This studio focuses on the integration and development of building systems with the spatial, theoretical, and contextual ideas of architecture. Work focuses around a rigorous semester-long team project that includes development of environmental systems and structural systems and details for a large, complex project. This is a vertical studio combining advanced level undergraduate and graduate students. Studio options vary from year to year.COURSE DESCRIPTIONThis studio is one of several CCA courses that will partner with Greenville, a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains nearly destroyed by the Dixie Fire in August of 2021. For several generations, Greenville has been sustained by the region’s ecological resources, through timber, ranching, and recreation. However, these industries have also depleted natural resources, redirected wealth from local workers to corporate shareholders, and denied Indigenous Maidu rights to land. In response, our studio will ask: how can Greenville rebuild by creating a more sustainable, inclusive, and regenerative economy?In contrast to an extractive economy, which depletes resources and labor for distant profiteers, a regenerative economy sustains the well-being of land and people while giving locals decision-making control, responsibility, and profit. To learn about regenerative economies in Greenville, we will visit the town, witness burn sites, share meals with our partners, and collaborate with local experts in timber, ranching, recreation, and fire-protection. We will create resource flow diagrams, make site strategy proposals, and then design buildings and landscapes that make these visions possible. Projects might include, for example, a locally-owned sawmill and maker space, a Maidu land trust, a slaughterhouse and market for local ranchers, or a firebreak repurposed as a camping wonderland. To guide our process, we will explore property as a legal device that links economic power to architectural space. Property has long supported extractive economies by giving owners exclusive rights to profit from the land. This is especially evident in the seizure of Indigenous land by Spanish and American settlers and the dislocation of Greenville renters and underinsured homeowners after the Dixie Fire. At the same time, however, property can also support regenerative economies. For example, workers’ cooperatives can support a local mill or market. Conservation easements can protect firebreaks. And temporal use rights can expand Indigenous access to land. In fact, coordination across property boundaries is required to address a regional scale of wildfire management across federal, Indigenous, corporate, family, and non-profit stakeholders. In other words, property can redistribute wealth, not just hoard it. It can proliferate resources, not just extract them. Our goal is to leverage our skills as architects to reframe the boundaries, temporality, and cultural expression of land ownership. Traditionally, private property has defined a one-to-one correspondence between parcel boundaries and a landowner’s rights and responsibilities. In fact, however, these alignments are never so clear. In this studio, we will crack these fissures open, to embrace unexpected alignments and misalignments across architectural elements—land, foliage, foundations, walls, roofs, furniture, and fixtures. For example, a roof might encompass multiple farmers’ market stalls, while the ground could be sculpted to redistribute water rights for common use. Students in this studio will be asked to redesign a single property (or cluster of properties) in Greenville. Designs will focus at an architectural scale (but with a regional impact). Students will work in teams of 2-3 people to develop research, strategy proposals, and designs culminating in the creation of large, lush drawings that we will share with our Greenville partners.  Notes:
Travel requirement: Students are expected to join a field trip to Greenville, from midday Thursday, 9/15, to midday Sunday, 9/18. Funds are available to cover travel costs and, if needed, to cover any lost wages. If absolutely necessary, students with previous engagements or other unavoidable obligations will be excused, but it is understood that every effort should be made to attend. 
 Affiliated courses: 
This course will share knowledge, resources, and partner contacts with Mark Donohue and Margaret Ikeda’s class. 
We are also in a “course cluster” with James Graham’s history/theory elective “Spaces of Extraction” and Brendon Levitt’s building technology elective “Regenerative Building Performance.” Our 3 courses will explore common topics from different angles, with exchanges along the way. If you’d like to go deeper into these topics, you are encouraged to sign up for some or all of these courses this fall. 
Urban Works: This course is aligned with (but not limited to) the B.Arch Urban Works concentration.

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