Required Course
Credits: 2-3-3 (3 semester hours)
Type of Course: Lecture and Lab
Instructors: Michael Gamble, David Green
Prerequisites: ARCH 2211 or 4219, or with approval
Course Overview:
The second course in Construction and Design Integration is required of the M.ARCH. The course requires demonstration of the knowledge of site planning and fundamentals and the fundamentals of building construction through representational conventions. The course is lab-intensive, with students working on graphic assignments either in a digital or analogical format. The first third of the course deals with site planning: grading and drainage, street layouts, storm water retention, retaining walls, and site construction. The remainder of the course expands upon the site planning portion, wherein a hypothetical site and building are used for a sequence of graphic exercises. The exercises confront issues of representing both normative and specialized conditions of construction, including masonry wall systems, precast concrete and curtain wall systems. Students must be able to represent the working components of wall assemblies and understand the relationships of components in terms of building performance. Design integration is stressed through the requirement of drawings at variety of scales. Elevations, axonometrics, wall sections and details simulate the iterative process of description similar to a project's design development stage. Weekly lectures are topical and provide information useful for graphic exercises. The lectures commonly focus on built examples of architecture and landscape architecture that illustrate specifically those issues of construction and representation contained within the graphic problems.
Learning Objectives: The course introduces students to the representational conventions of site planning, which includes material common to both the landscape architecture and the civil engineering disciplines. The conventions of representing existing conditions and interventions to architectural sites extends to architectural construction; e.g. horizontal to vertical, and must be demonstrated through a sequence of graphic exercises. Students must demonstrate the ability to represent proposed architectural intentions for a site and a building through plan, section, wall section, elevation, roof plan and detail. Beyond demonstrating representational conventions, students are challenged to consider legal, performative and aesthetic criteria as critical to the process of design integration.
Course Requirements: Satisfactory completion of a sequence of week-long graphic exercises, and one final design integration exercise.