Spring 2024 Technical Methods, Intellectual Domain and Elective Seminars

Technical Methods seminars explore strategies for conducting research in different focus areas of architecture, from visualization techniques, skill-building in the use of tools, and developing specific methods for technically-driven inquiry.

Course Title: Logging

This course will examine material origins and the ethics of material consumption as it pertains to wood construction. Wood has been one of the most popular building materials, alongside clay and stone, for thousands of years. As a natural material, it is the perfect expression of our intimate connection with the world in which we live. In fact, no other plant species is as dear to humanity as the tree. To that end, students will manually enact the process of how a tree, a perennial plant with an elongated stem, becomes a log, a part of the trunk of a tree that has fallen, and finally becomes timber, wood prepared for use in building or carpentry. Throughout this material transformation, we will examine and interrogate the three-fold definition of logger:

• a person who fells trees for timber; a lumberjack.
• a device for making a systematic recording of events, observations, measurements
• an agent of disturbance and change in an ecosystem

Utilizing this multi-faceted definition of logger, we will directly engage with the material culture of the forest industry, which most, if not all of the technological innovations surrounding this industry have been attempts to standardize and homogeneous the material. That is, to kill the plant so it will behave and perform in a predictable and consistent manner – to strip it of its ‘wood-ness’. As a counterpoint to this historical trend, the course will aim to embrace the living, unpredictable, and irregular features inherent to all trees and design experiments will attempt to capitalize on these bizarre and eccentric qualities. Through deep experiential and hands-on learning, this course will attempt to rekindle the omnipresent relationship between people and wood. 

Course contact hours will occur both on-campus (25%) and-off campus (75%) throughout the semester. Weekly discussions, tours, material harvesting, and student presentations will involve spending time outdoors in parks, preserves, conservation zones, and state forests while interacting with ecologists, conservationists, loggers, foresters, and industry professionals. Hands-on exercises in our Fabrication Workshop(s) exploring log milling will supplement weekly readings, short-story writings, and graphic production.

Course Title: Mapping Market Worlds 

This course introduces students to a combined GIS – 3D modeling framework for mapping 15 American markets and their urban context, including Buffalo’s West Side Bazar and New York’s Chelsea market. Although the markets differ in location, form, type, size, history, politics, and evolutionary trajectory, they play a shared role as incubator spaces that shape and are shaped by the cultural life and character of surrounding neighborhoods. To analyze economic interactions between markets and cities, we will use GIS to spatialize public economic and demographic datasets. To document the logistics that support diverse sites of market exchange, we will model market infrastructures. Finally, we will conduct fieldwork (photography, film, oral histories, and sketching) to visualize the social, material, and sensory messages that drive ‘market worlds’ (Mörtenböck and Mooshammer, 2015). We will synthesize these three scales of inquiry into a final project with multi-media tools (Adobe Premier and GIS Story maps). This multi-scalar framework will prepare students to visualize interactions among the social, economic, cultural, historical, architectural, and technological phenomena that evolve American landscapes and sustain civic life.     

Note that this seminar will take fieldtrips to Buffalo’s West Side Bazar and New York’s Chelsea market. 

Course Title: Curbing the Climate Crisis through Residential Weatherization

To address the climate crisis, New York State plans to reduce statewide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 40% by 2030 and 85% by 2050. Unfortunately, recent estimates from the federal government show that GHGs continue to increase in the residential sector. This is especially poignant for the houses of Buffalo, estimated by the Census to have the oldest housing stock in the United States.

To learn how to reduce GHGs from residential buildings, this class will delve into the fundamentals of residential weatherization and energy auditing. Concepts to be discussed include the house as a system, typical building assemblies, and mechanical systems. This class will follow a flipped classroom format where students will spend most of their time in class dedicated to hands on activities to reinforce concepts learned outside of class. These activities include using energy auditing tools, performing a blower door test, and using thermal imaging cameras, necessary skills to learn how to identify and address problems in a house such as energy consumption, air leakage, and moisture control issues. The semester long project will be the energy audit of a house, a valuable skill to future proof your career as the state shifts to a low carbon economy.

Support for this class comes from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority under PON 3981: Energy Efficiency and Clean Technology Training.

Course Title: "After" Engagement

This seminar will focus on community engagement for urban design and development through research and implementation. While developing a survey of modes and tools of community engagement, we will also be working with a Buffalo community development corporation to refine an ongoing community center project commenced in fall ’23 through a collaborative design effort.

Course Title: Generative and Evolutionary Design Exploration Methodologies 

Within the conceptual phase of design, designers uncover different aspects of a design problem, synthesize requirements and objectives into design alternatives, evaluate the generated solutions, and find suitable solutions through an iterative process.  In the recent decade, computational early-stage design tools along with multi-objective search algorithms have been developed to generate abundant design alternatives, provide a real-time numeric assessment of solutions’ performance, and assist designers in making appropriate design decisions. In addition, evolutionary design exploration methods, mainly using a genetic algorithm, have been increasingly employed to allow the exploration of a population of solutions, to prevent designers from fixation on initial concepts, and to expand the diversity of design alternatives to a manageable extent. This course aims to introduce computational design exploration methodologies that help designers to make informed decisions in a multi-objective design setting. In addition, simulation-based research methodologies and fundamental concepts of building performance assessment in different areas such as Life Cycle Assessment and structural performance will be introduced to support students in addressing multiple performance-based design objectives during the conceptual phase of design.

Students should either have passed Arc 611 or Arc 412, or have basic parametric design skillsets using Grasshopper. Students will be asked to apply lessons learned via lectures, readings, tutorials, and discussion sessions to conduct a design exploration research project.

This course also has related content to students who are interested in the Ecological Practices graduate research group. 

Course Title: Architectural Geometry and Construction 

This course will introduce students to robotic fabrication resulting from a variety of computational form-finding and form-conversion techniques.  Course content will include hands-on instruction of architectural geometry controlled by computational design tools as a critical component within advanced digital fabrication workflows. Class time will be structured into a series of workshops intended to provide hands-on experience with the Kuka KR240 robot arm in the SMART Fabrication Factory, Grasshopper, Kangaroo2, and KukaPRC. 

The influence of the technical arts on traditional forms of architecture has carried through to present day, reinvented by the accessibility of advanced digital tools and manufacturing equipment. With technical expertise comes material and structural innovation, and it is essential that architectural research transcend the traditional borders of our discipline to creatively address an increasingly unpredictable environment.  With this in mind, a primary course objective is to introduce students to a variety of computational modeling and simulation techniques that heavily leverage architectural geometry in the design-to-construction workflow. The course will take an architectural-engineering approach to guide small design-build projects that demonstrate a close coordination between digital form finding and form conversion/optimization with material and manufacturing constraints.

Construction-aware computation. Computation-aware construction. 

Course Title: Practicing Inclusive Design 

This course will explore inclusive design through a structured R&D approach. The goal of the course is to develop skills that can be applied to further inclusive design in architectural practice. A series of exercises will engage students in research, design innovation and communication on inclusive design topics.  The skills will include literature reviews, visual content analysis, ergonomic analysis, creative brainstorming, and interactive presentations. This semester the focus will be on inclusive restroom design, using the Private Containers in Public Places Exhibit that is on display in the Hayes atrium as a point of departure. This exhibit highlights the limitations of current design practices. The next step in this research is developing innovative solutions to address those problems. Several initial exercises will be used to provide a foundation for R&D activities culminating in the selection of topics for independent projects focused on improving access and use of public restrooms, e.g. signage, plumbing fixtures, toilet compartments, locks, etc. Students will prepare interactive exhibits of prototypes to communicate their research ideas in a way that engages end users in the design process.       

This could will count as a technical methods: urban design seminar or an elective for the spring 2024 semester per approval from the Director of Graduate Studies. 

Course Title: UNCONVENTIONS

The seminar will focus on developing novel and broadly-applicable representation techniques as a tool for critical reflection on the built environment. 

Operating between model space and paper space, UNCONVENTIONS will adapt technical drawing techniques within Rhino to create novel workflows and narrative technical drawings with an urban focus. Following a series of guided exercises, students will deploy these techniques to create complex, large-format drawings.

UNCONVENTIONS is to be coordinated with the Banham Fellow research program and the upcoming exhibition ILLIQUID ASSETS in the spring semester.

Intellectual Domain seminars explore the theoretical and historical knowledge-bases of various focus areas of architecture, with an emphasis on pursuing intellectual inquiry.

Course Title: Working in Tech: Thinking Labor in Architecture and Digital Production

This seminar reconsiders technological advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and increasingly sophisticated robotics as integrally related to transformations of labor. Departing from the present in which United Auto Workers are striking, among other things, in anticipation of changes to assembly line processes for electric vehicle production, and when unions for writers and actors are simultaneously negotiating new contracts that protect them from AI, we will return to long-voiced concerns about automation at different historical moments. Even as newer, more complex tools threaten to reorganize production and raise Luddite hammers, this course refuses the long-held idea that technology simply replaces human workers. Rather, we will explore how it produces new forms of digital labor or renews old ideas about nonhuman and dehumanized labor. Classic texts like Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. help us to understand the connection between slavery and robotics; with Marx's Fragment on Machines and Mumford on mega-machines, we’ll grapple with the supposedly un-peopled work of machine learning; and new writing on the implications of AI will be reframed by Italian Autonomist writing on intellectual and immaterial labor. The goal of this seminar is for students to arrive at a heightened understanding of their own labor conditions as they perform the primarily "immaterial" work of digital design, but also to acknowledge their instrumentality as designers: how their own applications of technology have the capacity to reshape working worlds and subjectivities.

Course Title: 10 Landscapes: Framing a Practice, Place, Process, and Experience

This course introduces ten frameworks for understanding contemporary landscape architectural discourse and practice. Drawing from Landscape Architecture Theory, Design Theory, Cultural Geography, and Science and Technology Studies, the course is organized around lectures, discussions, and a semester long case study to understand how the frameworks 1] outline a theoretical context for situating landscape as a discipline, place, process, and medium; and 2] foster a synthetic understanding of landscape’s (frequently) conflicting modes.

This course will empower students to:

1. Understand how landscape architecture is constructed, both conceptually and physically.

2. Understand landscape architecture as a managed medium that transforms spaces and systems from the scale of a garden to an ecosystem.

3. Apply a comparative case study method.

4. Apply frameworks to a given case to describe how social, technical, and biophysical processes ‘construct’ landscapes.

Course Title: A Case Study in Theories of Urban Settlement Patterns

This interdisciplinary seminar was mounted to fulfill the disciplinary gap between MARC and MUP students. The founding principle has been to creating and nurturing a collaborative, mutually supportive, and stimulating learning environment. Thus, it is aimed at sharing the same class and topics in Urban Design and, specifically, investigating how cities might have been shaped and evolved overtime. The course is open to graduate students in both programs, however, since this is an advanced graduate course, I recommend that you will be in the second year or semester and have taken at least a GRG studio/planning studio or seminar class (such as ARC547 UD/GRG Technical Method + MUP565: Understanding Good Urban Form) dealing with a question of cities/towns. Thus, the course is open to those who are interested in case studies focusing on urban settlements and a diverse range of patterns (typologies); shapes (morphologies); a host of robust theories (Normative Theories) and a specific topic in urban density and vitality.

The semester will comprise the three-sequential modules as follows:

In Part 1, we will take up City Typology and Morphology. Using a wide range of cities around the globe, this seminar will produce students’ inventory and analysis of a range of typographic and morphological investigations.

In Part 2, we will undertake an investigation of three Normative Theories. They include the Cosmic Theory, the Machine Theory, and the Organic Theory. Each of these theories are very compelling in their foundations and applications to making of a settlement or a city. Students will find some of these theories are so over-arching and still relevant to the 21^st century. Again, the module will end with student teams’ seminar presentations.

In Part 3, we will look at a broader but often neglected case study dealing with Density of human settlements asking questions of what kinds of benefits/advantages does the higher density city may provide: Do they include: Health, Sustainability, and Just/Equity? A series of student-led seminar probe a number of crucial issues facing the globe in the early 21^st century.

Thus, students will have an opportunities to investigate urgently important issues of cities:

• in questions of the shaping of cities, and their evolution overtime.
• in acquiring and exploring a variety of mapping graphics and techniques as a basic language for the seminar.
• in conducting student-led seminars upon reading a variety of articles by thoughtful authors in architecture/planning, geography, urban and intellectual histories, social science, and philosophy
• in comprehending a variety of “urban tenets” important in the evolution of cities and neighborhoods so as to apply them to transform local/regional communities into a more sustainable, just, and robust ones in which we live.
• in acquiring the ability to collaborate students from different disciplinary background, resulting in compelling result, thus contributing to raising an intellectual and ethical culture of the seminar.

A single-volume report (plus pdf) containing all the work from the three topics will be due at the end of the semester.

Course Title: Placemaking and placekeeping

Place and placemaking are hotly debated topics among architects, urban designers, planners, and policy makers. But what is this rather abstract notion of ‘place’? What is placemaking, and why is it so central to many professional and academic discussions? Who are ‘placemakers’? Are we?

This course demonstrates that ‘place’ and ‘non-place’ is all around us, and that a wide range of visions on place have greatly influenced our everyday environment. Through reading, discussing, analyzing, and making places, students learn how places shape us and how we shape places. A two-part approach first introduces place as a social, cultural, and psychological construct. In the second part of the course, students are introduced to the active profession and discourse of placemaking. They learn that so-called ‘placemakers’ are not just the usual suspects – although architects, urban planners and designers have certainly left their mark on the urban environment. Instead, they discover a wide range of artists, activitists, citizens, and governments that each have their own definition of place and making place.

This course introduces and explores the concepts and conceptions of place, placemaking, and placekeeping through a mixture of lectures, discussions, analyses, and placemaking exercises. As an intellectual domain seminar, students read, watch, and discuss texts, documentaries and films on place, placemaking, and placekeeping. But the course goes further than abstract observation and critique. To truly learn about defining, making, and keeping place, students also read and discuss Buffalo, a treasure trove of American visions of place. 

Course Title: Materials Archtects Engineers

The seminar will focus on materials and their development in design by modern architects & engineers.

Course Title: ON OBJECTS

This reading seminar investigates distinct theoretical frameworks addressing our relationship to the physical world. The course is structured around ten themes. The common denominator of the readings is a carefully articulated and distinct proposal of how the material world could relate to us. The texts are meant as offerings for the students’ own explorations. Classes are organized around in-depth student discussion. The course requires an in-depth reading of the texts and students are expected to proactively and independently address gaps in architectural history and theory. The objective is to broaden the range of theoretical tools and arguments available to students to critically evaluate and contextualize architectural works and also their own studio projects.

Any 500 level or higher graduate course at UB may count as an elective in the M.Arch program. If a student wishes to take a course outside of the Department of Architecture, they must work with the department offering the course to register. The courses below are those offered by the Department of Architecture. Note that all of these courses have limited seats because they are dual listed with an undergraduate section.

Please note that additional technical methods and intellectual domain seminars can also be used as electives in the M.Arch program. 

In this seminar students will explore various ways in which architectural education can be incorporated into the Pre K-8 curricula to enhance learning in a range of subject areas, such as math, science, social studies, and art. Students will engage in readings, discussions, and planning sessions prior to partnering with a local architect, Pre K-8 teacher, and the seminar instructor to form a teaching team. This teaching team will subsequently design and teach a ten-lesson project with Buffalo Public School students over the course of the semester culminating in a gallery exhibition. Students will be responsible for coordinating with their architect and teacher to implement the project outside of scheduled class time. This seminar is part of the Buffalo Architecture Foundation’s Architecture+Education project, which is supported by the American Institute of Architects Buffalo/Western New York Chapter.

This could will also count as a technical methods: urban design seminar for the spring 2024 semester per approval from the Director of Graduate Studies. 

Course Title: UNCONVENTIONS

The seminar will focus on developing novel and broadly-applicable representation techniques as a tool for critical reflection on the built environment. 

Operating between model space and paper space, UNCONVENTIONS will adapt technical drawing techniques within Rhino to create novel workflows and narrative technical drawings with an urban focus. Following a series of guided exercises, students will deploy these techniques to create complex, large-format drawings.

UNCONVENTIONS is to be coordinated with the Banham Fellow research program and the upcoming exhibition ILLIQUID ASSETS in the spring semester.

Any student who is interested in doing a thesis in the future is encouraged to take this course as an elective. Students planning to do directed research this spring are highly encouraged to register during the same semester. 

The ultimate goal of the course is to guide graduate students to develop a methodological and theoretical grounding for thesis projects. We will do this through reading assignments, writing exercises, group discussions, and peer review sessions. By the end of the semester, each student will have the opportunity to develop a high quality research prospectus. This course is less about deep theoretical discussions on research than a pragmatic, “how-to” dive into devising a specific roadmap and organizational configuration tailored to each student’s thesis work.

This course probes and subverts the typical: typical behavior, typical design, and typical methodologies. We will investigate the in/visibilities of labor embedded within architectural practice through drawing and modeling, examining specifications, and fabrication and construction. We will explore abstractions in architectural representation by operating between the micro - architectural detailing – and the macro - zoning regulations, borders, infrastructure - that shape the built environment. This course is an introduction to Building Information Modeling (BIM) through Revit, a BIM software. Students will also develop methods to both extract and produce quantitative and qualitative “information”. Throughout the process, we will challenge and critique notions of efficiency and automation embedded within the BIM design paradigm.