Standing on the grand staircase leading into the quadrangle of a major American university, I asked the tour guide, “Where is the school of architecture?,” she pointed behind me to the far corner of the campus away from the quadrangle and said “Over there, but we never see them, they never leave the building.”
At any university, it is common knowledge that architecture students spend endless hours in their building. The lights are always on and semi-conscious figures dressed in black wander about, but does anyone know what goes on in there? This is your opportunity to find out. Join me for an architecture studio.
The goal of the final studio is to explore new ways for designing and building architecture whether through a non-traditional design process, new materials, or new construction techniques. Each professor has an area of expertise and students choose which area interests them most. Buildings are then developed using the exploratory techniques. Of course none of the work will ever be built. This theoretical method is unique to architecture schools and difficult for many to understand. Medical students, after all, learn on cadavers and then patients, education majors learn by teaching, and mechanics learn by fixing machines. Logically, architecture students should build real buildings.
But architecture school at the University of Pennsylvania is not only about building construction, the program exposes students to many different types of design including but not limited to architecture. This semester the architecture department at Penn is offering courses in furniture and industrial design, digital fabrication, computer programming, robotics, set design, urban planning, development and something called non-linear design--a particular interest of mine.
Over the next fourteen weeks, you will learn about the inside workings of an architecture design studio. And on the last day in May after seven years and two schools of architecture education, I will graduate, and I will finally have to leave the building.
