This is a vertical studio combining students in their second and third year of the MArch program with students in the MAAD program, and those in the final semesters of the undergraduate architecture program. 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.COURSE DESCRIPTION The industrial revolution brought about an explosion of mass produced goods, including standardized building materials shaped by the manufacturing processes. Relying on the relative predictability of this ubiquitous material palette, one of the underlying assumptions of practicing architecture today is that materials come in knowable shapes and sizes and that they will indeed arrive from somewhere when ordered. Though in some ways standardization is a great boon to material efficiency, material standardization is predicated on extractive practices that pull material from one place and trash it in another, typically out of view from those who benefit from its use during the building lifecycle. Materials are harvested, from far-flung places relative to the building site, shaped into a product, and assembled into a building only to be dismantled and sent to the landfill mere decades later. Architecture demands materials new and neutral.In this studio, we will operate under an emerging material paradigm based not in extraction but rather reinterpretation of what is already existing. This paradigm takes advantage of advances in 3D scanning and computation to manage the complexities of working with nonstandard materials. This new material paradigm demands a new tectonic sensibility based on irregularity and three dimensionality in contrast to the homogeneity and flatness of the standardized material palette. Rather than working with materials through the abstraction of CAD software, in this studio we will accrue libraries of specific pieces of material gleaned from local waste streams. We will develop computational design and digital fabrication strategies based on direct responses to material shape, density, flexibility, etc. 
This studio will operate in three phases, working across scales from material, to building, to prototype assembly. In each phase, students will learn existing tools and techniques for working with irregular building stock while also developing their own methodologies. The first phase will focus on scanning materials and developing strategies for quantifying and depicting material lifecycles. Rather than focusing entirely on metrics of energy and carbon, students will be encouraged to develop narrative approaches to lifecycle assessment which make apparent the various social, economic, political and environmental vectors that intersect at the material. Working from the collective library of materials collected in phase I, phase II will be dedicated to inventing computational design and digital fabrication strategies for working with nonstandard materials. Contemporary CAD software contains inherent biases towards the standardized building material palette. In this studio, we will develop modeling strategies that instead address surface irregularity, unpredictable material streams and inherited geometry. These modeling strategies will aim to reduce some of the abstractions authored into CAD software in order to establish a more direct connection between the designer and the materials on which they operate.Finally, we will move from the model back to the material world where we will use various digital fabrication processes to construct assemblies of parts from the collective library. The application of the developed modeling strategies and tailored fabrication processes will look to re-establish the value of these materials as building materials, extending their use and shifting the perception that these materials are in fact waste. The studio will culminate in the design and fabrication of a chair that embodies the material narratives, modeling strategies and fabrication techniques developed over the course of the semester.Digital Craft:: This course is aligned with (but not limited to) the B.Arch Digital Craft  concentration.

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