PROFESSORS

This course, the first full-semester studio in the 3-year Masters of Architecture (3G) sequence, introduces students to the basic skills of architectural design (drawing, modeling, visualization) and the core components of architectural knowledge (terminology, concepts, and discourses). Students learn both how to make and how to think.

Through the design of a collective living community, students come to understand how the form of buildings impacts domestic relationships. To begin, each student in the studio is given an adjacent plot of land that is divided between private and communal spaces. The latter is determined in an initial group workshop where students work collectively to assign individual plots, define shared programs, and consider larger design aspects that play out at the scale of the whole site. This stage also asks students to think abstractly about how space is defined and allocated at the scale of city planning, allowing them to critically examine problematic concepts such as “private property” and single-family zoning. The initial group stage then transitions into a more individual design phase where students develop private living/sleeping spaces alongside shared programs.