Architectural design Studio class for 1st through 5th semester architecture students.

So, what is architecture? (We do not know precisely.) Perhaps it is the condensation of infinite inputs. And, indeed at first glance it feels like we are speaking about everything this semester. This semester, we will not define it. We will test it.

We used to call the studio On Living. And we are still very much concerned with changing the way we live. Maybe it is more how than on. It turns out that we believe in Architecture with a capital A.

How we inhabit, how we construct, how we relate? Architecture, in this sense, becomes a medium for rethinking the terms of living.

 

The work will unfold through a series of deliberate oppositions: comfort / consumption (facade), cores in / cores out, grid / no grid, community / privacy, these rules / those rules (form), clean / dirty (bathrooms and kitchens). These are not binaries to be resolved, but tensions to be exposed. They are not aesthetic preferences or moral positions, but rather competing logics, each with its own spatial consequences. We will work by exploring oppositions, setting-up deliberate clashes. We will expose the tension, test its limits, flip the script, or find a new balance. There’s no single right answer, just different ways of making it.

We will not seek resolution. Each task is a proposition. Each drawing, model, and fragment is a site of inquiry. We will work intensively with physical models and drawings, not as representations, but as tools for thinking. No diagrams. No explanations. Just models that test and drawings that speak. Architecture will be explored through making.