The primary aim of this studio is to take on a phenomenological approach - to create an ‘architecture of the place.’ It involves a deeply attentive process of making a built environment, rooted in the context.
The design process begins by understanding a heavily context-driven site by observing, recording, and analyzing it first-hand. Students will extract a core intuitive design response from their site observations and learn to express and materialize it through a built form.
This place-making process will focus on larger concerns such as placement on site and spatial organization - gradually leading to tangible aspects such as scale and proportion, materiality, structure, and enclosure; culminating in a meaningful architectural experience.
The secondary aim is to discover a unique design process based on the student’s dominant personality traits. While the overall studio structure is common for all, the design process will be shaped to respond to individual strengths such as introspection or observation, analysis or spontaneity, abstraction or detail orientation, etc.
Thus, the studio aims to understand both external and internal worlds, blending them to form a narrative of a contextual built response, arrived at by channeling innate strengths.
