Spring 2025 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.

Sub-title:  Re-Assembling the City

This course utilizes direct experience—including hands-on recording and full-scale making—in order to engage with the city of Buffalo and its architectural artifacts, their histories, and potential futures.  We will study historical building fragments, exploring methods of construction and reconstruction, as well as   their transformation, in order to gain a deeper understanding of materials and methods of building, and to reveal new tectonic possibilities.    

Skills of observation, analysis, and craft will be sharpened through field work, drawing/recording exercises, and hands-on material experiments.  The surrounding city and its historic building components will provide the context for reflection and response.  Working with tools in the shop will facilitate a process-based approach to the re-making of architectural elements and to their transformation/adaptation  into new designs.    

Sub- title: DESIGN FOR RESILIENT ENVIRONMENTS

Resilience is often framed as either a series of recoveries or a sequence of capacities. From both perspectives, infrastructure emerges as a ready-made, instrumental force, enabling current conditions to ‘bounce’ back to prior states or advance toward future ones. In this course we will examine resilient infrastructure differently, focusing on two often-overlooked characteristics in design education: infrastructure is more than just a collection of basic tools (such as pipes, bridges, or data banks); it is also a cultural concept that shifts across time and place. Studying it calls for historical analysis and an examination of its social and ecological impacts. And second, if infrastructure is to be resilient, designers must be prepared to support communities not in returning to flawed conditions after disruptions but in making informed choices about designing the future. These distinctions will be considered through case studies in which students critically examine the evolution of informal incremental housing (housing built over time) as an example of a resilient infrastructure developed in the Global South with relevance for the housing crisis in the Global North.

Sub-title: 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 (NYSERDA) under PON 3981: Energy Efficiency and Clean Technology Training.

Sub-title: Process, Promise, and Politics of World Heritage

In 1972, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted the “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage,” officially launching an effort to safeguard places of “outstanding value to humanity.” Since then, a total of 1,223 places across 168 countries have been designated World Heritage Sites. More recently, UNESCO has expanded its scope to also include inscriptions for “Creative Cities,” in recognition of driving cultural industries, and “Intangible Cultural Heritages,” listing nonphysical living traditions. But while such designations have obvious benefits in terms of international recognition and protections, many regions are severely underrepresented, despite having no apparent lack of sites of universal value and significance (including the United States—where only 12 cultural sites are designated). Further, disparities between the Global North and South beg important questions about such processes in terms of engagement, representation, value, and benefit.

All considered, what agency does world heritage play in our cities, regions, and nations? Can world heritage listing improve the built environment? Contribute to quality of life? Fuel local economies? Drive tourism? Build social and cultural capital? Inform more sustainable futures? Expand cultural and historical canons? In this seminar, we will not only study and debate the concepts, processes, and outcomes of world heritage listing and its urban ramifications (as the highest designation for recognition of the built environment), but also perform research and prepare documents to propose sites of world heritage for our collective urban benefit in the Buffalo-Niagara region. 

Sub-title: Architectural Geometry and Construction  

This course will introduce students to a variety of computational form-finding techniques tied to material and fabrication constraints. Course material covers a range of topics in architectural geometry, built case studies, and demonstrations of how construction-aware digital modeling precedes fabrication and manages large-scale assembly. Special focus is placed on form-active and surface-active structures like gridshells, segmented shells, and cable nets. Instruction on modeling approaches that ensure buildability and efficiency through physics-based simulation, planarization, and other material-driven techniques are of particular interest.  Class time is a balance of lectures, tutorials, and working sessions that provide hands-on experience with Grasshopper, Kangaroo2, and other associated plug-ins that facilitate construction-aware modeling and material production. Course content is structured into a series of workshops on visual programming, physics-based simulation, structural morphology, and the digital fabrication equipment available in the SMART Fabrication Factory. 

As a technical methods course in the Situated Technologies Research Group, the focus is on transferrable design techniques driven by the evolving relationship between emerging technologies and the built environment. The tools and processes introduced in ST coursework provide both a means and a medium for our research. The influence of the technical arts on architecture has carried through to present day, reinvented by the accessibility of advanced digital tools and manufacturing equipment. Technical expertise helps facilitate innovative design thinking, and it is essential that architectural research creatively and skillfully responds to an increasingly unpredictable environment. The course will take an architectural-engineering approach to a design-build project, demonstrating a modeling process that heavily leverages an understanding of geometry to address the realities of manufacturing and construction.  

Sub-title: Generative and Evolutionary Design Exploration Methodologies

This course introduces computational design exploration methodologies to support informed decision-making in multi-objective design problems. During the conceptual design phase, designers explore various aspects of a design challenge, synthesize requirements and objectives into alternatives, and iteratively evaluate and refine solutions. In recent years, computational tools and multi-objective search algorithms have emerged to generate numerous design alternatives, provide real-time performance assessments, and assist in making informed decisions. Evolutionary design methods, particularly genetic algorithms, have been increasingly utilized to explore diverse solution sets, preventing fixation on initial ideas and broadening the range of alternatives in a manageable way.

In the first half of the course, students will focus on parametric modeling, learning to create 2D patterns and 3D geometries using Grasshopper. The second half will cover performance-based design studies, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and structural performance, alongside design exploration and optimization methodologies, including genetic algorithms. These topics will prepare students to address multiple performance-based design objectives during the conceptual phase of design. The course will include a blend of lectures, tutorials, and discussions based on assigned readings.

Sub-title: Augmented Realities: Identity Exploration through Design (working title)

This seminar (offered within the Inclusive Design Graduate Research Group) focuses on technical methods of visualizing and making, with an emphasis on identity and design. Students will explore techniques for creating digital installations through a hands-on, experimentally-driven approach. Using both manual and digital methodologies, students will explore architecture shaped by identity from around the world and respond to their findings with augmented reality installations. Through targeted individual and group exercises, students will develop and refine their technical skills in spatial representation and virtual space making, as they investigate how personal or collective identities can shape the world around us.

Subtitle: Multispecies Design and the City

Contrary to the commonly held belief that cities are agents of ecological degradation, recent research has found that urban areas are surprising refuges for biodiversity. These urban environments, evolving more rapidly than their rural counterparts, have become hubs of evolution where species quickly adapt to new environments, forming complex and dynamic ecosystems. 

However, despite this flourishing urban biodiversity, this remains largely ignored in traditional approaches to architecture, urban design and planning, which have typically focused on accommodating human needs while neglecting the diverse communities of species that also inhabit the city.

The design research seminar guides students in researching and developing design criteria based on nonhuman urban inhabitants. Students will develop criteria for the design of spaces that not only accommodate but also engage both human and nonhuman life. Each student will produce a “field guide” that presents a set of design criteria based on their research.

The seminar fosters critical thinking, ecological literacy, and the ability to synthesize scientific research into design applications. Co-registration with the spring 2025 Situated Technologies Design Research Studio is highly recommended but not required. 

Sub-title: The Classroom and Its Discontents

The classroom has long been a foundational element of educational environments, evolving in response to both pedagogical and administrative critiques. Despite repeated efforts to eliminate or radically alter it, the classroom remains central to how we conceive schools. This seminar will explore the evolution of the classroom space, examine the challenges and alternatives posed to it, and reflect on its enduring significance. Through seminar discussions, case studies, and drawing exercises we will delve into the lessons the classroom's persistence can offer for the uncertain future of education.

Sub-title: Synanthropes

This seminar examines the manipulation of terrain, whether in the form the garden, field or construction site, and the ubiquitous byproduct of this shaping: the weed. As living things, weeds belong to the class of synanthropes: organisms characterized by their close association with human activity. Synanthropes contrast with the cultivated, even urban, landscape, and interfere with the best laid human plans. Whether native to a terrain (apophyte) or foreign to it (anthropophyte), synanthropes are by definition extraneous to their location, always in the wrong place. And yet they are everywhere. Effective peregrinators in their own right and aided in their spread by colonial enterprise, weeds have insinuated themselves across the globe. By their very ubiquity, they break down any tidy compartmentalization between what might be classified as wild or cultivated. What defines any particular plant as a weed, however, has nothing to do with any botanical or other descriptive criteria. The classification of a plant as a weed is entirely to do with perspective. Thus, as we shall see, weeds are a truly revelatory historical category, the theoretical implications of which have ecological, social, political and even aesthetic implications.

Sub-title: Gender, Sexuality, Architecture, and Space: 1945-1970

In the postwar years, the American home became the center of a new national focus on consumption and leisure. This course explores domestic functions through the lens of gender and sexuality, looking at the relationships among identity, bodies, and architectural spaces. How did users of the home accept or challenge prevailing cultural norms of domestic life, gender, and sexuality? How did architects and patrons try to reimagine the boundaries of identity and domestic space? What role did materialism and politics play in the design of the home? 

Sub-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. 

Sub-title: Material Qualities:

The seminar will focus on the qualities of materials, both familiar and strange, through readings, case studies, drawing and making.

ARC 596 Elective: Special Topics - Tiffany Xu 

Subtitle: “Wall Sections”

The wall section drawing codifies an assembly sequence that consists of structure, auditory or thermal insulation, water redirection, and finish appearance. This seminar builds upon themes explored in the 2024 fall semester seminar “Material Fictions” and maintains partial perspectives and situated knowledge as a framework for design thinking. The spring semester shifts the medium of exploration to sectional drawing. Precedents will focus on tensions between traditional vernaculars and imported modernisms. Students will come up with their own logics of layering, screening, and discerning between spaces.

This course is designed to develop a basis for a research project of your choice (final thesis project, grant application, policy document, independent research project, etc.). You will explore different research methods, theoretical references, and ways to plan your work. You will also dive into your topic and hone your main ideas. The course relies on readings, writing exercises, in-class workshops, instructor and guest presentations, discussions, and peer review. By the end of the semester, you will have developed a thesis and/or research project prospectus, with a roadmap tailored to your work and interests.