This is a vertical elective combining students in their fourth and fifth year of the BArch program with students from the architecture graduate programs. The content of the elective options varies from year to year, and covers advanced topics that invite critical thinking and innovation in the area of building technology.Section Description:Mother nature repeatedly threatens us with natural disasters and continually reminds us that floods, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and even pandemics are potential and ever present threats to our survival and to the viability of our built environment. Given that one of the primary functions of built architecture is to shelter and protect, how can we design structures that can do more than provide code minimum level of ‘life safety’ preservation, but go much further to recognize and surpass/bypass/redirect, or disrupt, the ever present threat of extreme natural disasters? The automobile/product model of total replacement after a crash/incident is neither practical nor sustainable when it comes to buildings and places where people live.Our course will explore strategies, technologies, and structural approaches that speculate and consider how we might negotiate such extreme events. We’ll do this by leveraging our architectural design skills and our critical problem solving abilities. Explorations will aim to strike a marriage between architecture, structure, and the colossal demands imposed by these extreme natural phenomena.We will exercise our analytical muscles and aim to sharpen our understanding of architecture in the context of: major environmental demands, structural stability, materials in terms of their strength and mechanics, structural systems, configurations, and sustainability with regards to disaster resilience, recovery, shelter, public health, and survival. Students will consider and ultimately design a project proposal along with their own adaptive resilient multi-faceted program that addresses the temporal stages from pre-disaster and initial response through immediate recovery and into and beyond long-term rebuilding and regeneration.

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