This is a vertical studio combining undergraduate and graduate architecture students. 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 DESCRIPTIONThe NEWER NOONAN studio offers students the opportunity to design a new kind of space for art and public life. The project  provokes and cultivates in-depth design inquiry into questions regarding the relationship between architecture and art, structure and space (both maker space and exhibition space), and environment and culture. 
 
Architectural typologies associated with the arts have evolved and expanded over time at a relatively rapid pace, and include a wide range of spaces: from “high art” museums and venues for more rarified visual arts, performing arts, foundations for the arts,  to more pragmatic facilities for storage of arts, buildings accommodating education of the arts, locally oriented art studios, galleries, maker spaces, community art centers, and spaces for street art.  The Newer Noonan project will consider the synthesis of multiple types across this spectrum.  
 
A key component of the studio project’s programmatic makeup derives from the now-in-progress transformation of the former shipyards at Pier 70 into a new San Francisco neighborhood, wherein the existing Noonan Building – an eighty-year-old wood structure housing the former shipyards administration offices,  repurposed in the 1980s as two dozen artists’ studios – is marked for demolition. An important part of the mission of the Newer Noonan studio project is to provide a new home for this community of under-resourced artists.
 
It is in the spirit of the more emergent street-side galleries and platforms for localized discourse that the Newer Noonan will look to inspire ways of thinking about the integration of public art with public space – creating a place for street art to coexist with the exhibition of more traditional, canonical arts related programs, alongside the soon to be displaced Noonan artists’ studios.  We will focus attention on questioning the ways in which public art is traditionally incorporated into the built environment and look to foster paradigm shifts from the typical private developer and commissioned artist standard to a dialogue about new platforms for public forum, participation, activism, plurality, and inclusivity. 
 
A key driver of design investigation for the studio will be a focus on CLT (cross-laminated timber) construction -- as a vehicle for exploring the space-and-form-making possibilities of this recent (and arguably consequential) building technique. This presents specific design opportunities afforded by CLT, such as how it can act as both structure and ornament, or how it might allow rethinking approaches to enclosure, surface and poche. 
 
During the semester the studio will consider experimental CLT case studies, and other provocations such as those found in the recent book, Blank: Speculations on CLT  – consider for example this prompt put forth by Yasmin Vobis: “Through CLT’s expanded scale, reduced environmental impact, and unfamiliar materiality, we can begin to reimagine ways of working that depart from established historical frameworks and constructional conventions. This opens up new opportunities for an architecture in wood that – like steel and concrete before it – can both assemble and address new contemporary publics.” Ultimately, the wood form, structure and socio-spatiality of the old Noonan building will be radically reimagined in the Newer Noonan studio project.
 

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