Courses

This UB Seminar on Architecture and the Human Body engages students with questions of significance in architecture and the wider world. The Seminar helps students with critical thinking, ethical reasoning, communication skills, and learning at a university, all within topic focused subject matter. The course includes an introduction to ways that design and related disciplines are studied within a large research university.

ARC 101 introduces a variety of architectural concepts and principles with a primary focus on four elemental aspects of architecture: space, site, use, and materials. The course helps students build a vocabulary of fundamental architectural terms and definitions that students carry throughout their development and careers as architects. Students are also introduced to a variety of drawing and modeling techniques, as well as decision-making strategies and design processes. Learning is both individual and collaborative. 

This course is an introduction to architectural communication techniques and the exploration of ideas through iterative drawing, sketching and modeling. Classes and course assignments will provide instruction on and allow for practical development of a wide range of skills including manual and digital 2D and 3D drawing, sketching, diagramming, collage, layout, and modeling techniques. 

Arc 121: Introduction to Architecture provides a fundamental examination of architecture and the built environment. Course material is presented in a lecture format, utilizing multiple media. Course topics include historical examples of architecture, using past and present buildings, landscapes, and urbanism as a tool for developing an understanding and appreciation of the architecture discipline and its design objectives. 

This course explores the medium of drawing as a fundamental tool of communication. Drawing is a tool that is often used to describe physical and psychological points of contact with the world—including our experiences of places, people or things—as well as ideas and emotions. Drawing is an activity of discovery, both for the creator as well as for the viewer.

Let’s celebrate the 105-years-old Dom-ino system by Le Corbusier. By this prototype, we are freed from the traditional practice of building facade, liberated from the conventional dependence on tectonics, and released from the plan typology. Before the Dom-ino system, the structure, history, and authority were evident on the facade, but Corbusier saw this system as a ‘free facade’ and ‘free plan’ toward the architecture of the new industrial era. 

This course provides professional architecture students with an analysis of case studies in architectural history from the earliest recorded vernacular structures of premodern societies to the beginnings of modern European culture in medieval and Renaissance buildings. 

Overview on interrelationship of the physical environment and buildings, specifically examining site design and environmental technologies, as they relate to environmental building systems design. More specifically, will develop an ability to respond to site characteristics including urban context, developmental patterning, zoning, soils, topography, ecology, climate, and building orientation. Students will also be introduced to the environmental technologies of lighting and acoustics including criteria relating to concepts and analysis in support of building systems design. Includes lectures, labs, field work, readings, exams, and projects. 

The studio will begin with the construction of buoyant vessels which will be floated at Gallagher Beach and raced as part of an annual regatta. As an instrument, they are ideal objects from which to investigate many fundamental questions that pertain to the tectonics of architecture – space and geometry, structure and skin, form and function, material and construction, etc. As an introduction to a semester-long pedagogy focused on tectonics, students will work collaboratively to design, fabricate, and float a 1:1 wooden vessel.

As the third course in the undergraduate media sequence, ARC311 aims to build on skills attained in Media 1 + 2. Media 3 explores the relationship between 2D and 3D information through a series of tutorials and workshops. 

A compendium on buildings, summarizing the essential information a developer needs in order to participate with other team members in the design of buildings, presented in a concise and comprehensive manner. 

In this seminar, students study architectural education and its recent history, as well as its implementation at K-12 levels. The seminar begins with readings, discussions, and planning sessions that introduce the basics of lesson planning and design curriculum development. Subsequently, each student will have a teaching experience in which they partner with a local architect, a primary, middle, or high school teacher, and the seminar instructor. 

The driving force of cities arises from collective energy. These days, that energy might be social, economic, political and environmental, with increased urban density increasingly being seen as a key to ecological sustainability. Because of its collective character, one of the challenges of the city is the balance between the public and private realms, an issue that is central in the design of urban housing. 

As a continuation of the media course sequence, students will continue building proficiency with 3D modeling techniques as they pertain to architectural visualizations. The primary focus of this course is to practice modeling with intention, by incorporating the design of architectural form, structure, and skin into a single coordinated process. Hands-on tutorials and weekly exercises are intended to assist and reinforce the studio agenda, while covering a variety of technical topics that are relevant to the current digital architectural toolset.

This class will design a Prototype 100-year Passive House using green materials with low embodied energy. Investigations will build on the model of the Butterfly House, one of five Affordable House Prototypes--ranging in size from 250-to-1,226 square feet--developed in the past three semesters of Sun_Food_Water.

This seminar will focus on tectonics, the convergence of poetry and technique in architecture. The course will explore innovative uses of materials through the examination of a series of contemporary buildings by distinguished international architects. It will seek to develop an understanding of how technical decisions in the deployment of materials, construction systems and details can be directed towards conceptual and cultural ends.

This is the second course in the Structures sequence. We will begin the semester by learning what types of loads are applied to our structures by using Building Code prescribed loading criteria such as Dead, Live, Wind, Snow and Seismic Loadings. The course will then move to develop an understanding of how these applied loads are resisted in structures using various materials such as wood, structural steel, reinforced concrete and Masonry. 

This is the third course in the structures sequence and will attempt to connect the basic understanding of structural behavior acquired in previous courses to the design-related thinking integral to the production of architecture. Thus, although focused on the study of structures, this course will investigate the relationship between structure and architecture. 

Environmental Systems 2 deals with the thermal and environmental processes that affect buildings, and gives design students the means to respond to and manipulate the thermal environment. Building science and design principles will be presented against a backdrop of sustainability: buildings consume 40% of the energy used in the US each year, mainly through heating, cooling, ventilation, and lighting. Integration of appropriate environmental technology suggests ways that this energetic appetite might be reduced. 

The fusion of biological, technological and design expertise present in alternative practices today has a robust history. That history, in turn, draws on an alignment of architecture with the natural world that has prevailed since Alberti declared that nature demonstrated reproducible principles of harmonious unity. What was designated by the term nature, however, has changed with time. The focus on anatomy and classification, for example, yielded to evolutionary reasoning in science and design with the emergence of the biological disciplines early in the nineteenth century.