ARC 626 – Biased by Design
Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Seminar
This seminar surveys forms of algorithmic governance and the various kinds of bias embedded within so-called smart urban systems and infrastructure.
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 619 – Architectural Geometry and Construction
Instructor: Nicholas Bruscia | Type: Seminar
This course introduces students to a variety of computational modeling and simulation techniques that heavily leverage architectural geometry and material constraints in the design-to-construction workflow.
ARC 606 – Remote Cultural Technologies
Instructor: Nicholas Bruscia | Type: Studio
Situated (remotely) within the historical and cultural context of Hida, Japan, the studio is a mixed-reality based collaboration with local partners aimed at developing AR-guided carpentry utilizing 3D scanned forest data.
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 605 – TBD: Uncertain Architectures
Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Studio
This graduate design research studio will investigate how to map a course of action in face of uncertain conditions.
ARC 625 – TOO MUCH FUTURE: Technological Sentiments in Crisis
Instructor: Gabrielle Printz | Type: Seminar
This seminar examines the social constitution of technology, its dimensions of power, and its impossible neutrality in the conceptualization and manifestation of “the future.”
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 606: Mass Customization | Manufacturing Variety
Instructor: Omar Khan | Type: Studio
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 619: Conditional Form – Functional Gradients
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Seminar
This hands-on course will explore the relationship between materiality, form and the environment through speculative computational drawing and simulation techniques.
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 625: Architecture and the Information Environment
Instructor: Omar Khan | Type: Seminar
This seminar introduces students to the significant ideas that define the information environment and how they concern architecture and urbanism.
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.
ARC 547: Conditional Form – Isomorphic Systems
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Seminar
This course will explore Ricolais’ concept of isomorphic systems via experimentation with bending-active surfaces and their skeletal equivalents.
ARC 605: Form Finding and Designing with Forces
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Studio
The studio will introduce students to computational form-finding as it pertains to the design of structurally elegant long-span roof canopies.
