Ithaca Campus
New York City Program Rome Program
Ithaca Campus
4th- & 5th-Year Design Studio 401/402/501- Ithaca Schedule: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. 12:20 pm - 4:25 pm
Prerequisites: ARCH 302. ARCH 401 is a prerequisite of ARCH 402. ARCH 402 is a prerequisite of ARCH 501
Five Sections of approximately 10 students. Section 1: Architecture & Digital Media & Material
Professors: Michael Silver and
Andrea Simitch
Course Overview: This studio will examine the relationship between various software-based modes of design and their programming of specific modes of material production. How together they influence both the conceptualization and the direct production of physical space will be the primary focus of the studio. The rigor of the ruled surface as it relates to specific computer-aided design techniques will in turn inform a precise material rigor as constructed through a specific production methodology.
The programmatic vehicle for this interactive relationship between methodologies of conceptualization and production will be an addition to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. ‘Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum is one of the oldest museums in the world devoted to anthropology and houses one of the most comprehensive records of human cultural history in the Western Hemisphere’. Each student will be asked to select and research a collection from the museum’s departments so as to propose a specific gallery or series of galleries within which this now expanded collection might be displayed.
The specific objects of the selected collection will offer a programmatic resistance to the inevitable seduction of the production methodologies. It is through their analysis and their subsequent interpretations that these methodologies will be tested and
expanded. The collected objects’ own production technologies, material qualities and effects, narratives and rituals will be analyzed and interpret ed through the lens the studio’s specific production methodology. It is these interpretations that will subsequently program the relationship between the housed and the house, the collection and the spatial collector.
The studio will explore the potential of digitally cut EPS foam for cast-in-place concrete. Models and a full-scale details will be constructed in the studio using an 8’x 4’x 4’ Digital Foam Cutter.
Back to Top
Section 2
Architecture & Urbanism Professors: Ciro Najle &
Homin Kim
‘The Tao begot one, one begot two, two begot three. The three begot the ten thousand things (…) Harmony is achieved by combining these forces.’ Tao Te Ching Course Overview: The boom of high rise apartment buildings and high density housing developments in South Korea has been the most powerful device for the regional transformations that the country has experienced in the past half century, and continues to be the ubiquitous architectural medium for the channeling of emergent life styles and for the homogenization of traditional social patterns. The pervasiveness of large scale housing ventures was used as the systematic means to accommodate the rapidly growing urban population following the economic expansion after the war in the fifties. In a period of sixty years the population in Seoul boosted from a million to ten and the rate of people living in cities in relation to the total population of South Korea increased from 18% to 85%. Enabled by cheap labor and rapid construction and by the ubiquitous development of reinforced concrete technology between 1960 and 2005 an estimate of three and a half million housing units were built. High-rise housing thus became a vehicle to absorb the increase of urban density, growing from a mere 0.2% among housing units in 1970 to half of them in 2005 and increasing their popularity from 2% to the 98% of the totality of newly built units currently developing in Seoul.
Driven by financial viability, cost-effectiveness and commercial success, the evolution and differentiation of these all-encompassing self-contained large-scale organizations have now become the ultimate and most obvious physical manifestation of the globalization of the korean economy. Starting in 1958 with the first government-led housing projects with only 152 houses (the Jong-Am apartment houses commonly known as aparts - or ‘a-pats’), and after a series of programmatic mutations, the evolution of the typology has gone through different thresholds of organizational diversification, enlargements in size, increases of density, and escalation in internal complexity, having at present acquired a life of its own. From the well spread low density and high density housing blocks, to the super-blocks, the high rise towers, and the super-highrise mixed use developments and sophisticatedly branded housing complexes, the dynamics of this ubiquitous intelligence was capable to respond and adapt to varying social demands, economic booms and recessions and a variety of governmental constraints and top down urban plans and policy, taking opportunity of the changes in the conditions in which they operated and constituting in the process a series of literally megalomaniac and yet highly down to earth forms of urbanism.
New high-rise housing types emerged as a result, with multiple and yet superfluous variations in the internal layouts and with an increasingly aggressive marketing campaign, which distanced the qualitative aspects of the developments from their branded image. Height was significantly increased from twenty five to fifty stories in the past two decades, and curtain wall systems and highly controlled air conditioning systems were introduced among the key commodities, and steel structural systems became more frequently used. The high-rise housing blocks, introduced after 1998, include a wide range of services such as sport fields and facilities, entertainment centers, nurseries, community centers, spas, schools, etc. The programmatic provision of the typology aims at reaching a status of apparent completeness and self-containment that isolates the type from its immediate surroundings, enclosing a highly manicured systemic mixture into a physical envelope and carefully presenting it to the public as a solid and reliable brand, back up by a big company, Samsung, Ipark, LG, Hyundai, Kolon Hanulche. Due to the renewed boom in the housing market, several architectural types and branding concepts are being actively tested in the market, satisfying economic demands, attracting the general public and proposing whole new life forms, yet lacking organizational richness, neglecting systemic interrelation and altogether disregarding integration.
Straight forward in their logics and humble in their nature, deceptive in their imagery and rigidly prescriptive, and yet fluent, agile, open and creative in their adaptability to changes, these models are wisely indifferent to any discursive resistance or to a merely critical position towards their effects. They do not call for theory and they reject being mitigated in their social or environmental effects. Rather, they require sharpening and coordination and aim at reaching higher levels of ubiquity, wider ranges of performance, further thematic exaggeration and new forms of programmatic integration. The Studio will take on this expansive developmental opportunity by increasing organizational potentials and aiming at the configuration of cleverer and more powerful design instruments for the evolution of new breeds in the typology. Researches will for this purpose identify existing norms and tendencies, expand their scope of effects, and intensify their machinic rationale, integrating programmatic systems, mixing crystallized types, encompassing a wide range of scales and interrelating domains of practice characterized by their segregation and independence of criteria. We will be searching for the ‘ubiquitous housing building’ and will identify our practice as highrise housing holistics, in search for rich and complex large-scale prototypes of housing development, capable to bypass the common divisions between branding, building systems, landscape and interior design and master-planning.
The research will count with the sponsorship of Kolon Hanulche, a major development and construction company in South Korea, who will fund the studio in a ten-day field trip to Seoul in October. Activities during the trip will include visits to construction sites and already functioning housing developments, meetings with developers and local architects and a workshop and a mid-term review with students from the Master of Architecture at Kunkook University, with which we will be collaborating with us during the semester.
Back to Top
Section 3
Architecture • History • Intervention
Seismicity: Design in Response to Region, History and Collision in the San Francisco Bay Area
Professors: George Hascup,
Jeff Chusid, &
Stanley Saitowitz 
Course Overview: This will be a studio about urban interventions, material culture and the opportunities a deep understanding of place provide. Bay area architect Stanley Saitowitz will guide us through his adopted home city, and through the investigations of two sites with power and promise: the first curtain-all building in America, the Hallidie, and the massive Pier 70 complex on the city’s waterfront.
Jeff Chusid will suggest ways to negotiate the collsions and embedded critiques of preservation and new design. George Hascup will direct the studio, and play
preservation off of modernity. Invited critics at both Cornell and UC Berkeley will complete the rich commentary. Major issues will include significance, integrity, stratigraphy, authenticity and control, as well as appropriate design in and with existing construction.
San Francisco itself is a place with history, and with collisions, of peoples, architectural traditions, and tectonic plates. The City was built in a series of spurts, beginning with the Goldrush of 1849; then after the 1906 Earthquake; then after the Second World War, and most recently in the 90’s dot com boom. Each period pro
duced a quantity of construction that has resulted in the coherent grain which gives this city its unique identity. This fabric is underpinned by the gridiron which structures the man-made topography. It is within this textured mat that we will operate now
to provide both continuity with the past and expression of the contemporary. It is expected that students will develop their own attitudes or theories for intervening, and also understand the way new design (re)presents and (re)tells the social and historical narratives that give meaning to place.
September 16th - 21st, 2007 Studio Excursion (5 days) of the San Francisco Region, led by Stanley Saltowitz, with a Schematic Design Jury at UC Berkeley.
Back to Top
Section 4
Architecture & Digital Technology / Responsive Systems Professors: Chris Perry,
Branden Hookway, and
Ezra Ardolino 
Course Overview: The Responsive Systems | Appliance Architectures research project locates architecture in the realm of circuitry, in assemblages of collectors, servomechanisms, and transistors that absorb, process, and redistribute matter, force, and information. We will consider the environments of our interventions to be essentially active, comprised of moving parts, temporal components, the proliferation of electronic and digital equipment and interfaces, and the ebb and flow of information in real-time. We do not wish to limit our investigations to the distribution of bodies (material, pedestrian, vehicular, etc) within the form and geometry of a static architecture, but rather seek out behaviors of feedback and response, where intervention transforms environments and is likewise transformed in a continuous relationship.
We have in mind the design of systems: collections of discreet parts that form a complex or organic unity. Such systems may range from those formally developed in cybernetics, operations research, and systems theory, to the more informal systems we might refer to when beating or gaming the system. With any systems, design must take place simultaneously at the level of the object or node and at the level of the wiring, connection, or protocol. Thus, the studio takes the appliance, a discreet object wired for connection in a larger system, as its fundamental design unit. We refer to the spatial and organizational qualities generated by assemblies of these objects and/or infrastructures as appliance architectures.
Back to Top
Section 5
Architecture & Sustainability
Professors: Dana Cupkova and
Kevin Pratt 
Course Overview:
Contemporary building practice tends to describe architecture as objects situated in a spatial and cultural field. Historically, architecture has defined itself as an autonomous discipline that develops form through an internalized discourse responsive to both particular socio-political contexts and generalized trends in intellectual and popular culture. Ecology posits that entities that have thermodynamic relationships to other entities are bound together in complex systems of energy and information transfer: ecosystems.
This studio will attempt to develop a methodology that forces architectural discourse to respond and adapt to complex ecologies, understanding context as both complex system and formative force, rather then site condition rendered into culturally constructed understanding of a ground as an occupiable surface. The studio will begin with the development of a simple material component that responds to and modifies specific environmental conditions. This component will then be studied in physical models and Generative Components - parametric CAD software, which will allow rapid evolution of potential variations and evaluation of their environmental consequences. The initial component design phase will run concurrently with a preliminary investigation of environmental and urban conditions in Abu Dhabi, which will culminate in a one week studio visit to the United Arab Emirates. The goal of the studio is to develop sequence of material component organizations – component arcologies - integrated into a synthetic system responsive to specific performative conditions. Programmatically the studio brief will address the environmental problem of water desalination and its potential programmatic and cultural byproducts. We will investigate the adaptive abilities of a parameterized form and its potential to become a responsive envelope. Staring from the scale of building component proposal this studio will evolve into a final collective project with urban consequences, a componentized holistic system embedded into its localized ecology.
Studio is organized in conjunction with the Generative Components workshop led by Kyle Steinfeld (ksteinfe@gmail.com). Students are encouraged to have at least basic 3D modeling skills and own a laptop.
Back to Top
Thesis Pro-Seminar ARCH 510.01
Course Schedule: Wednesdays, 9:05 am - 11:00 am
Location: 142 East Sibley Hall
Professor: Jim Williamson ARCH 510.02 Course Schedule: Thursdays, 10:10 am - 12:05 pm
Location: 142 East Sibley Hall
Professor: David Salomon
Prerequisites: ARCH 402. Co-requisites ARCH 501
Course Overview: As suggested by their slightly divergent definitions, an important temporal and epistemological gap separates a manifesto from hypothesis, and a hypothesis from a thesis. A similar separation often defines the relationship between architectural discourse and architectural objects. It could also describe the landscape of this pre-thesis seminar, as it will navigate the spaces between the manifesto’s “declaration of intentions” the hypotheses “provisional supposition” and the authoritative “proposition” associated with a theses.
In addition to identifying and researching a specific “architectural project” (which may or may not be the design of a building, students are asked to locate their investigation within contemporary debates surrounding a number of longstanding disciplinary problems. Positioning your own project within (or between) the present-day manifestations of such age-old topics as Site, Function, Design Process, Building Techniques, Form, Meaning, Professionalism -and their current translation into fields, events, surfaces, effects, intelligence etc.- will not only provide the context for the student’s work, but can help move a thesis beyond the personal interpretation of “known facts”, and enable it to actively move toward a “true theory”, one that the student can continue to test in future professional and academic endeavors.
Back to Top
Thesis
ARCH 502: (Ithaca only)
Professor: Faculty Advisers
Prerequisites: ARCH 501, ARCH 510
Course Overview: The thesis is intended to be the culmination of each student’s academic career, a synthesis of the student’s professional education and intellectual development. It represents the student’s confrontation of an issue that has particular meaning for him or her, and that could be considered a valuable topic of investigation and speculation. Theses vary widely in their scope, scale, and degree of realism. Most are speculations on certain fundamental aspects of architecture as a social and cultural practice capable of revising or correcting various phenomena observable in the real world. Many attempt to challenge the boundaries of architectural practice, while many others comfortably nestle within the parameters of traditional architectural productions.
The thesis is not simply a design, but an exploration of in-depth research, experience, knowledge, and the trials and errors of the architectural design process. The thesis should transcend the restrained goals of most academic design projects. The thesis culminates with a final review and the production of a hardcover text documenting the programming, development, and process that led to the final design.
Back to Top
New York City Program
4th- & 5th-Year Design Studio 401/402/501- NYC Course Schedule: Mondays, 1:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Professors: Susie Rodriguez and
John Zimmer Prerequisites: ARCH 302. ARCH 401 is a prerequisite of ARCH 402. ARCH 402 is a prerequisite of ARCH 501.
Course Overview: TBA Back to Top
Thesis Pro-Seminar
ARCH 510 - NYC Course Schedule: Fridays, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Professors:
Mohsen Mostafavi, APP Dean & TBA
Prerequisites: ARCH 402. Co-requisites ARCH 501.
Course Overview: As suggested by their slightly divergent definitions, an important temporal and epistemological gap separates a manifesto from hypothesis, and a hypothesis from a thesis. A similar separation often defines the relationship between architectural discourse and architectural objects. It could also describe the landscape of this pre-thesis seminar, as it will navigate the spaces between the manifesto’s “declaration of intentions” the hypotheses “provisional supposition” and the authoritative “proposition” associated with a theses.
In addition to identifying and researching a specific “architectural project” (which may or may not be the design of a building, students are asked to locate their investigation within contemporary debates surrounding a number of longstanding disciplinary problems. Positioning your own project within (or between) the present-day manifestations of such age-old topics as Site, Function, Design Process, Building Techniques, Form, Meaning, Professionalism -and their current translation into fields, events, surfaces, effects, intelligence etc.- will not only provide the context for the student’s work, but can help move a thesis beyond the personal interpretation of “known facts”, and enable it to actively move toward a “true theory”, one that the student can continue to test in future professional and academic endeavors.
Back to Top
Professional Practice
ARCH 521 - NYC Course Schedule: Tuesdays from 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm, and Thursdays from 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Professor: Jill Lerner Prerequisites: Third-year status or above
Course Overview: Professional Practice is a general introduction to the practice of architecture. The course subject matter is organized into two main areas of study: the understanding of architecture as a business enterprise and understanding what it means to be a young architect entering the profession. The course examines organizational structures of firms, delivery options, and project teams. Students are introduced to financial management and must demonstrate understanding of concepts such as budgeting, profitability, and overhead. The course covers marketing strategies for getting work. In addition, the course stresses the importance of AIA contracts. A history of the profession provides the background for the discussion of contemporary practice, and students are also encouraged to speculate on the future of the profession based on emerging trends in business, particularly with respect to outsourcing and technology.
Arch 521, Professional Practice places particular emphasis on the path to becoming a licensed professional, and, therefore covers in depth the IDP registration processes. For those students whose career paths may lead them beyond architectural design, there is some discussion of specialized roles and allied fields.
The method of teaching is primarily lecture format, although students are engaged in a variety of other ways with the course material. Invited practitioners participate as guest lecturers. Whenever possible there are visual materials (diagrams, images, etc.) to allow the student to relate abstract concepts to architectural projects. There are also film screenings which highlight the careers of individual architects. Periodic in class activities allow students to work collaboratively and discuss concepts of professional projects in smaller groups.
Back to Top
Rome Program
4th- & 5th-Year Design Studio
401/402/501- Rome Course Schedule: Mondays and Thursdays from 9:00 am - 4:00 pm (1:00 pm - 2:00 pm lunch break)
Professor: Vince Mulcahy and
Alberto Iacavoni Prerequisites: ARCH 302. ARCH 401 is a prerequisite of ARCH 402. ARCH 402 is a prerequisite of ARCH 501.
Course Overview:
TBA
Back to Top
Thesis Pro-Seminar
ARCH 510 - Rome
Professor: Vince Mulcahy Prerequisites: ARCH 402. Co-requisites ARCH 501.
Course Overview:
As suggested by their slightly divergent definitions, an important temporal and epistemological gap separates a manifesto from hypothesis, and a hypothesis from a thesis. A similar separation often defines the relationship between architectural discourse and architectural objects. It could also describe the landscape of this pre-thesis seminar, as it will navigate the spaces between the manifesto’s “declaration of intentions” the hypotheses “provisional supposition” and the authoritative “proposition” associated with a theses.
In addition to identifying and researching a specific “architectural project” (which may or may not be the design of a building, students are asked to locate their investigation within contemporary debates surrounding a number of longstanding disciplinary problems. Positioning your own project within (or between) the present-day manifestations of such age-old topics as Site, Function, Design Process, Building Techniques, Form, Meaning, Professionalism -and their current translation into fields, events, surfaces, effects, intelligence etc.- will not only provide the context for the student’s work, but can help move a thesis beyond the personal interpretation of “known facts”, and enable it to actively move toward a “true theory”, one that the student can continue to test in future professional and academic endeavors.
Back to Top 
