M.Arch

This studio, Not My Type, rejects the premise that the design of housing must be generic in order to exist. Instead, it challenges the current status quo through a collaborative research project and through actionable design proposals for the future of community-focused housing. The studio concentrated on both a specific site in Chicago’s near South side, in the Bridgeport/ McKinley Park neighborhoods, as well as brought to the table a broad exploration of global and historical housing typologies for exploration. The studio focused on a new community hub for the Chinese American Service League, a non-profit social services organization paired with senior and family housing. Located at a site at the intersection of public transit, environment, and neighborhood life, students prototyped new typologies for housing development as well as generated their own proposals for the site’s future. Students explored place as a contextual influence, drawing from cultural specificity and shared values of the project’s proposed residents as a catalyst for rethinking housing typologies from the inside out.

This course offers comprehensive knowledge in building sciences, sustainable design, active building systems, and their integration with architectural design. By introducing and reinforcing theories and practices, it enables students to understand complex systems and their impacts on the built environment. The course spans Environment and Building Systems I and II throughout the academic year. The first part, Environment and Building Systems I, focuses on the fundamentals of building sciences, highlighting various passive design approaches for heating, cooling, and lighting, and introducing basic knowledge in active building systems. These foundational principles prepare students for the advanced building integration techniques taught in Environment & Building Systems II.

This studio, Just Your Type, followed the previous semester’s Not My Type efforts, which challenges the current state of urban housing design and production. The Spring studio continued to concentrate on the same Chicago Bubbly Creek site with students proposing a master plan for the entire 5-acre site, then focusing on a first phase component of a new community hub for the Chinese American Service League (CASL), who now own the site and intends to broaden their social services programs paired with affordable senior and family housing.

The smaller scale, specific CASL program pushed students to thoroughly respond to the unique site conditions and its future flexibility; propose new typologies for housing, work, health, and recreation; understand the cultural specificity and shared values of the project’s proposed residents; fully integrate nature and landscape with the built environment; and explore innovative tectonics of low carbon systems, materials, and construction methods. They explored the atmosphere and experience of a home and collective living, issues of health and wellness, and interdependent mixed-use programs. The students had access to a range of outside experts and stakeholders, including CASL staff and current senior residents representing the immigrant and diasporic AAPI community. Leaders in structural and sustainable systems engineering, urban design, landscape architecture, city planning agencies, and construction engaged the studio to demonstrate the essential collaborative nature of our profession.

This studio is about how to take something ordinary and make it special. Students will take a commonly used building material—of their own choosing—research its physical properties, tectonic possibilities and expressive potential in a bottom-up design methodology and develop it into a building: a municipal Lost and Found facility for the city of Chicago.

The studio is intended as a bridge between school and professional practice. Fact: for the great majority of building projects, the architect does not determine the program (the what), the site (the where), the timing (the when), the client (the who) or the reason they are building it (the why); these are “givens” typically determined prior to the architect’s involvement in the project. Further, the architect does not control many of the factors which constrain building design—e.g., project budget, zoning regulations and building codes, market conditions, and so on; however, in almost every instance, there are two things that the architect does control—the building materials employed and the building’s construction assembly. This studio is conceived to foreground the role of materiality and construction assembly in architectural design, the locus of the architect’s agency. In other words, the studio is about developing the way you think about those aspects that are under your control as an architect.

This course provides comprehensive knowledge in building sciences, sustainable design, active building systems, and their integration with architectural design. By introducing and reinforcing theories and practices, it enables students to understand complex systems and their impacts on the built environment. The course spans Environment and Building Systems I and II throughout the academic year. The second part, Environment and Building Systems II, explores various active building systems, including HVAC, electrical lighting, water systems, fire safety, and renewable energy systems. The ultimate goal is to equip students with the ability to seamlessly integrate active building systems into architectural design. To support theoretical learning, various references utilizing active building systems as design elements are introduced.

In Design Communications II first year graduate students continue to develop technical and conceptual skills in various media of architectural representation. This semester students developed line drawings of complex geometry, digital collages, 3D printed models, composite drawings, and animations.