Advanced Topics in Architecture

This studio explores the architecture of building products at the US-Mexico border and the binational territories they shape. Students will be tasked with first analyzing and then designing for related manufacturing practices and their spatial, social, and material networks. An engagement with new technologies, subjects (both human and non-human), climate considerations, and labor practices will provide a critical lens through which to develop speculative proposals. An underlying agenda posits that architecture and environment are produced simultaneously, and that territories can often be understood through the particular materials, tectonics, and construction systems of their making. For this reason, both scales of investigation will be developed simultaneously and in relation to one another. This approach aims to blur the boundary between the traditional disciplinary realms of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and engineering.