Student Work Samples
Core 3: Cities
Graduate Section Led by Christina Truwit
Lecturers: Christina Truwit, Lafayette Cruise, Jess Myers
Travel course to Sweden
Sweden's Million program fell victim to the same pressures as many public housing schemes of its era. As worker demographics shifted, resident needs changed, and maintenance costs mounted, the political will to ensure housing for all waned. The Million program was largely privatized, and Stockholm fell into a persistent housing crisis. In partnership with the Stockholm based architecture students, Core 3 Cities studio revisits the initial ambitions of the Million program to house city residents with dignity. Students investigated the contemporary needs of Stockholm residents, as well as the lands of the city to propose designs that rise to the idea of housing with dignity.
Thesis Discursive Workshop
Section Led by Christina Truwit
Lecturers: Christina Truwit, Debbie Chen, Malcolm Rio, Aaron Tobey, Carlos Medellin, Ana Gabriela Loayza
Thesis Discursive Workshop serves as a pedagogical bridge between Thesis Seminar and Thesis Project. TDW hones in on students' discursive skills, written, oral, and visual, so they can choreograph a robust discussion around their work. Students will test the robustness of their thesis construct by examining a work-in progress provisional artifact, a database, and an interface.
Architectural Analysis
Section Led by Christina Truwit & Aaron Forrest
Lecturers: Cara Liberatore & Aaron Forrest
This semester, students will produce an in-depth analysis of selected works of architecture that are
decidedly caught between the ‘universal’ tenets of modernism and the particularities of vernacular,
subaltern building practices. Through careful analysis, students will aim to dismantle prescriptive
relationships between material and culture, vernacular and climate, and technology and history. This
course argues for the careful redeployment of Semper’s four elements not as originally conceived, in
relation to discrete material conditions, but rather as open-ended categories for exploration and critique.
Representation itself will also aid in the revelation of complexity between these original elements. Students
will be asked to contend with the problems of abstraction, and encouraged to produce a more literal
accounting of materiality, tectonic relationships and idiosyncrasies of ‘as-found’ built conditions in their
work. Students will explore the graphic and narrative limits of architectural drawing conventions as they
relate to each element - the worm’s eye view (ground), the reflected ceiling plan (roof), the elevation
oblique (enclosure), and techniques of representing material and occupation (hearth) - and explore how
they are capable of privileging (or denying) alternative architectural narratives and subjectivities.
Race & Modern Architecture
Section Led by Christina Truwit
Lecturers: Amy Kulper & Summer Sutton
As Mabel O. Wilson, Irene Cheng, and Charles L. Davis II, the editors of our
textbook, Race and Modern Architecture, say in the first sentence of the book –
“Architectural historians have traditionally avoided the topic of race.” – but to do
so, is to omit a critical dimension of the story of our discipline. Who does
architecture serve? What constituencies does architecture include and exclude?
Who performs the labor of architectural construction? Who is granted the
privilege of creating the architectural imaginary? These are the critical questions
that surface when considering modern architecture from the vantage point of
race.
This course examines the advent of modernism through the lens of race,
exploring how the formation of Enlightenment epistemologies paralleled the
formation of categories of cultural exclusion, like race.
