| Fall 2008 Architecture Graduate Courses |
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ARCH 200A (7) Sixty hours of lecture/seminar and 120 hours of studio per semester. Grading option: 200A must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. 200B must be taken for a letter grade. Introductory course in architectural design and theories for graduate students. Problems emphasize the major social, technological and environmental determinants of building form. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings, and field trips. History/Theory Course Module (Assistant Professor Andrew Shanken) This module of 200A is an introduction to historical and theoretical thinking in architecture, with a focus on those ideas, movements, methods, and words that have shaped the profession and catalyzed space- and form-making. The readings are intended to provide critical distance – one of the pursuits of history – and to develop a language of interrogation that will help put the studio experience into context. Students are asked to do short weekly readings and come prepared to discuss them. Several of the weeks include site visits to buildings that either put us in the mood for the readings or play off of them in compelling ways. N.B.: Since many of the readings are selections from books that will be on reserve, students may want to take turns creating pdf’s of the readings so that I can put them on the bSpace site for everyone. This will help alleviate the usual crush to read at the last minute. Site Visits
Weekly Writing, Presentations, Food
ARCH 201 (5) Three hours of lecture and five hours of studio per week. Prerequisites: 100A–100B or 200A–200B. Course may be repeated for credit. Each section deals with a specific problem such as housing, high-rise design, interiors, community development. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings, and field trips. Students interested in taking ARCH 201 must enroll in Section 1 and attend a presentation by all six of the section professors on Monday, August 25, 2008, from 2–4 p.m. in 112 Wurster Hall. Students then may request a preferred section. Final section assignments will be made by the Department of Architecture. ARCH 201 SEC 1
San Francisco has long been a city of refuge and radical juxtaposition. Arrival, departure, sanctuary, confrontation with the unexpected, nurturing of the unwanted, unnatural liaisons are all deeply woven into the landscape and ethos of San Francisco. In the 1980’s San Francisco began the city of refuge movement in the United States, offering official city support and sanctuary for illegal refugees from U.S.-supported right wing violence in Latin America, placing a slightly more official, but no less controversial, imprimatur on the historical reality of San Francisco’s dynamically counter-cultural ebb and flow. This largely forgotten program of social refuge is back in the city’s front page news again today, and under attack, linked to juvenile crime, the specter of terrorism, and the current resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment in national politics. But there is more than this, with points of departure for architectural imagination far more interesting than ho-hum metaphorical background to some lame studio brief. What can be built? Social refuge has become interwoven with issues of eco-system refuge for the native flora and fauna of California, increasingly threatened by the quickening creep of dramatic climate change. Traditional wildlife refuge concepts of the past century are no longer adequate as climates and eco-systems in California have begun to travel, upward in elevation, northward in latitude, and toward the coast. Wildlife refuge is no longer an issue of preserved natural real estate, becoming instead an issue of climate driven migration, and potential need for engineering life support. Within biology, active human interference in support of eco-system preservation—moving eco-systems rather than preserving them in situ—is no less controversial than San Francisco’s social refuge is to political debate. These questions are scientific, philosophical, and political, and will certainly form the ethical and inspirational background for our work. But we are architects, and as practical people, most interested in rolling up our sleeves and—if we can’t fix, or even fully understand, the underlying disease—we can certainly help invent an urban infrastructure and family of machines to deal practically with the symptoms. And incidentally, it’s not unlikely that something practical to address these problems is likely to make for some totally unexpected and pretty cool architecture. Plants and animals with all of their wildly interwoven baggage are already on the move toward San Francisco. Many scientists, from UC Berkeley and elsewhere, are gearing up to help them carry through on their long strange trip. Wilderness infected by human interference is fast becoming inadequate to sustain traditional forms of natural life in familiar habitat. Unnatural humanity is killing the earth—unnatural humanity surely must save it! The City of Saint Francis, that wacky patron saint of the animals, is ideally situated as a transshipment point in this migration through California to points north, and has more than passing experience as an urban zoo of unnatural bedfellows, their fellow travelers, and all manner of lost and wandering misfits. No work of human life support offers quite the raw power and possibility of the city as a new platform of artificially preserved natural diversity in transit. Imagine what San Francisco might become by rejuvenating our once great embarcadero and again overlaying this long hibernating incubator of the unexpected with all manner of transitory plants, animals and people, barged in and out and washing forth across the city more diversity of fecund and interbreeding life forms than ever previously encountered in historical civilization. Imagine all of the squirming, dirty life of a thriving medieval city intertwined by the forest primeval, yet thoughtfully designed and elevated to a far higher level of conscious appreciation and positive structure enabled by the miracle of modern engineering. But what will we do in this studio? There are three phases to the project. First we will research and discuss the issue and imagine the possibilities (about 1 week, with lots of drawing). Next, with research continuing, we will work as a team designing a master urban plan for this migratory wildlife overlay of San Francisco and its embarcadero (about two weeks, with lots of drawing). The final physical product of this phase will be a single large wall model of the city, and a series of layered digital maps. Finally, the majority of the semester will be devoted to individual or small team design projects focusing on one significant detail emerging from the group master plan. Studio participants will be encouraged to explore a range of design media, including particular emphasis on physical models and digital modeling, as well as any other personally interesting form of experimental writing, drawing and representation. This detail project will be selected and programmed by each individual student or team. The detail may be the design of a building, dock, barge or combination thereof, contributing to an overall conception of the new city function. The detail design project should thoroughly develop the concept, structure, systems and materials necessary to propose a practical, realizable construction project on the San Francisco Embarcadero, using currently available and immediately practical methods of construction. The instructor will support individual projects that are developed by the student to fully satisfy the expectations of a required Comprehensive Studio project. This qualification will not be automatic, and studio participants may also elect to work in other formats of design investigation without the comprehensive focus. Those students wishing to design this project for Comprehensive Studio credit, must submit a work plan and schedule outlining a comprehensive design process and proposed document product. Credit for the comprehensive studio will then be approved after the end of the semester, on approval of the completed set of comprehensive design documents, which will be reviewed for adequacy and completeness by a group of faculty critics and student peers. ARCH 201 SEC 2 Dwelling and Mourning One of the main endeavors of this design studio is to go deep within ourselves to open up the realm of our poetical vision, at the same time as, or prior to, fulfilling the requirements of the program. We will also focus on how to become inspired, develop and trust our initial instincts, sketches and ideas, as well as acquire critical distance through continuous drawing and model trial — and — error. Questions raised in our inquiry will include: How do we give form to rituals of living?; how do we become intimate with the spaces we design?; how do we engage “experiential phenomena of spatial sequences that trigger emotions and joy in architecture “(S. Holl)?; how do we design with the most fundamental yet elusive matter: Light? We are all aware that one of the most pressing questions we have to address as architects today is how to house an ever-growing number of people. Following this observation, we will explore in our first project three types of housing such as: the courtyard house for a family, the apartment for students, individuals or the elderly, and the loft for alternate living styles. While assembling these three types into a new prototype for medium density housing, we’ll attempt to redefine housing form as well as bring social diversity to the present housing market. In this project, we will have a chance to explore the intimate relationship between the body and the surrounding dwelling spaces, scales, rhythms, and light. In essence, we’ll ask ourselves how we can produce housing as Art: housing with the qualities of a painting, a landscape, a poem and with optimal adaptability to seasons and moods of the inhabitants. To ground ourselves in current Bay Area practices, we’ll visit at least one firm devoted to housing and work from time to time with one of its associates. Prof. Thomas Jocher, Director of the Institute of Housing and Design in the University of Stuttgart in Germany may also visit our studio in September. In a second project, on the hilltop of Mountainview Cemetery in Oakland (partly designed by Holmstead), we will build a non-denominational chapel and place to embaulm and honor or celebrate the departed. This project should give us a chance to push our creativity to the limit, designing an isolated inspirational building that matches the uniqueness of the site overlooking the cemetery hills, Oakland, the Bay and San Franscisco. Perhaps more easily than in the first project, we will have a chance to develop our vision from the “outside in”: visualizing beforehand a form whose potential force and skin qualities are not yet apparently related to the inside functioning of the building (thereby exploring how function could follow form — and not the reverse). The challenge will be to design a building which, whether seen from afar or experienced from within, could express your intimate relationship with the interrelated forces of life and death. If your drawings succeed to convince the Cemetery Board, this project has the potential to be built — yes, by you as the designer — and the manager has agreed to open the project for an in-class competition with a $1,000 prize. All along these two projects, you’ll be encouraged to find your own design path while being continuously aware of, and drawing inspiration from, other architects’ contemporary buildings. In our studio production, we will look for the balance between manual and digital drawings as well as model making, but most importantly, we’ll observe the difference between designing with our thinking mind and designing with our intuition and senses. Ultimately, my goal is for us to learn to design from our unified “heartmind”. So as to develop and sharpen this practice, we will also train in refining our teaching skills through hands-on exercises. Part of the studio experience is to realize that several thinking minds may produce more creative power than a single one. With this in mind, work in studio will be required. ARCH 201 SEC 3 When we say that 98% of buildings are designed without an architect (see Bell et al), what we are really saying is that 98% of buildings are not designed for the place that they are built. From air conditioning to prefab construction, from irrigation to illumination, the tendency of new building technologies has been to loosen the relationship between space (what we make) and place (climatically, culturally or ecologically described). New methods in architectural design provide what may be a crucial opportunity to reverse this trend. Through the functional integration of urban- and building-scale digital techniques (specifically, GIS queries and CAD scripting), the studio will research and propose new modes of design thinking, and, potentially, urban and ecological change. Background Apart from vernacular building, the customization of building for climate, locality, available resources -- or even whim -- has, in the last century, become a luxury. An important alternative to this state of affairs (which will be explored by the studio) arises from the convergence of two recent trends in the digitally mediated description of space. On the one hand, recent work in architectural design research, as well as theory, has emphasized the 'parametric' approach to design and fabrication. In this, systems-base approach, a unit or 'monad' of structure is modified by software to suit itself to various environments internal to a design scheme, stretching, transforming, and even disappearing based on contextual parameters; (such an approach draws on, and mirrors, the ability of natural systems, skin and bone, to shape themselves locally according to global adaptations (see Chu, Hensel, Goulthorpe et al.). On the other, far external to the scale of the building, the digital definition of urban space through "Geographic Information Systems," or GIS, has broken into popular consciousness with ready applications like Google Earth, Yelp, and Trulia (each of which use a GIS framework to deliver information selectively, based on location). These two propositions -- parametric design and place-based urban information -- will be used by our studio to suggest a third; that of a systematically local, digitally derived architecture that, like many marvelous things, happens at the delirious intersection of building and city, defining cosmopolitan space. The Studio Problem In 1973, Gordon Matta-Clark used the information technologies of his own era -- filing-cabinets, zoning maps, and aerial photography -- to unstintingly document dozens of "gutterspace" sites in Queens and Staten Island, New York City. Having purchased the sites, Matta-Clark intended to make the sites home to amenities that would in their own way critique a modernist view of the city; ("form," he commented in a manifesto before his death in 1978, "fallows function"). Our own studio will find within the current urban information system of the city of San Francisco a parallel and related site; the more than 1,600 "unaccepted streets" belonging to the city yet eschewed by San Francisco's Department of Public Works. Connecting GIS queries with scripting techniques (a process which will be taught in the technical portion of the studio, see below), the 1625 database records forming the city's enumeration of 'unaccepted streets' will be integrated into architectural procedures such that independent and unique architectural proposals may be designed for some, or all, of these sites. Both the intellectual, and literal structure of such an exercise -- exploiting and exploring the overlap between local and global digital tools -- will be the center of the studio's research. Technique and Technology While a previous 201 research studio (fall 2007) focused on the study and typology of San Francisco's urban leftovers, the current studio will be focused specifically on the techniques involved in directly connecting the sorting and analysis of place allowed by digital mapping to the parametric structure of scripted, computer-assisted, architectural techniques. These techniques have been researched and prototyped for the studio's use, and will be rigorously taught and supported both by the university's Geographic Innovation Facility), a studio assistant focused on Rhino and Rhinoscript technique -- as well as by the studio's critic. While knowledge of GIS or Rhinoscript is not assumed, a working knowledge of Rhino itself is strongly recommended. Those with questions on these sorts of issues, as well as the studio in general, should contact me at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ARCH 201 SEC 4
U.S./Mexico Border Wall as Architecture Blog Introduction For the most part, architects and designers have stayed away from the border security issue because it is too political. Ricardo Scofidio of Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York has said about architect’s involvement in a border fence project: "It's a silly thing to design, a conundrum. You might as well leave it to security and engineers." To date, the border wall design has been chiefly the dominion of these professionals, and the current fence proposal presents a Utopian scenario that ignores the rich and diverse contexts found along the border, raising controversy regarding issues of ecology, politics, economics, archaeology and eminent domain, to name just a few. The proposed fence meanders sometimes as far as 2 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border subdividing public lands and the private property of American citizens. In this zone between the fence and the actual border are spaces of conflict that demand redefining–the Army Corps of Engineers, for example, proposes that the fence cut directly through the University of Texas at Brownsville campus. Moreover, in the past 10 years there have been approximately 5,000+ migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border, and since the Secure Fence Act of 2006 the annual death rate continues to increase as men, women and children attempting to cross the border are pushed to further extremes. Studio “I had hardly imagined how West Berlin was actually imprisoned by the Wall. I had never really thought about that condition, and the paradox that even though it was surrounded by a wall, West Berlin was called "free”, and that the much larger area beyond the Wall was not considered free. My second surprise was that the Wall was not really a single object but a system that consisted partly of things that were destroyed on the site of the Wall, sections of buildings that were still standing and absorbed or incorporated into the Wall, and additional walls some really massive and modern, others more ephemeral all together contributing to an enormous zone. That was one of the most exciting things: it was one wall that always assumed a different condition.” Like the Berlin Wall, the horrific beauty of the “Great Wall of Mexico”, as it has been dubbed, is its potential as a multivalent system with an ability to transform large cities, small towns, and a multitude of ecological biomes, from farmland, beaches, deserts, riparian zones and canyons. The spaces formed on both sides of the barrier, if the Secure Fence Act is realized, are yet to be resolved and suggest a kind of “other place”—what Foucault would call a heterotopia —a collection of material and conceptual spaces that lie between reality and utopia. Field Studies ARCH 201 SEC 5
NATURE PRINT®, a molecular technology used by the burgeoning perfume industry to extract and reconstruct the delicacy and complexity of fragrant sources in nature offers both a metaphor and technique for this semester's design studio. While nature itself is increasingly engineered Architecture understood as a synthetic activity continues to find inspiration in natural processes. With the breakdown of complex ecologies and consequent increasing value attributed to organic materials, the preservation and development of new biotopes is a pressing reality. In a global context of climate change and environmental degradation the program for the manufacture and consumption of exotic scents may appear superfluous yet the studio proposes that the $20B a year perfume industry offers an intriguing real-world platform for an ecosystems approach to architecture. The challenge is to merge science and natural phenomena to create new levels of environmental performance and multi-sensory experiences without leading to a naturalistic reduction. OUTLINE PROJECT BRIEF Project One: "SECRET & INVISIBLE" PAVILION Project Two: IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENTS Prerequisites: 3D modeling skills and an interest in computational geometry, advanced materials, and engineering. The studio will support Rhino and Maya. Introductory tutorials using open source plug-ins and scripts will be offered during the semester. The use of a wide range of design techniques is encouraged across digital and analog processes and physical models. INSTRUCTOR PROFILE PETER TESTA is Principal of the Los Angeles based architecture and product design firm Testa & Weiser Inc., and Founding Director of the Emergent Design Group (EDG) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Testa's work is known for its synthesis of composite materials, computational geometry, and advanced engineering. He is internationally recognized for his ground breaking woven and composite structures including Carbon Tower (2002) and Strand (2007). His firm is collaborating with a wide range of companies in the global construction industry to develop next generation building systems and architecture. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the National Endowment for the Arts Design Arts Award. Prior to establishing his own firm he was Principal in Charge of several significant buildings and urban projects with the Pritzker Prize winning architect Álvaro Siza. He has held academic and research positions at Harvard University GSD, Columbia University GSAP, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2004 he has been a member of the Graduate Design Faculty at SCI-Arc. His work is exhibited at major museums and regularly featured in the international art and design press. Current exhibitions include "Skin & Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture at Somerset House Embankment Gallery in London, and the 2008 Beijing Architecture Biennale. The New York Times, BBC, and Times of London recently profiled his firm as an innovation leader redefining the art of building in the 21st century. ARCH 201 SEC 6
Site Today Fort Baker is home to the Bay Area Discovery Museum as well as the recently completed Cavallo Point Resort and Conference Center which has restored the Parade Grounds and reused the historic structures. The site also continues to be a thriving wildlife habitat and spawning ground for many species of birds, butterflies, and sea life. Extensive parking has been constructed to support these new attractions and make it easier for visitors to explore the area. Despite this new development, a large parcel of disturbed land along Horseshow Cove which once housed the military hospital is current unused. The water's edge along the cove is not easily accessible to the public: visitors come to Fort Baker to visit the children's museum or the resort and never get to the water. The Park Service plans to restore a beach along Horseshoe Cove between the Coast Guard Station and the Yacht Club and improve public access. This studio will assume the design of the beach and promenade along the water's edge.
The program calls for a large changing exhibition space and smaller gallery, an adjoining outdoor sculpture space with public access, cafe, and meeting room. The expansive site along the water's edge and the comparatively small program area offer the possibility to explore the reciprocal relationship of interior and exterior spaces in the context of the immediate building site and the larger landscape. Topography, views, solar orientation, tides, wind, and fog are elements of the site that will need to be taken into consideration. A permanent collection that is comprised of pieces that the studio will visit and experience firsthand is envisioned for the outdoor sculpture space. We will be asking you to develop your designs to address the comprehensive studio requirements including structure, enclosure, lighting, materials and sustainable energy performance. A goal of the studio is to gain a better understanding of how construction systems and careful detailing can inform and enrich the overall concept and experience of a building. www.fortbaker.net ARCH 209A (1–4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. One to four hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: Second- or third-year graduate standing. Topics deal with major problems and current issues in architectural design. The Dialectic of Poetics and Technology: Le Corbusier (3) Open to graduate students, undergraduates with permission of instructor only. It is helpful to have completed ARCH 140 and ARCH 200 or equivalent, but not required. This seminar examines the relationship between technology and design philosophy in the work of 20th century architects through analysis of individual buildings within the context of the complete oeuvre and an examination of the architect's writings and lectures. The seminar poses the following questions:
There will be a series of lectures exploring these questions in relation to the architect and a set of required readings to introduce the work of the architect and readings which explore the relationship between technology and design philosophy. Students will choose one building to investigate in parallel with the methods and issues discussed in class. These studies will be presented in class as completed and assembled for submission as a final project. Attendance, readings, and participation are required each week. The project assignments are scheduled more intensely during the first ten weeks of the term, allowing time for review and revisions. ARCH 209D SEC 3 UBBELOHDE (1–4) Formerly 209A. Prerequisites: Graduate standing. This is a fall seminar for students who plan to work on final projects (theses and professional reports) during the spring. The seminar, including lectures by the instructor, is meant to train students in pre-thesis or professional project research and to help them in selecting their thesis or professional report topic. The course includes weekly exercises ranging from writing articles documenting, illustrating, and critiquing buildings to producing a thesis or professional report prospectus. ARCH 209X (1–4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. One to four hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: Second- or third-year graduate standing. Topics deal with major problems and current issues in architectural design.
Download Fall 2008 ARCH 209X Course Syllabus This seminar aims to explore how the physical, and conceptual understanding of landscape can enrich current forms of architectural and urban design practice. We will introduce landscape and infrastructure discourses that increasingly impinge on the fields of architecture and urban design today. At the junction of landform, infrastructure, urban design and architecture lies a rich field of possibilities that is increasingly superseding the narrower field of each of the disciplines by themselves. Increasingly, landscape is emerging as a model for urbanism. Wastelands, areas abandoned by industry, railways, ports, areas that have seen the withdrawal of residential or commercial activity are emerging phenomena in the late XX century metropolis. Abandoned infrastructure or spaces enabled by have come to life when used for purposes other than they were originally conceived for: areas below freeways used for skating or dog-training lessons, dry concrete riverbed channels used for play, abandoned building foundations used for motorcycle training, sleeping by the homeless, sweepstakes or farmers markets. Concurrently a low intensity urban life has emerged in the suburbs not just through office parks and malls designed in their midst, but also through yard-sales or street parties organized on suburban streets. Some of the activity which would have taken place in the spatially rich environment of the department store in the nineteenth century has moved in this century to simple sheds, efficient containers of the sort the Cosco's uses to sell its merchandise: Many of these non-traditional spaces are not dependent on architects. This seminar will attempt to understand the meaning of urban/public landscapes and or so called “empty spaces” under or around infrastructure to learn from non-conventional urban spaces or those that conservative urban practice has left behind particularly those in which unintended occupation has occurred, explore spatial opportunities to re-design, optimize and or promote activities that may be taking place or could take place within them. This seminar fulfills both Theory and Social and Cultural Processes in Architecture and Urbanism criteria outlined below:
ARCH 219X (1–4) Fifteen hours of lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: 210 or consent of instructor. The Sociology of Taste in Environmental Design: Pragmatics, Symbolism, and Aesthetics
ARCH 229X (1–4) Prerequisites: Designated section of 129. Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Selected topics such as issues of project development and professional practice, construction law, materials and specifications, construction management, marketing and management, professional writing, issues in community development and public policy.
If architectural publishing in the first half of the twentieth century was characterized by the manifesto, the second half was characterized by the monograph and the current moment by a hybrid of the two. (The turning point in the first instance it might be argued was Venturi's, "Complexity and Contradiction," and in the second Koolhaas’ “S,M,L,XL.”) What makes the monograph distinct from the manifesto is that although it can take many forms and express a wide range of intentions (from intellectual discourse to self-promotion) it is always grounded in practice. Recently, however, the monograph has begun to be transformed into a vehicle for design exploration if not an ideological design statement in itself. Starting with a brief examination of the roots of the contemporary monograph in the manifestoes of early modernism and post-modernism, the course will turn its focus to recent developments in the monograph form, from Koolhaas to the present. The class will analyze the possibilities and limits of grounding a discourse in practice as well as in theory. In particular, the seminar will examine the relationship between publishing and practice in establishing the contemporary “Dutch School.” With the exception of a few canonical texts the course content changes from semester to semester. The course is not a survey but rather cuts a path through architectural theory that allows individual choice and demands a close study of ideas. Consequently, the seminar complements thesis preparation and, or, can serve as an introduction to critical thinking in architecture. Professional practice credit is given. The seminar is rigorous; each student will be expected to co-lead at least one seminar on the work and ideas of an architect as framed by their monograph. In addition there will be a number of one- to two-page written assignments. Enrollment is limited to 8-12 students. The course is open to all graduate students including recent and beginning ARCH 200 students. Undergraduates accepted with the consent of the instructor. ARCH 235 (1–4) Three hours of seminar per week. Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Required for doctoral students in this study area. Extended Course Description The course is open to students from other departments. OBJECTIVES RATIONALE METHOD 1. Finding a question: What is the nature of design methods, and why and how do they impact the tasks to which they are applied? How does one begin to find a research question when the means affect the outcome, and when both means and effects are in flux? (Examples: the invention of writing, the invention of the printing press, the invention of the telegraph, the telephone, of photography, the automobile, etc.). 2. Framing the question: What is the specific question you wish to research? Why is it important? To whom? This topic examines the major issues associated with a ‘method’ (technical, social, cultural, economic, legal, etc.), and will help you articulate the question you will want to explore. 3. Background research: What have others said/done about this question? What is your position, regarding their answers/solutions? This topic will introduce students to work that have been done by others in relation to the topic of your inquiry. Students will be asked to take a critical stance, that is—articulate their agreement/disagreement with the positions expressed by their predecessors. 4. Structuring and presenting a research argument: What is your hypothesis? Why do you think it will be better than the ones who preceded it? This topic will help students articulate their research ideas, including the reasons they believe will prove it more successful in answering the question than others have. 5. Underlying assumptions and world-views: What are the beliefs, worldviews, and biases underlying your approach/hypothesis? What is your point of departure, and how does it affect your hypothesis? 6. Research proposal: What steps will you take to accomplish your work? Generally, research consists of the following steps: FORMAT Each presenter must be well-prepared. For some it may take up to several weeks, even months, to prepare a 20 minute presentation for a conference (and that is after we have already studied and considered the subject matter often for years)! How long would you take, then, to choose your words, check your facts, select your slides, structure your arguments, prepare counter-arguments to objections that are likely to be raised, and answers to questions that are bound to be asked? Second, each participant must observe the norms of collegial behavior. In a forum such as this, all opinions are equally important. While one certainly may disagree with another’s opinion (even the faculty’s...), remember that your colleagues have the same right to disagree with you, and everyone has the right to express their own opinions. Hence, everyone must be given the opportunity to say what they wish to say. Shutting off discussion by a curt remark or a disruptive interruption serves no constructive purpose. Third, the role of the faculty is to facilitate the discussion and to contribute from their own knowledge and experience. That does not make them omniscient. To paraphrase William Greiner, the former president of the State University of New York at Buffalo, “if we, the faculty, are expected to know everything, there is not much to know…” Therefore, you must not always expect to receive constructive comments from the faculty: many helpful comments may come from fellow students. In the seminar, the only advantage of the faculty have over the students is their experience: often (but not always), we have had the opportunity to consider the same, or similar issues in greater length and depth than you had. ARCH 239X/139X (1–4) Prerequisites: 130A or consent of instructor. Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Architectures of Globalization: Contested Spaces of Global Culture Over the last four decades the world's cultures, political economies, and built environments have been drawn into new relationships by the wide-ranging changes associated with globalization. At the most general level, globalization describes the enlargement and reorganization of world markets, and the "compression" of space produced by advances in information technology and the acceleration of travel times. Cities have acted as important contexts for these processes, through their strategic roles in an increasingly interdependent world economy. As a consequence, much of the critical writing on globalization shares an implicit or explicit frame of analysis: the globalizing city and its built environments. ARCH 245 (3) Three hours of seminar per week. Prerequisites: 140 or consent of instructor. Scale models as a vehicle for the investigation of daylight in architectural space including issues of photometric measurement, qualitative assessment, temporal variability, and presentation technique. Daylighting Explore qualities of daylight with attention to developing an understanding of the physical and perceptual mechanisms that shape our experience of daylight. We will use physical models as a tool for the analysis of daylighting in buildings. The distribution of natural light in an architectural space is a particularly complex phenomenon that defies realistic numerical analysis. In contrast to the complexity of a computer simulation, physical models offer a practical tool for the investigation of light in space. Well suited to the skills of an architect, this technique can be used at all stages of the architectural design process. Models can predict a design's performance in quantitative detail and provide immediate visual information for assessment of qualitative issues. Student work will include the construction and analysis of lighting models as well as a series of exercises designed to hone your capacities to observe and understand light. ARCH 249X (1-4) Course maybe repeated for credit as topic varies. Fifteen hours lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: 140. Selected topics such as climatic design, mechanical systems, natural lighting, artificial lighting, acoustics. The Secret Life of Buildings (3) This exploratory seminar addresses a secret life of buildings, one related to physical performance. Think of a building that has been influential in your architectural development. How much do you know about the physical environment it creates? How it changes over the cycles of time, season, and weather? The building¹s amenities as viewed from an occupant's perspective? The energy it consumes? Buildings offer a remarkable target for energy conservation. In aggregate, they consume over one third of the total U. S. annual energy use and almost 60% of domestic electricity production. They are also extraordinarily persistent objects in our modern society with lives measured in decades if not centuries. Building design decisions result in energy performance patterns that will last our lifetimes. The seminar emerged from the VITAL SIGNS Project, a U. C. Berkeley curriculum materials development effort funded by the Energy Foundation, NSF, and PG&E in the 1990s. Vital Signs encouraged architecture students to examine architectural, lighting, and mechanical systems in existing buildings with attention to energy use, occupant well being, and architectural spacemaking. It assembled a collection of measurement techniques, often involving novel approaches, to reveal operating patterns in the complex environment of contemporary buildings. In VITAL SIGNS, existing buildings serve as laboratories and offer interesting lessons on the success and failure of various design methods. The approach has a number of benefits. The personal experience you gain in performing the evaluations contributes to your experiential base at a formative time. Analysis of data collected in the field and the comparison of these data to values given by simulation tools provides a foundation for understanding the more abstract tools and standards used by designers in practice. Finally, you can share these experiences with other students and schools in the form of written case studies. The class will conduct a series of case study exercises involving the collection of background data, the survey of those associated with the building (e.g. designers, operators, occupants), the measurement of physical parameters, analysis, and the writing of short reports. The course will include both individual and group assignments, with some opportunity to tailor the assignment to specific student interests. ARCH 264 (3) Two hours of lecture and one hour of discussion per week. Prerequisites: 160 or consent of instructor. This seminar looks at the implications of off-site fabrication in architecture: consistent, protected environments; worker efficiency and safety; trades are easy to coordinate; cheaper, semi-skilled labor can be used; construction periods can be shortened; and completion dates may be more predictable. Off-site fabrication can allow for increased refinement and trial assemblies. However, it may also create monotonous sameness when the processes and results are not considered with care. Extended Course Description This seminar will take a closer look at the implications of off-site fabrication in architectural production. It will move through three steps: in the initial weeks, we will look at precedents for off-site fabrication in architecture and construction, establishing an intellectual framework for subsequent work. Following this, we will look more closely at some common opportunities for off-site fabrication today. Finally, students will present their own research on local fabrication opportunities. This research will include a detailed report on fabrication opportunities, based on your interviews with architects and fabricators. ARCH 269X (1–4) One to four hours of seminar per week. Selected topics such as construction management implementation and geological hazards to construction. ARCH 269X SEC 1 This course addresses the methods and materials of construction. While you will not be an expert at the end of the semester, the course should give you the confidence to feel comfortable on a construction site or when designing a small building for studio. The course will focus on 4 major territories:
In the first half of the semester, we will look at the norms of construction in single-family detached housing (heavy timber, wood studs and light gauge steel framing, simple concrete construction for foundations, and the use of steel beams or columns in conjunction with a wood frame). The second half of the term will be directed at the use of materials common in small commercial and institutional structures, steel frame and concrete systems, and will look at more advanced building skins and roofing systems. During the course of the semester, it will become clear that there are differences between the way construction is portrayed in a text and the decisions that get made on any site. Sometimes the differences between the two are due to regional influences (available skills in the community, the presence of ice and snow, seismic activity, etc.) and sometimes they emerge from the way individuals make choices when a conflict between two goals exists. ARCH 269X SEC 2 Seminar: Material Bio-Intelligibility Matter has become an ever more essential media for enabling technological advances across multiple disciplines. This phenomenon derived largely from the advent of Quantum Mechanics revolutionized our perception of the world permitting us to see and consequently to manipulate matter into unimagined scales. Yet, material breakthroughs since the late twentieth century would not have been viable where it not for the introduction of computational systems which unveiled new thresholds in the fields of imaging and processing data. Broadened scalar manipulation spanning from macro to nano range has become feasible through advanced imaging technologies leading Material Science and consequently multiple disciplines to an exponential growth in the last decade. The introduction of these material advances presents radically new prospects for the field of architecture particularly when new scalar boundaries within material performance can become the origin for design research. The praxis of new design models that address simultaneously new scalar extents inevitably involves disciplines outside architecture principally when pertaining to the development of bio-responsive control systems. In order to efficiently address the inherent complexity of bio-systems early assimilation of performative criteria in the design research process must be met. This seminar aims at developing critical understanding of emerging technologies, fabrication and distribution processes involved in the production and application of functional materials as they amplify the bio-climatic intelligence of built environments. Students are required to confront and develop specific knowledge on the impacts that new technologies, new materials and new modes of production bear on the environment. This expertise is to be developed and manifested as integrative operations that aim at the reduction of energy consumption, material, volume, weight and industrial product replacement by existing technical systems, etc. Functional materials embody the new generation of ecological material optimization by combining positive environmental interfacing with technological innovation. Environmental materials that implement new functional properties can open up new niches and provide a product with functions previously unthought-of. This seminar will examine sustainable production, innovation and application strategies that embody optimization derived from new technologies applied into broad scale processing. This seminar addresses material design research as a multi-stage condition that encompasses full cycle analysis of material performance. Students are to develop an understanding of multi-scalar material performance emphasizing analysis of interdependencies of form, material distributions, and organizations, physical and bio-chemical exchange. Analysis of the rising application of biomimmicry within design practice in the development of material systems is a crucial component of the course. Specific examination of implementation methods of functional materials to address physical adaptability to environmental and climatic fluctuations will be studied. The latter refers specifically to the analysis of claddings that can embody equivalent performances to those applied for example in biomedics, with fabrics adaptable to physiological variations. “Local responsive intelligence” opens opportunities for climatic intelligence that is not dependant on mechanic/sensor based systems, thus making them more viable for ubiquitous application. Contemporary strategies for bio-climatic responsiveness via multi-scale intelligence will be examined from innovations on material simulation systems, low-energy/low-waste manufacturing, raw material reduction and material consumption reduction within potential design applications. ARCH 281 (4) Four hours of lecture/discussion per week. M.S. or Ph.D. standing or consent of instructor. This is the introductory course in methods of inquiry in architecture research to be required of all entering Ph.D. students in all areas of the program. The purpose is to train students in predissertation and prethesis research strategies, expose them to variety of inquiry methods including the value of scholarly research, the nature of evidence, critical reading as content analysis and writing, presenting and illustrating scholarship in the various disciplines of architecture. ARCH 296 (1–12) Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prerequisites: Advancement to candidacy for the Ph.D. Open to qualified students who are directly engaged in the doctoral dissertation. ARCH 299 (1–12) Course may be repeated for credit. Individual studies including reading and individual research under the supervision of a faculty adviser and designed to reinforce the student's background in areas related to the proposed degree. ARCH 602 (1–8) Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Individual study in consultation with the major field adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare themselves for the various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D. This course may not be used for units or residence requirements for the doctoral degree. |
Urban Water Studio 2008; Embarcadero Refugio San Francisco 
NATURE PRINT®
Program and Approach
Landscape/Architecture/Infrastructure/Urbanism
Ulterior Speculation: Monographs and Manifestos