Course Objectives

This course introduces concepts, tools, and techniques for the use of digital media in architectural representation. Students will work in and across a variety of software environments in order to produce two-dimensional orthographic drawings, paraline drawings, renderings, diagrams, physical models, and presentation materials. These representational products will be understood as containing a rich set of potentials, both as analytic tools applied to found precedents, and as generative tools engaged in the production of form and spatial ordering systems.

While this course is primarily technical in nature, we will refuse to subscribe to the notion that software proficiency can be taught in a discursive void, insulated from the larger conversations that shape the conventions and development of the discipline. In order to further the aim of “pedagogically aware” technical instruction, the course will adopt a series of attitudes toward orthographic representation as a tactic for approaching digital media. Coursework and precedent studies will be organized between poles of orthographic normalcy (source material that aligns with and responds to flat planes of view) and orthographic deviance (source material that willfully ignores the conventions of fixed view planes, demanding the invention of new representational tactics). Working between these two poles, students will gain command of digital representation as an instrumental device: so deeply embedded in the discipline’s modes of practice that it implicitly helps define the limits of what is architecturally imaginable.

Output

Students will be required to digitally construct a series of architectural and biological precedents. The digital source material will then be analyzed, manipulated, and eventually output using a variety of two- and three-dimensional representational techniques. As a final project, students will organize, layout and print two large format competition-style boards of the work produced throughout the term.

The course will use software packages common to both the professional and academic environments: Rhinoceros, AutoCAD, and Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat). Lectures and weekly assignments will facilitate an awareness of the use of digital media in contemporary practice and allow students to develop a vocabulary and conceptual framework for digital analysis, design, and production in the design studio.