ARC3016Y S
Instructor: An Te Liu
Meeting Section: L0101
Tuesday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm; Friday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

OBJECT> <EDIFICE is a Research Studio in which students will explore relationships between objects and buildings at various scales. We will begin with close scrutiny of a chosen object –- its material and formal properties, the methods of its making, its reason for existence, and the socio-cultural, historical, economic and technological contexts which inform its value, use, performance, and specificity.

We will analyze, interpret, (re-) represent, dissect, write about and talk about objects, while beginning to think of how objecthood might inform and compel design at various scales. Stemming from the initial study, students will design and build an intermediate “housing” structure at 1:1 scale.

This structure may, in some manner of your choosing, support, display, augment, hide, protect, destroy, de-construct, critique or reflect upon physical and theoretical aspects of the object in question. Students will also design and cast a fitting/fixture in bronze or ceramic as a component of the intermediate structure, and for incorporation into a larger building assembly.

In the latter half of the studio, we will increase the scope of speculation with the elaboration of a “housing for the housing”, be it in the form of a dwelling, an architectural sequence, a museum, a territory, a city. As we move across scales of inquiry, we will continuously and strategically direct attention back to the object –- refreshing and expanding the possible discourses around it, forming and reforming constructive relationships between object and edifice in architectural design.