This advanced studio, which is taught by Benén Moneo and Eduardo Rega, traveld to Madrid during Spring Break. What follows are reports written by students along the way and some of the early work of the studio.

Iglesia de San Pedro Mártir, Templo del Teologado de los Padres Dominicos

Perched atop a hill, the gardens and courtyards of the Dominican convent of Alcobenas gently follow the topography towards the Valdevevas creek. The program had to accommodate three groups of users: theology teachers, the already ordained priests, and the theology students, each with their own unique requirements. The hyperbolic shape of the church, designed by Architect Miguel Fisac and completed in 1958, allowed for a natural division between the choir and the congregation, with the altar being the common space. The core of the church is the altar, lighted from above by a pseudo dome, from where parabolic walls depress in either direction. The vertical space above the altar is filled with white light. From this point a band of windows along the roofline extend in both directions. Warmer, red tones were chosen for the choir, to give the color of blood, as the church was dedicated to St. Peter Martyr and his missionaries. A cooler blue hue was chosen for the congregation, further accentuated by constellation of blue glass blocks that allow light to permeate through the walls. The continuous band of clerestory windows acts as a mediator between these three spaces, gently evolving like a spectrum from blue stained glass, to white, to red.

Proyecto Madrid Centro, Strategic vision for the center of Madrid

The Proyecto Madrid Centro aims at revitalizing the urban core of Madrid through transforming and recycling the existing urban fabric. An initiative of the City of Madrid, the project aims to retain the social, economic, special, cultural and symbolic fabrics of the city center. One of its main objectives of Esquiaga Arquitectos is to reclaim the street as a public space. The Strategic Plan starts from the premise that the quality of the public space is the most relevant catalyst to trigger the transformation of the city. As a result, it is necessary to reinvent the public space from the perspective of limiting and rationalizing the preeminence of the car and recover the street for the economic and social activities of pedestrians and cyclists. The Strategic Plan offers an alternative, radical but susceptible of being gradually implemented and at a low cost, to the need to introduce limitation to the indiscriminate access of cars to the city center without affecting accessibility as an essential quality associated to centrality.

Estacion de Madrid Atocha

Madrid Atocha is the largest railway station in Madrid. Inaugurated on February 9, 1851, the original building was built in a wrought iron renewal style and designed by Alberto de Palacio Elissagne . The train platforms were partly covered by a roof in the form of inverted hull with a height of approximately 27 meters and a length of 157 meters. The steel and glass roof spans between two brick flanking buildings. Architect Rafael Moneo, who transformed the old station into a shopping mall/greenhouse hybrid, expanded the station in 1985. The adjoining modern terminal serves as an important transportation hub for the city of Madrid.

Parque La Gavia

Parque La Gavia is a water treatment system located on a newly developed area in Vallecas, Madrid. Designed by Pritzker awarded architect, Toyo Ito, the park was originally intended to treat waste water and purify treated waste water by natural resources. The water tree project has three steps that the water streams have to follow in order to reach its most purified state. Along the ridges of the site, the water runs through the first system where it allows the water to move through concrete barriers for four to six hours and then it is re-pumped into the ground. Due to the landscape of the area, the water eventually penetrates through the ground of the slopes and reaches the second step of the process where the water flows along canals, gravel and sand for one to two days. From there, the water is re collected at the valley that feeds the garden, the vegetation, and the surrounding housing area, and eventually becomes a part of the Gavia river, and purifies it. However, today, the water treatment park is not in use due to a regulation in Spain that states that untreated water bodies cannot be collected and treated at a public space. Therefore, the project is on hold.

Valdeluz with Javier Arpa

Javier Arpa, the senior editor of architecture publication a + t, was our guide to Valdeluz in Madrid. Valdeluz is an area developed in the north-eastern periphery of Madrid city center, and was conceived part of the development boom before the housing bubble. Javier provided background on the current situation of the area, and revealed the politics of government-developer relationships, and how the exploitation of land contributed to the poorly planned development schemes. There are highways leading up to Valdeluz, as well as a highspeed railway 30 kilometers to the west of the area; however, in contrast to the intentions, infrastructure does not guarantee a populated neighborhood. The result is a massive area of land divided by paved roads, equipped with streetlamps, trees, sidewalks and even two fiber-optic cables running underneath the whole area, that is undeveloped, uninhabited, and slowly consumed by nature. The 2500 residents of Valdeluz are left with an unfinished supermarket, a half-constructed church, no school, and a complete stop in development plans. Javier placed the actions and decisions of actors in context, and showed us the situation we are left with. It is a moment in time when we are provided with a chance to reflect, re-evaluate, and re-invent.

CaixaForum Madrid

The Caixa is a organization for cultural events that contains one of the most interesting collections, in madrid. It is located right next to Paseo del Prado that connects the forum to the heart of the city’s cultural district, between Rhina Sophia, Museo Thyssen, El Prado and Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid.

The most interesting part is the building that The Caixa inhabits its space, a former power station. The Mediodai, tagged as a very spanish style building that reflected an old image of Madrid, with its narrow little street and its remoteness from the rest of the city is one of the number of problems posed by the site.

To solve this particular problem, Herzong & de Meuron lifted the building on a structural operation that separated and removed the base and parts of the building no longer was needed. The removal of the base of the building created an under-path that would visually align the neighboring art institutions with the new architectural components of the CaixaForum. The lobby is suspended, hanging from steels columns welded to the second one which allows for the wow factor that the building is floating. Unforgettable experience!

Casa de las Flores

Casa de las Flores is an apartment project built by Secundino Zuazo in 1930s. This apartment block is influenced by Germany style and is supposed to be a new housing prototype for building a hygienic Madrid and providing good daylight, ventilation, terraces and open to street courtyard garden. Two “C”- shaped building blocks aligns north and south forming a courtyard garden and each block has its own small open space inside their volumes. All the residence has an access to the central garden. The building is a double-roof structure providing open public space on top roof and also avoid direct sunlight to the top floor over the hot summer. And the windows are also designed into an louver form to avoid direct sunlight. It’s also a natural refrigerator for food storage in cool days. The south east and south west side units are all designed with balcony as a strategy to reduce hot summer light. Those balconies are all equipped with flower-pots. That is actually where the name “House of Flowers” came from.

Cañada Real

Cañada Real is a slum area of informal structure by immigrants. The understanding of Cañada Real should begin with the Royal ways. Royal ways is a 9 paths system designed for the transit of animals from different parts of Spain. This land is owned by the Government and any personal construction on it is forbidden. The section of the Royal ways passing east side of Madrid is full of illegal buildings and shacks for 40 years, known as the Cañada Real Galiana. Now it is the home for around 50,000 people living here. There is no basic civic infrastructures available here. Those new immigration people has no legal access to electricities, fresh water, sewer system and schools. The Madrid municipal department had tried quite a long time to tear down those inform structures and flush out currents resident.

Carabanchel
Carabanchel is a Social Housing Project Located in the Carabanchel district, a “regeneration area” on the outskirts of Madrid.The city is trying to provide sustainable and affordable public housing for the its population growth, which are mostly consisted of immigrants. One of the example we saw in Carabanchel is a bamboo housing by Foreign Office Architects (FOA). FOA’s “advanced ecological technology” design focused on the two important elements of space and light. All the balconies are covered with bamboo louvers to avoid strong summer light. Another example we visited is the white block housing designed by Dosmasuno Arquitectos which providing cantilevered block spaces and shared public balcony.

Architecture Department

Edwin E. Cull
Samuel M. Morino
Bernt G. Zetterstrom

A Facade
H. F. Clark A. E. Hudson
Perspective – 1st Year
H. W. Bishop
6 Hour Sketch – 2nd Year
I. W. Thompson

Architecture
Thesis: Edward B. Maroney
Society of Beaux-Arts Architects’ Competition
Curtis M. Lovelace

Architecture
Thesis: Edward B. Maroney
Society of Beaux-Arts Architects’ Competition
Curtis M. Lovelace

Architectural Sketch Problem: Design for a College Club-House. – Kenneth E. Carpenter

Architectural Class: Edward B. Maroney

One of the drawings mentioned by the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects of New York.

Principal-in-charge:   Nader Tehrani (B.Arch 1986)
Project Manager:   Harry Lowd (M.Arch 2003)
Local Consultants: Bidard & Raissi (Paris, France), Architect and Agence Francois Vieillecroze (St. Tropez, France), Architect

For centuries, the enclosed courtyard has been overlaid on various geographic settings—each time transformed according to the climate, rituals, and construction practices of the place. A vehicle to capture the outdoors within the building, the courtyard is defined by its interiority.  The slipped court provides simultaneous interiority and exteriority—protected and private as well as extroverted and engaged. This house respects strict zoning guidelines, while merging with the landscape, extending natural flora over the roof. Sited within an olive tree grove, Pinus Pinea, and a vineyard, it seeks to leverage the sloping terrain, producing sustainable systems for amplification and cultivation. The most significant result of this integration of landscape and house is the production of a monumental vaulted threshold to a central courtyard. The vault is a ruled surface that mediates between the geometry of the supporting stair at the northeast corner, the pool, and living areas above. The main armature of the house appears as a single concrete monolith around two perpendicular beams; the first, the wall between the pool and the lower east wing, and the second, the cantilevered wall on the north edge of the house. Embedded within the spatial organizational logic of the house, these beams are encrypted within the “experience” of the house: windows into the pool, doorways from living areas to bedrooms, and views to the exterior, using the economies of opening to assure structural continuity. Structurally, the roof is a series of surface-active vaults that produce strong lateral stability. The slope of the vault maximizes the zoning envelope in order to bring in southern light, and it is the vault that forms the foundation of a green roof.  Beneath the roof are the primary living, eating, and sleeping spaces. The lower wing is conceived as a street-corridor, activated by a reading room and bunk rooms that open directly onto the landscape.

Designers of our environment, our buildings and our cities.

Collaboration between architecture and landscape architecture students

In the morning, the students presented their design process in German and English, and introduced the three institutions they represent. After a Q & A session and a short lunch, each representative joined a group with one German student and one American student to give specific feedback and recommendations.

One company representative described the team as having extraordinary “spirit,” and the energy between the members as exciting. Sasha Azbel, RISD MArch ’14, says, “I think this is where ingenuity and innovation come from in the real world, when different people from different backgrounds, from corporations and academia come together and offer this one time and space to talk about ideas.”

The team is currently following-up with the companies to involve them in the R&D process.

Natalie Kruch’s plan oblique drawing of Hans Scharoun Berlin State Library

Architectural Analysis is a new course that expands upon the concepts of Architectural Projection, which was also taught for the first time last fall. The coordinator is Chris Bardt and the instructors are Hansy Better, Peter Dorsey, Carl Lostritto, and Pari Riahi. Students explore one of a series of canonical 20th century buildings for the entire duration of the semester. We think that understanding good buildings–how they were conceived, built, and used–is necessary component of architectural education, but our focus is on methods for making that constitute analytic inquiry.

Chris Bardt opened the semester with the assertion that, “analysis can be understood as the creative process in reverse.” In this spirit, we begin with a drawing of the building in its totality. Of course, there’s no such thing as a passive drawing. The act of constructing an oblique axonometric, and afterwards, a digital model, will suggest new avenues of inquiry.

Lauren Roberson’s plan oblique drawing of the Muller House

Rebecca Commissaris’ drawing of the Sigurd Lewerentz St. Mark’s Church

Sarah Hadianti’s Plan Oblique Drawing of the Sydney Opera House

Taylor Haywood’s oblique axonometric drawing of St. Mary’s Cathedral

Xinru Liu’s plan oblique drawing of St. Mary’s Cathedral

Julian Urbie’s drawing of the Lina Bo Bardi Pompeia Sao Paulo Recreation Center

Jun Ahn’s plan oblique drawing of Maison de Verre

Malcolm Rio’s plan oblique drawing of Maison de Verre

Jianshi Wu’s plan oblique drawing of Sagrada Família

Anya Ivanova’s plan oblique drawing of the Johnson Wax Headquarters

Follow all events via events.risd.edu

The human brain is the new frontier in science and medicine. Our capacity to probe its functions has reached a point where we can now emulate brain processes to design software, such as speech recognition. Great strides are being made on the mysterious mind/brain relationship. As perhaps the most complex organizational entity we know, the brain may give insights into the way we think about ordering space, program, and the architectural organization of cooperative work environments. It can be argued that architecture itself is an action of the brain extending and modeling itself into the world.

This studio will explore the brain; through direct experiments and demonstrations, analogous modeling and presentations by prominent brain researchers. Based on these investigations, each student will design a new Brown Institute for Brain Science (BIBS), reimagining architectural possibilities for cooperation, public and research interaction, and organized collaboration within a dense program of research laboratories, clinical and teaching facilities and conference center.

The following is some initial student work exploring this subject.

A project based on a series of studies diving into both two dimensional and three dimensional elements of shadow and object. This study works in the arena of ambiguity or in the arena of architecture, where both language and visual syntax play a large role. Our perception of space and depth can be developed in both three dimensional and two dimensional worlds, working back and forth, based on each other. How can shadows distort our perceptions of space? What do we expect from the information that shadows give us? How is space defined by shadows?
by Daniel Kim

The perception / deception / interpretation of space.
Exploring the possibilities of spatial interpretation through hard lines by manipulating spacing, weight, and length. The conflicts between perception and conception are tested. By Chris Ardoin

Line: Edge. This study began with a series of x-ray perspectival drawings constructed through revealing only edges. The process of layering various edges begin to construct a spatial condition where edges can appear to move around, behind, through, out, or into the surface upon which they were drawn. By Allison Johnson

This studio is taught by Professor Chris Bardt. The course blog can be read here.

We began by programming our own software to make drawings with the help of machines. Each student was randomly assigned a position in a virtual stack of drawings (the drawings wern’t actually stacked, but we thought of them as one on top of another). Each drawing was tasked with refercning the drawing “behind” it as some kind of input.

Throughout the process we used a variety of machines: a pen plotter, laser cutter, hands and eyes.

Nathaniel Vice

Bean Suphasidh

We ran this experiment for three rounds, with each round responding to the previous drawing. These are the third round of drawings:

Julia Bowlin

Bean Suphasidh

Caterina Belardetti

Sierra Wojcik

Michael Jacobs

Min Kim

Sara Fetterolf

Maryam Dashti

Nathaniel Vice

J. Johnston

John Mars

Nicole Wiznitzer

Alexander Dale

At a recent review we were joined by some guests from the MIT Design and Computation Group.

This studio is taught by Carl Lostritto. For more information and details about our process visit the course site.

Richard Meier Presentation : 1990

The Bayard Ewing Bulding, home of RISD’s architecture programs : 1990

1990

The above is the work of Alex Ju in response to the prompt: “Create an item that interacts with a found object. It may envelope, touch delicately, enhance function, or deny it. In any case, its point(s) of and attitude towards contact must be purposeful. This assignment will require careful measuring and observation of your object to achieve a desirable interface between it and your fabrication.”

The above is the work of Cydney Ferguson in response to the prompt: “Create an item that interacts with a found object. It may envelope, touch delicately, enhance function, or deny it. In any case, its point(s) of and attitude towards contact must be purposeful. This assignment will require careful measuring and observation of your object to achieve a desirable interface between it and your fabrication.”

The above is the work of Feijiao Huo in response to the prompt: “Create an item that interacts with a found object. It may envelope, touch delicately, enhance function, or deny it. In any case, its point(s) of and attitude towards contact must be purposeful. This assignment will require careful measuring and observation of your object to achieve a desirable interface between it and your fabrication.”

C:What has changed since you were at risd?

L: This is a hard question to answer because I have not been directly involved with the architecture school since I graduated. But from what I gather, John Maeda has encouraged the use of empirical methods for structuring design methodologies across disciplines. This emphasis is something that I feel was present at RISD when I was a student, but perhaps it was not as explicit as it appears now. As a student at RISD, I learned how to form a design inquiry and to adhere to a clear design methodology which I was not as explicitly taught to do in my previous undergraduate degree.

In terms of digital fabrication, when I was a final year MArch student we got our first lasercutter and that was very exciting as it marked the early stages of incorporating digital fabrication techniques in studio. I was also the last year that was not required to purchase a laptop so I was at the tail end of an analog era so to speak and can imagine that this is something that has changed quite a bit. I don’t know what the impact of this shift to digital fabrication has been in the last few years. I imagine and hope that the transition has gone well because my experiences at RISD were always embedded in material production and tectonic explorations and I hope that the transition to digital modes of fabrication haven’t sacrificed the sensibility of working materially.

The promise of interdisciplinary exchange was one of the things that drew me to RISD but I found it difficult to make those connections outside of winter session. It seems that interdisciplinary opportunities have opened up in the last few years. This is encouraging as having an architecture department within an art school offers remarkable opportunities to glean insights on creative practices of related disciplines.

C:how did risd allow for you to grow as a designer while you were at the university?

L: There are two things that come to mind that impacted me most as a student in terms of gaining new sensibilities that I wasn’t previously familiar with. The first was something that was stressed very early on in Design Principles, which was the idea of thinking about the generative capacity of drawing and model. We were taught that drawing is not a technique or a method for representing a mental image of an idea, but it’s a generative tool for developing new spatial propositions. I now teach at The University of Edinburgh and the way of working materially and the sensibility of working between drawing and model is something that I try to teach my students.

The other thing I learned at RISD that I also try to teach students is that the design process involves developing a clear and coherent inquiry. How you develop a design thesis for your work and how you test that thesis by making is something that I try to instill in my students. These are two things that I learned early on and still carry with me.

C: what have you been doing since you graduated from risd?

L: I graduated in 2005 and moved to Toronto and started working for a practice called Plant Architect  and I also started teaching part time at the University of Toronto. At Plant, I worked on a number of interesting hybrid architecture and landscape architecture projects, as well as a number of civic projects, including the redevelopment of Toronto City Hall.

In 2008 I left Plant to start an independent practice called Studio Moffitt because I had a commission to design a single family home in rural Canada. It was an off-grid design-build project and I moved to the rural community to oversee construction of the house. That project was completed during the summers of 2009, 2010, and 2011.

In 2010 I started a job as a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and I have been teaching here full-time since. I am also completing a part-time PhD and still running the practice. I am in the process, along with other colleagues, of setting up a design-research office at the University of Edinburgh. I try to do a lot of things and I find them all fascinating, but it’s difficult keeping up with everything as you can imagine!

C: what are you currently making ?

L: I am always making something. In my studio right now I have an odd menagerie of things including 3 acrylic paintings in process, a half-finished cross stitched “tapestry”, a couple of origami light shades. I also have a matchbox pinhole camera that I like to carry around and take photos with. These are not serious projects obviously, but I do find that they inform ways of thinking about making architecture. I have found the transition to digital to be difficult, so I always have ongoing hands-on projects in progress because it gives me a tactile outlet that I don’t think I would have otherwise.

I work on competitions and these allow me to test spatial ideas and the relationship between analog and digital ways of working. Most recently, I worked on a renewable energy landscape competition sited in Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, which is designed by James Corner. In that case, I developed a technique of merging painting with digital drawing.

C: are there key questions you ask yourself when creating your work?

L: I think it is important to both know when to ask questions and when not to ask questions in the design process. On the one hand, you have to give yourself freedom to not know exactly why you are doing things that you are doing, but just to work intuitively and do them anyways trusting they will lead somewhere. But you also have to know when to pause and critically assess your work, to read it for cues, to ask what ideas are latent and to align what you’ve made with a bigger conceptual agenda for a project.

I teach issues related to sustainability, which raises technical questions in my work. So some of the questions I would ask now would be how certain design decisions impact environmental performance. I am interested in how buildings weather and how weather impacts building, which raises issues of orientation and configuration, microclimate modification and passive heating and cooling. These are verifiable ideas, not intuitive ones.

I am suggesting that it is important to have both sensibilities, to give yourself the freedom to play and just make, but also to be able to critically appraise your work and know how to evaluate it according to an agenda, whether that’s theoretical or technical. There should always be a critical dialogue between the two modes of thinking and working.

C:who is on your radar right now?

L: The person whose work I am quite interested in right now is Philippe Rahm because he conceives of projects according to different methods of thermal exchange and I am interested in the dialogue between immaterial and material conditions and how interior thermal environments can shape space.

There are architects I have always been fascinated by and continue to be such as Peter Zumthor, Alvar Aalto, Alvaro Siza, and Enric Miralles because of their respect for material sensibilities, loose contextual response and a certain robustness and understanding of materials and weathering

C: do you have any advise to prospective or current students at risd?

L: Learn patience and resist the rate at which ideas tend to change in the world. We have ready access to so much visual material and we have modes of production that are rapid-fire in nature and aren’t accumulative (control-z is deadly). Because of this, it’s easy to work impatiently and superficially. Invest in ideas that matter. They will persist long past your formal education. I would remind students of the luxury of time that they have to invest in ideas now; it’s a luxury that few ever have again in their lives. I would also encourage students to learn to communicate visually and all those other cliches  which I think are true, like take risks, balance confidence and humility, learn to accept that real growth involves some failure along the way, and be nimble.

House on Limekiln Line North Elevation. Photo: Shai Gil

House on Limkiln Line West Elevation. Photo: Shai Gil

House on Limemkiln Line South and West Elevation. Photo: Shai Gil

House on Limekiln Line Kitchen. Photo: Gabriel Li

House on LImekiln Line (L) View to Bedroom (R) View to Living Room. Photo: Shai Gil

Limekiln Grid (L) Installation (R) Topography Plan.

Clouds, Vortices and Plumes. Competition Image.

Exothermic Landscape. Competition Image.

Nathan Phillips Squre Revitalisation Project. PLANT Architect Inc. Photo: Lisa Moffitt

Nicholas Moore, Voshell Burgess, Camila Morales, Cloud City, (video documentation)

Final project for Mikolaj Szoska’s advanced studio, “Avant-Garde Doesn’t Give Up”

Beau Johnson, Photograms (collage of images)

Beau Johnson, Photograms (animation)

Beau Johnson, Untitled (video stills)

Beau Johnson, Untitled (video)

Beau Johnson, Inhabiting Malevich: Exploration in Depth, (final installation, drawings)

Beau Johnson, Inhabiting Malevich: Exploration in Depth, (final installation, cube)

Beau Johnson, Inhabiting Malevich: Exploration in Depth, (final installation, final critique)

Eugenia Yu, Slow Land, (drawing)

Eugenia Yu, Slow Land, (drawing)

Eugenia Yu, Slow Land, (drawing)

Eugenia Yu, Slow Land, (animation)

Eugenia Yu, Slow Land, (final installation, detail)

Eugenia Yu, Slow Land, (final installation, detail)

James Bogle, Age of Pop, (postcard image)

James Bogle, Age of Pop, (video stills)

Nicholas Moore, Burgess Voshell, Camila A. Morales, Cloud City, (inflatable – exterior view)

Nicholas Moore, Burgess Voshell, Camila A. Morales, Cloud City, (inflatable – exterior view)

Nicholas Moore, Burgess Voshell, Camila A. Morales, Cloud City, (inflatable – interior view)

Nicholas Moore, Burgess Voshell, Camila A. Morales, Cloud City, (inflatable – interior view, two different space configurations)

Nicholas Moore, Burgess Voshell, Camila Morales, Cloud City, (video documentation)

Architectural Drawing is a buildup of lines that together have meaning. They speak for a visual language that translates into spatial and inhabitable spaces. These lines are created under a pre-existing standard of drawing where any architect is able to convey to an audience a clear idea without having to use words. A drawing becomes a contract between the creator and those who interpret it.

These “drawing tools” have been developed through centuries, more conventionally in manual forms and now through digital means and methods. Architectural Drawing is continually challenged to carry new and more complex ideas of space. Architects seek to create their own way of representation under this global language, drawing.

Today, the hybridization between manual and digital representation has allowed for drawing to be perceived simultaneously in both two and three-dimensional forms. Allowing the architect to be aware of the entirety of the problem at once.  Architects travel between projected drawings and linear drawings to explain their process of thinking. Both methodologies of representation will be the language for Architecture in the future generations.

This workshop will frame architectural drawing as a personal investigation, where students will work with the framework of architectural drawing conventions to discover new ways of representation. The class will be comprised of four projects, and in-class assignments, all of which will be pinned-up in the final review.

Architectural Drawing is a buildup of lines that together have meaning. They speak for a visual language that translates into spatial and inhabitable spaces. These lines are created under a pre-existing standard of drawing where any architect is able to convey to an audience a clear idea without having to use words. A drawing becomes a contract between the creator and those who interpret it.

These “drawing tools” have been developed through centuries, more conventionally in manual forms and now through digital means and methods. Architectural Drawing is continually challenged to carry new and more complex ideas of space. Architects seek to create their own way of representation under this global language, drawing.

Today, the hybridization between manual and digital representation has allowed for drawing to be perceived simultaneously in both two and three-dimensional forms. Allowing the architect to be aware of the entirety of the problem at once.  Architects travel between projected drawings and linear drawings to explain their process of thinking. Both methodologies of representation will be the language for Architecture in the future generations.

This workshop will frame architectural drawing as a personal investigation, where students will work with the framework of architectural drawing conventions to discover new ways of representation. The class will be comprised of four projects, and in-class assignments, all of which will be pinned-up in the final review.

Architectural Drawing is a buildup of lines that together have meaning. They speak for a visual language that translates into spatial and inhabitable spaces. These lines are created under a pre-existing standard of drawing where any architect is able to convey to an audience a clear idea without having to use words. A drawing becomes a contract between the creator and those who interpret it.

These “drawing tools” have been developed through centuries, more conventionally in manual forms and now through digital means and methods. Architectural Drawing is continually challenged to carry new and more complex ideas of space. Architects seek to create their own way of representation under this global language, drawing.

Today, the hybridization between manual and digital representation has allowed for drawing to be perceived simultaneously in both two and three-dimensional forms. Allowing the architect to be aware of the entirety of the problem at once.  Architects travel between projected drawings and linear drawings to explain their process of thinking. Both methodologies of representation will be the language for Architecture in the future generations.

This workshop will frame architectural drawing as a personal investigation, where students will work with the framework of architectural drawing conventions to discover new ways of representation. The class will be comprised of four projects, and in-class assignments, all of which will be pinned-up in the final review.

Architectural Drawing is a buildup of lines that together have meaning. They speak for a visual language that translates into spatial and inhabitable spaces. These lines are created under a pre-existing standard of drawing where any architect is able to convey to an audience a clear idea without having to use words. A drawing becomes a contract between the creator and those who interpret it.

These “drawing tools” have been developed through centuries, more conventionally in manual forms and now through digital means and methods. Architectural Drawing is continually challenged to carry new and more complex ideas of space. Architects seek to create their own way of representation under this global language, drawing.

Today, the hybridization between manual and digital representation has allowed for drawing to be perceived simultaneously in both two and three-dimensional forms. Allowing the architect to be aware of the entirety of the problem at once.  Architects travel between projected drawings and linear drawings to explain their process of thinking. Both methodologies of representation will be the language for Architecture in the future generations.

This workshop will frame architectural drawing as a personal investigation, where students will work with the framework of architectural drawing conventions to discover new ways of representation. The class will be comprised of four projects, and in-class assignments, all of which will be pinned-up in the final review.

Some of the highlights included the Weissenhofsiedlung and Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart. In Munich a visit to the Brandhorst museum, BMW welt (Coop Himmelb(l)au), and swimming in the Munich Stadium.  A stay at the Bauhaus dormitory in Dessau and a night at the Berlin Symphony.

Enjoying Bratwurst in Munich (John, Grace, Sara, Jason, Caterina)

Prof. Jonathan Knowles and Prof. Laura Briggs lead a critique workshop

Crashing in the Bauhaus dormitory

Zach, Sara, Saja, Kevin (M.Arch 2014)

Jason, Sara, Saja, Kevin (M.Arch 2014)

Upon returning to Providence, the students developed the three proposals in preparation for a critique held on Friday, February 15th.  Much of the Architecture Department staff was in attendance with guests from RISD textiles, Brown engineering, and dean of Architecture and Design, Pradeep Sharma.

The above is the work of Colin Wiencek in response to the prompt: “Digitally fabricate the skeleton onto which new possibilities emerge for the hand. With the planning of a physical framework, scaffold or armature you can explore how techniques of the hand-built merge onto or within structures fashioned more methodically. Complement each with the qualities of the other.”

The above is the work of Feijiao Huo in response to the prompt: “Digitally fabricate the skeleton onto which new possibilities emerge for the hand. With the planning of a physical framework, scaffold or armature you can explore how techniques of the hand-built merge onto or within structures fashioned more methodically. Complement each with the qualities of the other.”

The above is the work of Feijiao Huo in response to the prompt: “Digitally fabricate the skeleton onto which new possibilities emerge for the hand. With the planning of a physical framework, scaffold or armature you can explore how techniques of the hand-built merge onto or within structures fashioned more methodically. Complement each with the qualities of the other.”

The above is the work of Matthew Solomon in response to the prompt: “Digitally fabricate the skeleton onto which new possibilities emerge for the hand. With the planning of a physical framework, scaffold or armature you can explore how techniques of the hand-built merge onto or within structures fashioned more methodically. Complement each with the qualities of the other.”

The above is the work of Ross Kellogg in response to the prompt: “Digitally fabricate the skeleton onto which new possibilities emerge for the hand. With the planning of a physical framework, scaffold or armature you can explore how techniques of the hand-built merge onto or within structures fashioned more methodically. Complement each with the qualities of the other.”

Architecture Critique 1975