Dynamic Digital Media ARCH 459/659.01 Course Schedule: Tuesdays. 2:30 pm - 4:25 pm
Location: Rand Hall Computer Class Room
Prerequisites: ARCH 151/152 or ARCH 551/552 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Ezra Ardolino 
Student Work - Fall 2007
Course Overview: APPROACH
This course will be presented as an introduction to the generative techniques and methodologies of computational modeling found within the Autodesk Maya software. While this course will serve as a device for establishing a basic set of modeling competencies it will double as a platform for the investigation of dynamic animate systems of formalization and representation. Specifically, this course will investigate the production of digital architectural media via the documentation of 2, 3 and 4-dimensional data with a variety of representational techniques (still images, animations and interactive digital interfaces) and software (Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Macromedia Flash).
ORGANIZATION + REQUIREMENTS
This course will operate via the utilization of a hybrid lecture/lab format as formalized weekly lectures are routinely followed by in-class assignments and workshops. Along with regular attendance and the completion of in-class assignments students will be responsible for delivery of both midterm and final projects. Collaboration between students is encouraged at all levels of this course.
Back to Top
Dossier (Image, Graphics, Text)
ARCH 459/659.02
Course Schedule: Mondays.10:10 am - 12:05 pm
Location: 200 Rand Hall and Rand Hall Computer Lab Occasionally
Professor: Branden Hookway
Prerequisites: ARCH 151/152 or ARCH 551/552 or permission of instructor.
Course Overview: This is a diagram of the typical trajectory of a book project.
It shows the wandering of the author as he or she interprets the world, gathering and eventually synthesizing information. Once compressed, the content is relayed to what the Dutch would call a form-giver, the one who designs the final product.
Compare the amplitude. The amplitude is our ability to freely engage and interpret the world directly, to move away from what is already known, and to explore.
This is a diagram of a new approach, where the creation of content and form are in dialogue from start to finish. When design practice is enlarged and superimposed on the creation of content, the designer takes part in the same processes of wandering and refinement as the author does.
While the pathways followed by the designer and author occasionally diverge, it is the separation and tension between them that generates ideas and qualities that could be produced in no other way. —Bruce Mau, “Twelve Strategies”, in Life Style (2000)
We live in time when media technologies and image culture increasingly impact our social, political, and economic life world. It is no suprise that architecture, a discipline long fascinated with media technologies, has sought to engage this situation. Arguably architecture has done so most thoroughly through print media. Dossier [Image, Graphics, Text] will explore print graphic design as a component of research and as a carrier of content potentially equal in importance to the production of text. Dossier will be both technical and speculative: technical in addressing the practice and history of graphic design; speculative in addressing issues in contemporary media culture and in seeking out new forms of producing and presenting research material. We will begin with a set of readings on media, visual culture, and technology from the postwar to the contemporary, and continue with an examination of recent cultural products making use of graphic material as an important carrier of content. Case studies might include logos, art projects, fashion and design magazines, graphic novels, theory journals, architecture publications, packaging and branding, film and video, typography, and websites, new media, and gaming. We will develop research topics through graphic design, producing timelines, image essays, typographic compositions, etc in place of essays. Dossier will emphasize the suitability of the graphic strategy to the content, and will refine these strategies through crits and reviews. Research will be collated and presented at the end of the semester in the form of a workbook.
Back to Top
Patternology ARCH 459/659.03 Course Schedule: Wednesdays. 7:30 pm - 10:00 pm
Location: 144 East Sibley Hall
Prerequisites: ARCH 151/152 or ARCH 551/552 or permission of instructor. Enrollment will be limited and permission of instructor required.
Professor: Paul Anderson and
David Salomon Studies from Light and Color Course (MIT), Gyorgy Kepes, 1965.
Course Overview: From the structure of the universe to the print on your grandmother’s couch, patterns describe a vast array of conceptual and physical phenomena. For architecture, something that so easily traffics between scientific rigor and personal taste demands attention, which partly explains their revival. While traditionally marginalized as frivolous decoration or overly deterministic principles, recent advances in digital and materials technology have helped produce a new generation of patterns with protean vitality and multifarious intelligence. These current versions are imbued with properties of elasticity, aperiodicity, opulence, variegation, and idiosyncrasy – qualities that enable them to simultaneously engage numerous operative and material domains. Their newly developed capacity to link seemingly disparate intellectual and cultural categories – such as organization and sensation, graphics and behavior, and process and content – provides an opportunity for a more precise and expansive role for patterns in architecture.
The course will cover a selected history of the pattern in design and speculate about future initiatives through a series of seminars and graphic workshops. The seminars will compare a variety of theoretical definitions of the pattern – including ones elaborated by Frank Lloyd Wright, Norbert Weiner, Gyorgy Kepes, Herbert Simon, Christopher Alexander, and Gregory Bateson – and link them to contemporary architectural debates. Workshops will document patterns from design movements that were contemporaneous with those theories and trace their evolution to today’s versions.
Back to Top
Digital Capture: Photography of Place ARCH 459/659.04 Course Schedule: Mondays and Wednesdays. 7:30 pm - 10:00 pm
Location: 221 Tjaden Hall
Prerequisites: ARCH 151/152 or ARCH 551/552 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Greg Halpern
Course Overview: This course will address the technical asspects of taking, altering and printing digital photographs, as well as the conceptual problems and possibilities of photography in the digital age. Specific attention will be paid to photography’s relationship to place -to the city, to architecture and to the landscape. Slide shows will provide a historical survey of photographic practice, from the inception of the medium through the contemporary scene, with a particular emphasis on the last ten years. The course includes weekly photographic assignments, critiques and readings. Emphasis is placed on the realization of an independent and ambitious final project.
Back to Top 
