Carl Ray Miller

This two-day core undergraduate design studio focuses on the role of the designer in public life, and the role architecture plays in shaping public life. Students address the legal, ethical, cultural, and political concerns that shape architecture practice through the development of a design project. Students use rigorous representation techniques, achieving a professional level of presentation. Students are expected to complete a professional portfolio and resume, along with their design work.

This studio examines issues of program, structure, and building skin to identify how public architecture represents itself as a cultural and political artifact. Rather than understanding architecture as autonomous from its social, cultural, and political environment, the studio posits that architecture must be integrated into the world, be informed by and transforming the social and technical systems that enable our built environments.

Students will review and study design approaches to expand their understanding of possibilities about new spatial dynamics informed by emerging social relationships, hybrid conditions and the social shaping of technology.

Readings, textual and visual case studies and site visits will vary, but always provide the background and theoretical grounding for the site and project analysis and final project development and portfolio presentation.

Project work is a cumulative archive of the process of problem analysis and design exploration that are translations of observations, facts and ideas ? all being made visible through diagrams, drawings and models. Parts of the semesters work will be conducted in groups, in group discussions and workshops and/or site visits; and which will all contribute to individual project work and portfolio development to be presented in a final critique.

This course requires students to have a laptop that meets SAIC's minimum hardware specs and runs the AIADO template.

The Introductory studio in the accredited professional graduate degree addresses the relationship between natural and cultural ecologies and the notion of site as contextual generators of architectural ideas. Including ideas about co-existence, thresholds, material flows and urban-rural bio-regions and systems. Course Goals and Objectives include the role that site and context play in contemporary architectural design, understanding design processes, developing basic design methods, conceptual experimentation and rigor. The studio requires the conceptual design of a small architectural intervention within a complex site and an intermediate level of visual and architectural analysis and representation through diagrams, plans, sections, elevations and physical and digital models.

Student performance criteria (SPC) that address the most recent National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB) requirements will be highlighted and form part of the coursework outcomes.

Readings, textual and visual case studies and site visits will vary, but always provide the background and theoretical grounding for the site and project analysis and final project development and representation.

Project work is a cumulative archive of the process of problem analysis and design exploration that are translations of observations, facts and ideas ? all being made visible through diagrams, drawings and models. Parts of the semesters work will be conducted in groups and which will contribute to individual project work presented in a final critique.

Resilient Systems will provide an introduction to multi-level sustainability, including analysis of site, landscape and cultural context as a precondition to architectural conceptualization. Students will demonstrate ability to synthesize sustainable systems and approaches into design projects including green infrastructure, active and passive structural and mechanical systems, facility with material properties and performance, repairability + preservation design.

Readings will be compiled from selections focused on material systems and their cultural histories [eg: Constructing Architecture: Materials, Processes, Structures : a Handbook] and case study white papers from trade and professional journals.

A structural element of this class is that it will run with a combined cohort made of 2 year option and 3 year option student groups - mixing established students with arriving students. The large class will have 2 or more assigned faculty and will explore independent and collaborative modes of learning. This will contribute to the program's learning culture.

Assignment work will consist of a series of short, topical design projects where students synthesize knowledge of sustainable systems and approaches into propositional architectural drawings and models. One semester long project will be integrated and balanced with several short vignette projects.