Workshops
How does design operate in our lives? What is our design culture? In this course students will examine the many scales of design in contemporary culture - from graphic design to architecture to urban design to global, interactive, and digital design. The format of this course moves between lectures, discussions, and collaborative design work to field trips in order to engage in the topic through texts and experiences. The work of the course involves discussion, writing, visual commentary, and group design projects.
Syllabus available upon request.
The goal of this seminar + workshop course is to develop new visual representations of the impact of environmental issues on New York City. The course will focus on two catastrophic events and sites: Greenpoint Oil Spill (1978), Newtown Creek; and Hurricane Sandy (2012), Lower Manhattan; and examine related toxic histories, environmental damage, impacted communities, clean-up and protection efforts and planning and design possibilities. Resourcing historical maps, on-site documentation and future design proposals, the class will explore environmental crises and their impact on the built environment and on the social, cultural and political life of the city. Based on this research, students will use digital mapping techniques, 360 video, and AR (augmented reality) technologies to create compelling experiential, spatial, analytical, critical, and reflective reconstructions of catastrophic events and remediation.
Syllabus available upon request.
This course seeks to explore architecture’s occupations as a critical component of disciplinary discourse and practice. While architectural projects have been many times understood as stable and autonomous objects when considering the way they advance authorial intentions and anticipate expected transformations, the course will focus on how architecture operates in relation to changing and heterogeneous actors and practices performed through their occupation. In fact, after their design, architectural structures are appropriated by diverse individuals and at times dissident collectives; they channel different institutional agendas; they are mobilized with different meanings for changing audiences; and they manage overlapping material processes. Different to other ways of regarding architecture’s use or inhabitation, occupation suggests an active appropriation of a space and its transformation. Students in this class will seek to demystify the relationship between architectural projects and the buildings’ occupations, exploring their performance and their significance expanding beyond architects’ intentions by critically revising the tradition of post-occupancy evaluations.
Syllabus available upon request.
This seminar will investigate new forms of drawing the city. It is a course for making, experimenting and collectively thinking about representational techniques that enable us to analyze the city in new ways. As a hybrid course examining both theory and practice, the course includes seminar-style discussions, field trips, and drawing workshops. In this course, students will discuss the work of other architects to learn from their drawing processes and discourse; sstudents will also explore and experience the city through readings, conversations and site visits; and, most importantly, students will draw and draw. This class will encourage fearlessness toward a blank sheet of paper, fostering an attitude that promotes research through the simultaneous actions of thinking and drawing. Together, students will draw some of the most iconic places in New York City and then incorporate individual drawings into the construction of collaborative drawings; experimenting with systems of representation that embrace shared research goals and participatory action as a new way to archive and draw our cities.
Syllabus available upon request.
This hybrid seminar & studio course will investigate the dynamic interactions between ourselves and the designed world. Through acts of design, we will explore different levels of engagement through the following perspectives: inside vs. out, public vs. private, and global vs. local.
This course is a platform for experimentation and innovation through both analog and digital fabrication methods, with an emphasis on thinking through making. Students are encouraged to help each other learn and have a fearless approach to making — failure and resilience are key ingredients for a successful design process. Projects will challenge students to explore how material choices and fabrication processes can inform their design decisions.
The course will survey a variety of design methods, forms, materials, tools, and techniques through a series of hands-on projects, technical workshops, presentations, discussions, and field trips. Projects will consider factors such as scale, the dialogue between space & the human body, sociocultural contexts, and more. Workshops will highlight fabrication resources available at the new Design Center at Barnard College. We will examine and discuss the work of other designers, artists, and architects, with material curated by both the instructor and students alike. Field trips will include visits to museums, design studios, and digital fabrication facilities in NYC.
Syllabus available upon request.
Advancements in technology today is making real the possibility of occupying the digital space of computers. Speculations on this digital realm within popular culture imagined an alternate reality that existed in parallel with the real where one could enter and exit freely. However, we may not fully realize that we are already living alongside this virtual reality as it augments our everyday lives channeled through spatial technology like our smart devices. The rapid growth of spatial computing continues to push us towards new levels of immersion as advancements in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (collectively XR) takes us both into the space of the computer and layers data on the built environment further blurring the boundary between the virtual and the real.
The virtual, though, is not exclusive to the digital and exists within the narratives and symbols embedded in our built environment as expressions of desire, place, and culture. While we may take for granted that the virtual is always there, it behooves architects to explore the virtual critically to both gain an understanding of its role within the built (and unbuilt) environment and to directly engage with its inherent spatial, experiential and immersive qualities. If instead, architecture’s engagement with technology remains limited to the production of images we risk reducing architecture to affect. XR technology offers a critical tool with which to examine how the virtual in architecture can be expressed experientially as it also calls into question our very notion of the real.
This course will task students with critically exploring the boundary between the real and the virtual utilizing Unity 3D video game development software, or game engine, to apply layers of the virtual as augmented reality applications overlaid onto more traditional modes of architectural representations as part of a deeper analysis of historically significant architectural projects.
Syllabus available upon request.
Maps and data are shaping contemporary cities. Everything—from traffic, to consumer patterns, to social behaviors—is now subject to being recorded, analyzed, visualized, and even turned into algorithms that could calculate a future city. This information overload, coupled with our current obsession for data visualization and with quick advances in digital tools, has reconfigured the evidentiary regimes used by architects and urbanists. It is now routine in urban analyses to push the use of data under the guise of objectivity, efficiency, and universal applicability. But data mediated approaches that promise the betterment of urban spaces are far from neutral, and their ambivalent effects have also contributed to reinforce algorithmic discriminatory techniques—a widespread practice that has gained the tittles of “algorithms of oppression” (Safiya Umoja Noble), “weapons of math destruction” (Cathy O’Neil), or “automating inequality” (Virginia Eubanks). Learning how data and maps shape cities is a crucial task today. This hybrid course aims to address this question by analyzing visual techniques used to represent urban data, as well as the technologies that they rely upon. Students will explore such questions through the reading of historical and contemporary texts, and the making of composite digital models—that is, 4D urban models that embed maps, images, text, and videos—that reconstruct an urban research question.
Syllabus available upon request.