UTSOA

Through a series of projects, lectures and readings this semester's studio work will concern itself with the purposeful inquiry of sustainability and form. Two different intentions of/for making form will be examined. The first is the nature of form and form making using mass, space and geometry as generative elements in design. In this instance form is described as being governed by "laws" of proportion, mathematics and geometry.

The second approach includes other concerns in the generation and creation of form, outside of the conventions of space and geometry, including psychological, temporal, kinesthetic, sensual, social, political, and cultural considerations.

The first portion of the semester will be divided into several parts, each comprised of a series of readings and exercises that examine specific, fundamental issues of composition and form making. While the problems are independent and discreet, each is to have an interconnectedness that you will direct as part of your personal concern. Issues of transparency and the relationship between void and solid will be examined in the context of Rowe and Slutzky's writings on transparency. Materiality will be added as an integral concern. Questions of sustainability and form will be examined especially through the relationship between materials, structure and skin.

Later projects will investigate program and the relation between form, material and space. Projects will include the design of an interior exhibition/display and the design of a small building on a specific site.

Analysis, evaluation and means of reporting and revealing information will be particularly important in your work and will include extensive descriptive studies done in drawing, photographs, models and other media, both virtual and physical. You are to examine design values within issues concerning materiality, technology and construction and the way they shape and make architectural form.

Insistence will be on the primacy of making as the vehicle for learning and discussing architecture. Remember too that you are working in surrogate, you are not (mostly) building your ideas, designs and studies full scale, but your attitude toward what you do make - drawings, models, etc. are directly reflective of your attitude toward the "real, built world". As always, emphasis will be placed on care, commitment, and content in the preparation of your work.