Courses

Faculty members affiliated with CAST offer courses through the Situated Technologies Graduate Research Group in the Department of Architecture.

The curriculum engages design experimentation that repositions architecture in an expanded field. The group explores methods of study and conducts experiments that probe the limits of architecture: prototypes, processes, techniques, modes of collaboration, and workflows. It adopts new methods to identify new sites of inquiry, at different scales and within different social and political settings, for an expanded field of practice.

Design studios and seminars result in a wide range of outcomes–buildings, devices, events, infrastructures, tools, workflows, interfaces–and in skillsets that enable students to articulate new agencies for architecture.

Current Courses

ARC 605 – Fidelity and Tolerance

Instructor: Nicholas Bruscia | Type: Studio
This studio will research the potential advantages and pitfalls of integrating mixed reality (MR) into well-established methods of handwork in a variety of contexts (local craft, manufacturing workflow, material production, etc).

ARC 625 – Fabricating the Real

Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Seminar
This course surveys the cultural history of VR, AR and MR, focusing on their ontological and epistemological implications regarding conceptions of “the real.”

ARC 617 – Fusing Dimensions

Instructors: Randy Fernando and Shawn Chiki
Type: Seminar
This course utilizes experiential learning methods to address how designers can interface the
nuances of real and virtual environments during the creative process.

Course Archive

ARC 605 – (un)common ground

Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Studio

This design research studio explored the spatial epistemology of contemporary remote sensing practices.

ARC 605 – Figure to Fiber

Instructor: Nicholas Bruscia | Type: Studio
While stereotomic projection is associated with shaping mass, surface disclinations may be associated with shaping thinness, turning our attention away from the monolithic and toward the monocoque.

ARC 619 – Tempered Environments

Instructor: Albert Chao | Type: Seminar
In dialogue with Hans Haacke’s 1965 Condensation Cube, this seminar investigates how to draw, model, and build physical and digital prototypes to explore tempered environments.

ARC 617 – Code and Space

Instructor: Albert Chao | Type: Seminar
The Situated Technologies Spring studio will explore the space of manufacturing and the promise of mass customization.

ARC 626: Manufacturing Autonomy

Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Seminar
This seminar will survey the changing dynamics between manufacturing, labor, technology and society from the Industrial Revolution to the present.

ARC 619: Unregulated Craft

Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Seminar
This course will explore the notion of manufacturing variety as influenced by the role of representation in the design and fabrication process. 

ARC 605: Structural Papercuts | Towns of Borrowed Spaces

Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Studio
Adopting similar plywood forming techniques exemplified by the Eames’, this sponsored studio will devise flat-to-form, lightweight shells as disaster relief partitions in open, densely packed, interior environments.

ARC 606: Cybernetic Factory

Instructor: Omar Khan | Type: Studio
The Cybernetic Factory takes as its subject the architecture of advanced manufacturing and its integration into local economies and communities.

ARC 605: (re)seeking architecture

Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Studio
This design research studio will investigate the limits of sensing, processing, and actuating physical space through the design, fabrication and development of a full-scale installation that attempts to playfully engage the contingencies of its use and occupation.

ARC 617 / DMS 606: Code & Space

Instructor: Jason Geistweidt | Type: Seminar
This design research workshop investigates this interweaving of code and space within the built environment through project-based experimentation.

ARC 547: Conditional Form – Calibrated Modeling

Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Seminar
Using a Vicon Motion Capture System, this course will focus on the calibrated modeling of bending-active wooden elements as a topic from which to gain experience with iterative digital form-finding as related to material behavior.

ARC 605: Flexible Architecture

Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Studio
Some composite materials are designed to return to their initial form after deformation by bending or stretching back into position. The studio will explore the scalability of flexible materials, and how we might organize them to produce stable but intentionally flexible architecture.