48-105: Architecture Design Studio - Poiesis Studio II: Radical Empathy in Architecture - Storytelling as an Architectural Manifesto
Coordinator: Tommy CheeMou Yang
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 15 units
As the second studio within the Poiesis Sequence, this studio will nurture a way of making and thinking in design that aims to cultivate the practice of architecture as an act of creative citizenship.
48-111: Exploring Pittsburgh
Instructor: Francesca Torello
F • 9:00-11:50am • In-Person • 3 units
Students will start exploring Pittsburgh – as built environment in which their work might be situated, as cultural context they need to interpret, and as creative material for their own work. They will learn some of Pittsburgh’s urban history, looking at phases of physical growth and dramatic change over time.
48-112: Digital Fabrication Skills
Instructor: Steven Sontag
TR • 2:00-3:20pm • In-Person & Remote • 2 units
This course serves as an introduction to the type of equipment and methodologies utilized in architectural fabrication. Students will develop a basic understanding of the field to leverage these processes to explore and represent the complex nature of their designs.
62-123: Digital Media II
Instructor: Matthew Huber
M • 9:00-11:50am • In-Person • 6 units
This is the second course in a two-course sequence that introduces students to a broad range of architectural drawing techniques and practices that document, communicate and generate design possibilities.
62-126: Drawing II
Instructor: Doug Cooper
W • 9:00-11:50am • In-Person • 6 units
The central learning objective of this course is building student capacities for visualizing three-dimensional space through freehand drawing. A broader objective is developing hand and visual skills: the ability to use line, tonal values and color (including digital color in Photoshop) to represent architectural space and architectural proposals.
48-240: History of World Architecture I
Instructor: Diane Shaw
TR • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
This survey cuts a broad swath through time, geography and cultures, surveying critical episodes in the built environment of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Americas from ancient times through the 19th century. Reflecting the inseparable relation between building and human needs, this course is not only a history of architecture, but also a history through architecture.
Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural History, Architecture (non-majors)
48-205: Second Year Options Studio - Desert Lands/Dry Lands: Other Ways of Worldmaking
Instructor: Sarosh Anklesaria
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
With anthropogenic climate crisis, it is essential to reimagine the architecture of the desert as one of radical empathy with the land. Using the desert as a prompt and area of study, this studio opens up other ways of building, dwelling and worldmaking.
48-205: Second Year Options Studio - Our Reality is Eros. Our Desire is Revolution.
Instructor: Theodossis (Theo) Issaias
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
The studio springs from the belief that space is a formation that is co-constituted through sexualities and genders. If the discipline of architecture has disregarded this very fact, queer and marginalized communities have been carving with remarkable ingenuity, courage and skill spaces to create the conditions for themselves. They have done so beside architecture and its technologies.
48-205: Second Year Options Studio - Design/Build Options Studio: Phase 2 Peace Garden Project
Instructor: Steve Lee
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
This studio is part of a multi-year, interdisciplinary, design-build effort to provide a diverse group of students with the opportunity to work with their eyes, hands and brains to transform an idea from a virtual world into the physical world. In this semester, we will again work with campus constituents to improve the quality of life on campus through engaging design intervention(s).
48-205: Second Year Options Studio - Ciphering Materiality: Catechizing Craft and Paradox of High Tech
Instructor: Misri Patel
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
This studio extends the provocation: How can one explore craft that assimilated culture and other foreign influences with the aid of cutting edge research in advanced fabrication techniques? Can the digital craftsman also have different sequences and tactile character?
48-205: Second Year Options Studio - Seven Fires Prophecy: Conjuring Ground Embassies
Instructor: Tuliza Sindi
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
The intent of this studio is to understand the potential spatial futures that are unfolding through the Seven Fires Prophecy, toward the realization of Fire Seven’s redemptive arc. The studio will work across several timescapes, where the Seven Years War event, as well as and the Fort Pitt Block House site (whose histories were generally predicted through Fire Four) will provide the mythological gateway into Pittsburgh’s – and the North American continent’s – spatial frameworks and material futures.
48-234: Introduction to Structures
Instructor: Ted Segal
W • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person & Remote • 3 units
This course introduces structural systems and the materials and elements that make up those systems.
Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural Technology (non-majors)
48-241/48-641: History of Modern Architecture
Instructor: Kai Gutschow
MWF • 10:00-10:50am • In-Person • 9 units
This course investigates the global history of modern architecture and theory across the 20th century. It asks critical questions about the canon, the changing nature of history and theory, the biases embedded in terms like “modernism,” “progress,” and “Non-Western,” and the deep legacies of colonialism, globalization, extractivism and capitalism in which modern architecture so actively participated.
Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural History, Architecture (non-majors)
62-275: Fundamentals of Computational Design
Instructor: Vernelle A. A. Noel
TR • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
Addressing conceptual and practical aspects of the relationship between computation and design, this course explores the fundamentals of generative and rule-based systems for designing and making, responsiveness, along with basic approaches to creative data processing, representation and materialization.
48-305: Architecture Design Studio - Praxis Studio II
Coordinator: Jeremy Ficca
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
This studio introduces integrated architectural design as the synthesis of disparate elements, demands, and desires. It situates architecture as a technological, cultural, and environmental process that is inherently contingent and entangled, yet tethered to a historical project of autonomy.
48-324: Structural Design 1 - Form and Forces
Instructor: Juney Lee
TR • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 6 units
This course introduces fundamental concepts of static equilibrium and stability of structures. By using geometry as the common language between architecture and structure, students will explore new ways of shaping structural form by drawing and manipulating the geometry of forces.
48-380/48-658: Constructing Value(s): Economies of Design
Instructor: Alicia Volcy
T • 10:00-11:50am • In-Person • 6 units
This course explores the systems of economic, political, social and regulatory forces driving the production of contemporary architectural projects. It critiques these systems, examines alternatives, and tests interventions in pursuit of value propositions outside of the bottom-line driven norms of late capitalism.
48-381: Issues of Practice
Instructor: Stuart Coppedge
R • 10:00-11:50am • In-Person • 6 units
This course explores the interdependence of contracts, drawings, specifications and correspondence and introduces the concept of the Standard of Care. It addresses business development, staff training and time management and introduces the economic, cultural and political contexts in which architecture is created. To reflect the pedagogical priorities of the school, social justice related issues related to architecture will be examined.
48-383: Ethics & Decision Making in Architecture
Instructor: Valentina Vavasis
T • 10:00-11:50am • In-Person • 6 units
This course investigates ethics for architecture and the built environment. Students will learn about ethics as a discipline, how to identify an ethical issue, and how one might work through an ethical problem.
48-519: Thesis: No Easy Resolutions
Instructor: Sarah Rafson
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
An architectural thesis is a proposition that results from a critique and reexamination of the role of architecture as a critical participant in the conditioning of (public) space. Marking the transition between academic and professional practices, the thesis project is an exciting opportunity for students to define their unique positionality and modes of practice relative to the discipline of architecture.
48-510: ASOS - Entangled Stories of the Anthropocene: Multispecies Conflicts / Multispecies Futures
Instructor: Priyanka Bista
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
This studio will be situated in the Koshi Tappu buffer zone, a heightened multispecies conflict zone, fraught with increasing daily human-wildlife conflict as a result of over 80,000 people living directly adjacent to the 176 sqkm Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve (KTWR). The ultimate goal of the studio is to find ways to reframe and reorient toward a future that is, hopefully, pluralistic and inclusive for all marginalized human and nonhuman inhabitants of the Koshi.
48-510: ASOS
Instructor: Heather Bizon
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
48-510: ASOS - Image Deep: /Contested Matter: Variations on Shelter and Biocement in the era of Climate Crisis
Instructor: Dana Cupkova
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
The ambition of this studio is to examine architecture of shelter and social housing that inquire into embodied energy and labor framework as a primary inspiration for formation of matter. The goal is to re-situate design within a hyper-local framework of material resources and life-cycle that positions architecture as a vehicle for ecological and communal restoration. Promoting a shift away from purely data driven rationales, the desire is to engage in the design framed by environmental ethics and sensory subjectivities as part of our collective aesthetic and ecological experience.
48-510: ASOS - Landform / Land Art: Scale and the Tradition of Regionalism
Instructor: Gerard Damiani
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
This studio looks at land art, in particular the works of Michael Heizer (b. 1944), a contemporary artist who specializes in large-scale site specific sculptures. The studio will speculate on the term “traditional regionalism” to help to refine an appreciation of site, landscape and landform. As part of this studio, we will visit works that are site specific to best understand how these works transform or reveal a new awareness.
48-510: ASOS - Terra Forming: Manifesting Material Histories
Instructor: Laura Garófalo
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
Once seen as static entities, earth sciences exhibition venues are facing challenges to their material and historical representations. This studio will question how institutions will represent geology in the face of the controversial new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. How do these institutions contend with critical material histories and hyper-natural conditions? How do they represent themselves? Can the buildings housing them engage visitors and scholars with sublime expressions of transformative forces? And most directly, how can processes like erosion, deposition, plate tectonics, and atmospheric energy cycling (or weather) inform a design process and the expression and performance of a building?
48-510: ASOS - Humanizing Brutalism: London’s Iconic Southbank Centre in the 21st Century
Instructor: Hal Hayes
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
This studio will explore the seminal integration of London’s cultural tradition of drama and its physical legacy of post-war Brutalist architecture at the Southbank Centre and study how they may be adapted, reinterpreted and further developed to serve the needs of diverse users and capitalize on the technological opportunities of the 21st century.
48-510: ASOS - Design/Build ASO Studio: Phase 2 Peace Garden Project
Instructor: Steve Lee
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
This studio is part of a multi-year, interdisciplinary, design-build effort to provide a diverse group of students with the opportunity to work with their eyes, hands and brains to transform an idea from a virtual world into the physical world. In this semester, we will again work with campus constituents to improve the quality of life on campus through engaging design intervention(s).
48-640: M.Arch Studio - PRAXIS II: deMASSing TIMBER
Instructors: Azadeh Sawyer, Matthew Huber, Jeffrey Davis
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
This course explores the role of tectonic cultures in molding our world and investigates strategies to deMASS TIMBER, promoting responsible wood usage. Through a non-linear, multi-scalar design process, teams develop intricate architectural assemblies, considering construction methods, structural design, thermal and visual performance, aesthetics and ecological impacts.
48-638: Structural Design 2 - Materials & Analysis
Instructor: Juney Lee
TR • 2:00-3:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
This course introduces fundamentals of strength of materials, computational modeling of structures and basic Finite Element (FE) analysis. It is the second of three courses of the Structural Design curriculum offered at Carnegie Mellon Architecture.
48-647: Materiality and Construction Systems
Instructor: Jeremy Ficca
TR • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 9 units
This course introduces students to contemporary methods of construction and draws attention to the materialization of architectural intent. It foregrounds the historical, technological and conceptual basis of construction systems to understand the building as a process and cultural artifact.
48-648: Ethics & Decision Making in Architecture
Instructor: Valentina Vavasis
T • 4:00-5:50pm • In-Person • 6 units
This course investigates ethics for architecture and the built environment. Students will learn about ethics as a discipline, how to identify an ethical issue, and how one might work through an ethical problem.
48-641/48-241: History of Modern Architecture
Instructor: Kai Gutschow
MWF • 10:00-10:50am • In-Person • 6 or 9 units
This course investigates the global history of modern architecture and theory across the 20th century. It asks critical questions about the canon, the changing nature of history and theory, the biases embedded in terms like “modernism,” “progress,” and “Non-Western,” and the deep legacies of colonialism, globalization, extractivism and capitalism in which modern architecture so actively participated.
48-644: M.Arch Pre-Thesis
Instructor: Sinan Goral
F • 9:00-9:50am • In-Person • 3 units
This course is designed for B.Arch and M.Arch students a year before their final Spring semester. The course develops an understanding of research methods, and explores the formation of ideas for architecture thesis projects.
48-670: M.Arch Thesis
Instructor: TBA
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
48-649: Design Leadership
Instructor: Matthew Krissel
R • 9:00-10:50am • In-Person • 6 units
This graduate seminar explores architecture and adjacent creative fields for design leadership models to fuel future-forward speculation. How might we shape leadership and culture in a new design era?
48-658/48-380: Constructing Value(s): Economies of Design
Instructor: Alicia Volcy
T • 10:00-11:50am • In-Person • 6 or 9 units
This course explores the systems of economic, political, social and regulatory forces driving the production of contemporary architectural projects. It critiques these systems, examines alternatives, and tests interventions in pursuit of value propositions outside of the bottom-line driven norms of late capitalism.
48-706: Urban Design Studio II: Urban Systems
Instructor: Nida Rehman
MWF • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
This studio will expand on MUD students’ understanding of neighborhood-scaled urban design through the examination of urban systems and systemic processes, focusing on the infrastructures of toxicity, and modes of local action against them.
48-773: Urban Design Media: Emerging Media
Instructor: Suzy Li
T • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
In this course, students use ArcGIS to map local experiences and large-scale urban systems and use spatial data science to make inferences. Potential advanced ArcGIS skills will be introduced, such as raster imagery analysis to identify urban built environment issues, including urban heat islands, and social inequity; and provide an evidenced-based mapping interface for decision-making.
48-713: MUD Urban Ecology
Instructor: Christine Mondor
T • 6:00-8:50pm • In-Person • 9 units
This class will examine the shifting regimes of urban ecology and equip students with skills and core concepts that enable them to lead or contribute to transition through design.
48-712/90-805: Graduate Seminar II - Issues of Global Urbanization
Instructor: Richard Nisa
W • 7:00-8:20pm • In-Person • 3 or 6 units
The seminar is an investigation into the future of cities focusing on three existential challenges: the escalating environmental crisis, growing social inequity and technological dislocation.
48-708: MUD Thesis Studio - Commoning the City
Instructor: Jonathan Kline
TR • 1:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 18 units
Commoning the City is a yearlong research-based-design thesis studio focused on social justice and community-led urban transformations, positioning design as an agent of change that can support citizens claiming their Right to the City.
48-677: Urban Land Institute (ULI) Hines Competition
Instructor: Stefani Danes
In-Person & Remote • 3 units
This course is for graduate students participating in the prestigious national Urban Land Institute (ULI) Hines Competition, an intensive real estate and urban design competition that takes place January 8-22, 2024. The purpose of the competition and companion course is for cross-disciplinary teams of graduate students to work collaboratively to create a complex urban design and real estate proposal on a real site in North America.
48-711: Paradigms of Research in Architecture
Instructor: Joshua Lee
MW • 8:30-9:50am • In-Person • 6, 9 or 12 units
This course provides an introduction to a wide range of research strategies including Experimental, Simulation, Quantitative, Qualitative, Correlational, Interpretive-historical, Logical Argumentation, Case Study, and Mixed Methods that can be used successfully across a wide spectrum of knowledge production.
48-722/48-524: Building Performance Modeling
Instructor: Wei Liang
TR • 2:00-3:20pm • In-Person • 9 or 12 units
The building performance modeling course focuses on conceptual foundations and practical applications of advanced and integrated whole-building energy simulation programs with emphasis on architectural building envelope systems, mechanical electrical building systems and controls, and on-site renewable energy systems.
48-732: Sustainable Design Synthesis
Instructor: Dana Cupkova
Day TBD • Time TBD • In-Person • 18 or 22 units
This is a culminating course of the Master of Science in Sustainable Design (MSSD) program, following the pre-requisite “48-731: MSSD Synthesis Prep.” This course leads students through an independent thesis development, co-advised by wider CMU faculty to develop a complete yearlong design-research project.
48-692: Shaping Light through Simulation and Virtual Reality
Instructor: Azadeh Sawyer
W • 10:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
This course explores the quantities and qualities of light. Students study how we can design with and for light while understanding the paradox of lighting design—that it is both science and art. Digital design and simulation tools will be augmented with virtual reality (VR) to extend quantitative measurements of lighting to include qualitative aspects of light such as its influence on occupants’ subjective impressions of a space, wellbeing and comfort.
48-569/48-781: GIS/CAFM - Spatial Analysis in Infrastructure Planning
Instructor: Kristen Kurland
In-Person & Remote • 9 or 12 units
The course includes in-person and asynchronous video lectures to learn important GIS concepts. Software tutorials and in-person/remote technical sessions cover leading GIS software from Esri Inc. Applications include ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Map Viewer, ArcGIS Story Maps, and Dashboards. CAFM/IWMS software will be reviewed.
48-721: Building Controls and Diagnostics
Instructor: Tiancheng Zhao
TR • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 12 units
The course introduces students to collecting and processing data acquired from building systems and evaluating their performance.
48-795 A3: LEED, Green Design and Building Rating in Global Context
Instructor: Nina Baird
MW • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 6 units (Mini 1)
This graduate level mini-course uses global building rating systems to gain perspective about sustainable design around the world. The course is organized within the framework of the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Rating Systems.
48-787 A4: LEED, Green Infrastructure and Community Rating in Global Context
Instructor: Nina Baird
MW • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 6 units (Mini 2)
This graduate level mini-course uses global building rating systems to gain perspective about sustainable design around the world. The course is organized within the framework of the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Rating Systems.
48-769 A: MSBPD Thesis
Instructor: Vivian Loftness
18 units
The MSBPD Thesis course engages students in a year-long research project within the areas of high performance building systems and systems integration, indoor environmental quality, and design for sustainability and climate.
48-715: MSCD Pre-Thesis I
Instructor: Daragh Byrne
W • 10:00-11:50am • In-Person • 6 units
This seminar introduces graduate students in Computational Design to the rudiments of graduate level academic research, and offers a space to discuss inchoate research methods, questions and projects in the field.
48-769 B: MSCD Thesis/Project
Instructor: Daniel Cardoso Llach
Day TBD • Time TBD • In-Person • 36 units
Classes provide both depth and breadth, while the culminating Thesis Project allows students the opportunity to narrow their research focus to a topic of personal and professional interest.
48-756: Project Planning and Reporting
Instructors: Najeeb Hameen, Gerrod Winston
F • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 12 units
The goal of this course is to expose students to advanced project scheduling methods and familiarize them with the primary reporting practices as performed in the construction industry, such as change management, resource charts and project status reports.
48-759: Value Based Design Introduction
Instructor: William Bates
MW • 2:00-3:20pm • In-Person • 12 units
This course will teach students the importance of value based design across all project types and delivery methods. The student will receive a firm grasp on the roles of each project stakeholder in a range of small to large construction projects.
48-328/48-737: Detailing Architecture(s)
Instructor: Gerard Damiani
F • 9:30-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
This course examines the role of the architectural detail in the formation/ thematic development of a work of architecture and how the detail reinforces the theoretical position of the architect.
48-355: Perspective
Instructor: Doug Cooper
R • 2:00-4:50pm • In-Person • 9 units
This course emphasizes free-hand drawing in general and free-hand perspective technique in particular. The objective is speed and transfer of drawing skill to design.
48-545/48-745: Design Fabrication
Instructor: Misri Patel
MW • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 9 units
This course represents an evolving think-tank that explores the synergy between computer-aided design and advanced fabrication techniques. Rather than viewing this technology solely as a means of generating outputs, the course emphasizes a craft-based approach. It requires designers to first acquire and master the tools of their trade before proposing viable designs.
48-524/48-722: Building Performance Modeling
Instructor: Wei Liang
TR • 2:00-3:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
The building performance modeling course focuses on conceptual foundations and practical applications of advanced and integrated whole-building energy simulation programs with emphasis on architectural building envelope systems, mechanical electrical building systems and controls, and on-site renewable energy systems.
48-516/48-616: Carnival Gateway Special Project
Instructor: TBA
M • 6:40-8:00pm • In-Person • 3 units
In this course, students will fabricate and construct the Carnival Entryway Pavilion, to be completed for the CMU Carnival, April 11-14, 2024. The course is conducted by NOMAS and advised by Professor Vicky Achnani.
48-517/48-617: Carnival Gateway Project Management
Instructor: TBA
M • 6:40-8:00pm • In-Person • 9 units
This course is for the team responsible for the design and project management of the Carnival Entryway Pavilion, to be completed for the CMU Carnival, April 11-14, 2024. The course is conducted by NOMAS and advised by Professor Vicky Achnani.
48-485/48-685: Design and Documentation in Revit
Instructor: Nathan Sawyer
M • 9:30-10:50am • In-Person • 3 units
This course will guide you through the process of designing in Revit from the schematic, conceptual design phase, to the construction document phase.
48-435/48-735: Modern Mexico: 19th-21st Century Architecture
Instructor: Diane Shaw
TR • 3:30-4:50pm • In-Person • 9 units
This course focuses on the 20th-century architectural and urban history of Mexico City. We will study both the high-style design vanguards and the vernacular built environment.
Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural History (non-majors)
48-442: History of Asian Architecture
Instructor: Xin Chen
MW • 11:00am-12:20pm • Remote • 9 units
From prehistoric times to the 20th century, this course will examine a broad spectrum of building forms and urban planning in China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia. The course will motivate next-generation architects to include an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective in their own works of design.
48-314A/48-614A: New Pedagogies: Unsettling Ground: Retiring the God View.
Instructor: Tuliza Sindi
M • 10:00am-12:50pm • In-Person • 9 units
The course will have students temporarily suspend modern architectural representation’s dependency on cartographic mapping, which as a medium, masquerades as an objective marker of the spatiotemporal qualities of place, and commits architects to time-space philosophies that yield spatial disembodiment, territorial regimes, and racial and land myths.
48-314B/48-614B: New Pedagogies: Material Regeneration
Instructor: Jongwan Kwon
W • 9:00-11:50am • In-Person • 9 units
The current energy crisis and climate change have impelled architects to challenge many standing assumptions in material culture and rethink the relationship between materials, the environment, construction methods, and labor. This seminar offers a critical view of the conventional material systems and practices and examines ways to shift towards adopting carbon-neutral, regenerative, and waste materials.
48-318/48-618: Discourse and Praxis in the Climate Emergency
Instructor: Sarosh Anklesaria
M • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 3 or 6 units
This course engages with emergent discourse in the climate emergency. It considers socio-ecological practices of resistance to the normative model of capitalist growth and extraction. The course will consider a discursive set of readings in architecture, ecology, anthropology, climate change, transitional justice, degrowth, and art to consider other ways of being and acting in the anthropocene.
62-525/62-725: Urban Nature, Architecture and the Modern South Asian City
Instructor: Nida Rehman
W • 9:30am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
This course examines the historic and ongoing processes of colonial and capitalist enclosure, extraction and exploitation that have shaped urban environments in South Asia from the mid-19th century onwards. The course also foregrounds scholarly literature and activist perspectives from across South Asia challenging the destructive processes of capitalist urbanization to envision alternative imaginaries of the environment and shape new ecological and spatial futures.
48-314D/48-614D: New Pedagogies: Co-designing Vertical University's living classroom in Kurule
Instructor: Priyanka Bista
TR • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 6-9 units
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.
48-367/48-667: Material Histories
Instructor: Francesca Torello
MW • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
This seminar looks at the history of the architecture of the last two centuries by following the thread of the history of materials. Students will discuss the ways in which buildings of the past and the practice of architecture were affected by which materials were available, how they were produced, and the craft required to work them.
48-752: Zero Energy Housing
Instructor: Nina Baird
MW • 3:30-4:50pm • In-Person • 9 units
This graduate level course explores passive and active systems that can be integrated for zero energy performance. Through lectures, case study research and an applied multifamily affordable housing project, students study the design approaches, codes, policy, technology and energy infrastructure that support net zero or carbon neutral performance.
48-795 A3: LEED, Green Design and Building Rating in Global Context
Instructor: Nina Baird
MW • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 6 units (Mini 1)
This graduate level mini-course uses global building rating systems to gain perspective about sustainable design around the world. The course is organized within the framework of the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Rating Systems.
48-787 A4: LEED, Green Infrastructure and Community Rating in Global Context
Instructor: Nina Baird
MW • 11:00am-12:20pm • In-Person • 6 units (Mini 2)
This graduate level mini-course uses global building rating systems to gain perspective about sustainable design around the world. The course is organized within the framework of the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Rating Systems.
62-706: Generative Systems for Design
Instructor: Jingyang (Leo) Liu
TR • 2:00-3:20pm • In-Person • 12 units
This course provides designers from multiple disciplines with a variety of computational techniques for generating, synthesizing, optimizing and materializing design alternatives based on custom inputs.
48-557: Formless as an Operation
Instructor: Heather Bizon
F • 9:00-11:50am • In-Person • 9 units
This seminar focuses on the formless as an operation relative to social constructs, parametrics and aesthetics. Geometry is often thought of as rational or a structure that secures and grounds things, however the structures of the built environment is an unfolding and indeterminate product.
48-314C/48-614C: New Pedagogies: A Multiple-Making Approach to Inquiry in Craft + Computation
Instructor: Vernelle A. A. Noel
F • 9:30am-12:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
This course focuses on using ethnographic methods, computational modes of inquiry, and design to study manual craft and their intersections with technological practices.
48-317: The Chair
Instructor: Vicki Achnani
MF • 10:00-11:50am • In-Person • 9 units
This is an intense design and prototyping course fueled by research, experimentation, material feedback and tooling. The exercise allows students to understand the chair as a piece of furniture, the manner of making that gives qualities to an abstract design or idea, the know-how of handling material, the emergence of tacit knowledge in the maker, and tolerance and feedback from the material. This spring, we plan to explicate and employ alternative materials such as agro waste, natural fibers, bamboo and mycelium to develop full-scale chair prototypes.
48-425: EX-CHANGE: Exhibition & Publication in Practice
Instructor: Sarah Rafson
MW • 9:00-9:50am • In-Person • 3 units
Students will work alongside EX-CHANGE director Sarah Rafson and the professional designer selected for the 2024 EX-CHANGE book to get a glimpse into the editorial and curatorial practice.
48-619: Machine Intelligence, Cybernetics and Design
Instructors: Ensar Temizel, Paul Pangaro
WF • 2:00-3:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
The seminar module focuses on the intricate relationship between the fields of architecture/design and cybernetics, dwelling on their intermeshed histories spanning more than six decades.
48-467: Design/Build Elective: Phase 2 Peace Garden Project
Instructor: Steve Lee
TR • 1:00-2:20pm • In-Person • 9 units
This studio is part of a multi-year, interdisciplinary, design-build effort to provide a diverse group of students with the opportunity to work with their eyes, hands and brains to transform an idea from a virtual world into the physical world. In this semester, we will again work with campus constituents to improve the quality of life on campus through engaging design intervention(s).