This design-build workshop challenges anthropocentric paradigms in architecture by focusing on rural revitalization through multispecies cohabitation in Jingdezhen, China.
What does architecture look like when humans, animals and plants occupy the same space?
What design opportunities can be identified within the rural villages? And how can we incorporate technology and innovation within these places ?

The workshop will fund students to travel to China: to Nanjing, Jingdezhen, and Suzhou - Shanghai,visiting, studying and working toward the re-design of a depopulated village near Jingdezhen as a demonstration site for a re-vitalized 21st Century farming village for research, education and production.

Provides the material system knowledge and fabrication process skills to successfully engage with all areas of the shop, from precision handwork to multi-axis computer numerically controlled (CNC) machining. Progresses through a series of basic exercises that introduce the material and workflow, concluding with more complex problems that explore opportunities and issues specific to architecture.

Introduces fundamental design principles as a way to demystify design and provide a basic introduction to all aspects of the process. Stimulates creativity, abstract thinking, representation, iteration, and design development. Equips students with skills to have more effective communication with designers, and develops their ability to apply the foundations of design to any discipline.

Realize design intentions materially, by hand and by machine. Learn techniques of lasercutting, 3D printing, textiles, light electronics, 3D scanning, design software, and generative processes. Explore the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) makerspace during this weekly one-hour playground for prototyping.

Undergraduates welcome.

Clients, funding, consultants, contracts–architects are enmeshed in financial mechanisms that forever remind us of our direct reliance on local and global economies. Money talks and architecture follows: our work articulating the interests of those served while fluctuating with the rapidity of the market. And while this relationship may be fixed, perhaps we can find ways to resist its normative logics, which exacerbate social inequalities and consolidate power in the hands of the few and the privileged. This workshop will explore alternative economies and financial arrangements to find ways to re-code capitalism’s tendencies, desires, and outcomes. We’ll draw from a range of writing–from queer theory to post-colonial studies to literary criticism–to undo dominant financial orientations and to engineer collective values.

We will ask whether in addition to designing architecture, we can also design the market that demands architecture–to produce economic scenarios under which we might build. We will read constellations of texts that include economic anthropology (studying how economies are shaped by behavior, cultural values, and social relationships), work from other disciplines, and case-studies to invent atypical demand-chains, resist models of optimal performance, and instrumentalize culture to undercut efficiency. We will look at how we might produce clients, programs, and actor networks rather than responding to the whims of the market. We will consider how we might think of economic arrangements as tools for designers.

Each week, students are asked to produce written responses to the reading and to help guide discussion, researching and exploring examples and references to ground our work. The task is to produce a collective and cumulative body of knowledge. Together, we will read, write, and compile a compendium of research on the topic. Students are encouraged to find broad reaching examples–from the domestication of post-war military technology to the proliferation of sharing economies to recent trends in reuse and the circulation of materials and everything in between. We will focus on buildings, materials, and products, largely drawn from North America in the 20th and 21st centuries but may also look further afield. The course will focus on real examples of immaterial and material phenomena, inventing new languages and representational strategies along the way.

Undergraduates also welcome.

Exquisite Simulation
Complex atmospheric and oceanic systems, changing through time, have been rendered brilliantly legible through sophisticated simulations by groups such as NASA absorbing decades of satellite data into distilled visual narratives:

• depictions of sea-level change allowing for melting ice, changing oceanic currents, and the spin of the earth, show surging swell on the east coast of Asia and the US, peaking at the faster-spinning equator
• the seasonal production and absorption of CO2 by diminishing biomass, augmented by dispersed plumes from increasing urban energy-use, are made legible as a decades-long planetary “breathing”
• economists have compiled eerily beautiful videos depicting filigree shipping lines, color-coded per commodity, as vectorial lines of desiring-production (Deleuze), demystifying billion-ton markets

Such elegant depictions offer startling and simple clarity to otherwise intractable systems. By offering visual legibility, such issues are absorbed into everyday thinking, despite their complexity.

By contrast, there are few sophisticated depictions of earth-surface exploitation and the ant-like spoil-heaping at civilizational scale of materials and energy – their re-distribution and transformation into flows of late-industrial “stuff”. Undergirding commodity markets is a seemingly limitless energy supply and a post-WW2 global free-trade economic order, both largely invisible given their ubiquity. 

Material Realism
We will learn principally from two masterful accounts of our energy and material civilization: The Many Lives of Carbon by Dag Olaf Hessen (all organically derived materiality), and The Material World by Ed Conway (focusing on 6 base mineral/metal commodities that essentially underpin the contemporary world – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium), both engaging and accessible. 

Part 1 of the workshop (working individually or in pairs) will seek to de-mystify key aspects of contemporary materialism to graphically portray the fragility or threat implicit in its geo-political and environmental portent, evidently with focus on architectural materials/methods, against a backdrop of mounting environmental stringency and a doubling of buildings by mid-century. In other words, we’ll deploy architectural aptitude to offer striking new ways to capture the complex reality of our material world, which will likely benefit from being witnessed through time (for instance in the startling new efficiencies of copper production that seems to have even outpaced Moore’s Law). 

“Autarky is an economic system of self-sufficiency and limited trade. A country is said to be in a complete state of autarchy if it has a closed economy, which means that it does not engage in international trade with any other country.” 
- Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations

Part 2 of the workshop will focus on the consequences when the assumptions of limitless material and energy availability are disrupted, as during Covid (supply-chain and labor disruption), or the Ukrainian war (imminent European recession through loss of natural gas), or the current imposition of tariffs and the vision of autarky that they imply – a significant rebuke to what has been a pervasive global free-trade hegemony. Akin to putting sticky tape on a balloon and then inflating it, so restrictions of material and energy supply necessarily distort architectural form (no-labor reconstruction in Ukraine, for instance). Copper might be mined and crushed in Chile, the dust shipped to China for refining, shipped back to the US to be drawn into wires, before being trucked to an east coast building site subject to US electrical codes; what happens when any of the regimes become autarkic?

Each student will be asked to develop or analyze an architectural element or assembly that allows for varying degrees of autarky in being able to adjust the material and/or energy assumptions of the project as parametric variants: what design and technical aptitude would this require? 
 

How can you build a creative practice that is adaptive, impactful, and future-ready?

This lecture-and-lab course equips students in design, arts, and cultural fields with tools and strategies for viable professional practice. You will engage with cultural economics and management, international frameworks, and practical tools such as business models, market positioning, branding, and intellectual property protection, applying them to your own work through structured exercises. Labs explore crossovers—ways creative practice can generate value and drive innovation in society and industry—developing experimental propositions for real-world applications.

You may enter with a professional direction in mind, although it is not required. The labs are designed to allow new directions and value propositions to emerge. The course fosters reflection and equips students to create professional offerings through a value-based understanding of cultural and creative production while identifying market opportunities with positive human impact. Final presentations consolidate learning into professional outputs with potential for incubation.