Design

 

"F" denotes a course offered in the Fall Semester.
"S" denotes a course offered in the Spring Semester.

 

Undergraduate Courses

 

101 F   Principles of Architecture I

Nonya Grenader & Danny Samuels

Principles of Architecture I is an introduction to basic concepts of the organization of systems, and how they may be described and represented. Progressing in length, scope and complexity, a series of problems explores abstract organizational principles in two and three dimensions - modularity and variation, natural systems, tesselation of elements, spatial organization, organizational concepts in architectural antecedents - and culminates in a focused architectural problem that synthesizes all of these ideas. At the same time, students are introduced to materials and tools of exploration and appropriate means of representation.

 

102 S   Principles of Architecture I

Dawn Finley & Grant Alford

"We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme."  - Gaston Bachelard
This studio introduces students to diverse (procedural and conceptual) architectural working methods; interrogating both digital and analog, as well as two- and three-dimensional means of production and representation toward the development of a rigorous, cohesive architectural design strategy. The typology of the house will serve as pretext and programmatic vehicle for this semester-long study, embracing the type’s potential to precisely frame a range of disciplinary questions. Students begin by studying and drawing a selection of canonical houses - articulating, through projection, a formal reading from which they will derive a transferable and independent architectural concept. From this initial concept each student will develop a diagrammatic extrapolation of architectural design strategies and implied understandings of domesticity. The second half of the semester will focus on formal and spatial implementations of the diagrams and coalesce in the design of a projective house. Issues of architectural representation, design technique, domesticity and context will be examined in weekly workshop sessions centered on one or more assigned readings, case study buildings, and/or architectural practices.

 

201 F  Principles of Architecture II

John Casbarian; Neyran Turan

The third of an eight-semester sequence of architectural design studios brings together the exploration of organizational diagrams and their relation to architectural form and technology. The studio will investigate diagrammatic organization systems as they act as conceptual devices that frame certain relationships between internal organization (program) and surrounding context, and shape those interactions by form. While understanding that architecture acts as part of a larger culture of thinking and making, the studio will explore the design of a clearly articulated architectural proposal for a library building in Houston. By exploring inherent tools and methods of architecture, students will be expected to demonstrate conceptual thinking and analytical rigor, giving equal importance both to speculative and pragmatic aspects of the project articulated through the production of detailed drawings and models that are coordinated into a final review presentation.

 

202 S Principles of Architecture II

Gordon Wittenberg; Doug Oliver

This studio is a focused introduction to architectural technology that is intended to build on the themes and concepts developed in Architecture 201. Systems of structure, climate control and sustainability will be investigated for appropriateness in relationship to the conceptual goals and aspirations of each project. The proposition of this course is that technology is not ‘added’ after a design proposal is fully formed; but rather, the relationship between ‘idea’ and ‘technique’ have always been inextricably combined within the intellectual history of Architecture.
 

 

301 F Principles of Architecture III

Christopher Hight; Neeraj Bhatia

This studio locates the nexus between infrastructure and ecology as a crucial point of architectural intervention within the contemporary metropolis and which, in turn, can be used to transform the relevancy of architecture to central issues arising in today's built environment such as climate change, densification, mobile populations and capital. The studio sections each examine the territory of the over twenty-one main bayous that compliment the freeways as the defining natural and infrastructural features of the Houston area. Using GIS mapping and other research, students produce projective maps of each bayou according to different traits and issues, from pollution to demographics. Based on these findings, students defined a site that could significantly engage and inflect a selected grouping of these mapped factors. Finally, urban scaled design projects were proposed that projected alternative forms of living admits by responding to fluctuating landscape and thereby designing through process, organization and temporality.

 

302 S Principles of Architecture III

Troy Schaum; Carlos Jimenez

Both sections of Arch 302 will develop investigations through research and travel that inform their design interventions on two discrete sites in Mexico City.
 

Section 1 - Iconomics (Schaum): This studio aims to first understand the specific properties of iconicity that have mobilized the recent proliferation of the iconic object in service of the agendas of global capital that are reshaping cities. The iconic architectural object's easy global legibility and transportability across borders has enabled it to become the dominant mode of architectural expression. However, these are the very properties for which global iconic architecture is often criticized. The investigations will require students to think broadly about the role architects can play as global practitioners through research and analysis, culminating in the design of a building to house the Americas Center. The Center, as an institution of global cultural exchange, proposes to construct an urban node that interfaces between the rich local culture of Mexico City and the broader constituencies of the Americas through exhibition, performance, and scholarship.

Section 2- Architecture and Globalism (Jimenez): As the world becomes more connected, architects are increasingly being asked to address the pressing demands of global urban expansion and its constituencies with deft agile designs supported by penetrating research. The studio project concerns the design of a significant cultural institution in the historic center of Mexico City. Strategically located a few blocks east of the emblematic Zocalo, the Americas Cultural Center's (ACC) is an urban infill project. The center's mission is to promote and encourage cultural exchanges between the various countries that make up the Americas. The 60,000 plus square foot building program provides a variety of performance, exhibition, media and study spaces, all free of charge to the public. Funded by the government of the Federal District, the ACC is a singular enterprise of local and global ambitions. It highlights Mexico City as a place, redolent of past present and future histories, nuances, vectors, intersections, pauses, continuities, findings, discoveries... in other words: a full encounter with the life of the city and its global retinue. The design of the final project is a full integration of all related design components (site, materiality, structure, technology, program, etc). Critical to the pedagogical intent of the studio is the assimilation of these underlying design components as they greatly determine the quality and character of the architecture. A design's achievement is magnified as it can be undermined by the ways its various parts come together. As an indispensable framework for approaching each design solution, these design components are not limited but rather open opportunities for research, transformation and imagination.
 

 

401 F Principles of Architecture IV

Carlos Jimenez; Grant Alford

Upper level architectural design problems with an emphasis on urban issues and site planning, and complex building organization. Required for preprofessional major in architecture.

Section 1 - Academy for the Study and Production of Films, Midtown Houston (Jimenez): The studio project is an Academy for the Study and Production of Films of approximately 45,000 to 50,000 square foot in area. It consists of a myriad of spaces such as classrooms, workshops, cinemas, offices, and a combination of indoor / outdoor spaces for filmmaking purposes. The entire building is dedicated to the exhibition, discussion, production, and study of films.
The art of cinema transcends multifold its common definition as “the movie industry or the business of making movies”. Regardless of the blatant exploitation or profit-driven urgency that lately propels the industry, films remain a thriving cultural phenomenon the world-over; or as the German director Wim Wenders commented once, “Cinema is a documentation of our epoch much more precise and broad than all the other arts…” Cinema is an art form and a building type where images coalesce in the revolving narrative of time and light, at any given time one can measure the myriad oscillations of life, events, dreams…… as filmmakers deliver indelible and poignant images “sculpted in time.”

Section 2 - Speculating on the American Prison (Alford): Few, if any, institutions engender architecture’s latent agency more completely than the prison. Compare, in addition, that the act of imprisonment constitutes the ultimate public expression of a social contract through the total submission of an individual to the state. The potential for these two ideas to come together in a meaningful public architecture seems undeniable, but the built results today leave much to be desired. While incarceration appears unequaled in its capacity for conveying, both operatively and symbolically, the common principles of its constituent public, its architectural apparatus remains largely immune to innovation and unchallenged in its relationship to current penal scholarship.

 The U.S. houses nearly 2.3 million inmates in federal and state prisons and local jails, and boasts the world’s highest rate of incarceration at 748 per 100,000 in population. It is within this context that the nation has seen the uneasy re-emergence of the private prison industry to mitigate some of the problems of the nation’s over-burdened system. Remarkably, prison privatization simultaneously offers genuine potential for prison innovation and raises the most unsettling questions of ethics and legitimization in punishment; the former by operating outside stalwart bureaucratic processes and the latter through conflicts between social duty and private financial interests. Prefaced by the most optimistic of possibilities offered by the private model, this studio will investigate the social and historical context of prisons and result in the speculation of a 40k – 50k sq. ft. private correctional facility (specificities of type and scope to emerge from each student’s research) for 150 inmates in mid-town Houston, Texas.

 

 

402 S Principles of Architecture IV

Neeraj bhatia; bryony roberts

Upper level architectural design problems with an emphasis on urban issues and site planning, and complex building organization. Required for preprofessional major in architecture.

Section 1 - Coherence, Part II: One-Several (Witte): This studio explores the synthesis of singular and multiple architectural organizations. We will speculate about what might be termed one-several spaces. Our investigations will start with the assertion that any architecture necessarily contains both singular and multiple attributes. Rather than imagining that architecture should be aligned with one or the other, you will be charged with articulating a particular hybridization of these two traits. While our conversations will center on the relationship between the singular and the multiple, we will also introduce a pair of terms through which to discuss how singularity and multiplicity relate to each other: “binder” and “buffer.” We will begin, and end, with architecture that can be qualified in terms of four spatial types: “singularity,” “multiplicity,” “binder,” and “buffer.”

Section 2 - Confronting Context - Figures that Reconfigure (Roberts): This studio considers the politics of appropriating and reconfiguring existing architecture as a means of enacting urban transformation. Building on a seminar that surveyed polemical strategies for engaging architectural context, this studio focuses principally on figures that reconfigure.

The appropriation of existing architecture is often treated as banal and utilitarian?-labeled as adaptive reuse or renovation?-and performed in service of commercial development. But appropriation is in fact never neutral, since it always asserts a new institution?s political and social values by reconfiguring existing typologies. Rather than continuing to deny the political implications of that process, the studio asks students to claim the agency of typological cannibalism in order to initiate urban change. In particular, the studio focuses on the insertion of a new film museum within the historic theater district on the Broadway Corridor in Los Angeles that is currently faltering economically. Students are challenged to propose new figures that reconfigure the existing buildings' relationships to the urban context, creating a productive rivalry between new and existing forms.

 

 

 

 

Graduate Courses

 

501 F Core Design Studio I

Ron Witte

As an introductory studio, the aim of ARCH 501 is to develop generalist expertise. The assignments will balance architectural techniques (methods for getting from A to B involving representation, conceptualization, form, organization) with architectural conclusions (the “why” of design work…the articulation of a thesis). The studio will be structured around three categories: Preconditions, Conditions, and Conditionings. “Preconditions” refer to the means that architects use to gather, form, and evaluate their work: drawings, readings, techniques, precedents, ideas, software. “Conditions” refer to the things that make up architecture: program, technology, and form. “Conditionings” refer to how we speculate, alter, reconfigure, invent; in short, how new architectures comes to be. Chronologically, the semester will be divided into three phases corresponding to these three categories. Teaching necessarily depends on an artificial understanding of the relationship among these three states. The need for basic knowledge (what is a plan, how does software work, how does one conceptualize, etc.) obliges a sequence of learned stages that, in actuality, is far more reciprocal. Another way of stating this: basic knowledge is itself subject to the discriminations upon which architectural ambitions depend.
 

 

502 S Core Design Studio II

Mark Wamble

Club Life: The studio addresses the design of an Urban Compound. The idea of a compound, urban or otherwise, is shaped by the organization of diverse activities distributed across discrete zones within a single site and with limited orientation to the outside. Discreet activities within the compound are arranged with a strong inward orientation by way of a common space, or set of spaces, designed to mediate their interaction. The program for the Urban Compound is a day-to-night club called Club Life. Theoretical issues engaged by the design of this compound will relate urban continuity to architectural form, and architectural form to a saturated leisure program operating around the clock. Each of these issues will invoke the need for students to claim a new and relevant definition of edge developed to manage spatial relationships at both the interior and exterior limits of the site, and in so doing contribute to our understanding of the urban compound as a relevant type.
 

 

503 F Core Design Studio III

Dawn Finley; Martin Haettasch

Reinventing the Civic Building—East End Annex:  The third semester core studio continues the study of disciplinary concepts and techniques raised in the first year while introducing more complex issues related to program, form, and context. The studio will investigate the possibilities of a new type of public architecture through the design of a hybrid civic building sited in the East End of Houston, in Harris County, Texas. The hypothetical proposal aims to reinvent the county annex building to surpass its minor administrative role in a peripheral urban setting in order to create a lively civic center that acts as an agent for urban engagement and renewal. Amending traditional administrative functions with public amenities that provide broader support to a community and its residents, the new building contains a branch library, performance space, and county courthouse annex. The annex processes clerical and administrative records for property taxes, automobile registration, given names, and marriage licenses, and accommodates courtroom proceedings for minor offenses. The additions of the library and performance hall promote a new urban potential for the area — inviting public participation in changing activities housed on the site (lectures, exhibitions, education workshops) as well as fixed, ongoing activities (library). A public reception area serves this new combination of programs. Students are encouraged to accommodate the dynamic needs of this new building typology while formally expressing its role in the urban context..

 

504 S Core Design Studio IV

Neyran Turan; reto geiser

Mundaneum : As the last of a four-semester sequence of core design studios, ARCH 504 prolongs the exploration of disciplinary probes in architecture while introducing more compound relationships between urbanism, form and program. While understanding that architecture acts as part of a larger culture of thinking and making, the studio will explore the design of a clearly articulated architectural proposal for a Mundaneum project. By exploring inherent tools and methods of architecture, students will be expected to demonstrate conceptual/critical thinking and analytical rigor, giving equal importance both to speculative and pragmatic aspects of the project articulated through the production of detailed drawings and models that are coordinated into a final review presentation.
 

 

601 F Architectural Problems-- Totalization Studios

Wm. T. Cannady, Troy Schaum, Doug Oliver, or Mark Wamble

The Totalization studios are taught as a group of four studios, each with a distinct research agenda and all coordinated to generate a more expansive discussion of a total architectural project. The four areas of include: Framework (researching “numbers,” that is, how architecture, economic feasibility and finance integrate — Cannady), Softwork (looking at mechanical systems and their relation with program and form – Oliver), Groundwork (looking at questions of urban density and type – Wamble), and Formwork (analyzing skins and envelopes — Schaum). Taken together, the four studios will describe specific slices through a larger body of building issues to form a collective think-tank exploring new forms of architectural practice.

 

602 S Architectural Problems Options

Emphasis on abstract thought and design capabilities relevant to systematic processes of designing specific buildings and facilities. Course content is topic-oriented and varies section to section.

NEW MONUMENTALITIES- the live/work factory as collective formation (Haettasch): When the concept of the ‘New Monumentality’ entered the architectural discourse within CIAM in the late years of WW2, its ambitions were twofold: In the face of increasingly functionally segregated cities, the rethinking of the Monumental promised a possibility to (re)introduce a hierarchical ordering system for the city based on the formal object, while at the same time giving architectural expression to the ambitions of the (democratic) collective. While the preconditions have changed today, the question remains: How can the essential human desire of collective identity be addressed in the face of a largely undifferentiated - now globalized - urban fabric of ever increasing sameness? This semester’s ARCH 602 Option Studio will explore the potentials for new kinds of monumentalities in the context of one of the fastest growing urban agglomerations worldwide - the Yangtze River Delta. The terms put on the table by Giedion, Sert, and Léger in 1943 will serve us as a point of departure. If the function of the Monumental was once the expression of a singular power or institution, a new era of emerging competition-oriented pluralism in China enables a monumentalization of the collective rather than the singular state. In particular one typology that is both monumental in scale as well as an architectural container for a collective will be of interest to our studio - the live/work factory. Having come into being from a rapid process of industrialization in the Yangtze River Delta and other agglomerations, these factories are self-contained cities within the city, housing from a few hundred to 20,000 inhabitants and organizing their social, private and work life.

Rice Building Workshop (Grenader and Samuels): The goal of the Rice Building Workshop is to present opportunities beyond the traditional design studio into the larger community, where creativity can be challenged by the demands of real-life practice. This semester, two concurrent projects will be explored, one a great opportunity to collaborate with a major Houston institution, the other, part of RBW’s long-term research and development in affordable housing.
Project 1: Café at Menil Campus- Site Selection, Conceptualization and Schematic Design
Impressed by the ZeRow House, the Menil Collection has engaged the Rice Building Workshop to develop ideas and establish a design direction for a new café on the Menil Campus, intended to be a new social center for the Menil campus. The mission is to work with the Menil staff and building committee to investigate and select a site, conceptualize possible design directions, and develop a design direction that can be used for development purposes. The intention is that, in subsequent semesters, RBW students would develop the complete design, co-ordinate consultants, prepare construction documents, and construct the facility.
Project 2: Prototype “Core” Unit- Design Development and Documentation
The RBW has devoted fifteen years of design and construction efforts to research and develop the production of low cost houses. Over time it has become apparent that the parts which require innovative thought are not so much the structural and enclosure systems, which have evolved to a high degree in the marketplace, but the numerous support systems- electrical, plumbing, HVAC- and fixtures and cabinetwork, which entail the greatest investments of labor and time on the job-site. This semester, the intention is to focus on a single direction for the core, and to design it in complete detai. In following semesters, this prototype will be fabricated and tested in the design and production of a low cost house to explore its implication as a mass-produced unit.

 Los Angeles Triple Standard - Urban Health in Superbigatopolis (Maltzan and Tate): Los Angeles has grown exponentially during the twentieth century and is a place where architecture and urbanism were largely independent endeavors. As architecture and urbanism begin to brush against one another in Los Angeles, an opportunity arises to help define a twenty-first century architectural vocabulary for the emerging city. Recognizing that many contemporary postwar sprawling cities in the United States are evolving and beginning to build within their underdeveloped cores, this studio will explore the possibility that architecture and urbanism can be an equivalent experience, both conceptually and physically. Los Angeles can increasing be read as a city of expanded thresholds. This studio will investigate three sites in Los Angeles; each is situated within a different prevailing threshold condition. Each site is assigned a specific program associated with the topic of public health. All three sites include a Center for Urban Health and Development which include spaces for educational programs and a public health clinic. Acknowledging both the pragmatic functions and social aspirations of public health, the studio will study the architecture-urban spectrum between the physical space of the institution and the evolving space of contemporary Los Angeles. The studio's interest in a program associated with public health is rooted in the catalytic potential that the content can produce interactions between a building, its immediate surroundings, and the larger city.

The Vertical School (Dellekamp): The Vertical School studio investigates a new school model that addresses both the need to rethink school program given the realities of density and economics, and the role a school plays within a given urban equation. Designs re-think the school as a vertical complex, defying the conventional vision of the school as a horizontal scheme. The building will be site-specific, addressing the local needs of the Colonia Condesa in Mexico City.

 

 

620 F / S Architectural Problems: Paris Program

Garry White; John Casbarian

This studio explores the dynamics of the evolution and transformation of the urban context and its expansion beyond established or traditional boundaries. In particular, the urban context of Paris can only be understood by looking beyond the commonly held notions of its physical manifestation as a static artifact. Although the city as it exists today may present a coherent and homogenous image, Paris throughout its history has developed around specific infrastructures within an ever-expanding sequence of physical boundaries, leaving fundamental traces that can serve as markers for analytical comprehension. The studio focus will be on exploring and developing specific strategies, through a series of rigorous exercises, for understanding the undercurrents of the city’s physical, political, cultural, social and economic expansion, (among a multitude of other issues) in order to develop design responses to the complexity of the urban infrastructure.

 

702 S Pre-Thesis Preparation

scott coleman

 

703/706 F Design Thesis / Written Thesis

scott coleman