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.

How do you go from a moment of obligation to starting or accelerating a movement?

This course explores the difference between innovation, social innovation, and systems change for social impact. Students interested in navigating complex environmental and social problems will explore frameworks and case studies from real systems change innovators to develop a more comprehensive view of complex problems and the systems they are part of —systems that often keep those problems in place.

In the course, you will apply experiential tools and methods to interrogate your own call to action, strengths, and gaps to address complex problems or needs. You will gain an understanding of the importance of understanding problems from the impact target’s perspective and explore innovative ways to create a scalable movement that ultimately can change a system. The final deliverable from the course is writing a case study on system change based on detailed actor mapping and interviews where you share your deeper understanding of a system you care about.

assemblies for collective life & work 
in Argentina’s rural landscape 

The Argentinian Pampas is a vast territory, widely known for its agricultural fields and productive infrastructures. This huge portion of the country is populated by hundreds of small towns—once vibrant centers of collective life that blossomed in the late 19th century and became home to many migrants.

Today, many of these towns are facing a slow but persistent exodus, leaving behind a hybrid landscape of tiny villages suspended in the middle of expansive crop fields.

What does it mean to inhabit this rural landscape in contemporary times? Are there possibilities for new collective forms of work and life in this extraordinary ecosystem of farms, ponds, rivers, migrant workers’ heritage, warehouses, and factories—all coexisting under the presence of an infinite horizon?

Learning from La Pampa is an invitation to discover this land located in the south of Córdoba, and to propose subtle architectural interventions aimed at rethinking the role of the Argentine countryside and the social and economic life of its historic towns.

The studio will be structured around two design exercises: a small rural infrastructure, or “a shadow,” and a cooperative with collective housing.

A Small Rural Infrastructure
Or, a shadow on the fields.

This first exercise is an approximation to the territory. It has the intention to understand the technological landscape of the countryside and the artifacts that populate the fields.

We will approach the exercise through a curated selection of remarkable Argentine films, literary texts, and photographs that reflect our rural culture and history, allowing us to explore together the beauty and complexity of the site.

Students will analyse a series of popular and local architectures that can be found when driving or walking in the campo (field) and propose an architectural intervention that could establish some dialogue with one or some of them.

The space will not have a specific program and has no prescribed size; it could be very small or extend up to 100 meters. Its scale will be determined by the idea and logics of the project. The technology, details, and structure of this infrastructure will emerge from a close study of the existing elements on the site: windmills, water ponds, silos, billboards, factories, and more.  

The shadow will be conceived as a place to rest within the vastness of the rural landscape. It could be nothing more than a simple roof or remain entirely outdoors. It could also include an interior—a room, a place to spend a night while traveling, perhaps a small bathroom, or a space to store a few belongings, the essentials one might wish to have when finding oneself in the “middle of nowhere.”

For this project students will produce a ¼ scale model, plans, sections, elevations, axonomtrics, collages and a 300-word text.

A Cooperative & Housing for the town 
Or, a second chance to live & work in the countryside.

Cooperatives have long been and continue to be key to life in Argentina. In the late 19th century, small neighborhood cooperatives emerged in areas where the State did not reach, enabling the construction of essential infrastructure such as electricity, telephone lines, potable water, and local employment.

Housing cooperatives helped families build homes collectively. Agricultural cooperatives allowed small farmers to store and sell crops and purchase supplies at fair prices. Educational and cultural cooperatives created schools, libraries, and community centers that became hubs of learning and social life.

n rural towns, cooperatives were especially crucial, fostering solidarity, community participation, and social cohesion while providing basic services and meeting spaces.

During the 2001 economic crisis, many companies went bankrupt or were abandoned by their owners. To save their jobs, workers took control of these businesses, turning them into worker-run cooperatives or recovered factories, where employees collectively manage operations and share profits. This model preserved jobs, sustained local economies, and promoted self-management.

Today, Argentina has approximately 30,000 active cooperatives across a wide range of sectors.

This second and final exercise of the studio will focus on the design of a cooperative in one of the rural towns located in the south of Córdoba, along provincial routes 4, 6, 11, and 8. Each student will select a town and place their project on a vacant lot, on the edge of the village, or in the surrounding rural fields.

The purpose of each cooperative will vary: some will be linked to the region’s agricultural production, others will be educational, cultural, or sports-oriented, and some may promote new productive activities that could benefit the people that live in the town. The specific program will be proposed and defined by each student.

As part of the proposal, each cooperative will include collective housing for its members, most likely those working within the cooperative itself. This introduces the dimension of living and working together, and invites a rethinking of how communal life in the Argentine countryside might be imagined today.

All cooperatives will be owned by the town’s neighbors and envisioned as spaces that strengthen community life, foster social ties, and contribute to the growth of these small urban centers.

The projects should be both rigorous architectural proposals and strong utopian visions, capable of resignifying the beauty of collective living in the Pampas.

Students will produce models at different scales, plans, sections, elevations, axonometrics, collages, and a 500-word text.

As a collective outcome, the studio will develop a small publication in the form of a book and host an exhibition for the final review at the Long Lounge.

Learning from La Pampa is an opportunity to enjoy architectu-re through a sensitive and slow understanding of the site and the culture of the rural Argentinian landscape. It is an invita-tion to look closely, to value the knowledge embedded in simple things, and to find pleasure in designing places that can intro-duce subtle, yet meaningful, changes in the lives of those who live here and those who may come.

Mandatory lottery process.