Carl Ray Miller

This course introduces students to the history, culture, and practice of architecture, interior architecture, and historic preservation through lectures, field trips, and hands-on exercises. Students learn fundamentals of spatial analysis and representation through orthographic drawing, understand the cultural context in which spatial practices operate, and explore architectural design. Class work may include field trips to historic buildings; visits to archives, exhibitions, or events; and design exercises introducing plan, section, elevation, and scale; translation between two- and three-dimensional representations of space; and architectural diagramming.

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.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

The Intermediate Design Studio in the accredited professional graduate degree emphasizes the capacity of buildings, interior space and urban interiors to engage and make tangible the opportunities inherent to diversity, change and the temporal occupation of space and time.

Course Goals and Objectives include developing an understanding of how diversity and temporal or contingent conditions inform architectural space making, form and program. These questions are explored through the design or adaptive re-use of a medium sized building accommodating 100 occupants, sited in a culturally diverse and historically complex context. The design exploration needs to provide evidence of a deep understanding of the ethical and social responsibilities of the architect, of human behavior in a context governed by diversity and change and translated into a design proposition of a contextually sensitive building ? while addressing site conditions, accessibility, building services and systems and user well-being.

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.