Hennie Jurie Reynders

This two-day core design studio focuses on the architecture of large-scale multi-use complexes that combine complex social programs with contemporary workplaces, manufacturing, or other related programs. Students integrate their design knowledge, addressing the design potential of complex building systems, and issues related to atmosphere, climate, acoustics, lighting, and energy. Students use rigorous representation techniques, achieving a professional level of presentation.

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

This team taught seminar explores contemporary discourses about landscape as it has developed from the unexplored, to the dominated; from picturesque agrarian to urban. Land as territory, once understood as fixed and bounded, is open, fluid, interactive, chaotic, and in constant flux with the architecture and infrastructure it is asked to support. Landscapes are physical, environmental, and virtual, existing in electronic space, within nature's cycles, and defined and mediated through interactive information and knowledge communication networks. Landscapes, Territory, Fields questions social, political and economic frameworks which inform contemporary configuration of territories and develops awareness and critical understanding of physical and social processes that define and effect changes in place over time .

The seminar-studio allows for serious play, experimentation and for the deliberate entanglement of theory and practice. We are not looking for solutions, but rather for sophisticated tools in the translation and communication of concerns. We encourage a pluralistic research method where empirical knowledge, deep research, biopic investigations and speculative explorations are all equally valued. The coursework requires reading, writing, discussion and the creation of artifacts in any medium through rigorous thinking, making and sharing practices

The seminar-studio is a truly interdisciplinary venue for those students interested in a critical research-through-design exploration dealing with spatial concerns grounded in body-space and object-space relationships - including ideas of temporality, gesture, identity, ownership, the social shaping of technology and structure and agency.

Readings and case studies vary, but are typically grounded in the philosophical positions of Bruno Latour, Peter Sloterdijk and the writings of Jeremy Till. We attend the occasional lecture and/or exhibition.

Project work emphasize the translation of ideas from text to two-dimensional, three-dimensional and four-dimensional work. The final project outcome can be in any medium and often exists as three-dimensional artifact, an installation or in a new-media format. The studio's final work is exhibited and opened to critique from an external panel of critics.

The graduate level Thesis Strategies seminar-studio is offered in fall semesters and intended for graduate students in Architecture and Interior Architecture engaged in preparatory research work that will ground and inform the successful development and final resolution of thesis project work in a following semester. The class will offer content on research methods, project structure and execution, and clarify common art and design thesis conventions and research-through-design methods. Professors directing the pre-thesis and research practicum, together with external critics, will respond to core project concepts, the relevance of proposed thesis concerns and questions and help to structure a viable project proposition, a timeline and introduce primary references and case studies so that the final thesis results in a comprehensive integration of research, intent and project exploration.

A Graduate Thesis must make a contribution to the field and will be defended within a critical and reflective academic environment. The Thesis Strategies course prepares graduate students for this responsibility and allows for the translation of research into a personal position and informed platform from where thesis project work will develop.

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 will vary, but always provide the background and theoretical grounding for individual research-through-design explorations and the crafting of a critical theoretical position.

Outcomes are a cumulative archive of the process of problem analysis, critical reading and discourse, and the initial design problem exploration. Combined, this body of work are the synopsis of insights into facts and ideas ? all being shared through text, diagrams, drawings and abstract models.