Courses
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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…
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Forever Young: How design must anticipate human longevity
Recent advances in healthcare have led to prospects of dramatic increase in life span, only a few medical breakthroughs away. This has resulted in a…
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Cabin on a Hill [M1]
Like Henry David Thoreau, we will build a cabin in the woods (except on a hillside) near something (a pond, for example) that allows one…
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What’s a Difference?: Two Billboards for the Sunset Strip [M1]
Architecture’s role in the city is, at least in part, to form civic arrangements that suggest the possible parameters of political life. Traditionally this has…
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Looseness: Indeterminate Architectures for Broadway Junction [M1]
In the late 1950’s and 1960’s, architects embraced uncertainty and indeterminacy, arguing for greater individual agency and freedom, open-endedness, impermanence, growth, and change. Speculative projects imagined new worlds where…
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REVISITING MIES: An extension to Haus Lemke in Berlin [M1]
Haus Lemke, built in 1932 by Mies van der Rohe, sits at the Obersee lake in the Northeast of Berlin. The house was completed before…
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After the Party 2.0 – The Vertical Fairground [M2]
Simon Hartmann, Tilo Herlach, Simon Frommenwiler
In this studio, students will reimagine the center of the fairground Messe Basel and its pinnacle event Art Basel. Students will elaborate on speculative projects…
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The Disenchanted City [M2]
Angelo Lunati, Giancarlo Floridi
The studio will be a collective investigation of the subtle and intriguing relationship that exists between buildings, their form and their character, and the city…
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The Order of Play: The Playground [M2]
We are going to design a playground in a small plot in Rionegro, Colombia, located 2.300 meters above sea level. The studio aims to locate…
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HOME AS PRODUCT: Imagining the Next Generation of Industrialized Houses [M2]
A home is both a physical and a spiritual construct. It is part of our human nature to search for a home that will provide…
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Sustainable Commons: The Function of Housing and Urban Mining (Arles, France Studio Abroad)
In many cities around the world, housing has become unaffordable and designed in ways that are increasingly disconnected from the way people live. The impact…
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Borderline(s) investigation #1 – Lightness
Stephanie Bru, Alexandre Theriot
Studio topic: Economy & Excess We aim to seize economic requirements to transform constraints into levers, producers of qualities. These may well be tangible or…
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Adaptive Quality
Jeanne Gang, Anika Schwarzwald
At a time when it is more essential than ever to conserve resources and prevent carbon pollution—which critically includes limiting the demolition of existing buildings…
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Unterbau City
Sharon Johnston, Hanif Kara, David Fixler
The studio will challenge the supposed opposition between heritage and progress in a mixed-use development within the Regent Quarter, a 6.2 acres site in London.
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The House: A Machine, Queer and Simple
Andrew Holder, Brennan Gerard, Ryan Kelly
What is a house? Who lives in one? And how? These are queer things to ask, insofar as the naivete of the questions implies an…
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A Paradoxical Paradox
Our writing system was devised by people who couldn’t read. Paradox:A statement or proposition that, despite sound reasoning from acceptable premises, leads…
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Eco Folly – Design
Our design research studio takes the folly as a typological springboard for coalescing formal creativity and sustainable imperatives. Whether at the scale of the structure,…
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Tall, Lean, In-between
The studio will consider three recent challenges facing the design of tall residential buildings in London: the stringent requirements for their careful placement and contextual…
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Kit House
The studio will explore the potential convergence of the American twentieth century tradition of the Kit House (exemplified by the Sears Modern Homes of 1908-1940)…
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Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World
The architectural and urban projects of this studio are focused on the potentials of the declining, yet evocative area of Tokyo known as Bakuroch? Yokoyamach?.
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Utopia: Forms of Community
Oliver Lütjens, Thomas Padmanabhan
We need new forms of housing for a more sustainable and more just way of life. Architecture is a language of form. Only by radically…
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The Shape of Things to Come
‘The Shape of Things to Come’ was the title of the 1971 Newsweek article which explored the role of the architect to help shape the…
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Quo Vadis, Addis?
The design studio Quo Vadis, Addis? addresses the question of how to integrate manufacturing in the textile and garment sector within the socio-spatial fabric of…
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Between Wilderness and Civilization: Monson, Maine
The town of Monson is the gateway to the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, the northernmost hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail which stretches from Springer Mountain in…
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Beauty Of Knowledge – American (ir)regularity
The studio Beauty Of Knowledge – American (ir)regularity is a follower to last year’s studio Places Of Knowledges, and previous year Form As Knowledge –…
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Architecture for Statehood
If Washington, DC were to be granted statehood, what would the introduction of its new governing institutions and agencies do to the city and the…
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De/constructing Cultural Tourism – Ke Zhan (Traveler’s Rest Stop) Case Study
The studio will take on the topic of cultural tourism in the context of China’s westward expansion related to its Belt and Road project, as…
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The Primitive Hut
Emanuel Christ, Christoph Gantenbein
Consisting of a roof and its supports, the Primitive Hut is the essence of architecture, and has always been an obsession and a fixed topos…
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Well-being: The function of a 21st century multi-story residential building
Over the past seventeen months, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to feelings of loneliness, anxiety, boredom, incarceration, and indolence for many living in cities around…