12/11/24 note: Class will now meet in studio 7-434

Building the Page and Portfolio is a communication design course that teaches the students how to design a book such as a portfolio or other publication using InDesign, high res images, writing, typography, and typesetting.

Undergraduates welcome!

The workshop, 'Setting the Table — Representing HER' spans three weeks and focuses on equipping students with the necessary tools to create a zine booklet featured at the Shift+W Represent HER - The Female Architect exhibit in the Keller Gallery next spring.
During our initial week, we'll engage in exercises centered on table conversations and research techniques. Moving into the second week, we would delve into various forms of representation, aiding students in expressing their intentions and motivations. In our third week, participants will gain design skills to craft a visually captivating zine showcasing their thorough research and visual work.
The workshop explores how gender diversity influences design by examining the interplay between female architectural representation and broader societal implications.

Register here

As part of the ongoing Programmable Mud research initiative, students will travel to Santa Barbara, CA, to engage in the design and fabrication of architectural scale 3D printing building elements made from locally sourced earthen materials. The focus of this workshop will be creating a 3D-printed earth building prototype for fire resilience, a pressing issue in California, and globally, as climate change exacerbates fire danger in urban communities. We will engage in on-site fabrication as well as thermal analysis, allowing students to implement their design ideas in real-time and create architectural systems relevant to the future of low carbon, climate-resilient architecture. The workshop will be structured around producing prototypes with reproducible, publishable methods to make the work accessible and relevant to developing standards in the field.

Explore fire-resilient earthen architecture through hands-on prototyping with locally sourced earth, clay, and robots. This workshop is open to graduate and undergraduate students interested in design, materials, and digital fabrication.

Please contact instructors with a short statement of interest.

How to re-design garbage into a living creature? The workshop introduces a workflow combining hands-on artwork-making and digitalization tools like 3D-scan and AI-generated rigged models.
     
This is a three-day workshop from Jan 10 to 12 (Wed to Fri):

• Day one: Collect or bring the trash you want or unwanted. A tutorial on the 3D-scan tool will be provided.
• Day two: Paper mache techniques. Turn trash into mesh by hand and by scanning.
• Day three: Animate your paper mache with generative AI!

Cities, industries, & systems are material mines that have formed over centuries. As these artificial mines are built, voids they form, out of sight, grow. In a time when resourcefulness is the new imperative, the realm of design beckons a shift from a boundless creative aspiration towards an appreciation of scavenged, processed, & off-cut materials, allowing them to shape imaginative pursuits.

For OFFCUT/CUTOFF, we will travel to Bahrain and immerse ourselves in an environment of industrial production. We will study, analyze, and map Awal Group’s operations, material sources and waste streams. Offcuts from the manufacturing of ducts and HVAC systems will form a palette of materials that we will upcycle through a series of fabricated design solutions. Techniques used will include but not be limited to rolling, bending, casting, punching, and inflating. The resulting work will be showcased at the House of Heritage along the Pearling Path in Muharraq. 

During our time on the island, we will be engaging with local metal smelters and design studios, including bahraini-danish, Civil Architecture and Studio Anne Holtrop.

Limited Seats, please submit an application by midnight Dec 10 here: https://tinyurl.com/offcutbh 

*open to graduate students only, cross-registration available.

Each day we wake up at the foothills of a new mountain of air, with a stream running above.

Use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to study watersheds, then HYSPLIT (from NOAA’s Air Resources Lab) to analyze structures in the air and visualize our web of ecological impacts.

Engage with fluid models, as well as forecast and climate data to understand the relation of mass and circulation in the atmosphere.

We will produce our own Atlas of Geographical Wonders.

Meet in the GIS lab of Rotch Library (first meeting) and Fluids Lab of Building 54.

This class is about making maps across scales. To the cartographers, maps are never neutral. It gives rise to decision-making that are first and foremost political—to  include, to exclude, to highlight, to hide away—which speaks to  a desired audience that is specific, if not social and cultural. That is to say that making maps is also about mapping space and  time.

Every session, we will explore a specific way of representing maps—the map of bodies, communities, cities, systems, territories, wars, and invisible traces to the globe. Students will be able to learn modes of illustrating and plotting maps, basics of GIS (in this case QGIS, but we could also talk about ArcGIS if desired), workflows between 2D and 3D representation of terrains, urban fabrics, data visualizations through illustrator and rhino, that could later compile into an atlas of drawings.

The class will run 3 hours, with the first 1 to 1.5 hours dedicated to theories and case studies of mapping and the second 1 to 1.5 hours dedicated to specific technical workshops. The  format is also flexible depending on the class size and the  students' desires.

While there is no specific "final output" for this course, it  would be great if everyone know what kinds of atlas/maps/drawings or skills they would expect the course to teach them as  an initial survey.

The class syllabus will be uploaded here in mid-December.

Limited to 8 — sign up here

One week workshop aimed at working through the various methods to go from a two-dimensional drawing to a three-dimensional drawing, by hand. The workshop will specifically work through Axonometric and Isometric projections as well as 1, 2, and 3 point constructed linear perspectives. Supplies will be provided but feel free to bring your favorite pencil and/or ruling device!

Sign up by January 8, 2024.

The urgency of the climate crisis has motivated a growing interest in material reuse at scale in architecture to support an alternative, circular approach to building construction.  The Odds & Mods pedagogy platform will offer a multi-year curriculum focused on these topics from a variety of perspectives.  In this IAP workshop, students and instructors will focus on technologies and workflows for digital circularity, encompassing a range of methods to acquire, characterize, design with, engineer, fabricate, and assemble reused and undervalued materials.  Students will specifically develop skills to engage in existing and emerging frameworks for reuse of unconventional and undercharacterized materials in creative architectural contexts.  The workshop will involve both technology-augmented, hands-on making and the use of computational design tools.

In this seminar, you will learn how to learn about and design a HVAC system that complements the environmental concept of a medium sized commercial or multi-unit residential building. You will learn the pros and cons of different HVAC systems  in terms of their spatial requirements, costs and operational energy use. This class is particularly geared towards students who have previously taken 4.401/4.464 since we assume basic knowledge of building energy modeling techniques. Our goal is to give participants the skills to advocate for their design ideas when in practice to empower architects and building designers to have a greater understanding of HVAC systems with the aim of improving the integrated design process.

Knowledge of Rhino and Grasshopper is required. We will be using the ClimateStudio simulation environment long with custom spreadsheets and grasshopper definitions. You are strongly encourage to bring your own design and further develop it during the seminar. The final outcome of the class will be a presentation of the environmental concept of your design and if accompanying HVAC system. He material will lend itself for inclusion in a design portfolio.

Undergraduates with appropriate experience welcome.