fall 2005
ARC 320K:
Design III
This semester you will continue to look, analyze and decipher the concerns that contribute to the design of buildings and to seriously engage the work of understanding and synthesize specific architectural elements. Which primary concerns effect design? How are these concerns defined and how are they assembled? This studio will place an emphasis on place making, scale, form, space, section, and program.
The session will be comprised of one short project (three weeks) followed by a short "hinge" assignment (one week) based on a reading by Alec Purves, "The Persistence of Formal Patterns", culminating then in a larger, more sustained project. Within this larger project there will be short assignments, limited in scope, but will nevertheless engage a range of architectural issues meant to examine determinates that effect and produce form. Short assigned readings will be given throughout the semester to support the discussion of design problems by means of analogy and suggestion. Class discussion will assume an acquaintance with the material introduced in the readings. There will also be limited writing assignments in conjunction with your design efforts.
Insistence will be on the primacy of making as the vehicle for learning and discussing architecture. Emphasis will be placed on care, commitment, clarity and content in preparation of drawings and models. Few beginning architects can understand a building just from the drawings. The capacity to interpret drawings spatially usually comes with much experience and most experienced architects still rely on scale models to test their concepts spatially. Only with a model can the whole concept be viewed at once; one can approximate interior volumes, proportions, and lighting conditions. The intersection of planes can be analyzed and elevations, which must be viewed separately as drawings, can be viewed together. With a scale model, for instance, we can approximate a structural condition, a most difficult condition for beginners to understand from drawings.
So, model making is probably your most valuable tool for designing and describing three-dimensional architectural ideas. It is almost a predictive certainty that your awareness of architectural ideas, your ability to analyze those ideas, and your ability to conceptualize spatially will develop in direct relation to the frequency with which you use physical models in your work both as design aids and as descriptive media. As you are working in surrogate, your attitude toward what you make (all media) is reflective- the work you do, the care, commitment and craft is an end in and of itself.