FORM
GRADUATE STUDIO
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN3G2 - ARCH 412 - FALL 2024COORDINATOR
Adam FurePROFESSORS
Adam Fure, Tess ClancyThe Form Studio investigates the relationship between building form and social formation.
The semester begins with a series of abstract formal exercises and ends with the design of a collective living community. To begin the final project, students discuss the nature of domestic space and what it means to share and care for each other above a sense of individual ownership and comfort. After this initial programming phase, students collectively determine a constituency for which they plan to design. Students then transition into an individual design phase where they develop their neighboring sites in detail. In this stage, students focus on the needs of the people that would live there and the qualitative aspects of their designs.
The site is a neighborhood block of formerly zoned single-family plots that the students rethink in terms of how space can be shared rather than divided. In addition to learning basic concepts of site design, such as circulation, core-periphery, scalar relationships, etc., students are asked to think critically about how space is allocated at the scale of city planning, allowing them to critically examine problematic notions such as “private property” and single-family zoning.
Through their work, students come to understand form in a multitude of ways, from the abstract relationships of geometry and space to the concrete effects of the built environment on social relations.