arcCA asked each of California’s nine NAAB accredited architecture programs for descriptions of coursework that addresses the realities of architectural practice. USC responded with an overview of their curricular and extra-curricular engagement with practice, which provides a useful introduction to this section. From Woodbury University, we include a synopsis of their three-course Professional Practice sequence, a straightforward approach to the question. SCIArc contributes an eloquent description of coursework in construction documents. The two Cal Polys, unbeknownst to one another, each submitted instances of integration of technical knowledge into design studios. UCLA describes its emphasis on research through digital technology. And CCAC and UCB offer examples of investigations at the level of constructability, through a detailing class and a seminar in off-site fabrication. For reasons obscure to the editor, a green building course offered by the New School never reached us, and we regret its absence. We supplement these items—which, we should emphasize, are meant not as a comprehensive survey but as food for thought—with two ‘ringers’: an award winning construction documents course from Arizona State University and a Washington University course in which students build a concrete wall to Tadao Ando’s specifications.
PRACTICE INTEGRATION
Robert Timme, FAIA, Dean, USC
As a professional institution with a long-standing tradition of providing education and training to architects in Southern California and beyond, the USC School of Architecture has always presented the practice of architecture as an integrated component of the professional degree programs. This integration is reflected both in the introduction of professional practice issues in the curriculum from the first year through the upper division and in the reinforcement of those issues by involvement of the professional architectural community in the school through the activities of the USC Architectural Guild, activities that expose students to the full range of “real world” professional issues.
The curriculum initiates this exposure with the first year course Architecture 114: Architecture, Culture and Community, which presents the responsibilities of the profession by discussing practical and spiritual needs represented by the cultures of the communities which architects serve and the social and urban environments that result. The student has contact with professionals from many areas of architecture, from landscape, planning, and development to lighting design, construction, and law.
This emphasis on integration of social, cultural, economic, and environmental issues is reinforced by the structure of the design studios, which often use the Los Angeles urban context for project orientation. The studios involve teaching faculty made up overwhelmingly of registered, practicing architects.
Four professional practice courses are required of all upper division students. These courses provide the opportunity for practitioner / educators to discuss issues from predesign to contract documentation using case study methods. These issues are made relevant to the students’ design studio work and incorporated with office and project visits.
Internship work experiences are an important and integral part of the education of many USC architecture students. Students are eligible for internships following the completion of the third year of design studio. Selection is based upon application and demonstrated academic achievement. Student interns are paid an hourly wage and many receive an additional tuition scholarship from the sponsoring firm. Internships provide students the opportunity to examine their interests, use newly acquired skills, and test their stamina under the real-time demands of the work place. Students receive practical experience by working directly with top design professionals on current building projects.
Coursework at the School is further reinforced through activities of the USC Architectural Guild. Founded in 1958, the Guild not only functions as a support group for the School of Architecture, it forms a unique link between USC architecture students and the professional community. Its members come from all aspects of the architecture, design, construction, and real estate development industries.
The Guild sponsors a number of educational events, scholarships, and annual traveling fellowships, which allow fourth- and fifth-year students to study architecture and urbanism in a country of their choice. The Guild holds seminars on topics such as portfolio preparation and interviewing as a part of a week of activities related to a spring job fair. Each year, the Guild selects four students to sit on the Guild board, which meets once a month to discuss forthcoming initiatives. The student representatives in the past have organized events designed specifically for students, such as office tours, construction site visits, and career development programs on campus.
All these activities give students the opportunity to enjoy valuable experiences outside the studio and provide them with additional insight into the profession to help prepare them for their future.
PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE SEQUENCE
Woodbury University
“Documentation and Codes,” the first of three required professional practice courses, reviews legal codes and regulations that affect architecture and influence design. Students study the development of project documentation based on local codes, with an emphasis on drawing format, organization, and specification.
In the second course in the sequence, “Research and Pre-Design,” students investigate theory and techniques for analyzing and integrating design methodologies, site, and social and organizational conditions into criteria for architecture. The theoretical and practical context for the students’ degree projects is researched and developed. Along with the completion of a substantiated written position of intent, students are expected to select a project site, to write a program, and to articulate a design methodology.
The final course, “Documents and Project Administration,” covers design delivery and project & firm management, including an analysis of documents, services, professional fees, budget and cost estimating, global markets, and professional ethics.
THE REALITY OF MAKING: COLLABORATIVE WORKING DRAWINGS
National AIA Education Honor Award Recipient
Max Underwood, AIA, Arizona State University
This course focuses on the development of a set of collaborative working drawings for a commission under construction. Graduate students divide themselves into teams of three and select an architect to work with for the exercise. (Over the years, students have worked with Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, Rafael Moneo, Morphosis, Antoine Predock, Rick Joy, William Bruder, and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.) After researching their architect and taking site visits to previous built work, the team begins developing a speculative theory of construction and detailing for the architect. Utilizing design development documents from publications or the architect’s office, the team analyzes the design evolution of the project in an attempt to understand why specific formal and technical vocabulary selections were being made. On the basis of these insights, the team begins a preliminary, speculative set of working drawings and details.
The first test of the team’s speculative working drawings comes with a construction site visit. The team visits the project under construction and, in discussions with client, contractor, and crafts people, begins to discover disjunctions between their conjectures and the actual building processes and built reality. As collaborative shop and field documentation continues, issues of the realities of technique, representation, invention, and judgment are raised and discussed.
The team revises both their speculative theory and working drawings, based on this collaborative effort, to reflect their new knowledge and conjectures. The development of structural and detail systems is achieved through the analysis of case studies, professional handbooks, and talking with specific product manufacturers. Students do not copy details, but develop new details that convey an understanding of the architects’ aesthetic, functional, and economic intentions.
Utilizing the collaborative working drawing set in office and site visits with the architect, the team discusses the architect’s design process, formal and technical vocabulary selections, and construction problems. The team then revises the set and compares it to the actual contract documents produced by the architect. The comparison reveals important professional lessons about the representation of sub-system assemblies, coordination, and construction management.
Four sets of collaborative working drawings are developed concurrently in the seminar. They result in a cross-fertilization of ideas and methodologies that fuels inter-team debate regarding individual architectural language and its ability to depart from the realities of contemporary technology and construction practices.
CONSTRUCTION DOCUMENTS
John M. Bencher, SCIArc
The essence of developing construction documents is the presentation of complex design through the application of a standard language. This standardized language is the result of the need to clearly communicate the content of the design to a third party that has not been involved in the development of the project and is being introduced to the project in its completed state for the first time. Creativity and expression are found in the organization, clarity, and craftsmanship of construction documents.
Construction documentation requires understanding the process by which the documents are produced, as well as their language. It involves the languages of other disciplines (structure, mechanical, electrical, etc.), the types of documents that should be produced (control drawings, plans, sections, elevations, details, etc.), and the sequence essential to success. It may include the development of unique or atypical drawings (diagrams, three-dimensional, composite). Construction documentation is a craft, and the process is perfectible.
The process of construction documentation involves the sequencing and coordination of multiple authors responsible for varying contents. Structural, mechanical, plumbing, electrical, acoustic, landscape, civil, specifications, and numerous other specialties require the coordination of a singular voice.
Language is comprised of symbols / objects structured by syntax, resulting in the capacity to communicate. In construction documentation, the construction community shares the use of line, tone, symbols, text, and number in a specific, codified system to communicate the means of constructing complex objects.
The work of the course is centered on the creation of a construction document package for a small to medium scale, single story residence. The sites are real, and students are able to select their sites from a master plan. All buildings are designed according to a representative sample of code restrictions applicable to projects of this type. Construction methodologies consist of typical wood or metal framing, concrete block or brick masonry, poured-in- place concrete, and/or steel framing as selected by the student. The student also selects interior and exterior finish materials.
DESIGN RESEARCH
David Erdman, UCLA
In the mid nineties, architecture’s first forays into digital environments, digital modeling, and digital fabrication were being played out in the hands of designers in both the academy and private practice. Speculation on these technologies’ cultural impact led to a re-positioning of academic design practice. Could this re-positioning shift the teaching of a seminar? A design studio? How could it impact relationships with clients or contractors?
UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design has fully integrated digital design and prototyping technologies into its graduate program. Courses utilizing CNC milling, vacuum forming, and 3D printing bring together design technology and research. The Department provides students the opportunity to interact with instructors who practice actively with a multitude of contemporary technologies and who find different ways in which these technologies affect practice and research. For instance, the design collaborative servo recently taught a studio that focused on the use of rapid prototyping equipment—a 3D printer—as a learning tool rather than a representational device. The output of multiple 3D models/ diagrams was seen as a tactile way for students to quickly repeat, re-feed, and re-calibrate models. Thom Mayne’s LA Now studio also used digital technology both to portray vast amounts of information to Los Angeles City Officials and to develop a design modeling system that can be added to and modified as the city grows and changes. For the Architecture Biennale 2000, Greg Lynn’s students, working digitally in collaborative teams, considered the design of various interior elements and manufactured prototypes of their proposals directly from digital models. The result was a chain of investigations, each responding to previously manufactured artifacts, each building knowledge based on the previous discovery (below and page 26, top and center).
Over the last few years, UCLA has developed seminars and studios whose attention to design and technology research has enabled students to obtain a level of facility and ability in those areas unavailable outside of the institution. The scope, rapidity of output, and understanding of research as a design practice that produces artifacts, experiments on material, and coordinates complex systems has expanded the boundaries of course offerings. Digital design technology (manufacturing/rapid prototyping) and data management (digitally augmented, graphic, modeling systems) both position UCLA squarely between research and practice. The department not only prepares students for future practice, it creates it.
OFF-SITE FABRICATION: OPPORTUNITIES AND EVILS
Dana Buntrock, Assoc. AIA, UC Berkeley/report by graduate student Brian Padgett
As the production of architecture becomes increasingly complex (with the development of new construction technologies, globalization trends, and economic pressures inflated by rising construction costs), it is more than ever essential for students entering the profession to have a broad understanding of issues of practice. In Professor Dana Buntrock’s graduate seminar, “Off-Site Fabrication: Opportunities and Evils,” students learn first hand how material fabricators affect design.
Students visit a series of local fabricators working in various materials (metal, concrete, wood framing, etc.), ranging in size from large-scale subcontractors to smaller, craft-house operations. Through these visits, they discover unique, regional capabilities and opportunities offered by fabrication facilities.
Concurrent with these class trips, each student conducts research on a collaborative relation between a Bay Area architect or firm and a fabricator or set of fabricators, in order to see how off-site fabrication is exploited by architects to achieve unique material uses, sophisticated structural systems, refined construction quality, and efficiencies in production. This intensive research involves interviews with building professionals (architects, fabricators, contractors, engineers, and others), broadening students’ understanding of architecture as a collaborative process. Students supplement and expand on these profession-related experiences with more conventional academic study. They read and discuss an extensive set of theoretical texts to understand the implications of their field research within a larger historical and global context of fabrication issues.
By merging the unique opportunities offered in field research with expanded insights gained in seminar research and discussion, “Off-Site Fabrication” provides a uniquely rigorous model for efforts in academia to engage with issues of practice.
BUILDING TECHNOLOGY IN THE CONTEXT OF DESIGN
Thomas Fowler IV and Brook Muller, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Upper division architecture students enroll in a building integration studio combining an ECS “studio” and a corresponding design studio. The two courses, with different instructors, meet in the same studio space on alternating days.
Early design studio exercises are exploratory and encourage the use of the computer for its facility in generating rich graphic vocabularies, suggestive of spatial character. In the ECS studio, foundation assignments—”conceptual understandings”— focus on systems that provide comfort to interior spaces, with a goal that students recognize that buildings are connected to larger constructs that extend well beyond the building footprint. Formal and material qualities of infrastructure systems that are ordinarily out of sight and out of mind are identified and graphically described.
Later ECS assignments—addressing such topics as day lighting, thermal performance, acoustics, and water and waste systems—directly enrich students’ design work. A typical ECS assignment has students analyze, quantitatively, an aspect of their studio project (however rough) and use this analysis to inform the next step in design. The assumption is that students will more enthusiastically and successfully contend with problems of building technology when they are presented within a larger framework of design.
As an example, “Inner Skins,” a study of room acoustics, required that students make preliminary decisions about interior finishes in the “interactive main space” of their design project, calculate the reverberation time (RT) of the space that would result from these material decisions, and determine the suitability of these RTs given the use of the space. In most cases, the RTs were unsuitable for speech and similar functions. Students reevaluated decisions about materials in an effort to lower the RTs. In most cases, this reevaluation led to an enrichment of the palette; perforated panels and fabrics, for example, were introduced in configurations that supported the established architectural vocabulary.
An emphasis on the skin of a building—”skintegration”— has promoted a compelling dialogue between studios and offers a tactic for considering larger architectural questions. A building’s skin profoundly influences the identity and character of the architecture (design studio) at the same time it mediates relationships between interior and exterior space, facilitating desirable penetrations such as light and views, while blocking undesirable phenomena, such as direct summer sun and moisture (ECS studio). By limiting and directing the scope of the inquiry, students understand more immediately that a working knowledge of building technology and a goal of designing beautiful buildings are not mutually exclusive but, rather, go hand in hand.
THIRD YEAR STUDIO, PROJECT #2 (PRECEDED BY A CASE STUDY ANALYSIS)
Judith Sheine, AIA, et al., Cal Poly Pomona
In this third-year studio, students are asked to design a small dwelling whose program consists of living/dining/ cooking/sleeping space (500 sq. ft.), bathroom (50 sq. ft.), and storage (50 sq. ft.), with circulation and outdoor decks and patios as appropriate.
Each student models the building at 1” = 1’-0” scale. The model is constructed of materials that are as close as possible to real construction materials, i.e. concrete modeled in Pourstone with wire and mesh reinforcing, wood framing modeled in wood, and steel framing in wood or plastic. The model is constructed in three phases: foundations, framing, and finish materials. Reviews take the form of inspections at each phase. During the process, a daily log is kept, recording construction activity and supplemented with photographs of the construction phases.
A project analysis precedes the construction of the model; it includes a list of materials, cost estimate, systems analysis, identification of key wall sections and details for development, and a construction schedule. For the Final Inspection, each student prepares a completed building model in site at 1” = 1’-0”; final plans, sections, and elevations at 1/4” = 1’-0”; a site plan at 1” = 40’-0”; key wall sections at 1” = 1’-0”; key details at 3” = 1’-0”; bound set of 24” x 36” blueprints of all drawings; and project records, including outline specifications, project analysis, log, and photos of the construction process.
CONSTRUCTION CASE STUDIES / DETAILING
Timothy Gray and Geoffrey Holton, CCAC (California College of Arts and Crafts)
This course is an investigation into the art of building. Through readings, lectures, and field visits, students gain insight into the physical implications of design decisions, the effort and intricacies of construction, and the iterative process of design, as well as an understanding of how design intention is informed and encircled by the tectonics of building. Exercises focus on techniques of construction and the detailing and sourcing of materials required to convey architectural intent. Tours of construction sites are a primary means of study.
Each student first creates a construction document—containing all information required to source and assemble the components—for one of three existing guardrails at CCAC. Students then develop in detail a part of a current studio project—a repetitive feature, such as a window wall or floor system; an “event,” such as an entry or stair; or a joint in the building where different systems interface—using working drawings to specify materials and assembly.
CONSTRUCTING ANDO
Paul Clarkson, Washington University, St. Louis
The course takes students through the design and construction process for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, designed by Tadao Ando, from an owner’s representative/construction manager’s perspective. Students learn why and how decisions were made to achieve a truly outstanding building. Topics addressed include owner requirements, design challenges, site challenges, design and construction team selection, relationship to surrounding buildings, cost issues, contracts, construction administration, perfection/no tolerance construction, construction techniques, quality concerns, and the interrelationship between art and architecture.
Students are given actual situations that confronted the design and construction team and are asked to provide solutions to these problems and challenges. One exercise involves learning to make the trademark, silky-smooth concrete of Ando’s buildings. Students learn about materials, admixtures, mix design, formwork construction, concrete placement, and curing of concrete. They assemble a form, mix concrete, pour concrete, and strip the form to produce a five-foot by three-foot concrete wall.
Originally published 1st quarter 2003, in arcCA 03.1, “Common Knowledge.”
