DESIGN FUNDAMENTALS

Design Fundamentals are the foundational studio courses for incoming students in architecture and interior design. Each design exercise is a gift, presented to reveal new ways to observe and shape our environment. We draw to see, and we build to speak. This communication is developed through rigorous acts of making, questioning, and remaking. We rely on the embodied knowledge within our hands to lead, until the head follows.

Fundamentals 1 and 2 are comprised of three related projects and share a common methodology. Each project is both analytical and generative. The first project is a formal spatial vocabulary. The second is temporal, a simple program derived from a ritual. The last project addresses the phenomenal and experiential.

Students create notational systems to clarify relationships and reduce information to the essential. These diagrams transpose scales and cross disciplines. They provide the dexterity to oscillate fluidly between the abstract and concrete.

Our primary objective in first year is to reveal space as a malleable medium. We build edges to limit and bound space, implicitly and explicitly. This may be done additively as we assemble and join components to capture space within. As a counter, this may be achieved through subtraction as we dig and carve to contain space.

The first semester introduces the ‘Joint’ as space, structure, and language. The primary means of construction is additive, a tectonic assembly. A solid wood joint is translated as an interlocking spatial joint. The joint is occupied as a domestic ritual qualifies a program and orientation.

The second semester introduces the ‘Vessel’ as space, structure, and metaphor. The primary means of construction is subtractive, a stereotomic excavation. A purist painting is translated as interlocking volumes of color. These volumes are realized as a Bathhouse carved into a wcliff site.