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.
The interlinked crises of climate, justice, and health continue to disproportionately threaten vulnerable and marginalized communities. Yet to date, most policy and planning efforts continue to privilege those with power, privilege, and ability, and to reinforce multiple planes of oppression and exclusion. Can the magnitude of our current predicament serve as a call to action for radical change? As we weigh our next steps, can we reinvent the ways we construct space, place, and identity – so that we can design for the inclusion of the broadest number of people?
This course examines the relationship between design, space, and practices of inclusion. We will reframe sustainability as the intersection of technological performance, on the one hand, with user experience and agency, on the other. Historical and contemporary examples will provide the foundations for new ways of thinking about architecture in terms of sensory choice rather than simply function or efficiency. Through case studies and material experiments, we will define and design environments for inclusion as spaces where different identities, abilities and possibilities can thrive.
Syllabus available upon request.
This seminar will introduce and investigate historically marginalized modes of cultural production, including Black, Indigenous, and traditionally female-driven practices as a means of rethinking the epistemic values of architecture and related mediums of communication and language, and rhetoric. Students will engage these aesthetic modes and templates - “fugitive mediums” - such as textiles and weaving, regional forms of hip hop and social dance, storytelling, and archival practice through a series of protagonists both historical and present-day as a means of activating and incorporating them into their projective design toolset.
Employing a pedagogy of discursive seminar and making exercises, students will conduct their own critical exploration of these practices while developing their own method of generative commentary through the curation and design of an “unruly” zine or viral pamphlet. Using the vehicle of the zine as a “site” of exploration, students will re-center these fugitive mediums while combining scholarly reflection, rhetorical polemic, and experimental design strategies both physical and digital, verbal and non-verbal. This seminar is conceived in dialogue with the Spring 2020 Fugitive Practice course conducted between Howard University and Yale University. The class will draw upon resources at Barnard, including the Design Center and the Barnard Zine Library, as well as experts and guests within and beyond the school.
Syllabus available upon request.
Maps are abstractions. Through the process of mapmaking, an environment’s visible and invisible elements are translated into a coded two-dimensional representation. At each step of this transformation, the mapmaker decides which information is to be edited in or edited out. Maps are thus subjective representations that bolster or conceal certain narratives. Like any artistic, architectural, or urban representation, a map is influenced by its maker’s socio-political moment and, in turn, the map influences its viewer’s perception of a space’s future. Students in this studio will study maps of the past, specifically the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps, which were part of a federally-funded project to assess neighborhoods’ credit-worthiness, a program that effectively determined individuals’ access to housing along racial lines. In 1936, Morningside Heights and South Harlem, the neighborhoods in which Barnard and Columbia University are located, were mapped by the HOLC. Students will be asked to interrogate the subjectivity of these maps, and to compare the maps’ assumptions with contemporary metrics and local narratives. This hybrid theory and practice course will consist of one one-part lectures, reading discussions, and presentations, and one-part student-led research and map-making initiatives.
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.
This design workshop explores the generative potentials of material logics and novel fabrication methods for architecture. Specifically, we will experiment with materials and work at full-scale toward the design of decorative vessels, engaging nonlinear material behavior, chance operations, digital and analog technologies, and mold-making to incorporate irrational geometries into replicable processes. Absent programmatic, mechanical, and other functional requirements, students are encouraged to take risks, develop their own lines of inquiry within the overall requirements of the seminar, and present their insights to others. Weekly design workshops and desk crits are supplemented by lectures, short readings, and guest speakers from the spheres of engineering, architecture, and art.
Principally, our design work will question the primacy of geometric rationalization during the course of design, concomitant with a reevaluation of drawing, modelling, rendering, animation, photography, and other representational techniques. As architectural design and construction are traditionally predicated on geometric rationalization and constraining matter to predetermined geometric bounds, they are latently predicated on linear-elastic material behavior. This regime of material behavior, where deformation is temporary and stress is proportional to strain, ensures that material organizations will not deviate from the geometries assigned to them. If architecture is popularly associated with strength, stasis, and control, it is surely due to the fact that it has existed comfortably within this elastic range. Thus, that a material or a structure can permanently maintain its shape has informed not only architecture’s symbolic functioning but also its formal generation during the process of design. Though geometric rationalization is obviously useful, this course posits that it, along with the elastic-linear range of material deformation, has limited architectural design in terms of its structural potential, environmental reciprocity, symbolic functioning, and formal possibilities.
Many of the most compelling architectural advances of the 20th century thereby bridged art and science, leveraged physical model making, engaged nonlinear behavior, and developed novel analytic methods to question the primacy of geometric rationalization. Experimenting with soap film, spider webs, clay, and stockings before the advent of digital computation, the engineer-architect Frei Otto found that physical models embodied structural behaviors and nonlinear geometries that drawings and calculations could not initially provide. In fact, measurements for his Munich Olympic Stadium were scaled directly from his models. Similarly, Frank Gehry’s appropriation of software from the aerospace industry finds origin in his beginnings as a ceramicist at USC. Through seminars and our own design work, we will likewise explore how technological advances might allow for greater architectural freedom (and vice versa), all while speculating on the potential scalability of our vessels and their consequences within and beyond architecture.
An architecture need not be entirely rational, but merely predictable in form and behavior to an acceptable degree. We should naturally not disregard geometric rationalization, yet question its primacy in the design process. Working iteratively and experimenting with materials at full-scale, our aim is to bring it in greater reciprocity with the singular material bodies and environmental conditions through which it manifests.
Syllabus available upon request.
Architects are always telling stories. In fact, we do nothing but tell stories. In school, we stand by our projects and explain our process. In practice, we talk about design with our colleagues; we draw to communicate our intent to builders. But what is a building to do after its architect has walked away?
This course is about the stories objects tell. We will read stories by architects and artists as well as their critics. We will look at spaces, and at works of art and design, and talk about the thoughts and feelings they evoke. We will share objects that are meaningful to us, and talk about why we love them. We will craft our own story, told through a physical object we will make.
We will explore the elemental architectural palette - material, color, light and shadow, form and void - and how these can be composed to create function, support program,
establish ambiance, convey meaning. Our medium for this exploration will be a light fixture - a relatively small and simple object - yet one that demands a high level of creativity, craft, and knowledge of design history. In other words - a microcosm for design thinking at once as technical and complex as contemporary LED technology and at the same time as intuitive as gathering around a campfire.
We will be rigorous in our craft. Students will use both digital and analog techniques, honing their skills in Rhino, lasercutting, finishing, assembly, and documentation. We will explore workflows and best practices to enable students to extend these techniques to other classes and into their future professional work.
Syllabus available upon request.
By highlighting the relationship between hazardous environments and social vulnerability,
environmental justice (EJ) mapping tools, such as EPA’s EJScreen, have the potential to
powerfully advocate for repairing harm in historically under-resourced communities. At the same
time, these tools tend to represent material flows, value accumulation, and sites of injustice as
isolated points and polygons rather than as interconnected socio-environmental processes. In
this class, we will work extensively with GIS spatial analysis and After Effects animation to
critically explore New York City’s energy systems, with a focus on the relationship to burgeoning
decarbonization and climate justice movements. Hybrid representation techniques will help
illuminate how fossil fuel infrastructure permeates social life and culture in ways that go mostly
unnoticed, the under-recognized role of grassroots activism in energy transitions, the
elusiveness and often immeasurability of toxic exposures, among other topics difficult to
spatialize through static forms of mapping. Each week will consist of skill-building workshops
paired with lectures and discussions that situate projects in relation to larger theoretical
discourses, from geography and environmental history to ecocriticism and feminist decolonial
perspectives.
Syllabus available upon request.