Instructor: Eddy Man Kim
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 15 units

This studio will investigate the role and process of architectural design as different forms of practice.

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Instructor: Jon Holmes
MW • 10:00-10:50am • In-Person • 3 units

This course introduces basic material assembly methods and the use of shop machinery, hand and power tools, preparing students to participate in a wide range of subsequent building and fabrication projects.

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Instructor: Heather Workinger Midgley
R • 12:30-1:50pm • In-Person • 3 units

The main objective of this first-year seminar course is how students learn, develop, and make decisions as they transition into architecture education.

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Instructor: Doug Cooper
T • 9:00-11:50am • In-Person • 6 units

This is an introductory course in free-hand architectural and general drawing. Its central learning objective is building a capacity for visualizing three-dimensional space through freehand drawing.

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural Representation and Visualization, Architecture (non-majors)

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Instructor: Matthew Huber
R • 9:00-11:50am • In-Person • 6 units

This is the first in a two-course sequence that introduces students to cultures of digital drawing and image production.

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural Representation and Visualization, Architecture (non-majors)

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Instructor: Valentina Vavasis
T • 12:30-1:50pm • In-Person • 3 units

This course is aimed at first year architecture students as an introduction to social justice and design ethics, and SoA’s pedagogy around these issues.

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architecture (non-majors)

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Coordinator: Laura Garófalo
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

This studio explores how architectural and landscape design can respond to a local biome. With a focus on climate and ecology, it highlights the use of precedent and the relevance of context in how architecture takes shape – how it develops its morphology.

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Instructor: Gerard Damiani
MWF • 10:00-10:50am • In-Person • 9 units

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

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural Technology (non-majors)

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Instructor: Nathan Sawyer
T • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 3 units

This course will introduce fundamental concepts of building physics. The knowledge and skills obtained from this course can be applied to studio projects and beyond, improving building design and performance through standard methods of evaluation and simulation tools.

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural Technology (non-majors)

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Instructor: Joshua Bard
Asynchronous • 9 units

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

Fulfills minor requirements for: Computational Design

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Coordinator: Heather Bizon
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

The Steel Necklace: Event, Housing, Infrastructure: In this studio, the design research part of the semester will become the project itself. Students will think critically about how we construct the identity of a place through its cultural, social, and ecological systems, and develop procedures for doing so.

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Instructor: Vivian Loftness
TR • 3:30-4:50pm • In-Person • 9 units

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

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural Technology (non-majors)

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Instructor: Jongwan Kwon
TR • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 9 units

Instructors: Gerard Damiani (Coordinator), Erica Cochran Hameen, Steve Lee
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

The objective of this studio is to go beyond the typical studio project and to demonstrate the necessary integration within the structural system, building envelope, environmental control systems and life safety system while providing the measurable outcomes of building performance as part of the design process.

Read More → Damiani → Cochran Hameen → Lee →

Instructor: Nina Baird
TR • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 9 units

This course focuses on active systems in commercial buildings and their integration with passive design elements: envelope, ventilation and lighting.

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural Technology (non-majors)

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Instructor: Francesca Torello
MW • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units

This seminar is designed to prepare students planning to work on a thesis project in the B.Arch or M.Arch programs. The seminar will help you refine the scope of the thesis argument, define appropriate research methods, and sharpen communication about thesis work in all of its phases.

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Instructor: Mary-Lou Arscott
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

Using narrative forms of drawn, modeled and cinematic media the design work will disrupt contemporary expectations with a new set of paradigms. The aim is to expand gender definitions, particularly in relation to workers engaged in construction and to bring new insights to the production of the built environment.

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Instructor: Jeremy Ficca
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

This studio examines a defining feature of the American landscape, the house, to explore alternative materializations, spatial configurations, and models of living in the face of climate change and economic inequality.

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Instructor: Daragh Byrne
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

This studio examines how we might { break down; undo; rethink; dismantle; discard } the { visions; systems; objects; infrastructures; landscapes; junk; detritus } of { smart; connected; intelligent } technology. Using a design research approach, we'll examine and unpack the wasteful, material and resource intensive, cycles of innovation found within modern technology.

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Instructor: Tommy CheeMou Yang
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

This studio explores the possibilities for an architecture for and of the people, using Chiang Mai, Thailand to contextualize and co-speculate through on-site fieldwork, film, and visual storytelling.

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Instructor: Anne Chen
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

The studio proposes to design and model a city creating an imagined urban landscape of geographic features, plots and circulation pathways, with experimental zoning rules to guide the placement of structures and spaces.

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Instructor: Kai Gutschow
MW • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 3 units

This course explores several evolving topics of material and digital culture in contemporary architectural design, research, and practice in order to provide foundational knowledge necessary for the establishment of the MAAD thesis proposal.

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Instructors: Jeremy Ficca, Joshua Bard
Day TBD • Time TBD • In-Person • 9 units

Instructor: Jeremy Ficca
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

Instructors: Sarosh Anklesaria, Jonathan Kline
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

Instructor: Kai Gutschow
MW • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 6 or 9 units

This graduate seminar explores important writings and ideas being discussed in architecture today in relation to “Design Ethics,” one of the central pedagogies of the SoA and the M.Arch program.

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Instructor: Vivian Loftness
TR • 3:30-4:50pm • In-Person • 9 units

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

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural Technology (non-majors)

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Instructor: Nina Baird
TR • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 9 units

This course focuses on active systems in commercial buildings and their integration with passive design elements: envelope, ventilation and lighting.

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Instructor: Francesca Torello
MW • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units

This seminar is designed to prepare students planning to work on a thesis project in the B.Arch or M.Arch programs. The seminar will help you refine the scope of the thesis argument, define appropriate research methods, and sharpen communication about thesis work in all of its phases.

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Instructor: Theodossis (Theo) Issaias
W • 9:00am-11:50am • In-Person • 6 units

In this course, we take heed from the Dig Where You Stand movement and dig where we stand; we locate agency across a broad range of stories, processes, events, sites, ideas, contexts, practices, and buildings.

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Instructor: Christine Mondor
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

As the first semester of the design studio sequence in the Master of Urban Design program, the Urban Places Studio introduces students to the fundamentals of urban design.

Instructor: Paul Ostergaard
W • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 3 units

This MUD Graduate Seminar introduces students to the practice of urban design. Six elements of practice will be examined including multi-disciplinary teams, public participation, engagement of major stakeholders, context and heritage, design communication, and implementation tools.

Instructor: Jared Abraham
M • 9:00am-10:50am • In-Person • 6 units

The methods and media used to represent the urban environment are essential tools for documenting existing conditions, proposing new interventions, illustrating suppressed or hidden characteristics, and communicating ideas to fellow practitioners as well as the broader public.

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Instructor: Jonathan Kline
F • 9:00-11:50am • In-Person • 9 units

The 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 emerging modes of design agency.

Instructor: Stefan Gruber
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units

Commoning the City is a yearlong research‐based design studio on social justice and community‐led urban transformations. Here, students explore design as an agent of change and how to support citizens in claiming their Right to the City. The first semester, taught by Stefan Gruber, provides a theoretical framing and case study research as a steppingstone toward the development of an individual thesis proposal.

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Instructor: TBD
T • 7:00-9:50pm • Asynchronous • variable units

Instructor: Dana Cupkova
W • 10:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units

The Introduction to Ecological Design Thinking is a graduate-level seminar that provides an overview of scholarly, design- and research-based approaches addressing ecology, technology, and climate change in architecture and urban design.

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Instructor: Tian Li
TR • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 9 or 12 units

EPS course refreshes essential building physics concepts, such as building thermodynamics, photometric quantification of light and luminous environment, human visual and thermal comfort, thermal modeling, and the principles of generating electricity from sunlight. The course emphasizes understanding, analyzing, and simulating these underlying thermodynamic principles and processes to provide immediate or in-depth quantitative feedback for informed exploration of various design alternatives.

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Instructor: Nina Baird
TR• 12:30-1:50pm • In-Person • 9 units

This graduate course focuses on heating, cooling, ventilation, and power supply systems for new and future commercial buildings.

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Instructor: Joshua Bard
Asynchronous • 9 units

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: Azadeh Sawyer
F • 9:00-11:20am • In-Person • 12 or 18 units

Synthesis Prep is an intensive course designed to help students refine their research plan and prepare for their synthesis project.

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Instructor: Vivian Loftness
TR• 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 9 or 12 units

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: Vivian Loftness
Day TBD • Time TBD • In-Person • Variable Units

The culmination thesis project for the Master of Science in Building Performance & Diagnostics includes individual and collaborative dissertations on the integration of advanced building and urban technologies for environmental sustainability, human health and productivity, and organizational change.

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Instructor: Valentina Vavasis
TR • 8:00-9:20am • In-Person • 9 or 12 units

This course teaches the fundamentals of real estate development in the U.S. Students learn about the real estate development process and the social, economic and regulatory context in which land use and real estate development take place.

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Instructor: Joshua Lee
MW • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 or 12 units

Uncertainty perpetually plagues the built environment. The inability of our buildings and cities to adapt to shifting circumstances has led to an enormous amount of waste. We will explore various forces and scales of change and review various strategies through a wide array of built precedents and products that have attempted with varying degrees of success to respond to these forces over time.

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Instructor: Nihar Pathak
MW • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 12 units

Americans now spend 95% of our time indoors, but under what conditions? How can we design our buildings to be energy efficient and promote healthy, safe, productive, and inspiring environments? To answer these questions and more, the course focuses on the fundamentals and concepts of Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ).

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Instructor: Joshua Lee
MWF • 2:00-3:20pm • In-Person • 12 units

This course is designed to apply the diverse knowledge and skills that AECM students have acquired during the program to a critical public interest issue related to Pittsburgh’s built environment.

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Instructor: Steve Quick
MWF • 3:05-4:25pm • In-Person • 12 units

Transdisciplinary Thinking is a compendium of Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) practice, methods, and management 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: Daniel Cardoso Llach
W • 9:00-11:50am • In-Person • 9 units

This graduate-level course examines the emergence of computation as a pivotal concept in contemporary architecture and design through a selection of design theories and practices responding to the so-called “computer revolution”.

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Instructor: Jinmo Rhee
TR • 4:00-5:50pm • In-Person • 10 units

This course prepares students for modeling geometry through scripted development of parametric schemes primarily for design applications—that is, to introduce students to basic scripting in geometrical modeling environment with a focus on algorithms relating to form making and to reinforce and extend basic concepts of parametric modeling.

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Instructor: Kristen Kurland
TR • 9:30-10:50am • Remote • 9 units

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: Joshua Bard
MW • 2:00-3:50pm • In-Person • 9 units

This course provides a practical, hands-on introduction to the application of industrial robotics in architectural and related construction domains.

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Instructor: Daragh Byrne
TR • 10:10am-12:00pm • In-Person • 6 units

Thermostats, locks, power sockets, and lights are all being imbued with ‘smarts’ making them increasingly aware and responsive to their environment and users. 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 • 10:10am-12:00pm • In-Person • 6 units

This seminar examines how smart and connected technologies can be designed for neighborhoods, what considerations are involved, and what effects such technologies create for communities. We will introduce and critically examine the relationships between smart systems with the places, infrastructures, histories, politics, publics and problems that surround them.

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Instructor: Daniel Cardoso Llach
R • 10:00-11:50am • In-Person • 6 units

With the notion of “critical technical practice” as a touchstone, this graduate-level seminar draws from across design, media, and science and technology studies to cultivate an awareness of the discursive and political dimensions of technology in design, and to guide participants in the formulation of a graduate thesis in computational design.

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Instructor: Doug Cooper
W • 8:00-10:50am • In-Person • 9 units

Color Drawing provides practice in the use of color to depict architectural surroundings. Following preliminary exercises using pastels, watercolor is used for most of the course. A central objective is that by the end of the course, students will have good judgement in evaluating color hue, value, and temperature and have gained confidence in the use of watercolor.

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Instructors: Eddy Man Kim, Matthew Huber
Day TBD • Time TBD • Remote • 3 units

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 SoA. There will be a series of workshops, assignments, and tutorials on digital design skills.

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Instructor: Sinan Goral
TR • 7:00-8:20pm • In-Person • 9 units

Design often favors probability. Rather than just problem solving, design should exploit curiosity, creativity, and criticality. 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: TBD
F • 10:10-11:00am • In-Person • 3 units

Instructor: Heather Bizon
F • 9:05-9:55am • In-Person • 3 units

Instructor: Laura Garófalo
WF • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units

While learning through making, students will develop their own expression of softness. Presentations, demonstrations, and workshops on craft will inform experiments focused on material qualities and their formal affordances.

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Instructor: Diane Shaw
TR • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units

This architectural history course surveys the built environment of Mexico and Guatemala during the Mesoamerican and Spanish Colonial eras.

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural History

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Instructor: Diane Shaw
TR • 3:30-4:50pm • In-Person • 9 units

This architectural and urban design history course examines the cultural histories of the design and redesign of world cities. The scale of urban interventions we will look at varies greatly, from the macro-scale of designing totally new capitals to the micro-scale of altering small nodes within a city.

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural History

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Instructor: Nida Rehman and Morgan Newman
F • 2:00-3:50pm • In-Person • 9 units

In this seminar we will examine the histories of environmental racism and injustice. We will ground our conceptual understandings through a closer look at ongoing environmental justice issues in Braddock and North Braddock, including through dialogue with local advocates and community members. Students will develop a case study focusing on air pollution in the Mon Valley region, working collaboratively to produce an annotated bibliography of atmospheric pollution and community action.

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Instructor: Francesca Torello
MW • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 9 units

An introduction to the architecture of the lands where Islam spread over the centuries, this course aims to provide a basic understanding of major epochs and regional variations. We will learn the function and meaning of the most important building types, examine how these types changed over time to adapt to the needs of changing societies and consider influences and exchanges with other traditions.

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural History

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Instructor: Tommy CheeMou Yang
M • 11:00-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units

This design research course explores the current developments in hybrid, multi-platform design and communication mediums to prototype new ways of creative storytelling in architecture, visual development, and concept design. Research methods around oral storytelling, ethno-ecology, radical mapping, and the children's book can allow for the exploration of subjects in ways not available to typical architectural and urban research conventions.

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Instructor: Jackie McFarland
W • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units

The intent of this course is to explore how Afrofuturism allows one to shift 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: Sarosh Anklesaria
F • 9:30-10:50am • Remote • 3 units

Instructor: Jeremy Ficca
MF • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 9 units

This course builds upon the rich history of production and manufacturing in architecture and foregrounds architectural component customization to explore prototyping and customization within the context of contemporary practice. It introduces students to a range of prototyping and design for manufacturing frameworks.

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Instructor: Priyanka Bista
WF • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 12 units

The seminar emerges from the instructor's work while co-founding the "Vertical University" project in Nepal. As a subversion to the traditional way we understand knowledge, the "Vertical University" builds on the learning potential inherent in the place-based, deep-seated indigenous knowledge of farmers living in biodiversity-rich landscapes.

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Instructor: Paul Pangaro
MW • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 or 12 units

The history of Interaction Design (IxD) is far richer than what is commonly known among students and teachers, practicing designers and entrepreneurs. Understanding IxD’s origins and evolution helps us realize the promises and possibly avoid some of the pitfalls of IxD’s future.

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Instructor: Joshua Lee
MW • 10:10-11:30am • In-Person • 9 or 12 units

Uncertainty perpetually plagues the built environment. The inability of our buildings and cities to adapt to shifting circumstances has led to an enormous amount of waste. We will explore various forces and scales of change and review various strategies through a wide array of built precedents and products that have attempted with varying degrees of success to respond to these forces over time.

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Instructor: TBD
W • 7:00-8:20pm • In-Person • 3 units

Instructor: TBD
W • 7:00-8:20pm • In-Person • 3 units

Instructor: Dana Cupkova
TR • 11:00am-12:50pm • In-Person • 12 units

Shaping Environments is a design-research seminar that explores alternative material formations beyond our current petrochemical reality. Using digital environments and computational tools, such as photogrammetry, depth-map texture modeling, AI workflows, and 3D printing, we will experiment with shaping new hybrid material systems.

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Instructor: Daniel Cardoso Llach
F • 2:30-4:20pm • In-Person • 6 units