Design Skills
ARCH202 ||| Winter 2024
This is a required course for all first-year undergraduate architecture students. Students in this course are introduced to techniques of architectural representation and design communication. Emphasis is placed on developing spatial imagination and strengthening students’ agency with both digital and hand media.
Over the 10 week term, the students also made over 2000 collages, one for each day of class per student, translating the day’s word into visual expression. These were installed onto a 6-sided wood and string sculpture during their Drawing Exhibition.
The Atmospheric Detail
ARCH 423/523 ||| Spring 2023
New drafting technologies allow us to capture the world in astounding detail, but before we can draw anything we despearately need to see clearly; paying attention to the world and people around us is the foundation of good design.
The Atmospheric Detail introduces students to the effects of time on the built environment. Materials patina, ecosystems weather; some buildings age gracefully, while others corrode and are removed or replaced. Through a combination of on-site hand drawing and as-built LIDAR documentation, students are taught to notice and deduce building assemblies and the associated artifacts of the ageing process at a variety of scales.
Working Drawings
ARCH 487/585 ||| Spring 2025
The scope of work for this studio is to design and generate working drawings for the remodel of the vacant Columbia Bank/Selco Credit Union Building located at 1450 High Street, reimagining the space as the Northwest Center for Architecture, a local nonprofit dedicated to raising public awareness of how architecture impacts our lives.
In addition to minor remodeling, signage, general planning, interior layout, lighting and material selection, consideration must be given to the design of accessible exhibition spaces, archive spaces, staff spaces, retail spaces, and restrooms.
The building was originally designed by Eugene architect Daniel Herbert in 1970. Inspired by the first Earth Day that same year, he designed the building with demountable components that could be easily reused or recycled.
Building Information Modeling
ARCH 425/525 ||| 2023-2025
BIM – Building Information Modeling – represents a structural shift in the way architects and designers represent a building. BIM represents a building as systems of parametric information. Traditional representation forms (plan, section, elevation) can then be extracted from those systems, along with robust reports on code compliance, sustainability, assembly, performance, and occupancy. BIM also provides for management guidance throughout the building lifecycle.
This class will be examining BIM’s potential for computational, conceptual, and schematic design.
This course investigates common and novel methods for creating and describing form with BIM.
Rudiments of Form
ARCH 423/523 ||| Summer 2023
This Media for Design Development course is concerned with the nature of perception. As our image culture becomes saturated with AI products, how do we retain trust in human communication? What we are looking for is incidental to the image.
In translating a sequence of simple forms – point, line, plane, platonic solid – from hand drawings and physical models into visual programming artifacts via Dynamo for Revit, students are challenged to show just where the mind is at. As Lisa Robertson says regarding scaffolding: “It finds its stability between gestures.”
Architecture represents the production of imagination. As Marco Frascari says: “We make buildings, and buildings make us.”
Graduate Design Process
ARCH 611 ||| Summer 2021, 2024, 2025
This course, for first-year Track 1 graduate students, introduces the practice of architectural communication, primarily through the medium of drawing. Using freehand drawing and conventional constructive
techniques, students will learn how to represent 2- and 3- dimensional space. Exercises and readings are designed to develop a foundational, critical understanding of architectural representation and spatial
thinking in contemporary practice, providing essential tools for the students’ design processes and studio work.
This course runs concurrent to ARCH 680 Intro Graduate Design, the summer Track I studio course. This course is intended to enrich and support studio development and output; some assignments are expected to be produced in tandem with studio objectives. The course meets twice weekly, and consists of technical instruction/demonstration, lecture, and critical feedback of student’s work.
Design Studios
ARCH283, ARCH284, ARCH383, ARCH680 ||| 2021-2025
Undergraduate and graduate design studios developing a range of project types and scales.