Students explore architecture through the lens of design-build as a live act, rather than as separated or sequenced endeavors. This intentional fusing of ideation and realization borrows from live improvisational theater as a forum for space-making and narrative development, as a means of breaking down the inertial limitations to the architectural creative act.

Project Examples

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The live assignments take place within existing architecture, and attempt to transform banal and every-day environments into spaces of performance and enactment of an alternative reality.

Rather than creating space from whole cloth, the interventions must transfigure an existing context. This allows a benchmark for assessing the success of the work, as well as an inherent tension between the veiled and created spaces that must be resolved.

Light is the primary tool that was used for the class exercises because of its malleability and for the immediacy of its effect. Students learned to manipulate space through light by studying its capabilities and intricacies in real time as they shaped and reshaped space, altered materiality, and re-presented the familiar.