SITUATION
GRADUATE STUDIO
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN3G3 - ARCH 422 - WINTER 2024COORDINATOR
Meredith MillerPROFESSORS
Meredith Miller, Peter Halquist[MATERIAL] Vistor's Center
Arch 422, the final studio in the first year of the M.Arch program, introduces a range of design methods and representational techniques that interrogate materials up close and within the distributed contexts of their life cycles. From part-to-whole logics of assemblies to the cultural and ecological impacts of building materials, students make connections between the physical qualities of architecture and what they tells us about the world.
Throughout the semester, students work between physical making & material experimentation and life cycle research on a material of their choice. Students develop individual positions on their material–from societal impacts to unseen labor practices, from end-of-life challenges to alternative uses, and other insights that inform their designs. Meanwhile they use drawing and models to test tectonic approaches to configuring space and program through specific qualities of their materiality.
These studies culminate in a proposal for a [Material] Visitor's Center next to the Cuyahoga River, surrounded by Cleveland Ohio's steel industry. While visitor’s centers typically create a space for people to learn and appreciate sites associated with traditional ideas of nature, beauty and human history, these projects reimagine the visitor’s center as a place that produces and maintains knowledge of material processes that underpin contemporary life, as well as the people and landscapes involved in those processes.