02/27/19

Pre-requisites: ARCH-500A and ARCH-501.

The final comprehensive architectural project under the guidance of a faculty adviser to demonstrate architectural knowledge, skills, and professional interests and goals.

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.

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.

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.

This is a design research seminar that will explore the relevance of architectural form as a product of discovery by exploring the reciprocity between form (geometry), force (performance), matter (organization), and craft (fabrication). It investigates and extends the design research legacies of analogue form-finding in the works of Frei Otto, Antonio Gaudi, Heinz Isler, and Felix Candela by exploring digital and analogue techniques for discovering form through variable material and geometric organizations and force simulations, while simultaneously considering the design opportunities being afforded by advances in computation and fabrication technologies. In this elective course, students will research and analyze the history of funicular form and its applications within architecture, explore the application and manipulation of both physical and digital form-finding experiments, performative analysis and simulation, and digital fabrication protocols to explore the potential for materiality and non-standardization processes to augment performance through variable organizations. The goal of the course is to understand performance as a design catalyst for the exploration of form. Students must have proficiency in Rhino 3D and a minimum proficiency with Grasshopper. All other software will be introduced in the course.

Students will need to have the following softwares installed:

• Rhino 3D
• Grasshopper plug-in for Rhino
• Kangaroo plug-in for Grasshopper
• Karamba plug-in for Grasshopper

Computational systems have reached the speed of operations that allows simulating human perception in real-time. It is no longer necessary to wait for hours to obtain an accurate depiction of the interplay of light with materials or calculate the angle of a shadow. By exploring gaming technology, this class will invite students to re-consider architectural representation through the scope of a real-time medium, where the exploration of space can be performed at a simulated 1:1 scale. 

Real-time technologies, as advanced by game engines, are not only a medium for architectural visualization, but also a medium for simulation, where data can be superimposed over architectural geometry, enabling an augmented perception of a digital project. By learning how to visualize and how to simulate data over pre-existing geometry, the class intends to give new tools of inquiry for mapping and framing architectural information. 

This course will be structured as a technical introduction to real-time visualization and virtual reality, exploring the opportunities and challenges presented by the medium. The course will be taught using the game engine Unity and will make use of the USC VR sets to test students projects in virtual reality. 

The objectives of the course is to challenge traditional conceptions of space and representation, generating conceptual simulations that develop insight into architecture’s potential. 

Space activity and space age technologies are now an integral part of, and fast becoming a positive force in city development and evolution. Space technologies are helping transform and rehabilitate old cities and their aging infrastructure too. Water and power distribution, transportation and air quality, food production, delivery and waste management, emergency health care and disaster relief all have complex interdependence through agile and advanced communications built into their vast and ever more intricate and intertwined networks. Monitoring and metering activity are all heading toward autonomy, leaving supervision and anomaly resolution as the principal tasks for human crew.

From Archeology to Agriculture and Automobile and factory emissions, space-based technologies are changing the way we see, monitor and respond to our surroundings with agility. Remote sensing allows agile monitoring of the weather and hazards like fire and earthquakes and help to organize relief efforts in ways never before possible. Technologies like high resolution hyperspectral imaging can even access yield and spot disease burden in crop and livestock and even help to contain deadly pathogens from quickly spreading into pandemics.

As the world population grows, so does the need for more resources and their efficient management. We will study, imagine and visualize how to imbibe and apply useful and appropriate technologies and processes of current and proposed human space activities to create more synergetic relationships between the manmade and natural environments using principles of human space activity as a guide.

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.