Focused on seeing the world around us, the end of first year studio draws the students to realize their own process of seeing – that seeing is an act that precedes definition, a kind of pre-action controlled through intentionality, interpreted by an internal filter that appropriates meaning. Part of what makes a designer “good” is their ability to dislocate their own subconscious gaze in order to see the problems they are solving through the eyes of those they are designing for. A doghouse does not have to perform like a human house (although sometimes it does), and so on. This project, dubbed “The Lighthouse,” challenged the students to design something architectural that brought others face-to-face with their own inner sight.

An aspiring architect’s ability to interpret, discuss and understand architectural space begins in first year studio. What is Architecture? What is beyond the scope of Architecture? Early studio projects force students to question the common notion that architecture is the backstage and that what's backstage is architecture. This project looks at the architecture of the urban environment through a map of motion and sensorial experiences, begging the question “where do fact and fiction merge?”

The root function of a practicing architect centers on their ability to follow rules, like building codes and client requirements. This first semester project, dubbed the nest, had to hold a half pound object on a 4"x4" platform 48" above the ground a minimum of 4" away from any surface such as a wall, stairwell, tree, etc. The nest could not be permanently affixed to any surface, could only touch the floor at one point but could touch any other amount of surfaces as necessary. Students were asked to take on these rules as a source of inspiration rather than an oppressive constraint in the design of the nest.

In the first years of architectural study students are challenged to develop their ability to perceive the World around them. As an analytical exercise, students were asked to capture movement in a drawing. Whereas traditional architectural graphics represent a still, static thing, the motion drawing is conceived as a multi-relational, disjointed composition. These disjunctions imply what we, the students, were meant to learn: that no singular instance can be understood without looking at the others; each part has a relationship to the rest; and, every construction is off-balance because of the traces of another construction.