ARI 350R / ARI 381T / ARC 380C
Tues 5:00pm - 8:00pm, WMB 5.102
Open to ARC grad students, and all ARI students
Ria Bravo: ria.bravo@austin.utexas.edu
Interior Fabrications is a research driven, full scale design build seminar that treats interior construction as a serious disciplinary question. Rather than positioning interiors as surface, finish, or decoration, the course asks how assemblies, materials, and structural logics shape behavior, privacy, collectivity, and identity. Construction is not treated as a technical afterthought but as a cultural and spatial act. Students work collectively and at one-to-one scale, moving from conceptual research to iterative prototyping and fabrication.
The seminar foregrounds layered thinking. Skins, joints, and structural systems are examined as interdependent conditions that produce experience and mediate between bodies and space. The specific form of the built work may shift from year to year, but the focus remains on tectonic clarity, material agency, and embodied learning. By building at full scale, students confront gravity, tolerance, labor, and resistance directly. Process matters as much as outcome. Documentation, reflection, and critique are embedded throughout. Ultimately, the course asks how rethinking interior construction can reposition interior design as an active participant in shaping architectural systems rather than merely completing them.
