Arch 684: Contemporary Theory I (Architecture | Software), Fall 2018: https://blogs.mcgill.ca/architecture-software/
Image: Mohr, Manfred. “Computer Graphics”. In Radical Software 5, no. 5 (1971): 18.
Category: teaching
As coordinator of the core second year undergraduate design studio at the McGill School of Architecture, I am developing and implementing a pedagogy based on visual computation and generative drawing. The confrontation of the logics of an abstract formal system with contextual forces becomes a site for programmatic imagination. Here are iterations of the syllabus:
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Formal Systems studio, Pratt Institute
First year undergraduate design studio that I taught as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Pratt Institute School of Architecture. The studio was coordinated by Duks Koschitz and included short design exercises in addition, subdivision, intersection, hybridization with lines, planes, and volumes, followed by a longer final project in which the students translated these formal operations into architectural space.
In the fall 2013 I designed and taught a graduate studio at the Boston Architectural College, grappling with the idea of openness in architecture. I was fortunate to have a great roster of students with fresh ideas and inquisitive minds. For the studio syllabus and studio work you can refer to the studio’s official website.
— Project by Asli Baran
Studio Brief: Design is a form of colonizing the future: “scripting” and anticipating use-scenarios through spatial and material configurations. Reality, however, always comes as a surprise. The unpredictability of the future and the ever-changing needs and desires of a design’s future inhabitants, is forming a new kind of design conscience: designers give up the control of their designs and leave their works open to modifications and re-appropriations by their future users. This studio critically engages the emerging phenomenon of open architecture, and explores its conceptual, methodological, and practical implications in the ways that we, as designers, relate to the creative process and its outputs. Through design exercises, readings, guest lectures, and a building scale design project we will tackle questions of authorship, participation, user empowerment, copying, and creativity, as well as their relation to computational tools and new communication techniques. By taking the role both of the author/creator and the user/appropriator, students will develop personal strategies and methods to creatively modify architectural spaces, as well as to design architectural settings that facilitate such operations.