Courses

Buildings influence how we see and hear, eat and sleep, mourn and heal. Monumental buildings may be thought to embody the highest ambitions of architects and the public; by contrast, this studio argues that modest buildings – in size, budget, or use – can capture the mind, evoke emotions, and touch the spirit more immediately. Students in ARC 102 work in small teams to design and construct an architectural prototype that elicits delight, dignity, humanity, and beauty. 

This second course in the undergraduate architectural media sequence will focus on building student digital drawing and modeling skills through the introduction of AutoCad and Rhino. We will discuss technical proficiency as well as effective use of these and other companion tools to create clear, well crafted and visually rich images. 

The course gives students the opportunity to learn the basic aspects of a skill that can prove of extraordinary value not only for representing real-life objects or scenes, but also for thinking and observing. Through a series of lectures and weekly practical exercises, students will be able to sketch throughout the semester, from live scenes to abstraction and imagination. 

The connections between diversity and design are more relevant today than ever before. Understanding these concepts, their histories, and their relationships is an essential part of a twenty-first century education. 

The second semester of the junior year focuses students on the development and refinement of an architectural design based on a deeper understanding of architectural space. The specific spatial qualifiers that we will address in studio are site, structure, and the integration of various building systems. Each of these topics will be examined to explore interrelationships of the various systems which comprise a building. The specific building type that students will be working on this semester is the design of a mixed use Bicycle Institute/Community Center on a site adjacent to the former Erie Canal in the Blackrock neighborhood of Buffalo, New York.

The focus of this Class will be completing the development of a Prototype 100-year accessible Passive House using materials with low embodied energy. Investigations will build on the 778sf House designed in the Fall Semester. 

In 1953, Konrad Wachsmann imagined a single universal structural element which, if mass-produced, could be used in building construction for every conceivable purpose. Even after more than 60 years, his notion of a modular, coordination based system has not been implemented and current building structures are based on the Dom-ino system (1914) or steel-based post and beam system with conventional bolt/weld connection. 

This course contextualizes the historical contributions of African-American artists into the postwar tradition of architectural utopianism. While most black writers and filmmakers were not trained as architects or interior designers, they took a strategic interest in the language and imagery of architectural modernism in order to critique the negative effects of urban renewal or the economic disinvestment of black neighborhoods in American cities. 

The final course in the media sequence exposes students to parametric modeling techniques as they pertain to architectural design and representation. Building on the introductory skill-building exercises in Media 5, this course is structured into a series of in-class workshops that provide students with hands-on experience with Grasshopper 3D (and associated plug-ins, as applicable). 

This course focuses on construction materials, systems and integrated design. Through the careful study of buildings that relate concept to construction systems and tectonics, students develop an appreciation for the value of fully resolved execution. This study locates architecture at the juncture of design intention and technical means.

This course provides an introduction to the environmental and the design aspects of architectural lighting and acoustics. The series presents both qualitative criteria relating to architectural concepts and computational analysis to assist design. Students will develop an understanding of interior lighting, daylighting, room acoustics and noise control as components of architectural design through a structured program of lectures, readings, exams and projects. 

This course will focus on the professional practice of architecture including (the following are the NAAB Student Performance Criteria addressed in the class) an understanding of the fundamentals of building costs, such as acquisition costs, project financing and funding, financial feasibility, operational costs, and construction estimating with an emphasis on life-cycle cost accounting.

Using technology for graphical representation has become a standard in Design practices. Understanding how technology can aid in the design, rather than inhibit creativity, has been a struggle in the emerging world of Architecture. Each professional needs to be able to leverage technology throughout the design and construction process to aid in such tasks as site planning, schematics, design development, analysis, construction documents and project management. In this course students will learn Autodesk Revit to aid in the design process and analysis, create construction documents, and render graphics for each stage of design. 

The focus of this studio is integrated architectural design - a synthesis of concept and construct addressing design strategy, program, site, construction, and technology. Students’ work will be informed by exploration of urban issues, history and culture as well as materiality and craft. Design proposals will be expected to address structure and environmental systems, life safety, accessibility, and material assemblies. During the semester, students will be engaged with aesthetic, technical, social, and environmental aspects of design and will consider matters ranging from the scale of the city to the tectonic detail.

As the second course in the graduate media sequence, ARC 512 will expand on developing analog and digital graphic skill sets. Through a series of demonstrations, lectures, and short exercises, students will be exposed to intermediate 3d modeling techniques, basic rendering, digital / hybrid illustration, and post-processing techniques. In addition to expanding technical skills, this course will introduce modeling for multiple outcomes and discuss the link between product and methodology.

As we consider the impacts of our actions in the age of the Anthropocene, the challenges of creating more visceral, experiential resonances in the environment is often elusive, especially as we find ourselves ever more accountable to metrics and standards of performance. How do we, as designers, harness the power that architecture already yields – as forms of communication and vehicles to shape lived experiences – to address social, economic, and ecological issues, while still advocating for design itself as an essential and critical force in our culture? How will we intervene and build with resonance in the face of the Climate Crisis?

The MC GRG Design Studio Manus et Machina – Hand and Machine – explores the potential combination of the direct action of the hand as the primary tool to produce material qualities, and the indirect action of the machine as the ultimate strategy to finalize material production. Working with clay as the primary material, due to its performance multiplicity throughout its various states of solidity and strength, the students will explore design actions that go from the more primal mixing, pressing, ramming, compacting, forming, and firing, to later infer the resulting pieces with water-jet precise extracting or cutting operations. 

This studio critiques the reductive character of type thinking in western architecture by producing a culturally-inflected mode of adaptive reuse that materially indexes the complexities of black life in the city of Buffalo. It uses the European inspired developer housing stock on the city’s East Side as a physical site for indexing the latent material customs of black life that have yet to be recorded in architecture culture.

The Situated Technologies Spring studio will explore the space of manufacturing and the promise of mass customization. Stan Davis in his 1987 book Future Perfect coined the term “mass customizing” to describe the change in business perception from a mass market to a mass-customized market, where products could align more specifically with individual customer needs. The advent of digitization and CNC fabrication opened the possibility for producing multiple versions of a product at relatively little cost. This forecasted the notion that accommodating a customer’s individual desires may no longer be cost prohibitive.

This course will explore a mixed reality workflow between digital simulation and fabrication. Using the Microsoft Hololens and Fologram, an augmented reality platform within Rhino, we will develop a process to guide the assembly of digitally fabricated parts by attempting to calibrate the digital simulation to material behavior in real time. The mixed-reality workflow may provide more experiential design feedback than the simulations alone, and may enhance the representational responsibility of digital and physical models.