This is a vertical studio combining students in their fourth and fifth year of architectural studies. The students may choose from a diverse range of options of study proposed by different faculty members. In general the studio options are grounded in a conceptual basis that invites theoretical and/or programmatic innovation. These studio options may vary from year to year.Unreal Worlds (In The Real World)As we come to spend an increasing amount of time in VR for working, socializing, and entertainment experiences, how might architects investigate this platform to significantly alter the presence of built spaces in the real world (IRW)? This semester’s Advanced Architecture Studio will form a creative collaboration with Oculus VR in Menlo Park, CA. As emerging VR platforms open up new ways to think about occupying virtual worlds in meaningful ways that is both shared and individualize, the studio will undertake thought-provoking trajectories to pair today’s understanding of the technology with tomorrow’s potential for real-world architectural realization. Unreal Worlds (In The Real World) will be team taught by CCA Professor Thom Faulders and Joyce Hsu, Designer/Prototyper at AR/VR Facebook and Oculus. The studio will be divided into three phases, operating on “both sides” of the VR screen – in other words we’ll be creating in VR worlds while at the same time translating these discoveries into architectural design scenarios for aimed to re-inform real world architecture. Students do not need to have any previous experiences in VR platforms. Phase 1 will entail workshop tutorials for designing spaces to be accessed inside the Oculus VR platform. To augment these efforts, the studio will tour Oculus labs in Menlo Park, and will be provided with headsets for use at CCA. During Phase 2 of the studio students will critically challenge the strengths and limitations of virtual spaces by designing an Exponential Living Habitat.  These will be hybridized buildings that undertake innovative and adventurous ways to explicitly merge matter-based architecture with the more esoteric freedoms made possible with VR. How can we re-think small spaces to accommodate super large virtual typologies, populations, and distances? What archetypal tropes continue to resonate and what can be discarded or re-invented for tomorrow’s living environments? Phase 3 will allow us to transcode our newly ‘radicalized’ VR version of architecture for living into a large-scale built material model. Forcing us to engage the virtual through material and gravitational translations, these models will conceptually represent and describe scalar differentiations and archetypal assignments learned throughout the semester.

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