Past Featured Courses

ACTIVATE is a series of pop-ups that bring life to unexpected spaces in the Loop. These free events give the public a chance to interact with local art, music, and performance and take part in transforming environments. Students will collaborate with the Chicago Loop Alliance to re-imagine and create one of these pop-up events. 

This two-semester long course (Winter and Spring) engages select mid-and upper-level undergraduate and graduate students with the particular concerns and constraints of ‘real-world’ projects. Working with design influencer Sight Unseen, students will design and execute work to be exhibited in Sight Unseen Presents, an event that pairs designers with retailers, galleries, and restaurants throughout NYC as part of NY Design Week.

In this course, we will employ traditional and digital techniques to map and model these material flows in the context of the Anthropocene. We will produce two and three-dimensional artifacts that reimagine the city as a geological formation, compiling these documents to produce the first Geological Atlas of Built Chicago.

Inviting students to explore the unique forms of study that occur below the surface, Pedways: Chicago Underground posits alternative narratives for the Pedway and the city through research, engagement, and art and design interventions on the space of the Pedway itself.

Designer Artist Citizen Site: Exploring Belonging will create an independent exhibition that responds to, expands, and challenges the U.S. Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, “Dimensions of Citizenship,” commissioned by SAIC and UChicago. 

This semester-long intensive furniture studio will critically engage the chair as an archetype. Chairs have long been a fascination of designers as they require a developed understanding of structure, material, and form. Importantly, chairs represent the cultural mores of the time in which they are produced and are inextricably linked to larger systems of power, technology, and economy.

This course provides beginning design students with the technical and conceptual tools to express their ideas more effectively in 2D, 3D and 4D. This class concentrates on methods for clarifying and articulating ideas while also developing capacity to work fluidly between digital and analog methods. 

Students in "Reimagining Smart Interactions with Communities" will work through their practices to create interventions at street intersections around Chicago.

This course is for students in art and design interested in understanding the process in which affordable housing is delivered in the US and in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood, in particular. This course will analyze several housing developments in North Lawndale and propose new strategies for the production of affordable housing in under-served neighborhoods, taking advantage of local resources and collaboration with community organizations, schools, and businesses.

Working with community participants from the Homan Square / North Lawndale area of Chicago, the course developed tools of inquiry and instructional modules for exploring space and place. 

The uses of many materials is expanding through exploration of both design and fabrication through digital technology which allows us to visualize, analyze and fabricate forms that were previously out of reach.

This studio explored mapping and diagramming as interdependent techniques. With an emphasis on representing spatial relationships as products of political, economic, or cultural constraints and interests, and vice-versa, the visual representation of locales and their associated narratives was taught as an act of intentional abstraction. 

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Loop Post Office in Chicago provides an exemplary building for the study of skins in architecture. The building skin becomes a surface opened to investigations through the various strategies of material, perception, temporal and programmatic thickenings.

The studio/seminar advocates for the emergence and the mobility of research in design.  Our goal is not to merely amass results, but rather, with the aid of results to demonstrate how design research can adapt itself to new procedures

An interdisciplinary elective for senior undergraduates or graduate students interested in exploring design concerns.  The Critical Artifacts seminar-studio allows for serious play, experimentation, and for the deliberate entanglement of theory and practice.

Curating architecture inhabits a double bind: curating implies the care, collection, and display of objects; architecture is not object-centric and instead defines itself as a stance towards the activity of building. 

This is an experimental, transdisciplinary class. Students will develop objects and spaces while working with 2D and 3D materials, digital and physical. The formats will range from props, scripts, costumes, and video, amongst others.

A seminar to complement the Art Institute of Chicago's Arms and Armor collection. Firearm design and patents, military and civilian usage, shooting and hunting clubs, movies and mythology, gun stores, and urban tragedy are covered. 

Each week the class goes to at least one lecture or exhibit, which gives us the chance to actively take part in Chicago’s design arts discourse. Most VAP lectures are attended, as they occur during class time. Before each lecture we read about the person and ideas, at the event we listen, and after the event we critique and write.