Instructor: Eddy Man Kim
MWF • 1:25-4:15pm • CFA 200 • In-Person

This studio will investigate the role and process of architectural design as three critical acts: to see, to empathize, and to deliver.

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Instructor: Jon Holmes
MW • 10:30-11:20am • CFA Shop • In-Person
MW • 11:30am-12:20pm • CFA Shop • In-Person
MW • 6:30-7:20pm • CFA Shop • In-Person
MW • 7:30-8:20pm • CFA Shop • In-Person

Instructor: Heather Workinger
TR • 1:25-2:45pm • CFA 214 • In-Person

Instructor: Doug Cooper
TR • 9:05-11:55am • CFA 200 • In-Person

Drawing I is an introductory course in free-hand architectural drawing for 1st year architecture students and students from other disciplines.

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Instructor: Matt Huber
TR • 9:05-11:55am • CFA 200 • In-Person

Instructors: Valentina Vavasis, Kai Gutschow
TR • 1:25-2:45pm • CFA 214 • In-Person

This course will start by defining “ethics” and “design ethics” and consider how ethics differs from morals or laws.

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Instructor: Laura Garofalo
MWF • 1:25-4:15pm • CFA 200 • In-Person

The studio will explore the topics of morphology, organization, and context in architecture.

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Instructor: Gerard Damiani
MWF • 10:10-11:00am • MM 103 • In-Person

This course introduces and examines the fundamentals between design intent and construction materials, the science of materials (performance) and their assemblies.

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Instructor: Omar Karaguzel
TR • 3:05-4:25pm • CUC McKenna • In-Person

The goal of this course is to introduce fundamental theories of building physics and simulation-aided design development skill sets in the fields of building lighting and thermal performance and room acoustics.

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Instructor: Josh Bard
TR • 1:25-2:45pm • MM A14 • In-Person

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of generative modeling using computer aided design as practiced in the field of architecture.

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Instructor: Dana Cupkova
MWF • 1:25-4:15pm • MM 312 • In-Person

“Praxis Studio I: Cultivating Infrastructure: Inhabiting Stacked Ecologies" is a core design studio centered on architecture’s response to climate change. Studio pedagogy is focused on a role of landscape in the built environment: uncovering its social, infrastructural and ecological histories, and related patterns of pollution in the effort to re-shape cultures of post industrial urbanization and discover design strategies for architecture as a vehicle for ecological and communal restoration.

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Instructor: Vivian Loftness
TR • 3:05-4:25pm • MM A14 • In-Person
T • 7:00-9:20pm • MM 103 • In-Person

This course introduces architectural design responses for energy conservation, natural conditioning, human comfort, and the site-specific dynamics of climate.

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Instructor: Stefan Gruber
TR • 10:10-11:30am • MM 103 • In-Person

This course introduces students to urbanism and explores architecture as situated and relational practice subject to broader social, political, economic, ecological and cultural forces.

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Instructor: Nina Baird
TR • 8:35-9:55am • MM 103 • In-Person

The primary goal of this course focuses on sustainability as covered by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This course will develop your understanding of how you can contribute to that future through design in the built environment.

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Instructor: Francesca Torello
TR • 10:10-11:30am • PH A19 • In-Person

Instructor: Jeremy Ficca
TR • 12:30-4:20pm • MM 312 • In-Person

This studio presumes that a viable transition to a circular economy necessitates a recalibration of how one builds and ultimately, how design can better address a broader understanding of its processes and artifacts.

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Instructor: Stefan Gruber
TR • 12:30-4:20pm • MM 312 • In-Person

This first semester of the yearlong “Commoning the City” research-based design studio provides a theoretical framing and case study research as stepping stones toward the development of an individual thesis proposal.

48-742 Urban Design Methods with Jonathan Kline is a co-requisite.

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Instructor: Gerard Damiani
TR • 12:30-4:20pm • MM 312 • In-Person

ASO will go beyond how space and time affect the role of architectural sequence in real time to a question of how a building is understood throughout time.

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Instructor: Christine Mondor
TR • 12:30-4:20pm • MM 312 • In-Person

HELIOStudio will examine how the pivot between energy technologies will reshape our use space and will test how our landscape and urban form determine how we deploy technologies.

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Instructor: Hal Hayes
TR • 12:30-4:20pm • CFA 200 • In-Person

This studio will help students develop a strong, comprehensive, holistic design process and learn to seek inspiration from the design components and socio-cultural issues involved in a large, complex building project.

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Instructor: Bill Bates
TR • 12:30-4:20pm • CFA 200 • In-Person

This studio will explore an opportunity the purpose of past structures by revisiting an abandoned state prison structure, the Pennsylvania Correctional Institution of Pittsburgh, designed almost two centuries ago.

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Instructor: Mary-Lou Arscott & Francesca Torello
TR • 12:30-4:20pm • CFA 200 • In-Person

This studio will move from a critical reconsideration of Pittsburgh’s versions of modernism to formulate novel responses by experimenting with non-linear narratives in moving image.

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Instructor: Stephen Lee
F • 1:25-4:25pm • Room TBD • In-Person

The Cut, the Beach & Beyond will be a Fall design elective with a Spring build option studio working with Campus Design & Facility Development, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and campus constituents to improve the quality of life through design intervention(s) on campus.

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Instructor: Doug Cooper
W • 8:00-10:50am • MM 303 • In-Person

Color Drawing builds knowledge and provides practice in the use of color, principally with watercolor, to depict architectural surroundings.

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Instructor: Irving Oppenheim
W • 1:30-4:20pm • Remote

This course culminates in a group project involving form-finding and analysis/design of a cable net roof, based either on a prominent built example or a 3-D boundary geometry chosen by the group.

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Instructor: Ardavan Bidgoli
TR • 10:10-11:30 am • Remote

Inquiry into Machine Learning and Design introduces students to this emerging field, giving them the tools to make their own machine-learning-based design tools by adapting state-of-the-art models, developing new models, and understanding how data shapes machine learning processes.

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Instructor: Tommy CheeMou Yang
M • 10:10am-12:00pm • CFA 211 • In-Person

The Urban Traces Seminar weaves history, ethnography, storytelling, and the delayering of the built environment through fieldwork to examine and counter-map the representation of the city.

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Instructor: Laura Garofalo
W • 9:40am-12:30pm • CFA 206A • In-Person

This course will question how we perceive, define, represent, construct and reconstruct our world in relation to evolving concepts of “nature” and their manifestation in art, architecture, and landscape architecture.

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Instructor: Jackie McFarland
W • 10:10am-12:00pm • CFA 211 • In-Person

The intent of this course is the explore how Afrofuturism allows one to sift perspectives out of a Eurocentric, white, patriarchal, heteronormative perspective to give agency to those who see and experience the world through different eyes.

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Instructor: Diane Shaw
TR • 10:10-11:30am • CFA 102 • In-Person

This course surveys the architecture and urbanism of Mexico and Guatemala during the Mesoamerican and Spanish Colonial eras.

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Instructor: Francesca Torello
MW • 10:10-11:20am • MM 107 • In-Person

The course follows the intertwined histories of architecture and archaeology from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, critically engaging with the outsized influence of classical antiquity on architectural theory and practice and its role of authority and model in the Western artistic and cultural debate.

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Instructor: Nina Barbuto
TR • 1:25-3:15pm • CFA 211 • In-Person

Instructor: Nina Barbuto
TR • 11:50am-1:10pm • HL 106C • In-Person

Instructor: Nida Rehman
F • 9:00-10:20am • Remote

Situating Research will introduce incoming graduate students to a range of research approaches through lectures and conversations with SoA faculty, PhD researchers, and other invited guests.

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Instructor: Eddy Man Kim
Day TBD • Time TBD • Room TBD • Modality TBD

The Design Skills Workshop (DSW) is a summer course for incoming SoA graduate students to establish a baseline of technical skills appropriate to the expectations of the design culture at the SoA.

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Instructor: Josh Bard
TR • 1:25-2:45pm • MM A14 • In-Person

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of generative modeling using computer aided design as practiced in the field of architecture.

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Instructor: Nina Baird
TR • 11:40am-1:00pm • MM 415 IW • In-Person

HVAC and Power Supply for Low-Carbon Buildings is a graduate course that focuses on heating, cooling, ventilation, and power supply systems for new and future commercial buildings.

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Instructor: Omer Karaguzel
TR • 10:10-11:30am • MM 415 IW • In-Person

The Environmental Performance Simulation (EPS) course outlines a series of environmental design principles with emphasis on evidence-based design approaches and reviews of building case studies.

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Instructor: Vivian Loftness
TR • 8:35-9:55am • IW 415 • In-Person

This course explores the relationship of quality buildings, building systems, infrastructures and land-use to productivity, health, well-being and a sustainable environment.

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Instructor: Kristen Kurland
TR • 10:10-11:30am • Remote

This course is designed to introduce a student to 3D software tools, including AutoCAD 3D, Revit Architecture, and 3D Studio MAX.

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Instructor: Valentina Vavasis
TR • 9:50-11:10am • DH 1112 • In-Person

This course teaches the fundamentals of real estate development: its process and context.

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Instructor: Joshua Lee
MW • 9:50-11:10am • MM 415 IW • In-Person

Instructor: Jeremy Ficca
MF • 9:05-10:35am • MM C4 • In-Person

The course emphasizes the reciprocity of design and prototyping, challenging students to leverage physical artifacts as tools for thinking. In this way, prototyping is a means of exploration, not merely a method of production or fabrication. More than a large model or mere three-dimensional rendering of form, the prototype is a testbed and instrument of design projection.

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Instructor: Nida Rehman
F • 2:30-4:00pm • Room TBD • In-Person

This course is an Ethics Mini 2 Elective. In this seminar, we will examine the histories and definitions of environmental racism, environmental injustice/justice, and environmental unfreedoms. We will read and discuss literature from a range of fields, explore case studies in the U.S. and beyond, and have conversations with activists, architects, and scholars invested in spatial justice. Through these we will critically assess architecture’s role as a mechanism of environmental inequities and injustices, and learn from social movements for radical and hopeful change.

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Instructor: Jordan Geiger
W • 1:25-4:25pm • Remote

This seminar’s collective research into collateral architectures will let students come away with ideas for new practices, new users or clients, new uses, and new experiences.

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Instructor: Ramesh Krishnamurti
TR • 3:35-4:25pm • Remote

Instructor: Jeremy Ficca
F • 10:45am-12:00pm • MM 303 • In-Person

This course explores architecture's digital culture to introduce contemporary topics of architectural research, design, practice, and construction.

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Instructor: TBD
MF • 1:20-5:10pm • MM 312 • In-Person

Instructors: Sarosh Anklesaria, Jonathan Kline, Emek Erdolu
MWF • 1:30-4:20pm • MM 320 • In-Person

This studio unpacks architecture’s entanglement with extraction, exploitation, and capital to explore emergent models for transformative socio-ecological praxis.

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Instructor: Kai Gutschow
TR • 11:50am-1:10pm • CFA 214 • In-Person

This graduate seminar starts with the conviction that Architecture is not only buildings, technology, form, program, environment, or space . . . but also culturally constructed discourse and ideas.

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Instructor: Vivian Loftness
TR • 3:05-4:25pm • MM A14 • In-Person
T • 7:00-9:20pm • MM 103 • In-Person

This course introduces architectural design responses for energy conservation, natural conditioning, human comfort, and the site-specific dynamics of climate.

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Instructor: Nina Baird
TR • 8:35-9:55am • MM 103 • In-Person

The primary goal of this course focuses on sustainability as covered by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This course will develop your understanding of how you can contribute to that future through design in the built environment.

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Instructor: Francesca Torello
TR • 10:10-11:30am • PH A19 • In-Person

Instructor: Stefani Danes
MWF • 1:25-4:15pm • MM 312 • In-Person

Instructor: Paul Ostegaard
W • 10:10-11:30am • MM 409 • In-Person

Instructor: Heather Bizon
F • 9:00-11:50am • CFA 206A • In-Person

Instructor: Kristen Kurland
TR • 3:00-4:20pm • Room TBD • In-Person

Instructor: Diane Shaw
TR • 3:30-4:40pm • CFA 102 • In-Person

In this course we examine various histories of the design and redesign of cities and the reasons for those interventions.

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Instructor: Ray Gastil
T • 7:00-9:50pm • WEH 6423 • In-Person

The seminar focuses on the connections between policy, planning, and the design of regions, cities, and neighborhoods, down to the scale of the individual project.

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Instructor: Jonathan Kline
F • 9:20-11:40am • CFA 317 • In-Person

This course explores core urban design methods and theories organized into three themes intended to give students a foundational understanding of urban design, examine key critiques of urbanization, and explore urban design’s agency.

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Instructor: Dana Cupkova, TA: Colleen Duong
F • 10:10am-12:00pm • MM 307 • In-Person

This graduate-level seminar offers an overview of scholarly, design-based, and research-focused approaches to bio-technological design frameworks, committed to connecting critical thinking and design methodologies towards constructed ecologies across scales: from material systems, to architecture, urban design and landscape infrastructures.

Instructor: Azadeh Sawyer
Day TBD • Time TBD • Room TBD • Modality TBD

This is a variable 12/18 unit course that ensures a delineated, focused scope, with refined timeline and deliverables for the Fall Synthesis effort. Design-research thesis projects are situated at the intersection of design, material lifecycle and computation, addressing multicultural aspects of ecological thinking, while enabling actionable expertise in sustainable design methodologies.

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Instructor: Vivian Loftness
Day TBD • Time TBD • Room TBD • Modality TBD

Instructor: Daniel Cardoso
W • 8:00-9:20am • GHC 4211 • In-Person

The subject of this course is the emergence of computation as a pivotal concept in contemporary architecture and other design fields.

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Instructor: Ramesh Krishnamurti
TR • 1:25-2:45pm • Room TBD • Modality TBD

This course aims to prepare students to model geometry through scripted development of parametric schemes for architecture applications — that is, to introduce students to basic scripting with a focus on algorithms relating to form making and to reinforce and extend basic concepts of parametric modeling.

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Instructor: Sinan Goral
TR • 7:00-8:20pm • Room TBD • In-Person

Possibilistic Design is a project-based design seminar that concentrates on how critical design theory and powerful storytelling might pave the way for a more responsible, equitable, and exciting future.

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Instructor: Daragh Byrne
TR • 1:30-3:20pm • Remote

This course will chart the emergence of the now ‘connected world’ to explore the possibilities for future products and connected spaces with the Internet of Things.

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Instructor: Daragh Byrne
TR • 1:30-3:20pm • Remote

This seminar examines the space between the smart city and smart home.

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Instructor: Daniel Cardoso
R • 5:10-6:30pm • PHA 22 • In-Person

Through assignments, discussions, and presentations, this graduate research seminar cultivates the skills to identify a research question, situate it within a wider scholarly conversation, state its relevance, and clearly formulate its methods and potential contributions.

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Instructor: Daniel Cardoso
Days TBD • Time TBD • Mill 19 • In-Person

This course interrogates the confluence of robotics and artificial intelligence methods and its potential applications to architectural design and construction.

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Instructor: Erica Cochran
MW • 10:10-11:30am • Remote

The course is an introduction to the importance of the indoor environment and human health and productivity. The course provides an overview of the metrics utilized to define IEQ and methods to identify their correlations to energy consumption, health, productivity, equitable design and design justice.

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Instructor: Joshua Lee
MWF • 1:30-2:50pm • BH 136E • In-Person

Instructor: Steve Quick
MWF • 3:05-4:25pm • MM 415 IW • In-Person

Transdisciplinary Thinking is a compendium of Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) practice, methods, and theories with an emphasis on how the AEC professions can more effectively work together by understanding each other’s roles, responsibilities, and professional perspectives.

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Instructor(s): Various
Remote Only

This course is for Ph.D. students who have successfully completed their qualifying exams and are working on their dissertation work. In the thesis proposal phase, the PhD student completes the preliminary research needed to plan a course of action leading to a successful dissertation on a selected topic. The thesis proposal must be publicly defended. This phase ends when the thesis proposal is accepted, whereupon the doctoral candidate is deemed to be in all but dissertation (ABD) status.

Instructor(s): Various
Remote Only

In the dissertation phase, the PhD student writes a dissertation on the selected topic that represents a significant research accomplishment, makes a significant contribution to knowledge in the area of concentration, and includes material worthy of publication. The dissertation must be publicly defended. The students will be awarded the degree upon successful completion of the defense and submission of the final dissertation document.

Instructor(s): Various
Remote Only

This course is for Ph.D. students who are preparing their dissertation proposals.