Advanced Option Studio: Structured Play
This studio asks how architecture might emerge from direct sensory experience, empathetic listening, and shared understanding, rather than form or image alone.
Valdrada by Tvisha Arora.
This studio partners with teachers at Pittsburgh Montessori School, whose expertise shapes our work. Students learn to communicate across difference, practicing architecture as an act of care and responsibility.
Craft is positioned as an active, iterative thought process, not a record of decisions already made. Through analog drawing and full-scale making, students develop an agile, inventive process grounded in direct engagement with materials and people.
Students design a small, experimental, neighborhood-scale Montessori school in Pittsburgh for early childhood education. The project emphasizes accessibility, sensory experience, and inclusive learning environments, with attention to children with visual, motor, sensory, or cognitive disabilities. Students are encouraged to think critically about early childhood pedagogy and propose new models for the neighborhood schoolhouse.
The studio begins at the scale of the hand, with Montessori materials, then moves to the body with classroom furniture, to the classroom, and finally to the building as a whole. Students explore how architectural space can support diverse bodies, modes of perception, and ways of learning through materiality, light, sound and touch.