COURSE OVERVIEW

COA 1011 is the first of two design studios in the Common First Year curriculum.  It is a supervised studio class that meets for two 4-1/2 hour sessions each week, and is required of all undergraduate students entering the College of Architecture.  

The course:

• Proceeds from a broad understanding of design in the world: as a set of operations that shape places, spaces, products, buildings, systems, and environments. Its animating desire is to sponsor and support a curiosity about the world (and everything in it) and to provide the tools with which to engage this world in all its potential complexity and immediacy.
• Accommodates and challenges incoming students who vary greatly in their prior preparation, in their awareness of the designed and built environment, and in their stated preferences for the majors they wish to pursue after the Common First Year.
• Apprentices students in learning to see, to describe, and to understand the world as part and parcel of the process of re-presenting, re-imagining, and re-proposing it.  Students engage objects, buildings, spaces, and situations at different scales and from multiple points of view: how something is made (conceived and produced), used (consumed and experienced), and re-made (construed and interpreted) is all part of the mix.
• Provides an introduction to procedures for framing inquiry – for setting up the “problem‟ as well as the “process’. Students explore a range of different media and genres of thinking, looking, making, and inquiring, and learn to be strategic in their selection and use.