This is a vertical studio combining students in their fourth and fifth year of the BArch program with students from the architecture graduate programs. The studio focuses on the integration and development of building systems with the spatial, theoretical, and contextual ideas of architecture, inviting innovation within its practice. Work focuses around a rigorous semester-long team project that includes development of environmental systems, structural systems, and details for a design project.Section Description:Over the last two years, CCA architecture faculty and students have worked with the Greenville area community to help imagine how to rebuild after the Dixie fire, which destroyed almost every structure in the town. Previous projects in several studios have focused on potential replacements for key buildings in the downtown core, adding back physical spaces and programmatic functions that were lost in the fire. Our spring 2024 Integrated Studio will also engage with the rebuilding of the town, but in a different way, starting with an analysis of the educational programs and structures that were spared by the fire. The elementary and high schools in Greenville were mostly undamaged, and the structures have been able to serve new and continuing functions in helping provide some aspects of a continuing community core. Most notably, the school cafeteria and multi-purpose hall has been able to host many community events, and to become the focus of workshops, CCA/community engagements, and many other activities as well as serving ongoing school needs. While the elementary school has continued to operate, the high school education program was almost completely stopped after the fire, despite the intact campus. Already diminishing in student population in recent years, the twin disasters of the Covid pandemic and then the loss of housing and local residents from the fire prompted the district to largely close the school, with most of the remaining students transferred to schools in other towns in the area. It was decided that this would be better for the students, so they could join with a larger high school in a community that was spared by the fire, but it also left a conspicuous hole in Greenville—the high school buildings are there, mostly empty, and much of the life and activity that those students, teachers and programs had contributed to the town went away.The challenge that we will take on as a studio is to reimagine the structures and programmatic activities that can bring this student life back into the Greenville community. Our studio will play the role of speculative partners in imagining new ways to rethink the utilization of the existing campus, and to rethink the ways in which the educational programs of Greenville can be more integrated into the rebuilding process and physical form of the town itself, rather than remaining solely on the former campus. One option is for a charter school now housed in nearby Taylorsville to relocate to Greenville, possibly using some of the currently underutilized Greenville High campus, and there may be other options being explored by the community and school district as well, so our goal will be to help provide all those involved in school planning in Greenville to have some additional architectural solution options to consider.This is a real project being explored by the community, and requires a thoughtful combination of evaluating existing context, and imagining future structures and multiple combinations of potential uses and users. As an Integrated Studio, we will be working on a full range of architectural issues, beginning with complex programming studies and continuing on through all phases of design into final building detailing. Primary structural approaches will use innovative applications of mass timber building systems. To best contribute to the exploratory dialogue with the community client, our studio will work in six or seven small teams to propose slightly different approaches to sites and programs. Our studio will produce a set of ideas, documents and artifacts that we will share with the community to help them further evaluate and develop the next steps of planning for these important seed buildings in the ongoing Greenville rebuild.The studio will include a multi-day site visit to Greenville from February 16-18.Travel requirement: This course includes a required travel component. Students are expected to join a field trip to Greenville, California, from February 16 to February 18. The onsite program will begin at noon on Friday the 16th, and complete lateen Saturday the 17th, so expected travel times will be departing the Bay Area early Friday, and returning at your leisure on Sunday. Travel will be by student-organized groups in student cars, with mileage reimbursement from the school. If absolutely necessary, students with previous engagements or other unavoidable obligations will be excused from attendance in person, and will receive alternate research/project assignments in exchange, but it is understood that every effort should be made to attend the in-person meetings in Greenville. In order to participate in the field trip, students must complete the CCA Student Travel Emergency Contact Information and Release Form, which will be shared with them in advance of the trip. Students should anticipate spending no more than $100 for this trip.

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