This advanced level undergraduate studio focuses on conceptual and/or design/build topics at the intersection of architecture with other disciplines. Studio options vary from year to year.Section DescriptionWe will seek to re-imagine the creation of a dwelling environment by looking at the efforts of utopians, the avant-garde, and folk builders to break free from the disciplinary handcuffs that impede the creation of a consistent vision or non-standard solutions. Various futurists have offered proposals for a “house of the future,” that promised convenience, comfort, and pleasure from integrated technologies and entertainment. Often relying upon speculative technologies, these homes were usually imagined to be mass-produced consumer products that could be plugged into an urban network of structure and infrastructure. Even earlier, artists and architects conceived of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” in which the architecture, interior design, furniture, and sometimes even the clothing of the residents were of one consistent design. Largely associated with the Art Nouveau style, these projects created an immersive alternate reality apart from conventional aesthetics or expectations.Popular entertainment often embraces provocative explorations of “what if?” that reimagine the world. The products of industrial design, such as automobiles and smart phones endlessly chase the future and are praised not just for what they can do, but for how they look and feel. Paintings and sculptures also have the power to make new worlds in the eyes of its viewers through various techniques such as abstraction.In order to re-evaluate the domestic environment, we will take an integrative approach incorporating design-thinking and processes from Architecture, Interior Design, Industrial Design, Furniture Design, and Fine Arts. These approaches will be used to design the entirety of a prototype residential interior around the needs and bodies of an imagined set of users.Our approach will embrace the ideas and thinking of each practice. Architecture may give us spatial organization, structure, and concept; Interior Design provides affect, materiality, lighting, mood, color; Industrial Design addresses ergonomics, experience, interaction, enhancement, usability, and feel; Furniture Design helps us think about fabrication, beauty, touch, and finish; finally, the Fine Arts of painting, installations, and sculpture guides us beyond function toward themes, aspirations, moods, and ideas.

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