Stephanie Surjan

Learn the fundamentals of freehand architectural sketching to document and interpret the built environment through essential drawing techniques, including orthographic, axonometric, and perspective. Through guided walking tours of downtown Chicago, students will explore the city's iconic urban fabric, developing skills in on-site observation and visual documentation.
As they sketch key landmarks and urban spaces, students will gain insight into Chicago¿s architectural legacy, shaped by visionaries such as Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The course also highlights the city¿s evolving skyline through the work of contemporary architects and firms, including Jeanne Gang (Studio Gang), Dirk Denison, Legat Architects, Moss Design, and bKL Architecture.
By the end of the course, students will have a deeper understanding of architecture as a visual language and will be equipped with the foundational skills to record and analyze the built environment thoughtfully.

This course introduces the foundational tools and techniques of architectural representation using software platforms such as Rhino and Revit. It is intended for students with little or no prior experience in architectural software.

Students learn the conventions of architectural drawing, including plans, sections, elevations, scale, and basic three-dimensional representation. The course emphasizes the relationship between two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional models, and introduces digital workflows for drafting, modeling, file organization, and drawing output.

Class work includes lectures and demonstrations; readings; and iterative exercises to build understanding of concepts and skills with software. This course requires students to have a laptop that meets SAIC's minimum hardware specifications and runs the department software template including Rhino and Revit.

This course teaches advanced operations with the tools of architectural representation. Students learn parametric and generative modeling strategies, advanced Building Information Modeling (BIM) workflows, and methods for moving between software platforms such as Rhino and Revit at multiple phases of a design project.

The class introduces the use of real-world site data, including location and sun settings, to support environmental analysis and design decisions. Emphasis is placed on coordinating digital models, producing drawings, renderings, and basic animations, and clearly communicating design intent and process.

Class work includes lectures, demonstrations, readings, and iterative exercises. This course requires students to have a laptop that meets SAIC's minimum hardware specifications and runs the department software template including Rhino and Revit.

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.