Spring 2026

This studio nurtures a way of making and thinking in design that cultivates the practice of architecture as an act of creative citizenship.

The city of Pittsburgh is our (permanent or temporary) home and the site of many of our studio projects. In this course, students start exploring Pittsburgh as built environment in which their work might be situated, as cultural context they need to interpret, and as creative material for their own work.

This course serves as an introduction to the type of equipment and methodologies utilized in architectural fabrication. Students develop a basic understanding of the field to leverage these processes to explore and represent the complex nature of their designs.

This is the second course in a two-course sequence that introduces students to a broad range of architectural drawing techniques and practices that document, communicate, and generate design possibilities.

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural Representation and Visualization, Computational Design, Architecture (non-majors)

This course builds a capacity for visualizing three-dimensional space through freehand drawing, along with the use of line, tone, and color.
   
Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural Representation and Visualization, Architecture (non-majors)

This course cuts a broad swath through time, geography and cultures, surveying critical episodes in the built environment of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas from ancient times through the 19th century.

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural History, Architecture (non-majors)

This course focuses on how students learn, develop, and make decisions as they transition into architecture education.

This course investigates the history of a wide range of buildings, architecture, cities, landscapes, and theory across the 20th century around the world. 

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architectural History, Architecture (non-majors)

This course takes computers outside the box and outlines a journey of discovery revealing computation as connective tissue encompassing multiple facets of contemporary architectural practice and experience.
  
Fulfills minor requirements for: Computational Design

This studio introduces integrated architectural design as the synthesis of disparate elements, demands and desires. It situates architecture as a technological, cultural, and environmental process that is inherently contingent and entangled yet tethered to a historical project of autonomy. 

This course introduces the fundamentals of strength of materials, computational modeling of structures, and basic finite element (FE) analysis. This is a hands-on, skill-building course about learning how to translate a conceptual design intent into a computational structural model, then applying material and boundary condition constraints to analyze and understand structural behavior.

This course explores the systems of economic, political, social, and regulatory forces driving the production of contemporary architectural projects.

Fulfills minor requirements for: Architecture (non-majors)