spring 2007
ARI 325L / 434L:
Construction II: Interior materials, assemblies, and systems
Instructor:
Samantha Randall
This course is focused upon both the materials and the methods of construction technologies in the shaping of interior environments. We will explore conceptual and technical relationships, in depth, and often with our own hands -- constructing physical prototypes when needed, dissecting technical manuals, pouring over construction documents, or case study projects by designers famous, anonymous and otherwise. We'll visit campus buildings, cafe's, and coffee shops, bad office buildings, and good ones, your parent's home, your bedroom, your countertop, your kitchen cupboard. We'll read a lot, some technical, some conceptual, we'll touch everything, cut it open, drop it, throw it, burn it, bend it, break it, attach it to a wall. We will seek MATTER - its life, its longevity, its character, meaning, and tolerance, its weight and measure - and its METHODS - process, production, prototype, practices. We'll make some things, and find out how others make things, too, visiting with men and women in the field who do this for a living, and some who do it just because they love it.
The course material is divided into three sections:
Part 1: MATTER : Material Taxonomies
Part 2: METHOD : Material Assemblies
Part 3: MEDIUM: Drawings, Details, Codes + Specifications
When the course of study draws us out in the field, it will be scheduled either during class or lab time, or with a reasonable agreement of a separate class meeting time to provide for the journey. Hands-on projects will take place during class or during lab times in the Design Workshop or Materials Lab; we'll review ahead of each session where classes or demonstrations will be held.
Aldo Rossi in A Scientific Autobiography
Truly every architecture is also an architecture of the interior or, better, an architecture from the interior: the blinds that filter the sunlight or the line of the water; together with the color and form of the bodies that live, sleep, and love one another behind the blinds, constitute, from the interior, another facade. These bodies also have their own color and light, a reflected light, so to speak; this light has something of the weariness or physical exhaustion of the summer, a sort of dazzling white among wintry tones..."