Courses
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New York New York
Kersten Geers, David Van Severen
There is a famed anecdotal evidence that designing a tower is easier than designing a chair. The boastful comparison was rather meant to aggrandize architects’…
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Baizo House – Perception Description Representation
On October 8, 1980, New York band Talking Heads released Remain in Light, their fourth album. The album's final track, "The Overload", was written in…
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Percent for Art: A New Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
In the option studio, we design a new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by re-using the structure of a large-scale shopping…
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Nexus of Ecology, Education, and Design – A new School of Design on an Island at Yangtze Estuary
This studio project touches upon two important areas relevant to our collective future— ecology and education. This is a future in which we must change…
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Parisian Knees
There is little doubt that density is reshaping our cities, at a furious pace and with vast implications for urban life. As far-reaching as these…
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Earth Curvature: Context as Material / How to Read Place
Students will craft their own architectural language, guided by personal ethics and an original vision towards a sustainable architecture that also strives to timelessly resonate…
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Forgotten Fort Kongestein
This studio will explore potential new attitudes toward historical preservation, transformation, and adaptive reuse. The location is Fort Kongestein on the Eastern Coast of Ghana,…
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Housing as a Sustainable Common
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, architects were the driving force of progress in developing housing typologies that would enable people to live more socially…
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From Within to Without [M1]
This studio will explore the notion of interiority in the public realm by reimagining an existing mid-sized commercial building. As e-commerce, shifting consumer habits, and…
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Second Opportunities in Architecture [M1]
Iñaki Abalos, Renata Sentkiewicz
In its historical context, architecture has demonstrated an extensive capacity for the adaptation of typologies or forms to different sites, programs, and circumstances. In opposition…
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Do-It-Anyway: Place, Tectonics, and Time [M1]
In this studio, students will design and fabricate a sleeping space at one-to-one scale in the period of seven weeks. Why? We are living…
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Transforming the Urban Villa with Private Garden into a Contemporary Typology [M1]
The studio will deal with the strategies for the transformation of a coveted but obsolete architectural type, the urban villa in the park, keeping its…
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Revisiting Utopia: Bio-Based Megastructures in the Texas Desert [M2]
Regine Leibinger, Stefan Sauter, Karen Stein
The social and political tumult of the 1960s prompted a resurgence of utopian architecture. Rising fuel prices, a growing dependence on technology and, in particular,…
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Exploring Collective Bonds: Creating Spaces of Solidarity [M2]
In what way can design serve as a conduit, spanning the gap between heterogeneous groups and binding them through their shared collective endeavors? How do…
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Necessary Architecture [M2]
Our cities are filled with buildings–why more? With our discipline about to split into activists and professionals, we need to find purpose for architecture. We…
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Monumental Affairs [M2]
As architecture and urbanism continues to grapple with exposure from atypical authors the need for constructive examination becomes more pressing. Global terror and dissent typically…
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Ruinophilia & Pentimenti – Chinatown Milan Case Study
Arguably, the conception of ruins has long shaped western architecture historians’ origins narrative dating back to antiquity. Largely shaped by a distinct visual culture and…
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Grafting Adaptations onto Existing Buildings and into the City
Today’s architects have an urgent responsibility to address the climate crisis by radically reducing the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from our work. Reusing and adapting…
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Identity and Difference: Annuated Civic Typologies
This term we will revisit a theme we first explored in the option studios Block Blob Mat Slab Slat (2015) and—to a lesser extent— Intuition…
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Revitalizing Onomichi: Architecture, Community, Territory
Onomichi is a port city in Hiroshima Prefecture in the western part of Japan with a history of ship building. It was one of the…
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Voices of Change
Oliver Lütjens, Thomas Padmanabhan
The tone of our voice is more important than the words that we use. When we speak, we use a common language that we share…
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Barnes’ Barns in the Grid of Des Moines
This studio will explore the typology of the industrial shed – a 60,000 square foot building – developed from a kit-of-parts assembly to accommodate adaptable…
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Reconstructions / Unearthing Traces (On History, Memory and Architecture for Life)
“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.” James A.
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The Last Free Space [M1]
What can public libraries do that other spaces – schools, community centers, museums – cannot do? This studio will study and speculate on how a…
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An Incomplete Performance [M1]
Our option studio will explore the double meaning of performance – working between the short-lived act of theatrical performance, and the environmental performance of long-lasting…
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Swerves [M1]
Half a century ago, architecture became open-ended. Buildings would change and grow, architects argued, not unlike cities. Architects embraced impermanence, promoted flexibility, timed obsolescence, and…
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Do-It-Anyway: Place, Tectonics, and Time [M1]
In this studio, students will design and fabricate a project at one-to-one scale in the space of seven weeks. Why? We are living in an…
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Designing the In-Between; Transecting the Heart of Chinatown on a Forgotten Site [M2]
A curious “missing tooth” in the chaotic and dense urban fabric of Boston’s Chinatown reveals a vivisection of the neighborhood and provides an opportunity for…
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Building on Buildings [M2]
In pre-Hispanic cultures, pyramids were often built on top of others. Layer by layer, the structures would grow, understanding that each finished building would at…
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Tower for a Collector [M2]
This studio follows on from a teaching program called “City & Utopia” established 10 years ago in Paris with the aim of exploring the world…
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Housing Future: Reclaiming the Chicago 6-Flat as a Site for Architecture [M2]
Lap Chi Kwong, Alison Von Glinow
The pairing of “Housing Future” and the “6-Flat” is somewhat contradictory. Housing Futures typically point towards advancements in new technologies or new configurations. On the…
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An American Model
Kersten Geers, David Van Severen
In the three previous studios, our aim was to investigate simple (drawing) tools of architecture – plan, section and perspective – in order to obliquely…
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THE AMERICAN HOME: Revisiting ‘Rural & Urban House Types’
Christoph Gantenbein, Emanuel Christ
“We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of…
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Architecture at a Crossroads
In the early 20th century, Manhattan represented the culminating and most extraordinary form of interdependence between architecture and urban morphology. Its unprecedented density, confined to…
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Complete Houses, Designing Non-Fragmented Landscapes of Beds
In this Studio, we will take further the concept of “Complete Streets” (safe, accessible to all, multi-program, sustainable, and context conscious), to reimagine the relationship…
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The Paradox of Hunger – Rural Mississippi
Mississippi has some of the richest soil in the country, with rivers such as the Mississippi, Pearl, Pascagoula, and many more flowing and supporting the…
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Proximities / Room for a House
“Making comparisons is the only good method in a world in which things take on consistency in relation to others. A comparison may be implicit…