 BCE to 1500 CE.
A historical survey of global architecture, analyzed as a product of social, cultural, religious and political forces.a: 4500 BCE to 1500 CE; b: 1500 CE to present.
Coming Soon
Architects are designing increasingly complex building skins using new materials and processes that were not imaginable just a few years ago. This course is intended to provide a solid foundation of building envelope design issues and technology while exposing students to some of the most advanced building skins today.
No previous facades experience required for this course.
Case study-oriented course presenting critical relationships between human health and well-being and architectural and landscape architectural design at three scales: buildings, public space, and the urban landscape.
This course focuses on the design of a diverse collection of hospital and community settings for healthcare. The course introduces students to a range of building types that vary from major trauma centers to small scale community outpatient facilities. It traces the evolution of healthcare settings from the Greek period to current times, including the newest emphasis on public health and lifestyle.This topic of healthcare design is huge in scale and magnitude. In fact, many firms who specialize in this area, have their own in-house training programs. This course is meant to provide an overview of this changing building type and how it impacts the practice of medicine (and architecture) today.
The course starts with the history of the hospital as a building type from 500BC to the present day summarizing with a list of today’s challenges and tomorrow’s future trends. It describes powerful research findings that show how landscape designs can combat depression and promote relaxation. Building organizational strategies and programming approaches are reviewed as well as factors that affect appearance and functionality. It examines the patient room and new trends that embrace old ideas and introduce new ones. It demonstrates how and why families/friends have become more active participants in the healing process. It also shows how empirical analysis (often labeled evidence-based design) is affecting practice. Finally, it ends with a look at new technologies like imaging diagnostics and operating room procedures which are changing high-tech medicine.
Comparative studies of professional practice between U.S. firms and firms in other countries. Open to international upper-division undergraduate and graduate architecture students only. Graded CR/NC.
Prerequisite(s): ARCH 302bL
Design methodology, typology programming, site analysis, budget formulation and pro-forma procedures. Office management, emphasizing professional service and professional ethics as well as project management focusing on the architect’s responsibilities during construction.
If you are considering becoming a developer of housing after you graduate, this course will provide you with an introductory overview of the issues and challenges developers face in providing small-scale housing in an urban setting. Designed primarily for upper-division undergraduates, this seminar will explore the various elements and stages of the housing development process for projects in Southern California. Students will learn about and prepare each component, including land, entitlements, program, design brief, support spaces, site plan, hard and soft costs and a cost analysis/proforma suitable for presentation to banks, investors and lending institutions. The course will include guest lecturers who are practicing professionals in the Los Angeles housing development arena and who will present a series of local case studies. There will be ample opportunities for open discussion.
Guest lecturers include non-profit and for-profit developers, architects, construction managers, entitlement consultants, cost & estimating specialists, lenders and investors, contractors, and property managers. Lectures will also include architectural design, quality, sustainable design, and the related cost issues.
Despite the cultural dominance of the single-family home in Los Angeles, this region has also been a laboratory for innovative multifamily housing. This course introduces precedents dating back to circa 1900, from bungalow courts and garden apartments to today's Transit Oriented Communities (TOC) and the return of low-rise compounds following the legalization of ADUs, JADUs and the passage of SB 9 and 10. The course will show how designers and builders of multifamily housing in Los Angeles have been highly innovative, synthesizing regional climate, lifestyle, aspirations for the good life and building technologies with diverse influences from overseas. Students will also learn about the politics of multifamily housing in Los Angeles, its role in economic and racial segregation and the persistent struggle around rental affordability and stability.
In search of adequate and affordable housing models, this seminar addresses the challenge of equitable housing provision from the perspective of collective action and collective housing. We will look at pragmatic solutions and utopian visions, investigate innovative approaches at the architectural and organizational level, and speculate on how one could transform existing frameworks of housing production towards more inclusive systems.
Against the backdrop of prevalent housing crises in Los Angeles, the United States and around the world, this seminar will discuss collective housing as an essential component for both social and environmental equity for people from all social and income backgrounds. While on an organizational level, collective housing models offer great potentials to deliver social and spatial justice through more affordable, adequate and equitable financial and ownership structures, collective housing schemes also offer a variety of possibilities to contribute to a more sustainable built environment through densification and a more efficient use of resources. Transforming existing forms of housing and housing policies towards more sustainable and inclusive architectural propositions and housing systems are considered a core task for a more equitable future.
Along these lines, ARCH-529 will be transformed as well. In its new iteration as ‘Collective Urban Housing – Innovative Programs, Pragmatic Precedents and Visionary Recent Case Studies’, the seminar will introduce relevant models and examples of collective housing, discuss complementary texts and theories, and, through a series of research and writing exercises, start to create a collection of collective housing that can be shared beyond the seminar and ultimately show socially and environmentally sustainable ideas and solutions for future dwelling scenarios.
With over 80 percent of the U.S. population living in urban areas, “cities” have become human’s new natural habitat. Landscape architects, architects, planners, geospatial analysts and other disciplines/professionals can play a key role in the creation of more “symbiotic cities”—places where people, plants, and other animals coexist. This shift necessitates a substantive understanding of the interwoven ecological, social-political and economic systems at play in urban areas. This course aims to expose students to a deeper understanding of the major concepts, principles and applications of ecology that are most relevant to the design and transformation of urban areas.
Contemporary challenges—social and environmental—demand landscape architecture projects perform greater, more diverse and precise services, in addition to the typical amenities of a park. Simultaneously, a shortage of un-utilized space challenges the profession to provide even the most basic amenities within increasingly unorthodox sites. Landscape architecture has thus been forced to not only expand what performances it designs, but also innovate how and where. Today, it must seamlessly hybridize basic social services, such as recreation and safety, with complex environmental services, ranging from climate modification to waste management, all within unprecedented post-industrial or active infrastructural sites. This course seeks to prepare students for this complex challenge (and design opportunity) through a performance-oriented survey of innovative designed landscapes and specialized skill-building. Through biweekly lectures and discussion, guided field trips, and diagramming exercises, students will examine and critique the performance “systems” of innovative landscapes—internationally and locally. The goal is to construct a platform of perspective, technical knowledge, and field-cultivated experience from which to address the considerable challenge of designing, implementing, and maintaining high performance public landscapes.
This course involves (1) the review of information found in plant physiology, and ecological principles and concepts of sustainability found in natural systems, (2) the study of native and introduced plant species and plant associations of Southern California and (3) calculations and data used to estimate water and energy use associated with urban landscapes. The primary purpose of this course is to develop a foundation for the design of urban landscapes that provide greater benefits and achieve higher levels of sustainability than current landscapes. Learning will be achieved through lectures, discussions, campus planting identification walks and field trips. Lectures will incorporate a series of weekly exercises and readings.
Landscapes are living systems that can contribute to the health and success of urban environments. This course focuses on the liveness of plant matter as a primary design medium of landscape architecture. Focusing on the cultural, aesthetic and performative roles of plants, the course asks students to develop planting designs and design methodologies for sustainable urban landscapes that benefit the more-than-human world. Investigating urban forestry techniques and their effects will require students study trees as critical urban infrastructures that can help achieve urban landscapes with increased levels of habitat diversity and ecosystem services.
This course is designed to endow students with foundational authoring skills in digital media and analog processes with which to engage the materiality, spatiality and temporality of landscape while concurrently introducing the lineage of landscape representation and its theoretical foundations. Through iterative and translatory processes of making, students will develop the ability to operate between analog and digital processes, between two and three dimensions, between given and introduced conditions, between static and dynamic states, and across scales. Course readings and lectures will examine how certain techniques of imaging the biophysical world impact the way in which we interpret, understand and eventually shape our surroundings and how these techniques relate to larger conceptual shifts in our cultural imaginary.
FALL 2023 TOPIC: BIOMATERIALS
As we race through our planet-scarce resources to sustain the appetite of consume-and-dispose culture, the need to reevaluate our non-regenerative processes of existence becomes increasingly more urgent. Our collective response to climate stress will require not just innovative tools and technologies, but social and economic transformation – a shift in our thinking about the biophysical world and our role and responsibility in it.
This course will introduce students to an ethically oriented practice of biodesign - investigating the opportunities that this emerging area of practice affords, particularly as it relates to current and impending climate-related catastrophes. The course will familiarize students with new materials, fabrication, and prototyping techniques to develop novel biodesign proposals, while exposing students to advanced research and methods informed by current conversations within life sciences, biological design, synthetic biology, bio-arts, interaction design, and other relevant emerging topics. This year’s topic will focus on material ecologies, circularity, regenerative systems, and biomaterials.
ARCH540 is associated with the Landscape Futures Lab at the School of Architecture. As such, we will be drawing from and collaborating with its affiliate faculty and with our partners on this project, including the Biodesign Challenge and Shannon Robinson, head librarian of the USC Architecture & Fine Arts Library. Material samples produced by students throughout the duration of this course will be donated to the Architecture & Fine Arts Library to start their first pilot bio-based material sample collection!
Students with the most provocative and thorough projects at the end of the semester will represent USC at the Biodesign Challenge competition held in NYC at the Parsons School of Design and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)! The annual Summit is scheduled for June 2024.
This is a hands-on, practice-based course, open to all disciplines and levels.
The first of the MLA 3’s core design studios, this course introduces the fundamental concepts, principles and elements of landscape architectural design and studio culture. Students conduct a variety of exercises to develop and coordinate a theory and practice of landscape architecture design, representation, and site engagement. Studio begins with introductory design exercises and site analysis and transitions into full-fledged site design. Expertise and skill are cultivated through drawing, site observations, and active discussions and include an immersive, multi-day, site visit to Catalina Island. The course seeks to cultivate a dynamic design dialogue—a dialectic—between our interventions, bodies, and the existing conditions. Along the way, students will learn and practice digital and analog drawing and modeling techniques in coordination with the required media class.
As the density of modern cities compresses more and more on the public open spaces so integral to the well-being of their populations, the role of the landscape architect becomes increasingly vital to the development of viable schemes to maximize and enhance the parks and plazas that constitute the public realm. Additionally, it is arguably within the role of these designers to integrate, within their proposals, elements that will serve as markers or talismans of the history of the sites which, in the 21st century world, are being so rapidly redeveloped that the sense of the past is often irrevocably lost. This semester’s work will focus on the both the weaving of park and plaza space into the urban fabric, and the relevance of history, both local and typological, into these projects.
Prerequisite(s): ARCH 541bL
This core studio jumps in scale from 541aL to tackle urban design that integrates landscape strategies to set the framework for new and existing urban districts and metropolitan agendas. Using landscape as multi-benefit infrastructure, the studio focuses on urban systems – physical, social, ecological, economic, political, technological – to imagine more just and resilient futures. These infrastructures aim to guide and organize future urbanization to arrive at more equitable metropolitan frameworks and healthful biophysical systems. Skill-building includes basics of urban design: massing, block typologies, circulation, etc, all while deploying landscape as the primary urbanistic medium. Methods of analysis and design include fieldwork, mapping (GIS), modeling and simulation, and scenario-building. Students are asked to engage with community organizations and policy-makers, with the hope of impact extending beyond the university.
The final of the “core” studios, the scale moves into the territorial dimension, and tackles existential threats caused by one or more impacts of anthropocentrism – climate volatility, species extinctions, soil depletion, sea-level rise, air/water contamination, deforestation/desertification, etc. Working across scales, students will generate both site-specific strategies and replicable principles that can be deployed in multiple contexts. The studio will synthesize the material of landscape with economic, infrastructural, technological, scientific, social and cultural systems to generate ideas that have the potential for policy impact.
This course will look from and through cities of the Global South to productively engage with various perspectives and framings of Landscape as Urbanism. Through the presentation of a case study index of cities and projects, this course situates the designed landscape as a framework and catalyst for urban form and process. In other words, it presents landscape as a medium of urbanism - embedded in processes of urbanization.
We will pay particular attention to the role of economic, sociocultural and political forces in shaping socioenvironmental urban systems. That is, we take as a starting point that the natural and engineered systems which structure cities are in flux and are both sites of continuous contestation and possibility. We will take this critical position towards the city as both an analytical tool (to question how and what we see) and as a guide to the possibilities of action (what we can do).
This hands-on elective is organized around the design and installation of a Test Plot* on Catalina Island in the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center’s “Green Ravine” on Catalina Island, near Two Harbors. Students will begin by researching the site’s environmental conditions and regulations, community and ecology, its history and contemporary status, as well as look at visions for the campus. Students will undertake a process of research, interviews, site studies and site preparation, with a reconnaissance site visit. This will culminate in planting in late Fall. To do so the class will design a restoration strategy, propose a native planting palette, and implement it. It will also develop and implement a communication and stewardship strategy and propose methods of monitoring the planting from various disciplinary standpoints. The Test Plot will be monitored the following year by two Test Plot Interns and maintained by a model established in the class. The class seeks to be multidisciplinary and welcomes undergraduate and graduate students in and out of the School of Architecture. Through its hands-on applied approach, the class combines multiple subjects, including the project site itself, practices of ecological restoration and monitoring, stewardship and labor, and planning and executing community-engaged sustainable projects.
Last year the class helped establish a successful 5,000 sq ft native planting on the long-neglected Elephant Hill Open Space in Northeast Los Angeles in collaboration with the local community. In the previous two years, the class established similar Test Plots at Rio de Los Angeles State Park and Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook.
ARCH-546 may be repeated for a maximum of 6 units when topic is different.
This course topically explores both the multiple human-caused impacts on the planetary environment – sea-level rise, increased wildfire, deforestation, habitat loss, etc. – and examines landscape architectural strategies and capacities to mitigate both the causes and the effects. The course splits time in the field, examining challenging landscapes and landscape interventions, and in the classroom, studying global challenges and landscape architectural applications.
As the second media requirement for landscape architecture, this course is aimed at introducing various physical, digital and spatial modeling methods as generative means of structuring design proposals. Through translatory processes of making – using physical, digital and durational media – students will develop techniques to explore both the expression and experience of landscape as a three-dimensional medium. The course focuses on the synergy between materiality, form, structure, surface and space, their processes of production and assembly, and the effects that the interaction between physical systems and landscape phenomena produce. The course is therefore organized into the following parts: the expression of landscape as three-dimensional form (physicality); the experience of being in and moving through landscape as a three dimensional space (immersion), tied together by the use of digital media as the means to move from physical models into spatio-temporal environments (translation). Students will gain skills in hand and digital modeling (Rhino + plug-ins), digital fabrication (3D printing, CNC milling), and animation (Lumion and similar).
No matter your exact title, institution, training and special skills, whether architect, planner, or elected official, you will act in some capacity as manager, planner, and policy maker for historic sites and buildings. As a conservation professional, you will be expected to have a basic understanding of scholarly research; interpretation; design and aesthetics; materials conservation; public policy and land use law; real estate; and community planning. As such, this course will serve as an overview of the aspects of heritage conservation related to policy and planning.
Recommended preparation: ARCH 549
Regardless of how you work with the built environment, you will need to express ideas clearly and communicate in different ways with different people to meet different goals. This course applies basic communications principles to heritage conservation, architecture, urban planning, and related fields. We will explore the ever-changing landscape of tools and tactics (including AI), along with enduring truths about how humans perceive information. You will practice different types of writing and learn when and how to use jargon (if ever). You’ll analyze how public narratives influence issues like housing. You’ll learn how to connect with different audiences, create and repurpose compelling stories, and use images effectively. You might even conquer your fear of public speaking. Through individual and group assignments, and a final project based on your professional interests, this course will help you build essential skills that will serve you well throughout your career.
This course provides an introduction to the field of cultural resource management (focusing on
archaeological resources) as it is practiced in the U.S., presenting fundamentals of
archaeological theory, methods, legal frameworks, and research goals for non-specialists in the
field. It focuses on contextualizing archaeology’s crucial role within the larger discipline of
heritage conservation. Mastering the basic concepts of archaeological theory and practice will
help architectural historians, architects, landscape architects, and planners become better
stewards of our collective cultural heritage.
Understanding of the global history of landscape design in relation to social, political, religious, environmental and aesthetic principles; current design theory, projects and their historical references are critically reviewed and analyzed.
The physical and ecological construct of urban landscapes across the world consists of a finite and identifiable series of elements – streets, buildings, rivers, infrastructure etc. However, the specific form, intent, intervention with, sustenance of, and inherent attitudes towards these elements, is shaped by several deeper phenomenological forces and circumstances that create distinct identities and signatures of people, place and culture. Different histories, growth patterns, governance structures, cultural beliefs and aspirations all ultimately create different expectations of what the urban landscape is and can be. This recognition has serious implications to the practice of landscape architecture and urbanism. How do we gauge the appropriateness of our interventions in a specific culture? How do we negotiate between our personal biases on what a place ought to be, versus reading it for what it is? How do we understand the practice of landscape design beyond passive physical amelioration, as a reflective engagement with cultural expectations, towards deeper change?
The course examines of the contemporary urban landscape as an enmeshed duality of parallel culture-specific “urbanities” and “urbanisms”. “Urbanities” refers to the myriad phenomenological traits and processes of urban life and cultural experience – from polarizations of poverty and wealth, to the rapid urbanization of cities. “Urbanisms” in turn refers to the diverse physical products and characteristics of the urban landscape – from the psychedelic streetscapes of Tokyo, to the slums of Dacca. Moving across urban history in time and space, this course offers comparative perspectives on attitudes to the city and nature across various places and cultures. Where do they overlap? Where do they separate? How do their cross-influence one another?
Allensworth Rising: An Agrarian Utopia of Black Possibility
This 3-unit workshop course with real-world consequence invites students in design, planning and conservation as these fields intersect with food systems, design as it applies to rural landscapes and infrastructure, Black agrarian self-determination, California agriculture and its future, Native foodways and land practices, and Latinx ruralisms.
Southern California has a unique place in the history of landscape design and urbanism. The effects of rapid multi-cultural development, as expressed in both the built environment and the images promulgated in Art, Film and Literature, have, at each stage of the region’s history, projected a model to the rest of the world of a landscape of seemingly limitless possibility, both hopeful and dystopian. Through an analysis of the successive stages of land planning, garden design, and plant introductions, along with a careful consideration of the diverse writings informed by the distinct landscape of the area, the course will critically assess the cultural arena from which these strong images emerge, and what role designers have played, successfully and unsuccessfully, in molding the built environment
This class introduces the theories, tools and techniques for (1) documenting historic landscapes and living cultural landscapes, as well as (2) provides a foundation for how to conduct document-based archival research related to the history of landscapes. It provides basic training in learning to “read the landscape” through careful observation and recording. Primary tools for documentation will be drawing (hand in field), photography, photogrammetry, GPS, while civil surveying and more advanced digital recording techniques will be discussed, including laser scanning.
This course will focus on meaningful, ethical and effective methods for designing and planning the physical environment with communities rather than for them, with the term project specifically focused on working with a historically disinvested community local to USC. The intention is: (1) to provide theoretical footing for why and how methods of community codesign and other community-based methods of engagement and involvement are effective at achieving more equitable, meaningful, vibrant and resilient neighborhoods; and (2) to develop a toolbox of techniques that can be deployed across communities and projects to reach, engage and involve particular audiences and community members in evaluating, planning and designing their physical environments. The term will be dedicated to a particular community through a partnership with a key organization focused on that community’s built landscape through the lens of equitable access, public health and wellness, cultural memory and place attachment, and climate resilience. The term project will be an exhibition featuring the outcomes of this engagement process – cultural asset mapping, oral histories, visual and textual output of ongoing engagement and some propositions for how these might inform the design, planning and/or conservation of the community of focus. Means of ensuring reciprocity so that students give back to the community in some form will be essential to the project.
This course will concentrate on providing students with a fundamental technical skillset applicable to the design and delivery of high-performance façade systems. The predominant focus will be the design of contemporary glazed curtainwalls and rainscreen systems in their many forms.
The building façade system uniquely combines elements of performance and architectural expression like nothing else in architecture. It is a highly complex system that requires a detailed and comprehensive exploration of myriad, often competing, variables that converge at the building skin. Increasingly, architectural practice demands expert knowledge of the complexities of the façade system to realize building performance and budget goals. The façade system plays a defining role in a building’s appearance, a pivotal role in resilience and sustainability outcomes, and is critical to the health, wellness and productivity of building occupants. In addition, it typically represents 15-25% of a project’s construction budget. Façade system skills are vital for the successful practice of architecture in producing healthy, cost-effective, resilient and sustainable buildings and urban habitat.
This course intends to provide the student this basic skillset, including the fundamental building physics and performance criteria that each façade system design must accommodate involving the performative behaviors of thermal mechanics, water vapor and air transport in various materials, moisture and condensation management, and airflow and rainwater control. The course content will familiarize the student with the basic building physics, tools and techniques required to successfully design and deliver a responsive high-performance façade system. Upon completion of this class, students will be able to develop façade system performance parameters for a given project, explore materials that meet the prescribed parameters, and develop a basic façade system design and details of construction to realize the design aspirations and technical requirements of the project.
One of the most important aspects of field research is the opportunity to gain insight into the relationships between design language, building proposition and construction process of specific periods/architects/buildings/landscapes. It is an occasion to discover not only the tenets upon which an designer bases his work, but also how these tenets resolve complex relationships between a project, its site and the cultural/theoretical context in which it was constructed. Through thoughtful case study analysis students will explore how these external forces influence/direct the form and shape of the designed response.
This Field Studies course will concentrate on projects and practices [from the analysis of buildings to the focused engagement with the methods of practice], landscapes and ecologies [both natural and manmade], and urban spaces [including parks, plazas, and urban (re)development projects]. The field study of these spaces and methods also provides an opportunity to understand the complex relationship of the designer with place. These place-based investigations will engage field studies to employ analytical methods, representational techniques, and speculative inquiry into the fundamental spatial and infra-structural elements of place. This investigation allows one to develop awareness as well as appreciate the complex relationship between a place, its inhabitants and the spaces that facilitate a multitude of events and activities.
This course will provide students with a comprehensive understanding of how artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can be integrated with various aspects of sustainable architecture, such as façade design, environmental performance, indoor environmental quality, and post-occupancy evaluation. The focus will be on applied machine learning and its role in enhancing the sustainability of the built environment through integrated design processes and environmental control mechanisms.
The course will emphasize the importance of user-centered design and the use of advanced computational algorithms without compromising any architectural or project resources. It will cover the building design process and the necessary steps to assure sustainability, user satisfaction, and environmental comfort and wellbeing.
The course content will include hands-on technical applications such as post-occupancy surveys, environmental data collection, design parameter surveys, and virtual reality. Students will also learn various artificial intelligence algorithms to aid in their coursework. By the end of the course, students will have a comprehensive understanding of how to integrate artificial intelligence algorithms into the building design process to enhance sustainability, user satisfaction, and building performance. They will be equipped with the skills to identify challenges and develop practical solutions by using artificial intelligence algorithms in the built environment.
Designers are storytellers. Each line we draw or model we build expresses intent. Historically, drawing has been the primary medium of expression in the communication of design ideas. Anyone can tell a story, but learning to tell an engaging, poignant story that generates real interest, enthusiasm, support and excitement is a vital tool in today’s fast-moving digital culture. This course helps the student understand how visual stories can serve as an active tool to critically explore, evaluate, and express ideas. This course specifically stresses the instrumentality of online videos for communicating and thinking, and as a foundation for creative action.
The core concept of this course is that architecture and design students are entering a profession that is increasingly entrepreneurial. We need to know how to make our own media.
Instructor Background: Lee Schneider is creative director of Red Cup Agency, a communications agency based in Santa Monica and known for its work with startups, entrepreneurs and social activists. He is the founder of Digital Fundraising School, an online school that helps media-makers, designers and tech visionaries become better crowdfunders. He is the author of "Be More Popular: Culture-Building for Startups." He has guest-lectured and taught workshops and classes at USC, University of Minnesota College of Design, Architecture for Humanity, and Public Architecture. Before his work with Red Cup, he was executive producer and founder of DocuCinema, a media production company that made documentaries and series television for The History Channel, Discovery Health, The Learning Channel, ReelzChannel, Food Network and Bravo. Early in his career, Mr. Schneider was a writer for Good Morning America and a producer for Dateline NBC.
(1.0 - 12.0 UNITS)
Research leading to the master's degree. Maximum units which may be applied to the degree to be determined by the department. Graded CR/NC.
This course will introduce students to an ethically-oriented practice of biodesign - investigating the opportunities that this emerging area of practice affords, particularly as it relates to current and impending climate-related catastrophes. Our collective response to climate stress will require not just innovative tools and technologies, but social and economic transformation – a shift in our thinking about the biophysical world and our role and responsibility in it. As such, new modes of practice are necessitated. The course will familiarize students with new materials, fabrication, and prototyping techniques to develop novel biodesign proposals, while exposing students to advanced research and methods informed by current conversations within life sciences, biological design, synthetic biology, bio-arts, interaction design, and other relevant emerging topics. This year’s topic will focus on the disappearing worlds of the Audubon and processes of co-design that yield emergent habitats and expanded dwellings for-and-with companion bird species.
Basic principles of structural (seismic/wind and gravity), HVAC, building envelope, access/egress, building service systems; and sustainable strategies are critical to the proper execution of performative goals. The integration of building systems will be delineated to demonstrate the tectonic viability a design solution.
Comprehensive project emphasizing the interaction between general principles and local sites, building technologies and total building design.
This course stems from the assumption that architects should not only be able to use various tools but should have the ability to create new critical and experimental design tools that respond to specific design-questions. In this course, we will aim at the generation of design-question oriented customized digital workflows. These customized workflows will explore the potential of breaking down a design problem into several questions in order to approach architectural and urban research through a bottom-up method. This technique will allow us to experiment with converging varied inter-operational platforms in order to develop custom toolsets for each proposed design question. The process of workflow customization will amplify our ability to explore options and achieve depth and speed of analysis. In this course we will use Rhino/Grasshopper as meta-tools which enable the creation of other tools.
However, the course is not about software itself, but about experimental design processes. Using a series of custom scripts, techniques and workflows, Rhino/Grasshopper will be used to create new interfaces that disappear and become part of the Rhino environment or even part of the physical world. External input devices (cameras and sensors) will be used to create new relationships with 3d modeling, data will become incorporated into new forms of tools, and representation will be explored as a way to design the behavior of the user. Technology will not be used as calculators, but as augmentations of the designer that alters their design process.
The point of the course is to develop computational design thinking in order to acquire a critical lens for the evaluation of digital tools. Through a closer look at the relationship between computational design theories and methods, we will engage in an experimental feedback loop where new ideas can generate new design techniques, and new design techniques can thus generate new ideas.
Contemporary architecture is designed predominantly with digital software. Although the designer is the puppet master pulling the strings, different digital tools encourage distinct workflows, which have critical impact over design outcomes. Polygon-based modeling software, such as Maya, offers designers a range of sculpting techniques to construct form, which is vastly different from NURBS-based software such as Rhino. Polygon modeling provides a faster feedback loop between intuition and outcome, enabling unique aesthetic sensibilities, and at the same time challenging the user's precision and control. This course aims to explore the form-shaping capacity that polygon based software (Maya) affords to designers. The course will introduce students to a range of techniques concerning modeling in Maya and consist of lectures, tutorials and in-class work sessions.
Urban Theory: Los Angeles Case Study
Through critical scrutiny of greater Los Angeles, this course poses a series of questions about how to make sense of urbanism and urbanization more broadly. Los Angeles provides a compelling and consistently troubling case through which to investigate the complex interdependence of the spatial and the social: how the physical form of a city and the life lived within it call each other into being. Its peculiarities also equip us to appreciate the limits of a formalist approach to urbanism — a physical determinism which still imbues design practice in much of the world — and assert the role of theory and research in unlearning it
This course provides an introduction to a range of new fabrication techniques and technologies that will encourage students to rethink the nature of architectural fabrication and representation. The subject matter in this course anticipates that students already have a working knowledge of the major material groups within architectural design and construction (Wood, Metals, Concrete, Masonry, Glass, Plastics, and Composites). Over the course of the semester, we will look closely at how these materials are being utilized and advanced in fields outside of architecture and will also learn the methods and processes that are used in their fabrication.
Vertical structures respond to gravity, wind, seismic, and thermal loads. They also need to be integrated with architectural objectives, creating a synergy of form and structure. This course covers various methods for stabilizing vertical structures, including foundation design, moment and braced frames, framed tube design, shear walls, and building diaphragm design in the context of wood, steel, concrete, and masonry structures. Students will explore the use of Multiframe; LDG (Lateral Design Graph); SDG (Structure Design Graph) to design moment frames, braced frames, and shear wall structures; and PDG (Post Design Graph) to design posts in wood, steel, concrete, and masonry for axial and bending stress.
Required text
Structure and Design: https://titles.cognella.com/structure-and-design-9781516522989
Detailed information is posted at http://uscarch.com/structures/
In this course students will learn advanced digital workflows to conduct contemporary landscape architecture design research. A specific interest of the course is to address how these workflows address dynamic landscape systems, existing and proposed.
In recent years, the need for advanced design methodologies has become ever more pressing as landscape projects are asked to manage—or serve as—dynamic systems. Increasingly projects must perform dynamic environmental services and/or manage dynamic risks, while still providing quality open space. To effectively navigate the multifarious requirements of these projects, landscape architects must invent workflows, specific to the challenges of each project, where specialized analyses operate alongside typical design tools. For example, to design a flood control channel they might interface various advanced real-time evaluative tools (e.g. hydraulic modeling, habitat analysis, and economic evaluations) within an iterative community-inclusive design process.
Prerequisite(s): ARCH 542abL
This course is an option research studio that tackles questions integral to the current practice of landscape architecture. Options offer diversity in scale, scope and geography, often with international possibilities. Opportunities for collaboration with other disciplines in the school (including Architecture and Heritage Conservation) are sometimes offered at this level. The expectation for this course is students have developed skills and values that ensure more self-direction in research and design development, culminating in a diversity of final proposals.
The course will focus on the development of novel façade system solutions—solutions responsive to the shortcomings of contemporary façade systems—with an emphasis on their application in both new and existing buildings.
Prerequisite(s): ARCH 549 Introduction to, and exploration of, topics leading to the development of a thesis prospectus and directed research towards the completion of the master’s thesis in heritage conservation. Credit on acceptance of thesis. Registration restricted to Master of Heritage Conservation students who have satisfactorily completed 12 hours of graduate course work and have permission of the Program Director. Graded IP/CR/NC.
This course has several coincident agendas. We will complete the Master’s Thesis for the Building Science program which each student has developed in preceding 596 and 692a classes. But in the process, we will address a broad range of ancillary topics. We will create a “culture of learning” as part of the course. Although it is a studio course, there will be guest lecturers, lectures of assigned topics and periodic reviews, as well as normal studio time. We will review the scientific method in general and as it applies to each thesis topic. We will consider the value and impact of investigative tools in the process and product of Architecture. We will write papers which could be submitted to conferences or journals as a prototype of technology transfer (and a measure of the value and validity of the material.) Those of you who have had abstracts accepted will use the abstracts as topics for these papers. We will do several interim presentations to the first year students and to outside consultants and to committee members, prior to the final presentation. We will examine topics in Building Science which are of current interest, whether or not one of the current theses addresses these topics. We will write the thesis in several stages, so that there is opportunity to modify and improve both the research and the writing prior to the thesis due date. Prior to the due date, each student will produce a thesis in the format acceptable to the University and with content acceptable to all committee members. Finally, each student will produce a shorter version of the thesis material in a format consistent with publication. In the process, each student will learn something about the content area of each other student’s thesis.
Prerequisite(s): ARCH 596
This course has several coincident agendas. We will complete the Master’s Thesis for the Building Science program which each student has developed in preceding 596 and 692a classes. But in the process, we will address a broad range of ancillary topics. We will create a “culture of learning” as part of the course. Although it is a studio course, there will be guest lecturers, lectures of assigned topics and periodic reviews, as well as normal studio time. We will review the scientific method in general and as it applies to each thesis topic. We will consider the value and impact of investigative tools in the process and product of Architecture. We will write papers which could be submitted to conferences or journals as a prototype of technology transfer (and a measure of the value and validity of the material.) Those of you who have had abstracts accepted will use the abstracts as topics for these papers. We will do several interim presentations to the first year students and to outside consultants and to committee members, prior to the final presentation. We will examine topics in Building Science which are of current interest, whether or not one of the current theses addresses these topics. We will write the thesis in several stages, so that there is opportunity to modify and improve both the research and the writing prior to the thesis due date. Prior to the due date, each student will produce a thesis in the format acceptable to the University and with content acceptable to all committee members. Finally, each student will produce a shorter version of the thesis material in a format consistent with publication. In the process, each student will learn something about the content area of each other student’s thesis.
Prerequisite(s): ARCH 596
Directed research option for the MLArch degree.
This research seminar provides a foundation for the Advanced Design-Research studio course in the Spring (ARCH 698b). The seminar may be oriented toward topical, geographical and/or methodological study. The Advanced Design-Research sequence integrates students into a deep research process that culminates in proposals that have replicable potential and the potential for impact on environmental and urban policy. Topics are set by the instructor but offer a wide range of options for students to pursue their passions and interests as developed during their previous coursework in Landscape Architecture.
The final studio in the design sequence, Advanced Design-Research is intended to integrate students into a deep research process that culminates in proposals that have replicable potential and the potential for impact on environmental and urban policy. The ARCH 698a research seminar in the Fall provides the research basis for this studio course. Topics are set by the instructor but offer a wide range of options for students to pursue their passions and interests as developed during their previous coursework in Landscape Architecture.
Advanced topical investigations emphasizing diverse areas of specialization. Projects will be faculty-led research investigations that concentrate on diverse areas of vital concern.
Directed Design Research option for graduate level architecture degree. Credit on acceptance of research project. Graded IP/CR/NC.