Miku Dixit

This design studio introduces students to architectural design, with architecture’s capacity as enclosure to produce alternate climates, biomes, and ecologies forming the major conceptual framework for studio projects. The studio will explore, through research and design speculation, the history and possible futures of the architecture of the nonhuman world. From very early on, we will be aware of the widest possible range of spatial and temporal scales: from the microscopic and instantaneous, to the planetary scale, to the longue durée of geological time. Landscape and environmental factors will be treated as architectural fundamentals integral to the design process rather than as supplemental components or afterthoughts. Consequently, projects will be highly attuned to natural history, climate, and site specificity. Creative work will be advanced through successive assignments and design briefs that increase in scale and complexity over the semester. Prior experience with hand drafting, digital drawing, and physical and digital modeling is beneficial but not a requirement.

This studio introduces students to architectural design with a focus on supply chains, material flows, embodied energy, and lifecycles of building materials. Alternative materials, whether heavy and earthen or lightweight and ephemeral, will serve as avenues for design research. Our design investigations will operate from a basis of energy and resource scarcity by doing as much as possible with as little as possible. Rather than an approach characterized by austerity, however, we will rethink the design of the built environment from the ground up by questioning basic assumptions that undergird the carbon economy. The studio will encourage students to operate with the resourcefulness, efficiencies, flexibilities, and informal systems seen in parts of Asia, Africa, and South America as precedents for design and construction. Could these methods from the Global South allow us to reimagine the territory and lifecycles of an architectural project? In addition, we will explore design opportunities presented to us by phased construction and strategies of disassembly and reusability. Creative work will be advanced through successive assignments and design briefs that increase in scale and complexity over the semester. Prior experience with hand drafting, digital drawing, and physical and digital modeling is beneficial but not a requirement.

This design studio introduces students to architectural design and representation with a particular focus on human perception and the body in space. Rather than thinking of perception in the framework of the classical five senses, dividing the human sensorium, we will be concerned with the interplay and cumulative “ecology of perception” among optics, vision, and movement and the manipulation and modulation of these stimuli to produce architectural effects. In this way, light, vision, touch, balance, corporeal awareness, locomotion, and their interactions become an assembly of tools and devices available to the designer to produce experimental, architectural-perception machines. Initial design explorations will be informed by the scale of the human frame, as well as the spaces between individuals. These early projects will draw from the ever-shifting and contested frameworks of pandemic-era social distancing to develop a wearable prosthetic architecture. Subsequent projects will grow in scale to culminate in a building-size design proposition. We will use the tools of architectural representation—drawings, visual media, models, and prototypes—to explore how space is perceived and represented, as well as how architecture as a material practice mediates our perception of the world around us. We will approach the act of design itself as a complex and iterative series of intensive procedures of translation and discovery requiring visual and tactile awareness and feedback. Creative work will be advanced through successive assignments and design briefs that increase in scale and complexity over the semester. Prior experience in digital drawing, 3D modeling, and model fabrication can be helpful but is not a requirement.

This design studio introduces students to architectural design and representation. Architecture’s capacity as enclosure to produce alternate climates, biomes, and ecologies will form the major conceptual framework for studio projects. Of particular interest is the architecture of the terrarium, conservatory, and botanical gardens and their history and possible futures. We will use the tools of architectural representation—drawings, visual media, models, and prototypes—to explore how space is perceived and represented, as well as how architecture, in turn, mediates our perception of the world around us. We will approach the act of design itself as a complex and iterative series of intensive procedures of translation and discovery, requiring visual and tactile awareness and feedback. Creative work will be advanced through successive assignments and design briefs that increase in scale and complexity over the semester. Initial studies in structural intuition, formal analysis, and experimental representation will lead to a more sophisticated development of a visual argument and the articulation and defense of a design proposition. Prior experience with hand drafting, digital drawing, and physical and digital modeling will be useful but is not a requirement.

This course introduces students to architectural drawing, with a particular focus on experimental and hybrid forms of spatio-temporal representation on both paper and digital mediums. Fundamentals of orthographic and perspectival projection and drawing conventions, as well as the role of notation and the diagram, will be combined with the creative use of imaging, time-based media, geographic information systems, and other digital tools. We will draw heavily from notational techniques used in a wide variety of fields, including film, photography, music, anatomy, botany, and geology. Recognizing that the mediated space of the studio under remote learning is a result of the physical separation of the air that we breathe, we will also pay close attention to spatially representing invisible and ephemeral phenomena such as air flow, ventilation, and environmental factors. The physical and virtual space of the classroom itself will be one of our many sites of spatial inquiry. This course is open to all skill levels, and while prior experience with digital tools is helpful, it is not required.