FIRST YEAR DESIGN STUDIO

Desmarais [C]

Crosby | Nasa | Norman | Passarelli

This introductory design studio is the first in a series of core design courses that focus on foundational concepts and methodologies explored through drawing and making. The focus is primarily on immediate and local spatial settings, introducing students to the careful study of the world around them, what can be found there, and what can be imagined to be significant about the shaping of place in an architectural sense.

The goal as each technique is learned is to utilize this expertise as a springboard from which to develop new approaches and unknown solutions. Drawing comprises an architect’s primary modes of seeing/thinking/creating and will form the cornerstone for a studio-based process of critical thinking. Students study composition, the nature of something determined by its ingredients or constituents, by observing the way in which a whole is made up of interrelated parts. Building an awareness and understanding of the relationships between parts will propel the design process by generating ideas and defining physical properties with which to work.

The methods for doing so will include workshops that entail material study, free-hand drawing, drafting, constructed perspectives, and 3D modeling. All of these methods will be undertaken to give students a sense of ‘how to see,’ that is, how to move between both the empirical — what is found through observation and the careful recording of those findings — and the speculative, or the creative formation of what ‘might be’ as we proceed from recorded information to generative abstraction.