Misfits: Design and Prototyping with Incompatibility

This seminar investigates architectural design and prototyping grounded in local material conditions, circularity, and making, amid resource depletion and labor shortage. Students engage methods for working with irregular, non-standardized forms, geometries, and materials, treating their incompatibility as a plural design condition while developing an understanding of the processes and contexts from which such irregularity arises. Grounded in tectonic theory and adaptive reuse, the course moves through a sequence of exercises, cataloging, analyzing, designing, and prototyping, that integrate misfit forms into contemporary building practice. Students build a critical framework alongside a body of speculative work that reimagines materials and techniques for sustainable practice, contributing to an emerging mode of spatial making attentive to the specificity of place and resources.