School of Architecture

Omar Khan
Location: CFA 201
www.soa.cmu.edu

The SoA educates students in the discipline of architecture emphasizing the role of creativity in architectural design; understanding its historical, social and environmental context; critically engaging technology in its innovation; and ethically working for social progress and justice in the built environment. Our undergraduate and graduate degree programs prepare students for the challenges facing architecture and urbanism in the twenty-first century, namely global warming, artificial intelligence and social justice. We aim to produce discipline-defining designers and thinkers in diverse global contexts. 

This world-class architecture education is enhanced by our position within one of the world’s leading research and entrepreneurship institutions, and by the fundamental premise that architectural excellence demands both rigorous training in fundamentals and the development of unique specializations. Students may extend their core knowledge either through concentration in architecture subdisciplines like urban design, sustainable design or computational design, or through interdisciplinary interaction with CMU’s other renowned programs in the sciences, humanities, business and engineering. Though every SoA student graduates with intensive architecture knowledge, no two graduates leave with the same education. 

In the twenty-first century, few architecture problems are straightforward. Graduates of SoA excel in the roles architects have performed for centuries - and in new roles catalyzed by the depth and breadth of their education - to create and execute innovative solutions to a huge range of emerging global challenges.

Undergraduate Degree Programs

The SoA offers two baccalaureate degree programs: the 5-year, professional Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch), and the 4-year Bachelor of Arts in Architecture (B.A.). Both programs begin with the same studio-based curriculum in the first year, but then begin to diverge in terms of opportunities and outcomes. The B.Arch requires 10 studios and an extensive set of required professional courses, while the B.A. requires a minimum of 4 studios and fewer technical courses, all of which can be spread out over the four years of the program, and thus allow students to explore different opportunities in their studies.

Undergraduate students are admitted to the SoA without a declared degree program. By the end of the second year, students must select either the B.A. or the B.Arch degree program. The student’s academic advisors, faculty, and Head provide mentoring and information to guide the student in selecting their degree option.   

Bachelor of Architecture Program (B.Arch) 

The Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) is a 5-year, first professional degree program accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB, www.naab.org/accreditation/information/) with a carefully defined set of “Program Criteria” (PC) and “Student Performance Criteria” (SPC). The B.Arch is for students proposing to pursue a career as a licensed architect or related profession, and centers around a carefully structured set of professional and technical courses about building design and construction, alongside the social, cultural and professional contexts in which architects operate. Our students graduate with a professional degree that prepares them to excel in practice—but that also launches them into key specialties within and around the profession. 

Due to the technical nature of the B.Arch program at CMU, it is STEM-eligible, meaning that in addition to one year of Optional Practical Training (OPT), an international student on an F-1 visa may apply for a 24-month STEM OPT extension following graduation.

Statement on NAAB-Accredited Degrees

In the United States, most registration boards require a degree from an accredited professional degree program as a prerequisite for licensure. The National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), which is the sole agency authorized to accredit professional degree programs in architecture offered by institutions with U.S. regional accreditation, recognizes three types of degrees: the Bachelor of Architecture, the Master of Architecture, and the Doctor of Architecture. A program may be granted an eight-year term, an eight-year term with conditions, or a two-year term of continuing accreditation, or a three-year term of initial accreditation, depending on the extent of its conformance with established education standards.

Doctor of Architecture and Master of Architecture degree programs may require a non-accredited undergraduate degree in architecture for admission. However, the non-accredited degree is not, by itself, recognized as an accredited degree.

The Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture offers the following NAAB-accredited programs:

  • Bachelor of Architecture (450 units)
  • Master of Architecture (Pre-professional degree or equivalent + 180 units)
     

The next NAAB accreditation visit for the Bachelor of Architecture is scheduled for 2027. The first NAAB visit for continuation of accreditation for the Master of Architecture is scheduled for 2023.

The full 2020 NAAB Conditions for Accreditation can also be found on NAAB’s website at: www.naab.org/accreditation/conditions-and-procedures/

Bachelor of Arts in Architecture Program (B.A.)

The Bachelor of Arts in Architecture (B.A.) is a 4-year liberal studies degree program that allows and encourages interdisciplinary exploration. The program is built around a core foundation of architectural studios and technical coursework, but more than half of the units required for graduation are general studies courses and flexible electives. B.A. students have the opportunity to double major, test the boundaries of the discipline, and explore a variety of interests. If you are a student that embraces creativity, is curious about the world around you, and enjoys engaging both the left and right sides of your brain, the B.A. program could be a perfect fit for you. 

As a 4-year, pre-professional architecture program, the B.A. allows those who are interested to continue in architecture with a 2-year professional M.Arch degree program (often called a 4+2 degree), or to go on to specialize in other fields in graduate school, including urban design, landscape architecture or other fields related to design, the built environment, virtual worlds, community engagement, sustainability, and more. The B.A. also makes it possible for students to transfer into architecture from other studies. 

In the first year, the B.A. program begins with the same studio-based curriculum as the B.Arch program, but then begins to diverge in terms of opportunities and outcomes. The B.A. requires only the first four studios and the core courses from the first two years of the B.Arch sequence, and these can be spread out over the four years of the program. Students may take more studios, specialize in particular aspects of architecture, or explore broadly. 

For students seeking to integrate architecture with another field of study, CMU also offers the BXA Intercollege Degree Programs. BXA students graduate with a Bachelor of Humanities and Arts, a Bachelor of Science and Arts, or a Bachelor of Computer Science and Arts degree.

 

B.Arch Curriculum

Minimum units required for Bachelor of Architecture450
First Year: Poeisis
48-100Architecture Design Studio: POIESIS STUDIO 115
48-104Shop Skills3
62-122Digital Media I6
62-104Design Ethics & Social Justice in Architecture3
62-125Drawing I6
76-101Interpretation and Argument9
99-101Computing @ Carnegie Mellon3
48-105Architecture Design Studio: Poiesis Studio 215
62-123Digital Media II6
62-126Drawing II6
48-240History of World Architecture, I9
48-xxxPittsburgh3
xx-xxxElective6
Second Year: Poeisis
48-200Architecture Design Studio: POIESIS STUDIO 318
48-215Materials & Assembly9
48-116Introduction to Building Performance3
62-225Generative Modeling9
xx-xxxElective6
48-205Architecture Options Studios18
48-241History of Modern Architecture9
48-234Introduction to Structures3
62-275Fundamentals of Computational Design9
48-xxxSeminar II3
xx-xxxElective6
Third Year: Praxis
48-300Architecture Design Studio: Praxis Studio 118
48-315Environment I: Climate & Energy in Architecture9
48-250Urbanism and the Social Production of Space9
48-xxxArchitectural History III (Selective)9
xx-xxxElective6
48-305Architecture Design Studio: Praxis Studio 218
48-380Real Estate for Architects6
48-xxxBuilding Physics 26
48-xxxStructures 26
xx-xxxElective9
Fourth Year
48-400Architecture Design Studio: Praxis Studio 318
48-432Environment II: Design Integration of Active Building Systems9
xx-xxxDesign Ethics (Selective)3
xx-xxxElective9
xx-xxxElective6
48-405Advanced Synthesis Options Studio II18
48-381Issues of Practice6
48-383Ethics and Decision Making in Architecture6
xx-xxxElective 9
xx-xxxElective3
Fifth Year
48-500Advanced Synthesis Options Studio18
xx-xxxElective 9
xx-xxxElective 9
xx-xxxElective6
48-510Advanced Synthesis Options Studio IV18
or 48-519 Architecture Design Studio: Thesis II/ Independent Project
xx-xxxElective 9
xx-xxxElective 9
xx-xxxElective6

B.A. Curriculum

Minimum units required for Bachelor of Arts in Architecture360
Design Studios
48-100Architecture Design Studio: POIESIS STUDIO 115
48-105Architecture Design Studio: Poiesis Studio 215
48-200Architecture Design Studio: POIESIS STUDIO 318
48-205Architecture Options Studios18
Architecture Coursework
48-104Shop Skills3
48-xxxPittsburgh3
48-240History of World Architecture, I9
48-241History of Modern Architecture9
48-116Introduction to Building Performance3
48-250Urbanism and the Social Production of Space6
48-215Materials & Assembly9
General Studies
99-101Computing @ Carnegie Mellon3
48-025First Year Seminar: Architecture Edition I3
76-101Interpretation and Argument9
48-xxxSeminar II3
62-104Design Ethics & Social Justice in Architecture3
62-122Digital Media I6
62-123Digital Media II6
62-125Drawing I6
62-126Drawing II6
62-225Generative Modeling9
62-275Fundamentals of Computational Design9
Electives
48-xxxArchitecture Electives45
xx-xxxUniversity Electives (Outside SoA)45
xx-xxxFlex Electives (In or out of SoA)105

Minors in Architecture

The SoA offers several minors in various specialty subjects related to architecture, some are only available to non-architecture students, others are only available to architecture majors, and still others can be taken by all CMU students. For the most up-to-date list of minors, see: https://soa.cmu.edu/minors

Non-architecture students may minor in: Architecture, Architectural History, Architectural Representation & Visualization, Architectural Technology, and Computational Design.

Architecture majors may minor in: Architectural Design Fabrication, Architectural History, Architectural Representation & Visualization, Building Science, and Computational Design. 

The Minor in Architecture sequence is for students who intend to develop intellectual links to the architectural profession. The scope of courses offered includes a full spectrum of professional issues in architecture. (Available to non-architecture majors only.)

The Minor in Architectural Design Fabrication is intended for students who wish to develop focused, disciplinary expertise in both analog and digital material methods for shaping the built environment and become involved in a community of practice dedicated to a rigorous pursuit of making as a mode of architectural research and cultural expression. It is also for students interested in gaining advanced placement in the SoA's Master of Advanced Architectural Design (MAAD) program. (Available to architecture majors only.)

The Minor in Architectural History is intended for candidates interested in the history of architecture in its many manifestations, including high style and vernacular buildings, western and non-western traditions, built and theoretical works, and rural to urban contexts. Students wishing to pursue the minor should meet with the Architecture advisor to determine if a course is eligible.   (Available to both architecture majors and non-architecture majors.)

The Minor in Architectural Representation and Visualization is intended for students who wish to develop particular skills in architectural representation, and for those who are interested in gaining advanced placement in the SoA's Master degree program in Computational Design (MSCD)(Available to both architecture majors and non-architecture majors.)

The Minor in Architectural Technology is intended for students who seek to develop intellectual links to the technical aspects of the profession. (Available to non-architecture majors only.)

The Minor in Building Science is intended for students that want to deepen their knowledge in the building sciences, and for those who are interested in gaining advanced placement in the SoA's Master degree programs in Building Performance & Diagnostics (MSBPD) or Sustainable Design (MSSD)(Available to architecture majors only.) 

The Minor in Computational Design is intended for students who wish to engage with computation as a vehicle of generative, material, and spatial design exploration, and for those who are interested in gaining advanced placement in the SoA's Master of Science in Computational Design (MSCD).  (Available to both architecture majors and non-architecture majors.)

Advanced Standing in Master Degree Programs

The SoA offers a unique opportunity to undergraduate students who wish to pursue a post-professional Master’s degree in an architecture-related field. The Accelerated Master’s Program (AMP) offers baccalaureate students the opportunity to expedite their completion of a Master’s degree, saving both time and money—and allowing them to hit the job market with specialized knowledge and two CMU degrees. Baccalaureate students can pursue a graduate degree in the following subjects: Master of Architecture (M.Arch) (B.A. students only), Advanced Architectural Design, Architecture–Engineering–Construction Management, Building Performance and Diagnostics, Computational Design, Sustainable Design, and Urban Design. An AMP student must complete all of the units required by BOTH programs, less a maximum of 48 units that can be double-counted. For instance, B.Arch + MSSD-Applied would be 450 units + 135 units less 48 double-counted units, or 537 total units total for two degrees. B.Arch students may begin pursuit of a post-professional Master’s degree through AMP as early as their third year. 

Graduate Degree Programs

Carnegie Mellon University is recognized for outstanding contributions to science, technology, management, policy, and the fine arts. The School of Architecture builds on a tradition of interdisciplinary study. The School of Architecture offers seven (7) Master's degrees, and three (3) Doctoral degrees in the following areas of study:

Master of Advanced Architectural Design

The Master of Advanced Architectural Design (MAAD) is a post-graduate, studio-based program that engages emerging methods of design and fabrication through architectural design to speculate upon future modes of architectural practice, enhanced construction methods, and material culture within the built environment.

Master of Architecture 

The Master of Architecture (M. Arch) is two-year, studio-based, NAAB-accredited, first professional degree program to educate tomorrow's leaders in architecture-related careers. It requires a 4-year, pre-professional architecture program such as the B.A. or its equivalent to enroll, and is thus often called a 4+2 degree. The M.Arch program provides both the broad, comprehensive training in fundamentals required for U.S. professional registration and licensure, and the opportunity to focus on, speculate in, and obtain dual degrees with other research-based master’s programs in the SoA. Our M.Arch program’s strategically small size allows our self-motivated students to shape their individual educational agendas and career paths as they interact directly with a broad array of vertically integrated studios and advanced research projects in the school, the university, the local community, and around the world.

Master of Science/Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture–Engineering–Construction Management

A joint effort between the School of Architecture and the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, the Architecture–Engineering–Construction Management (AECM) programs prepare building delivery professionals for careers in capital project delivery dealing with the entire life-cycle of capital projects, from pre-design to design, construction, commissioning, operation, and maintenance stages. Graduates are educated to become effective decision makers who can positively impact economic, environmental, and ethical aspects of the built environment through professional management strategies. Our graduates have successful careers in government, industry, business, and NGO (non-governmental organization) sectors, prospering in positions where design professionals continuously make large-scale capital project design, construction, and maintenance decisions.

Master of Science/Doctor of Philosophy in Building Performance and Diagnostics

Our graduate programs in Building Performance & Diagnostics (BPD) have long led the world in advanced building technologies that sustainably reshape the built environment. BPD deals with the comprehensive integration of building design and advanced technology, as a means of producing high performance architecture. Led by the Center for Building Performance & Diagnostics (CBPD) and housed within the Robert L. Preger Intelligent Workplace, students have the opportunity to gain both diversity and depth of knowledge from world-renowned and experienced faculty.   

Master of Science/Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Design

Our graduate programs in Computational Design are among the first and best known in the country, and our legacy continues today. The Computational Design program takes a computer science view of design, applying both the science and art of computing to design problems, in relation to creation, presentation, analysis, evaluation, interaction or aesthetic expression; in real and imagined applications, both perceived and conceived. From the beginning, the program has benefitted from close cooperation with other units of the university, particularly the School of Computer Science and the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Our research-based degree programs are intended for practitioners, educators and researchers in architecture, computer science, engineering and those interested in design. Our graduates go on to successful careers in government, industry, academia, and software development. 

Master of Urban Design

The Master of Urban Design (MUD) is a studio-based program distinguished by its emphasis on integrating socially engaged practice with new tools and techniques for representing, understanding, and designing cities; by the opportunity to work in trans-disciplinary teams at the intersection of the arts, humanities and technology across Carnegie Mellon's departments and colleges; and by its location in Pittsburgh—a thriving post-industrial laboratory.

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

The Master of Science in Sustainable Design (MSSD) is a post-professional research-based graduate program focused on enabling deep expertise, critical thinking, and investigation of innovative sustainable strategies for the design of the built environment. The MSSD program explores technical and multicultural aspects of ecological thinking, while enabling actionable expertise in sustainable design methodologies. Based in the legacy of sustainability teaching at Carnegie Mellon University, the MSSD program prepares students to excel in research methods, and to become experts in integrative design thinking for the future of the built environment.

Student Advising

Architecture students can receive advice from many sources, including the faculty, staff, and administration of the School. All SoA undergraduates are urged to meet with the Senior Academic Advisor to review their academic progress and plans before each semester. Such meetings are important to take full advantage of elective possibilities within the curriculum, general progress toward graduation, and professional goal-setting. Students may also check their progress using the online academic audit in the Student Information Online (SIO) and should review the audit results with the senior academic advisor. The Academic Advisor will assist students with registration, academic audits, transfer credits, study abroad, SoA minors, finals grades and academic actions, as well as SoA and university policies and resources. 

In addition, we encourage all of our students to become involved with student organizations such as AIAS or NOMAS, as well as committees such as the Student Advisory Council (SAC) in order to learn from peers. Students should seek advice about the Architectural Experience Program (AXP) and architectural licensing through the Architect Licensing Advisor

Study Abroad

The SoA strongly encourages students to study abroad. The perspective gained through immersion in another culture and language is invaluable. A student is exposed to architectural subjects not readily available at CMU and will study architecture directly in a foreign context. The Office of International Education (OIE) is an excellent resource for getting started for study abroad planning.

Study abroad can fall into four categories: University Direct Exchanges, University Sponsored Programs, External Programs, and Departmental Summer Programs. 

Students are allowed one semester abroad for which they receive studio credit except for those students at approved direct, year-long exchange programs. Students may study abroad in the Fall, Spring, or Summer semesters. Careful planning and scheduling of your courses are necessary when incorporating a study away experience into your curriculum. Students should investigate and start making decisions to study abroad by the fall of their second year, so they can plan their courses accordingly. Please see the academic advisor prior to making any decisions on what term to schedule your study away experience. 

To qualify for a study abroad program other than the departmental summer programs, a student must have completed their third year of the program, have a minimum overall QPA of 3.00, and be in good academic standing (no current academic actions). 

Students in SoA departmental summer programs must have completed their first year, and must be free of any academic actions for the semester prior to studying away, or permission may be denied. Students can petition the UPEC for exceptions. 

Students who participate in a study abroad program for one semester will transfer non-studio course credit by submitting course descriptions of each course taken as well as an official transcript from the host Institution. Official translated transcripts must be submitted to the academic advisor before the beginning of the academic year to receive transfer credit. Grades are not transferred, only credits. Transfer credit is awarded upon receipt of an official translated transcript and only for courses with the grade of a C or better (not C-). When students return from study abroad, they must pin up original work during the study away exhibit, which will be subject to review by the UPEC or designated faculty.

Course Descriptions

for AN up-to-date LIST AND Descriptions of courses being taught in the SoA, see soa.cmu.edu/courses, including links to offering to previous semesters

About Course Numbers:

Each Carnegie Mellon course number begins with a two-digit prefix that designates the department offering the course (i.e., 76-xxx courses are offered by the Department of English). Although each department maintains its own course numbering practices, typically, the first digit after the prefix indicates the class level: xx-1xx courses are freshmen-level, xx-2xx courses are sophomore level, etc. Depending on the department, xx-6xx courses may be either undergraduate senior-level or graduate-level, and xx-7xx courses and higher are graduate-level. Consult the Schedule of Classes each semester for course offerings and for any necessary pre-requisites or co-requisites.


48-025 First Year Seminar: Architecture Edition I
Fall: 3 units
The main objective of this first-year seminar course is on how students learn, develop, and make decisions as they transition into architecture education. The goal of this course is to promote academic success and encourage connections within the SoA and the University at large. Teaching and learning strategies will be introduced to help support the transition into architecture and the development of independent critical thinkers. Students will be introduced to campus resources that support their academic/social/personal integration into the campus community. Topical areas to be covered in the seminar will include academic success strategies in architecture education, academic development, career planning, mentorships, academic and personal support services, and the aspects of professional practice in architecture.

Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-026 First Year Seminar: Architecture Edition II
Spring: 3 units
The first-year seminar (part 2) introduces students to opportunities at Carnegie Mellon University and beyond. The goal of this course is to encourage students to pursue their interests inside and outside of the School of Architecture by introducing a range of opportunities, including study abroad experiences, internships, academic minors/additional majors, and research opportunities. Additional topical areas to be covered in the seminar will include an evaluation of the previous semester, scholarship/academic funding opportunities, ethical decision making, design resume writing/branding, and engaging with the Career and Professional Development Center.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-095 Spatial Concepts for Non-Architecture Majors
Fall and Spring: 10 units
This course serves as an introduction to the spatial concepts of architecture for students from other disciplines. The course is focused entirely on project design work (this is not an historical survey, technical or lecture course). This course is very hands-on Projects will explore the design and experience of spatial environments through a series of creative investigations. The semester will be broken in to 3 parts:Intro/Exploration and a long term project. In Intro/Exploration, students will have many hands on opportunities to start to build a common language to describe spacial investigations as well as creating them. This will consist of short projects, with each design investigation progressively building upon the previous exploration; these early projects will consist of both individual and group work. They will focus on Making. The second half of the semester will consist of one long term project to be created individually, incorporating students? personal theories of architecture based on an overarching question. Studio work will be supported by group discussion based upon critical review of student work, readings, slide presentations, videos and films. There will also be a few field trips. Students are encouraged to explore their own areas of interest with respect to their work in class. Self-motivation, class attendance and an open mind is mandatory, however, no prior architectural, engineering or artistic experience is required. Students are expected to perform work both inside and outside of class. Students should be prepared to purchase various supplies throughout the course. This course is in partial fulfillment of requirements for an Architecture Minor.
48-100 Architecture Design Studio: POIESIS STUDIO 1
Fall: 15 units
This studio will investigate the role and process of architectural design as different forms of practice. The studio will practice drawing, making, and building architectural narratives in iterations at various scales of time and space, to establish productive habits and develop essential techniques and skills in architectural design. In learning how architects see in both visible and invisible terms, the studio will analyze design precedents and problems that generate ideas about architectural material, form, and systems. In understanding how architects empathize with whom or what they serve, the studio will rigorously investigate methods of abstraction and critical dimensions relative to human form and experience. In practicing how architects deliver in the professional context, the studio will develop mastery of spatial composition, representation, and narrative as means for an architect to iteratively test, experiment with, and communicate spatial ideas.

Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-104 Shop Skills
Fall
This course will introduce basic material assembly methods, and the use of shop machinery, hand and power tools. It prepares students to participate in a wide range of subsequent building and fabrication projects. We will aim to build confidence and safe work habits while demystifying the interactions between tools and physical materials.

Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-105 Architecture Design Studio: Poiesis Studio 2
Spring: 15 units
As the second studio within the Poiesis Sequence, this studio will nurture a way of making and thinking in design that aims to cultivate the practice of architecture as an act of creative citizenship. By building an affinity for an approach linking the cross-cultural study of how people perceive and manipulate their environments can push a multimodal understanding of architecture and urban design. We will use a multi-disciplinary approach to become detectives interrogating the contemporary and historical tissue of Pittsburgh through the occupations and working lives, therefore elevating ordinary folks and trades that had and continues to foster the fabric of the city. Grasping the multi-faceted changing environment, this studio will use architectural tools as a base of inquiry to speculate and allow us to transform the way we view our world through multiscale multisystemic perspectives. The structure of the studio will follow one cohesive research driven design project that will explore narrative modalities, by using critical cartography, archival research, storytelling, programming adjacencies and tectonic exploration as a method to produce a hybrid shop-house focused on the historical trades of Pittsburgh. Students in the sequence will be introduced to critical proficiencies, learn new techniques of representation, adapt rigorous illustration and animation tools in the production of a dwelling project that is rooted in its urban fabric.
Prerequisite: 48-100 Min. grade C
48-116 Introduction to Building Performance
All Semesters: 3 units
This course will introduce fundamental concepts of building physics. The knowledge and skills obtained from this course can be applied to studio projects and beyond, improving building design and performance through standard methods of evaluation and simulation tools. Couse curriculum running concurrent with studio projects will aid students in further developing and guiding design decisions to incorporate fundamental concepts related to climate, energy, light, relationship to site, and occupant visual and thermal comfort. Students will develop a general understanding of, site analysis, building placement and amp; form as it relates to building performance, photometric principles to evaluate lighting conditions, thermodynamic principles, and heat transfer, building energy, renewable and embodied energy. Skills, tools, and knowledge base learned in this course with enable designers and architects to employ sustainable practices at all phases of design, leading to better performing buildings.
Prerequisites: 62-122 and 62-123 and 62-125 and 62-126
Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-120 Digital Media I
Fall: 6 units
IDM is a required course for all first year architecture students. The course introduces students to a wide range of digital methods and concepts available to architects for design, representation, and documentation. The coursework is directly coordinated with Studio assignments providing the students with the opportunity to master their digital skills in a meaningful manner. Due to the amount of content covered there is no single text for this course, but the course is supported by materials created by the instructor. IDM addresses topics such as digital image editing, vector illustration, HTML coding, and 3D modeling.
48-121 Drawing I
Fall: 6 units
Architects draw and build models for a variety of reasons: to record and reference; to analyze and reveal order, intent, and relationships; to speculate; and to visualize new propositions. The study of architecture requires the connection between the mind, the eye and the hand, so that the nature of ideas and their relationship to physical form can be investigated. The connection of the mind, hand and drawing skills requires considerable time and effort. This course introduces why architects use these forms of representation. Students are introduced to how to do basic academic research as well direct assignments that apply the fundamentals of freehand drawings and drafting techniques as it pertains to plans, sections, elevations and paraline drawing, analytical diagraming and model making.
48-125 Digital Media II
Spring: 6 units
IDM2 is a required course for all first year architecture students. This course is the continuation of IDM. IDM2 introduces students to measured drafting and the process of creating a construction drawing set. The coursework is directly coordinated with Studio assignments providing the students with the opportunity to master their digital skills in a meaningful manner. Due to the amount of content covered there is no single text for this course, but the course is supported by materials created by the instructor. IDM2 addresses topics such as digital drafting, construction drawings, advanced 3D modeling and HTML programming.
Prerequisite: 48-120
48-126 Drawing II
Spring: 6 units
Drawing and Appearance? is a traditional course in free-hand architectural drawing. Its central learning objective is building a capacity for visualizing three-dimensional space through the making of hand-made drawings. Two secondary objectives foster visual literacy: the ability to use line, tonal values and color to represent architectural space and the ability to use drawing to represent architectural proposals at various levels of abstraction Coursework includes free-hand and constructed perspective, shade and shadow projection, chiarroscurro drawing in colored pencil and color drawing in pastel. Work is submitted in three portfolio submissions of two weeks duration each. Coursework is built around exercises in the required course text: Drawing and Perceiving, John Wiley and Sons.
48-175 Descriptive Geometry
Spring: 9 units
Descriptive geometry deals with solving problems in three-dimensional geometry through working with two-dimensional planes using basic mechanical tools. Descriptive geometry deals with physical space, the kind that one is used to since birth. Things one can see around us have geometry and even things that one cannot see, also have geometry. All these things concern geometric objects almost always in relationshipsthat is, next to, above, below, intersecting with, occluding, hidden by and so onto one another that sometimes requires us to make sense of it allin other words, when we try to solve geometric problems albeit in architecture, engineering, or the sciences. In fact, descriptive geometry has proved itself to be practically useful; it has been one of the more important factors in the design of scientific apparatus, engineering systems and architectural structuresit is the basis of modern geometrical computing. Descriptive geometry is constructivemeaning, one uses conventional mechanical drawing tools: namely, compass, ruler, protractor, divider, triangles, etc., to construct solutions to geometric problems. This course specifically revolves around the historical techniques for manually solving three-dimensional geometry problems.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-200 Architecture Design Studio: POIESIS STUDIO 3
Fall: 18 units
The Poiesis Studio 3 explores how architectural and landscape design can respond to a local biome. With a focus on climate and ecology, it highlights the use of precedent and the relevance of context in how architecture takes shape - how it develops its morphology. As the architectural profession collectively recognizes the built/natural environment as a complex web of interacting parts constantly exchanging energy and resources, we become interested in developing architecture that contributes to context from which it arises. In response Poiesis 3 will seek to support and enrich the local ecology (both cultural and natural) in a similar way to how a biome's flora and fauna both adapt to their surroundings and help form sustaining ecosystems. The studio gives students a foundation in site and precedent analysis, passive design strategies, and ecological and environmental systems thinking. Through an iterative process you will develop formal and programmatic organizations as field conditions, or aggregations that highlighting the localized interconnectivity of buildings, bodies, and environment and redefine boundary conditions. Merging architecture and landscape, your resulting morphologies will become a mediator between interior and exterior, public and private, the social and the ecological. Working from the scale of the site to that of the envelope your designs will arrive at a sensorially rich, environmentally responsive and resilient architecture.
Prerequisites: 62-123 and 48-025 and 62-104 and 62-126 and 62-125 and 62-122 and 48-105 Min. grade C and 48-100
Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-205 Architecture Options Studios
Spring: 18 units
This studio aims to entirely reimagine the Mobile Home; to challenge its cultural stigma, and to propose new and innovative thinking on home design, home delivery, mobility, community, and the ever-evolving definition of the American Dream. During the post-war period, "Motor Coaches" were seen as an ideal solution to a growing housing shortage. Early Mobile Home design presented an opportunity to develop new housing typologies viewed as cutting-edge and innovative; marketed as both a "modern" and amp; affordable means of living. Since the post-war period, Mobile Homes and their occupants have been relegated to the periphery of American society. Housing stock is aging, and new homes have failed to adapt to contemporary modes of living. The Mobile Home presents an affordable housing typology that is widely ignored by Architects despite a growing demand for small, affordable and efficient housing. The first half of the semester will focus on the design of a new Mo·bile Housing Prototype. During the second half of the semester, students will refine their prototypes while adopting a specific region of the US in which to adapt their designs. Throughout multiple cycles of research and design, we will use physical models and orthographic drawings as our primary means of investigation and representation. Consideration will be given to culture, image, form, typology, economy, prefabrication, deconstruction, aesthetics, and experience.
Prerequisite: 48-200
Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-215 Materials & Assembly
Spring: 9 units
This course introduces and examines the fundamentals between design intent and construction materials, and the science of materials (performance) and their assemblies. Learning how materials and techniques inform spatial and form making decisions will be a central theme for the semester. Lectures and discussions will focus on the meaning, aesthetics and techniques related to the use of materials and the process of construction. A basic understanding of essential, well-known systems of building construction will be our base line. Discussions and case studies of contemporary systems that extend, experiment with and question these known systems will introduce you to the great depth to which this basic knowledge can lead you. Joint assignments with the design studio will provide you with an opportunity for an in-depth exploration of these fundamentals of construction through a direct application and synthesis of this new knowledge to your studio project.
Prerequisite: 48-100
Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-217 Structures
Spring: 9 units
Structures is a required course taught in the second year. It is a successor course to Statics, complementing that previous course by emphasizing structural member design in wood, steel, and reinforced concrete; spatial synthesis of hierarchical one-way systems for gravity load; structural types for lateral load including braced frames, shear walls, and rigid frames; introduction to geometric structures such as cable nets, domes, shells, and air-supported structures.
48-222 Explorations in Craft: Soft Forms, Stable Structures
Fall and Spring: 9 units
This course focuses on physical model making of soft forms. Softness is an evocative quality in architecture, but how do we "find" and then represent those elusive soft forms? How do we demonstrate a level of intentionality and control in their execution outside the digital realm? How do we suspend disbelief and open haptic possibilities? How do we manipulate materials with control? Using soft materials and/or expressing fluid form we will explore analog and digital craft pairings for fabrication, assembly methods, and physical form-finding techniques. The design and use of items like cutting and sewing patterns, bending jigs and casting molds will introduce the types of interfaces that facilitate thoughtful crafting of models. While learning through making, students will develop their own expression of softness. Presentations, demonstrations, and workshops on craft will inform experiments focused on material qualities and their formal affordances. Explorations and experiments will also consider structural stability in relation to soft material and formal palettes. These will inform a final independent project. The methods we work with in this class are intended to open possibilities and refine model making skills. Note: The class will have a materials fee to cover workshop costs. There will be some teamwork.
48-234 Introduction to Structures
All Semesters: 3 units
This course introduces structural systems and the materials and elements that make up those systems. Students will study historical and contemporary examples of bridges, long-span roofs, and tall buildings from technical, social, and symbolic perspectives. Through these built works, students will become familiar with structural engineering terminology and the behavior of different structural systems. They will also learn how materials, construction, and non-technical factors influence structural form. Additionally, students will evaluate the aesthetics of large-scale structures and discuss the relationship between engineers and architects. As they learn about structures, students will develop their problem solving skills and ability to communicate ideas by practicing using equations, drawing, and writing.
48-240 History of World Architecture, I
Spring: 9 units
This survey 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 nineteenth century. Reflecting the inseparable relation between building and human needs, this course is not only a history of architecture, but also a history through architecture. Over the semester, we will examine architecture as a form of cultural expression unique to its time and place. Through readings and lectures, we will study the ways that the design, use, meaning, and legacy of a building and its site was conditioned not only by the architect's will or the patron's desire, but also by a web of technological, religious, social, cultural, economic, and political factors of the time. There will be several exams over the course of the semester including during finals week.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-241 History of Modern Architecture
Fall: 9 units
This course investigates the global history of modern architecture and theory across the 20th century. We ask critical questions about the canon, the changing nature of history and theory, the biases embedded in terms like "modernism," "progress," and "Non-Western," and the deep legacies of colonialism, globalization, extractivism, and capitalism in which modern architecture so actively participated. After briefly identifying architecture's role in some of the great challenges facing the world today and #8212; climate change, high tech, and social justice and #8212; this course loosely works backward in time following these themes. Along the way we explore major movements of the Euro-American avant-garde and so-called "heroes" of modernism, but also diverse responses to modernity, including vernacular, popular, tropical, and even anti-architecture around the world. We will highlight the role of experimentation and provocation, but also of timeless ideals, local and indigenous traditions, and how they each intersect with the demands of function and technology as well as social and political imperatives. Work for the course falls into four categories: 1) attendance and participation in lectures and discussions; 2) reading, both original documents from the period, and more recent critical histories; 3) writing a series of 2pp. critical reflections on the readings; 4) a semester-long, carefully curated research project on "Non-Canonical" buildings from the Global South in the 20th-century.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-250 Urbanism and the Social Production of Space
Fall: 9 units
Formerly titled "Case Studies in Architecture and Cities" (CSE STD ARC CIT).
48-300 Architecture Design Studio: Praxis Studio 1
Fall: 18 units
Typically, we do site research and then design something for that site. However, this is a studio where the design research part of the semester will become the project itself. We're going to do site research and correlate it with the information we can find. We're going to make unconventional models and experiment with how we construct a network of sites through sets of relationships, linguistic, computational, and visual descriptions. In principle, we're going to think critically about how we construct the identity of a place through its cultural, social, and ecological systems, and develop procedures for doing so. We will investigate Pittsburgh as a collective site. Over the course of the semester, we will develop a "necklace" or circuit of sites that addressing Event, Housing and Infrastructure. The Steel Necklace will be a composite of these three different architectural/urban interventions to address the cultural, social and ecological issues of Pittsburgh. As the urban condition is a network of shared expressions, lived experiences and relationships, our studio will be a collaborative studio exchanging and intermixing projects. Students will detail into the collective network developing in high resolution a housing component relative to infrastructure and event spatial interventions.
Prerequisites: 48-116 and 48-205 Min. grade C and 62-275 and 48-215 and 48-200 Min. grade C and 62-225
Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-305 Architecture Design Studio: Praxis Studio 2
Spring: 18 units
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. It is within the contested space between these two notions of architecture that the studio operates. The studio sets out alternatives to extractive practices and introduces students to bio-based material practices and computationally facilitated methods of manufacturing and construction. While the studio directs attention to concerns of building, such as context, building systems, program, and regulatory constraints, it challenges students to situate design as a Project that engages contemporary discourse and ecological imperatives to explore emerging aesthetics, spatial organizations, and materializations. Our discussions and your work this semester will be guided by the following overarching questions: What is architecture's capacity to facilitate civic exchange/life in America today? How might we understand public space today? What are the public spaces, rooms, and interiors of the city in an era of increasing virtuality and privatization of public space? How do building typologies evolve and transform in response to technological and cultural shifts? How can architecture support and reveal the fluid and diverse needs of a community? How might a material-first, carbon-aware approach infuse the design process with greater material specificity and productive constraints?
Prerequisite: 48-300
Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-308 Reading and Writing Architecture
All Semesters: 9 units
As readers and learners, we consume lots of writing about architecture: articles appear in magazines, convincing and polished, finished products for which we struggle to imagine the process. We seldom pause to reflect on how that writing is produced, much less on how we could make writing a tool that works for us. In this collaborative, hands-on class we will work to demystify the process of writing in all its messiness and to highlight its iterative nature. We will explore how various genres of writing work and how architects can use them effectively, not only to communicate with audiences of all kinds but also to explore their own creative ideas. We will read writing about architecture by a number of different voices - architects, critics, historians, journalists, and activists. We will discover from their own approaches to writing what might work for us. We will experiment with writing and editing and explore how text, images and layout may come together to create a cohesive communication strategy. We will focus on becoming sophisticated as consumers and producers of written communication as we are for visual media.
48-310 Prototyping Stories: Experimental Children's Book and Vis Dev as An Architectura
Fall and Spring: 9 units
This design research course explores the current developments in hybrid, multi-platform design and communication mediums to prototype new ways of creative storytelling in architecture, visual development, and concept design. Research methods around oral storytelling, ethno-ecology, radical mapping, and the children's book can allow for the exploration of subjects in ways not available to typical architectural and urban research conventions. Throughout the Fall '23 Term designers will be tasked to use Pittsburgh, PA as a laboratory to develop a research project, from initial concept to an extensive script, including design elements, character development, as well as an urban critique of the city. Frameworks around composition, color, mapping, modeling, the parallel projection, and techniques in painting that are used in architecture, visual development, and concept design will ask how storylines translate and transform in the creation of a comprehensive project using industry techniques. To curate the explorations, we will explore innovative ideas in visual storytelling using techniques of interactivity in children's book design, experimenting with new forms of narrative strategies. The experimentations will result in a final exhibition at the end of Fall 2023.
48-313 Kalla Visiting Faculty Elective
Spring: 9 units
No course description provided.
48-314 Thomas Visiting Faculty Elective
Fall and Spring: 9 units
Coming Soon.
48-315 Environment I: Climate & Energy in Architecture
Fall: 9 units
Our commitment to designing net zero energy and indeed carbon positive buildings and communities is critical to environment equity and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The U.S. uses more energy per capita than every other industrialized nation without even a guarantee of a shared quality of life. Energy bills can be as much as 25% of all disposable income for low-income households and seniors living solely on social security, and having the power, water or heating shut off is devastating. This course introduces architectural design responses for energy conservation and natural conditioning, human comfort, and the site-specific dynamics of climate. Students will be expected to combine an understanding of the basic laws of comfort and heat flow with the variables of local climate to create energy design guidelines for their own work. The state of the art in building energy conservation and passive heating and cooling technologies will be presented in lectures and supported by readings and assignments. To stress the significance of architectural design decision-making on energy consumption and comfort, full design specifications and calculations will be completed for a residential-scale building. Students will compile a professional energy consultant's report, designing the most viable energy conservation retrofit measures for their client from siting, massing, organization, enclosure detailing, opening control, to passive system integration and management. An overview of world energy consumption in buildings and energy design standards will be illustrated by lectures on building energy conservation successes, and emerging demands for a broader definition of sustainability. The course will end with a focus on the design integration of natural conditioning systems and the potentially dynamic interface of mechanical systems in small- and large-scale buildings.

Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-317 The Chair
All Semesters: 9 units
Making entitles to an intimate connection with the site, native atmosphere, building components, and their assemblies, where a designer/maker can operate at local - regional and global levels comprising all the building systems. This sedulous process takes very closer to the materials where a designer/ maker can gather insights into material behavior (both mechanical and visual) and is better placed to alter the effects of architecture through its materials and generating processes. The same can be applied to chair making. The chair no longer remains a chair, as the making process makes it a ground of experimentation and learning to shape the material into the desired object. The reaction with the matter is no more inert, as it tends to provide feedback to the maker while shaping it. This immersive process of learning by doing in entirety, aids students, in improvising their thought process, the judgment of material behavior, use of the right tool to save material, and developing novel ideas for production and assembly. Prototyping and making largely help develop the understanding concept of joinery/material behavior, and properties in relation to form. The exercise allows understanding chair as a piece of furniture, the manner of making that gives qualities to an abstract design or idea, the know-how of handling material, emergence of tacit knowledge in the maker, and tolerance and feedback from the material.
48-324 Structures/Statics
Fall: 3 units
We examine structural types, structural behavior, material behavior, and construction constraints that underlie our design of buildings, emphasizing the need for a designer to envision a complete 3-D structure. We mostly build "orthogonal structure" constructed in horizontal and vertical planes, requiring high-strength modern materials such as steel or reinforced concrete, comprising roughly 75-80% of the course. This is complemented by "geometric structure" where the three-dimensional shape dictates function; prominent examples include membranes, cable nets, historic masonry domes, and shells. Geometric structure is characterized by "form-finding." Statics underlies all topics, and our treatment is consistent with NCARB expectations.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-328 Detailing Architecture
Spring: 9 units
This course examines the role of the architectural detail in the formation/ thematic development of a work of architecture and how the detail reinforces the theoretical position of the architect. Architectural detailing is often considered only a technical task, but in fact the detail holds the key to inspire, integrate and reinforce the architectural idea as well as the architect's intellectual/ societal position. Many scholars, historians and academics have avoided the detail as a snapshot into the design methodology of architecture. This class is an attempt to do the opposite. The course will consist of a series of weekly lectures, readings, field trips and student developed graphic and physical representations that reveal how the role of detail has played an essential role in the history, evolution and development of the built environment.
Prerequisite: 48-205
Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-332 Teaching and Learning
Intermittent: 6 units
In this course, students will learn about effective strategies for teaching architecture and the built environment. Topics include the cognitive differences between novices and experts, instructional techniques, and goal alignment. As part of the coursework, each student will implement these teaching strategies to design and teach a lesson. Elements of developmental psychology, learning theories, and classroom practices will inform the architectural education lesson. Teaching and learning techniques can be generalized for communication with clients, practice, and the community.
48-336 Architecture and Agency
All Semesters: 9 units
If buildings consume vast resources and are often embedded in extractive systems of material and labor, how can the agency of architecture be deployed to consider other forms of thinking and praxis? What tactics, strategies, manifestos, and actions can architects deploy to resist, upend, destabilize or reinvent normative mechanisms of architectural production? How do such practices seek new modes of conceiving the architectural project and its concomitant processes; radically reinvent the brief, site, program, material or tectonic capabilities? This course will consider agency simultaneously through historical and contemporary forms of praxis as well as theories that inform them.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-338 European Cities in the XIX Century: Planning, Architecture, Preservation
All Semesters: 9 units
The history of the main cities of Europe during the XIX century is a history of change and transformation. The physical environment and the political, financial and administrative structures adapt to the needs of new masses of population and to the challenges of metropolitan life. In some cases, cities even acquire new representative functions, as they become a national capital. This course traditionally offers an overview of the urban culture of XIX century Europe, reconstructing aspects of the broader historical context and then focusing on reading the effects of the XIX century transformations on the physical appearance, structures and image of present-day European cities, such as Paris, London, Berlin, Barcelona, Vienna and Rome. This semester we will add to this analysis, acquired by learning and applying a set of essential questions about XIX century urban transformations, a second look at the image of the city - the issue of how the city is represented and described in the various moments of its Nineteenth century transformation (from historical maps, to paintings, from postcards to literary descriptions). We will try to consider its changing visual representation and the different perception of its character and peculiarities over time, finally discussing how the Nineteenth century image of each city still affects how it is viewed today. We will rely, along with the usual reading materials (articles, book excerpts) also on visual documentation, such as photography and film. The course is based on lectures and discussions and requires personal elaboration, as well as a fair amount of reading and writing.
Prerequisite: 48-240
48-339 IDeATe: Making Things Interactive
Spring: 12 units
In this hands-on design-build class you will learn the skills to embed sensors and actuators (light, sound, touch, motion, etc.) into everyday things (and places etc.) and to program their interactive behavior using a microcontroller. You'll also dive into the fields of VR/AR/MR and experiment with combining these disciplines with physical computing. Through weekly exercises and a term project the class will introduce basic analog electronics, microcontroller programming, projection mapping and virtual reality; as well as exploration into using kinetics and materials to make the things you design perform. Emphasis will be on creating innovative experiences. The graduate edition of this course will require additional work including a paper that can be submitted to a peer-reviewed interaction design conference such as CHI, UIST, or TEI. Students from all disciplines are welcome: but please note that the class demands that you master technical material. Experience in at least one of: programming, electronics, or physical fabrication is strongly recommended.(Participants will provide their own supplies and materials.)
Prerequisites: 60-223 or 16-223
Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-340 Modern Architecture and Theory 1900-1945
Intermittent: 9 units
This architectural history lecture course surveys the modern buildings and literature of the first half of the twentieth century, focusing primarily on Europe but extending also to non-western countries. We begin with a look at the "crisis of modernity" that plagued most of western civilization in the late 19th-century, and then focus on the major movements of both the avant-garde and other responses to modernity from 1900-1945. The course includes lectures, readings, and discussions about a broad range of issues, including 1) Formal tendencies; 2) Theoretical issues; 3) National traditions; 4) Biographical sketches; 5) Significant technologies and materials; 6) Political motivations; 7) Social and amp; cultural influences. Emphasis will be placed on the relationship of buildings to the more general cultural, intellectual, and historical circumstances in which they were created, especially the important manifestoes, theoretical and critical writings that so determined the project of modern architecture. Work for the course involves extensive reading and a major research paper.
Prerequisite: 48-240
48-341 Expression in Architecture
Intermittent: 9 units
This architectural history seminar will explore expression in architecture in its many forms, particularly in written works of architectural theory through the ages. We start with the premise that architecture is not merely pragmatic, technical, or functional: it can express or communicate like a language, it can represent and inspire like many of the arts, it can shape behavior and emote, it can trigger memories, emotions, or meanings. As Isozaki put it: ?Architecture is a machine for the production of meaning.? We?ll investigate many ways that architects have theorized the design process, as well as the forms, materials, and contexts of architecture, to express a myriad of ideas and sensibilities. We?ll also look at the ways that buildings can communicate and have meaning, often beyond the intent of the architect, and usually changing over time. Some of the topics to be explored include the classical orders, gothic geometry and mystical light, the theatrical space of the Baroque, architecture parlante, character, and style in the Enlightenment, tectonics as structural expression, political architecture and morality, the aesthetics of functionalism, Expressionism, key terms such as ornament, representation, linguistics, and semiotics, as well as more recent theoretical constructs such as embodiment, materiality, atmosphere, and affect. The work of the seminar will include intensive weekly readings, especially of primary sources by the architects seeking to express ideas, weekly presentations and discussions about the sources, and a term paper on an important theory of expression in architecture of your choice.
Prerequisite: 48-240
48-348 Architectural History of Mexico & Guatemala
Intermittent: 9 units
Despite the leveling forces of mass culture and globalization, the geographic and social diversity of the U.S. has created distinctive regional mosaics of landscape and architecture. Say New England and images of English Pilgrims, town greens with white framed churches, and industrial mill villages may come to mind. The Southwest conjures different images, perhaps of adobe pueblos, Spanish friars, arid ranches, and the color turquoise. The built environment of the Midwest, the California coast, the Mississippi Delta, and many places in between reflect particular regional identities that have been both unconsciously and consciously created over time. This course examines the historical development of regional patterns in the American built environment. It investigates how and why a regions architectural identity evolved in the ways that it did. To what degree is place something to respond to, to interact with, and to what degree is place something that is created? Our focus will be primarily pre-20th century when the forces of vernacular traditions were stronger, we will also examine more recent trends of regionalism as an aesthetic choice and a theoretical stance.
Prerequisite: 48-240
48-350 Postwar Modern Architecture and Theory
Intermittent: 9 units
This architectural history lecture course surveys the modern buildings and architectural theory of the post-World War II period. It begins with the cataclysm of WWII and the fundamental shifts it caused on the conception of modernism, technology, cities, and geo-politics. It proceeds to investigate themes such as rebuilding and reconstruction, grand modern masters such as Mies, Kahn, and Le Corbusier, the fascination with technology, megastructures and utopian thought, the need for monumentality, meaning, and regional identity, and the dissemination of modernism from corporate America to the third world. It ends with the rupture in modernism associated with the social revolutions and the rise of a post-modern architecture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The course includes lectures, readings, and discussions to define the unique character of the postwar period, as modernism both reigned supreme, and began to be questioned. Emphasis will be placed on the relationship of buildings to the more general cultural, intellectual, and historical circumstances in which they were created. Special attention will be devoted throughout the course to the important manifestoes, theoretical and critical writings that so determined the project of modern architecture. Work for the course involves extensive reading, preparing for class discussions, and a major research paper.
Prerequisites: 48-240 or 48-241
48-355 Perspective
Intermittent: 9 units
This freehand drawing course considers perspective from three understandings of perceptual psychology. Part 1, built on the pedagogy of Kimon Nicolaides, aligns with the Transactionalist understanding of perception. It considers perspective as discovered truth. Part 2 builds on the early work of perceptual psychologist, J.J. Gibson, and aligns with the Ecological position of Gibson and his followers. It considers perspective as an absolute truth of the visual field. Part 3, aligning implicitly with Gestalt psychology, treats perspective as an imposed schema. The course concludes with a final project built around the student's interest.
Prerequisite: 62-126
48-356 Color Drawing
Intermittent: 9 units
48-356 Color Drawing provides practice in the use of color to depict architectural surroundings. Following preliminary exercises using pastels, watercolor is used for most of the course. A central objective is that by the end of the course, students will have good judgement in evaluating color hue, value, and temperature and have gained confidence in the use of watercolor. Coursework assumes some knowledge of linear perspective. Work consists of in-class exercises and weekend assignments built on these. Students can expect to spend up to 6 hours of work per weekend.
Prerequisites: (48-126 and 48-121) or (48-135 and 48-130) or (62-126 and 62-125) or (48-125 and 48-120)

Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-359 Special Topics: Design Build / Building Systems
All Semesters: 9 units
In this studio we will consider Thoreau's essayso much of it about his own design/build experiencein today's context. Collectively, we will design a cabin to meet the high standards of sustainability set by Eden Hall. After a round of prototyping, testing, and design development, the studio will create a set of construction documents and shop drawings. Covid and funding allowing, we will begin building the cabin at mid-term, with construction continuing into the summer or fall as required. This studio has a nine credit co-requisite, 48-358 Cabin Building Systems, which is also open to CEE students. Its focus will be on the building systems for the cabin that is being developed in the parallel studio. Topics include energy performance (e.g. production, renewable energy systems, passive and active ways to achieve efficiency, and modeling); integrated structural and engineering systems (e.g. building envelope, water treatment and management, heating and cooling systems, and electrical and lighting systems; and sensing for monitoring and control. The class will have a team-based format that is hands-on and lab-oriented rather than a seminar structure, and it will contribute directly to the build part of the studio.
48-367 Material Histories
All Semesters: 9 units
Materials affect the way we engage with a building and carry cultural meanings connected with complex histories, deeply and at times messily intertwined with the social, political and ecological context. In this seminar we will look at the history of the architecture of the last two centuries by following the thread of the history of materials. We will discuss the ways in which buildings of the past and the practice of architecture were affected by which materials were available, how they were produced, and the craft required to work them. We will reflect on how architects interpreted, manipulated, or added to those meanings through their own work. Materials' lifecycles and the networks of extraction, production, transportation, and reuse had an impact on the built environment in the past, just as they do today. We will learn from historical examples to assess the consequences of the choices we make as designers. Finally, we will critically engage with the presence of history as a layer of complexity embedded in the material itself - an effect that is compounded in the practice of reuse of materials with patina, marked from their past use.
48-368 Rediscovering Antiquity: Archaeology for Architects
Spring: 9 units
The course follows the intertwined histories of architecture and archaeology from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, critically engaging with the outsized influence of classical antiquity on architectural theory and practice and its role of authority and model in the Western artistic and cultural debate. The traces of classical antiquity, buried in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern landscape, retained part of their cultural significance over the centuries and became the object of a "rediscovery", almost a cultural obsession. Artists, travelers and architects filtered and re-interpreted the reality of ancient objects and places, conjuring up their own vision of the past and nourishing their own creative pursuits from a continuous dialogue with history. At the same time, new political agendas, new biases and new goals were associated with antiquity, influencing the way the past of the region was explored, how the finds were studied and exhibited in residences and Museums, and ultimately creating a stern competition to appropriate this legacy, with deep links to colonialism and imperialism. The ripple effects are still being felt today, for example in the discussion about the repatriation of cultural heritage. We will study the history of this moment to better understand the cultural vantage point that often influenced the fabric of our cities, presided over the creation of many of our cultural institutions and the buildings that represent them, and had a deep and lasting impact on the ideas about architecture and its relationship with history. This will help us grasp more clearly the impact of the "passage to the Modern" and some of the complex and still open issues it brought about.
Prerequisite: 48-205
48-369 Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism for the Gulf Region
Intermittent: 3 units
Ensuring a sustainable built environment in Qatar is critical to sustainable Gulf Region and indeed a sustainable world. The quality of our architecture and urban design can significantly address the challenges of heat, water, energy, mobility, material resources, waste, and health. This course is intended for non-architects to explore the potential of sustainable design for desert climates. Six weeks of explorations and presentations will introduce each student to: Climate analysis for Gulf Region countries and their 'twins' around the world; Green standards for desert climates with their embedded metrics (eg UNSDG, LEED, GreenStar, WELL); and Precedent as a precursor to innovation - a search for great sustainable examples across building types and land use. In-class and homework assignments will create a series of collaborative student slide shows each week. As possible, invited speakers and site visits will be pursued. The final week will be dedicated to a class perspective on the importance of the built environment for carbon and climate change, and student recommendations for building and infrastructure goals for a more sustainable Gulf region. CMU-Q graduates should be dedicated to a more sustainable built environment and understand the design changes needed for sustainability, the benefits to quality of life and to ecological sustainability. Every discipline is a catalyst and a stakeholder in our future - as client, as design/engineer, as consumer, as financier, as scientist.
48-371 City & Suburb: Housing in America after 1850
Intermittent: 9 units
This architectural history course examines the development of American house and housing choices during the period 1850-1975. A recurring picture of the "American Dream" has typically included the image of a single-family, detached dwelling set within its own green yard in the suburbs. However powerful and durable that image is, the history of house and home in America is actually a far more complex story with many different twists and turns. In the course we will look at both urban and suburban housing choices and cultures, ranging from single family detached dwellings to multi-unit housing, and across a social spectrum income, class, race, and gender. Through the use of occasional field trips, we will use Pittsburgh as a touchstone for understanding broader national trends in the history of American urban and suburban housing. The course is organized as a lecture course supplemented with field trips and discussions based on field trips and primary source readings. The additional time slot on Thursday afternoons will be used only when field trips are scheduled. Student work will include a research paper and several shorter written assignments throughout the semester.
Prerequisite: 48-240
48-373 Istanbul Constantinople. An Urban History
Fall and Spring: 9 units
A dynamic metropolitan area, with a burgeoning population and rapid urbanization, Istanbul is at the same time a finely woven tangle of historical layers. In this class we will introduce urban history and its methods as we focus on key moments of Istanbul's history. We will delve deeply into the city's powerful and at times competing historical narratives. We will trace the growth and transformation of the urban fabric, discussing Istanbul's role as imperial capital of the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, its changing fortunes in the twentieth century and the historical roots of the present-day world city. We will discuss cultural specificity and reactions to international models, the challenges of preservation and transformation of the urban fabric and the political making and re-making of its cultural identity. We will also take into account the power of this city to fascinate and inspire through the centuries - the imagined city as a layer of the physical one.
Prerequisite: 48-240
48-374 History of Architecture in the Islamic World- A Primer
Fall: 9 units
An introduction to the architecture of the lands where Islam spread over the centuries, this course aims to provide a basic understanding of major epochs and regional variations. We will learn the function and meaning of the most important building types, examine how these types changed over time to adapt to the needs of changing societies and consider influences and exchanges with other traditions. We will examine the historical context within which art and architecture developed and explore critically the lingering signs of those traditions in contemporary society.

Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-380 Real Estate for Architects
Spring: 6 units
This course explores economic, structural, and political forces that drive real estate development decisions. Through lecture and discussion, real world case studies and simulations, students explore the development cycle from multiple perspectives and gain insight into dynamics that determine if, how, and when projects are realized as well as relationships among architects, developers, and communities. Class attendance and participation is required.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-381 Issues of Practice
Spring: 6 units
This course explores the interdependence of contracts, drawings, specifications, and correspondence and introduces the concept of the Standard of Care. It addresses business development, staff training, and time management and introduces the economic, cultural, and political contexts in which architecture is created. To reflect the pedagogical priorities of the school, social justice related issues related to architecture will be examined. Students will engage with practitioners, consultants, constructors, and others who together form the design and construction team to learn the specific knowledge and skills the team members bring and to understand the importance of collaboration. They will study the effects of owner expectations and field conditions. Students will learn the value of, and path to, licensure, exploring NCARB's licensure path and Architectural Experience Program (AXP). The course describes alternative career paths that would allow students to use knowledge and creative skills gained in their time in the School of Architecture. The class will align with the Professional Ethics and Real Estate courses to provide a comprehensive exploration into the broad profession of architecture and be taught in coordination with the students' concurrent architecture studios so that the students can consider their studio projects from a practitioner's business perspective.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-383 Ethics and Decision Making in Architecture
Intermittent: 6 units
This course investigates ethics for architecture and the built environment. Students will learn about ethics as a discipline, how to identify an ethical issue, and how one might work through an ethical problem. Frameworks will be presented with case studies for practice and discussion. On a macro scale, we will consider the entanglement of architecture with capital as well as sustainability and climate change. We will also touch upon day-to-day concerns regarding safety, zoning, contracts, material selection, internet of things and workplace discrimination. Reading responses and class discussions are the primary format for learning. Each student will also conduct an ethical assessment of one of their studio projects. Non-architects are welcome.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-386 PORTFOLIO & RESUME PREPARATION (UG)
All Semesters: 3 units
No course description provided.
48-390 Physical Computing Studio
Spring: 10 units
This collaborative studio course will allow interdisciplinary teams to develop wearables with a focus on assistive technology. The ubiquitous nature of mobile devices coupled with low-cost and easily integrated sensors and actuators make this a good time to approach real problems for a range of users from the physically disabled to athletes. Teams will learn skills in hardware, software, fabrication, and design communication in order to effectively develop and share their ideas.
Prerequisites: 16-223 Min. grade C or 60-223 Min. grade C

Course Website: http://ideate.cmu.edu/
48-400 Architecture Design Studio: Praxis Studio 3
Fall: 18 units
This studio is the capstone of your undergraduate education and is an opportunity for you to integrate the various technical aspects of your professional degree to date. Each student will have the opportunity to select from one of three proposed building typologies and project scales. As a requirement of this studio, students will participate in student teams developing each project to a high level of technical development. The objective of this studio is to go beyond the typical studio project and to demonstrate the necessary integration within the structural system, building envelope, environmental control systems and life safety system while providing the measurable outcomes of building performance as part of the design process (NAAB student criteria 6). Consultant engineers play an active role in the studio process providing expertise and discussions resembling professional practice. This semester the three studio instructors will be Professors Gerard Damiani, Erica Cochran Hameen and Stephen Lee.
Prerequisite: 48-305 Min. grade C

Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-405 Advanced Synthesis Options Studio II
Spring: 18 units
Having proven competency in the spectrum of skills determined necessary for tomorrow's architect during the first three years of the program, students in their fourth and fifth year are permitted to select from a variety of studio options, each providing the opportunity to build upon or augment some of those skills with new or more nuanced perspectives. All advanced synthesis studios are open to both years, the vertical integration offering enhanced learning opportunities.The content and focus of each studio is governed by faculty interests, which run the spectrum of architectural pursuits, ranging in scale from the design of a piece of furniture to a city and in approach from a comprehensive and complex building program to a critically-driven speculation. They may also be interdisciplinary in nature, taking advantage of the unique juxtapositions made possible at Carnegie Mellon.
Prerequisites: 48-412 and 48-400
48-408 Co-designing an Indigenous Biodiversity Knowledge Learning Space for the Vertica
Spring: 12 units
This is an advanced comprehensive Critical Practice track studio, with one large, complex, semester-long building design project. The studio pedagogy is based on the parallel development of a real project currently being planned, a new performance space for the San Francisco Symphony; it is on the same site and with the same goals and constraints as the actual project. The participation of clients, the professional design team working on these projects, and users is incorporated in the studio? exploration and design process, culminating in review presentations to the client and project team and publication of the body of work. This studio is also a key component of Carnegie Mellon University?s Theater Architecture Program, and is offered annually to fourth- and fifth-year students in the Bachelor of Architecture program. The co-Requisite, Theater Architecture Seminar (48:408), provides in-depth research in the typology, analysis of precedents, and the programming and planning of the studio project.
48-409 History and Future of Interaction Design
All Semesters: 9 units
The history of Interaction Design is far richer than what is commonly known among students and teachers, practicing designers and entrepreneurs. Understanding IxD's origins and evolution helps us realize the promises and possibly avoid some of the pitfalls of IxD's future. This course blends readings, lectures, discussions, and prototyping as a means for students to experience this history as if first-hand. Students become immersed in pragmatic yet mind-expanding examples of person-machine interactionssuch as MEMEX, Musicolour, Hypertext, Dynabook, Fun Palace, Colloquy of Mobiles, Architecture Machine, THOUGHTSTICKER, Architrainer, and Hypercard. Through period articles and subsequent perspectives, students research a handful of historical innovationsand then prototype key concepts from that history, forefronting what has been lost in modern commercial implementations. This offers students a hands-on experience of the history of IxD. To explore IxD's future, students are invited to invent itto prototype their individual future vision of interactive experiences. The course is especially suitable for students with interest or background in interaction design, computational design, responsive architecture, and interactive media.
48-410 Advanced Synthesis Options Studio II
Spring: 18 units
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL) provide new frameworks for the future of design discipline, while simultaneously questioning the form of authorship and the use of architectural precedent. Offering almost instant resolution of a seemingly complete architectural proposal - the architectural image / sketch can be generated without any design process, prompted solely through natural language in reference to the vast digital archives. Language of architecture typically considers spatial development of architectural forms based on architectural types, elements, programs, and ideologies, while resourcing the historical knowledge of a precedent. However, here the use of architectural reference - especially in context of its ethical implication - might be obscured. This studio will ask how we can expand the design process using AI. What are the consequences of jumping from a narrative into the generation of an instant image, and how does this way of working change design intent, socio-ecological framework, ideological implications and a spatialization process of an architectural proposal. The ambition of this studio will be to examine architecture that inquires into embodied energy as a primary inspiration for formation of matter. The goal is to re-situate design within a hyper-local framework of material resources and life-cycle that positions architecture as a vehicle for ecological and communal restoration. Promoting a shift away from purely data driven rationales, the desire is to engage in the design framed by environmental ethics and sensory subjectivities as part of our collective aesthetic and ecological experience.
Prerequisite: 48-305 Min. grade C
48-425 EX-CHANGE: Exhibition & Publication in Practice
Spring: 3 units
Are you interested in exploring exhibition design, curating, or publishing as part of your practice? This course will give you hands-on experience, inviting you into the process of planning, designing, and curating the 2023 EX-CHANGE, an exhibition and publication that will be launched at the School of Architecture in fall 2023. EX-CHANGE is the School of Architecture's annual exhibition and publication celebrating student work from first year to PhD. Inaugurated in 2017, EX-CHANGE represents an ongoing opportunity to shine new light on the SoA's programs and to position the work within larger questions of research and practice. Students will work alongside EX-CHANGE director Sarah Rafson and the professional design team who have been selected for the 2023 EX-CHANGE to get a glimpse into editorial and curatorial practice. This is an opportunity to play a role in shaping an exciting school-wide event.
48-432 Environment II: Design Integration of Active Building Systems
Fall: 9 units
If there is a benefit to recent global and national upheavals, it may be that we are even more keenly aware of the importance of equity, of social justice, and a more sustainable future. That sustainability must cover the full range of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and your understanding of how you can contribute to a better future through design in the built environment is a primary goal of this course. High performance buildings are achieved with designs that effectively integrate passive and active systems. This course focuses on active systems in commercial buildings and their integration with passive design elements you've studied previously: envelope, ventilation and lighting. We also consider building codes that address outside air requirements for ventilation, and for energy and water efficiency, and discuss where related US building codes lead or lag in promoting exceptional building performance. Environmental sustainability and buildings within the United States receive the greatest emphasis in our work, but we also consider how performance definitions may change where resources like energy or water are limited or unavailable. The active systems covered include lighting, ventilation, heating/cooling, water distribution and water heating, and renewable energy production and amp; storage.

Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-435 Modern Mexico & Guatemala: 19th-21st Century Architecture
Fall: 9 units
This course examines the architectural history of modern Mexico and Guatemala, with an emphasis on the 20th century, but drawing on the 19th and 21st centuries as well. We will use architecture as a lens through which we study how both the high-style design vanguards and the vernacular built environment were responses to forces such as industrial modernization, urban growth, economic fluctuation, international relationships, political and social revolution, indigenous discrimination, genocide, and cultural regeneration. Throughout the course we will look at the countries' urban and rural architectural evolution as explicit and implicit expressions of identity (Mexicanidad or Guatemalidad).

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-438 Modern Mexico & Guatemala: 19th-21st Century Architecture
All Semesters: 9 units
This course examines the architectural history of modern Mexico and Guatemala, with an emphasis on the 20th century, but drawing on the 19th and 21st centuries as well. We will use architecture as a lens through which we study how both the high-style design vanguards and the vernacular built environment were responses to forces such as industrial modernization, urban growth, economic fluctuation, international relationships, political and social revolution, indigenous discrimination, genocide, and cultural regeneration. Throughout the course we will look at the countries' urban and rural architectural evolution as explicit and implicit expressions of identity (Mexicanidad or Guatemalidad).
48-440 American Regions & Regionalism: An Architectural History of Place, Time, and Cul
Intermittent: 9 units
Despite the homogenizing forces of mass culture and globalization, distinctive regional mosaics of landscape and architecture are still evident across the United States. In this course, we will examine the ways in which the interactions of people, place, and period have created distinctive regional patterns. We will primarily focus on the periods before the 20th century, when the forces of vernacular traditions were strongest, but we will also make forays into more recent trends of regionalism as an aesthetic choice, a theoretical stance, and an intentional place-making device. Students will complete several essays and an independent research project. Non-majors are welcome.
Prerequisite: 48-240
48-442 History of Asian Architecture
Intermittent: 9 units
This course is intended to serve as an introduction to the evolution of urban spaces and the function of the architecture in South Asia, China, Korea and Japan. It is organized chronologically and will examine the impact of indigenous philosophical principles on the organization of villages, capital cities, and religious centers. The course will begin in the Indus Valley where complex urban planning along with public and private architecture flourished from 2600-1900 BCE. We will examine South Asian Hindu and Buddhist cave monasteries as well as freestanding Hindu temples and identify the salient architectural forms that identify each type. We will then move to China where the earliest villages were arranged according to ideas about nature and the organizing system of fengshui. By the earliest Chinese dynastic period, urban planning and building placement were beginning to be codified according to Confucian and Daoist ideals. Later Chinese imperial centers were consciously designed according to Confucian regularity and hierarchy in order to make visual statements about power. We will then move to consider urban organization and Buddhist temples in China, Korea to Japan where South Asian and Eurasian models were adopted and adapted. The examination of the Japanese warrior culture will include castles, new ideas in residential architecture, the Pleasure Quarters, and retirement villas. Contemporary architecture will be addressed through individual and group projects that will investigate specific structures and situate the buildings within the cultural and historic circumstances that led to their creation.
Prerequisite: 48-240
Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-448 History of Sustainable Architecture
Intermittent: 9 units
The History of Sustainable Architecture investigates themes of nature, ecology, pollution and conservation in the built environment and visual arts. The term ?sustainable architecture? is a comparatively recent one, arising in reaction to the destructive and toxic nature of the industrial era and its strident ambassador, Modern architecture. Yet, an esthetic and philosophical view of harmony with nature accompanies many forms of historical human activity in the built environment. Similarly, issues of waste removal, mechanical systems and natural materials that characterize current concerns have illustrative historical roots in numerous civilizations going back centuries and even millennia in pre-Industrial or non-industrial cultures. This course will engage texts and examples relating not simply architecture, landscape and urban history, but also art, philosophy and popular culture as a means to understand the many precedents for today?s interest in sustainable architecture and planning. The course will examine texts and works by figures including Vitruvius, Pliny, Leon Battista Alberti, Thomas Cole, Frederic Law Olmsted, Buckminster Fuller, Reyner Banham, Ebenezer Howard, Hassan Fathy, Bernard Rudofsky, Norman Foster, Robert Smithson, Andy Goldsworthy and more. Students will be encouraged to apply principles from the class to understanding and execution of work in their own discipline.
48-452 Real Estate Design and Development
Fall: 6 units
This course will introduce the Real Estate development process and explore the interdependence of development drivers and the design process. Classroom learning, exercises and guest-lectures will introduce students to the concepts of market and financial analysis, as well as the basic techniques of budgeting, proforma development, and valuation. Parallel to this investigation, students will evaluate real world developments and interface with the development professionals that executed them to learn how development drivers shaped the development process and decision making. Students will study how market demand, tenant requirements, site constraints, and available capital affect feasibility, and through this the ultimate design solution. The semester's effort culminates in the execution of a mini-development project. Students will work in teams to complete a basic market analysis, program evaluation, schematic design, construction and development cost estimate, proforma analysis, and a determination of financial feasibility. Development practitioners will interface with student teams during this mini-project to offer "real world" guidance on student schematic designs and feasibility analysis.
Prerequisite: 48-305
48-453 Urban Design Methods
Fall: 6 units
This undergraduate lecture course introduces urban design history, theory and methods. It is a required supporting course for the Urban Laboratory design studio, and similarly examines urban design at multiple scales: city form and networks, neighborhoods and block structures, streets, public spaces, and urban building typologies. Key issues introduced include the emergence and evolution of urban design as a discipline, economic, social and political factors affecting the contemporary city, and environmental sustainability at the urban scale. A wide variety of cities, projects, proposals and methodologies are examined. Assignments include readings from seminal texts, quizzes, and a final examination.
Prerequisite: 48-305
48-454 Futures of the City/Cities of the Future
Intermittent: 9 units
If all design can be read as attempts to predict and to shape the future, then no one looks further into the future than the urban designer and the urban planner. The work in which they are involved often does not materialize in their lifetimes; in fact, the duration of the projects are so long twenty, thirty, fifty and hundred year timeframes, it is more than likely that he or she will pass on before the project reaches fruition. The trouble with predicting the future is that it is so uncertain, so undecided, so unknowable. A brief look backwards reveals that we are not the first generation to consider the future. History is replete with predictions, some of which were actualized, the vast majority of which were not. Today's forecasts for tomorrow vary wildly. A handful of optimists view the future through rose colored glasses, whereby humanity is delivered to salvation via technological wonders and the widespread adoption of common social values. A larger group predicts the end of the world as we now know it, but even they cannot agree on the cause of our demise, with those arguing that climate change will kill us clashing with those convinced that we will be destroyed when robots achieve technological singularity. Shy of total extinction, however, any vision of the future requires designers, and will likely occur in urban (or formerly urban) locations. As of this decade, for the first time in history, more than half of the world's population, almost three and a half billion people, live in towns and cities. Estimates suggest that by 2030 this number will swell to almost five billion.
Prerequisite: 48-205
48-459 Material Simulacra
All Semesters: 9 units
This fabrication-based course interprets Jean Baudrillard's ideas of "panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production." Serial mold-generated surface studies activated by material properties, behavior, intuition, and expression ask how our perceptions of the real is mediated by language of the made artifact. Structured as the tripartite investigation: TheoryResearch-Craft, this seminar's pedagogy is centered on the cultural, historical, ethical, aesthetic and tectonic values of architectural materialism to arrive at an awareness of what a material conveys. Analog and digital techniques and simulations engage the technological and intellectual roles of the craftsperson.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-467 Design Build Elective
Spring: 9 units
In this course, students will work on an interdisciplinary, design-build project to improve the quality of life through design interventions on campus. The semester will begin with a review of design proposals developed during the Fall semester, and through a collaborative process the class will determine what can be built given budgetary and workforce constraints. Students will complete construction documents, de­velop project management plans, build full scale prototypes, procure materials, and construct the designs.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-470 The Depth of Surface
Fall: 9 units
Lamination is the process of gluing wood together along the edge or face of a plank. There is unlimited variety in the ways to do this and to generate pattern in the process. This course will prescribe a few basic ways to laminate following standard rules of wood working and then introduce the possibilities of pattern generation. Generally lamination is unidirectional, however, in this class we will introduce ways to achieve cross directional patterning and the use of inlay to elaborate on the idea of patterning. Projects will be visual and sculptural statements. Their function will be limited and will not be furniture. Each exercise will present a series of basic wood working operations, which, when repeated and recombined will become products of compelling visual character. As visual idea statements you will be asked to experiment, invent and explore and take these standard operations in new directions. As visual idea statements the greatest clarity of vision will be achieved through careful construction.
48-473 Hand and Machine Joinery, New Directions
Fall: 9 units
In the Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 there will be some changes to the shop electives offered. First the Spring Furniture Design and Construction course # 48564 will no longer be offered because that content is incorporated within the Furniture Studio in the fall. Next, the two shop mini courses previously offered in the fall will each be expanded to become full electives, one in the fall and one in the spring. The prerequisite for both of these classes is documentable experience with the band saw, table saw (ripping and crosscut), drill press and the belt and disk sander. The Hand and Machine Joinery, New Directions, is scheduled Tuesday and Thursday mornings 10:30 am to 11:50 in the spring 2018, and will be a 9 unit elective running the entire semester. The elective will focus on building a free standing (or hung) cabinet with doors. If enrolled students have taken the Exploring Pattern course in the fall the doors made in that class will be mounted on the cabinet. If students have not taken that course then a pair of simple doors will be made instead. The primary goal of this course will be to learn the steps of making a simple cabinet using hand and machine joinery. Quality of craft will be of great importance. Uniqueness of design will not be emphasized, however individuation of the cabinet will still be possible throughout the construction, starting with choices between a wall mounted or free standing (with legs) cabinet, the selection of hardwoods, the specific size of parts, and the selection of particular detail options. The construction process will be carefully staged with demonstrations continuing throughout the semester. The cabinet will be perpendicular and rectangular. Students will use standard mortise and tenons of various sizes, bridal joints, floating tenons, tongue and groove, spline and dovetail joints.
48-478 Digital Tooling
All Semesters: 6 units
This course serves as an immersive analysis of the available technologies located in the Digital Fabrication Lab at Carnegie Mellon and beyond. Students begin to understand equipment limits/boundaries, purposes and concepts; and the possibilities that arise from thoroughly comprehending how these tools work. During your Digital Experience, students begin to understand more systematically how to use these tools to their advantage. A better understanding of the equipment proves very useful towards a SoArch Student's 3rd, 4th and 5th years at Carnegie Mellon; but more importantly provides a fundamental understanding of a leading edge technology that will certainly prove itself as an integral tool for any Designer throughout their professional career. It is based on the idea that pushing the limits of design fabrication; comes from knowing the limits of your tools. The course operates by discovering tooling extremes; thus indicating limits, and then incorporating these boundaries (and/or breaking them) with Digital Fabrication methods and tooling; ultimately providing a platform in which students begin to understand and incorporate project efficiency. Prerequisites: Imagination, Laser Cutting, Milling and 3D-Modeling Experience required. (Rhinoceros 3D Preferred)
Prerequisite: 48-205
48-485 Design and Documentation in Revit
Fall and Spring: 3 units
This course will guide you through the process of designing in Revit from the schematic, conceptual design phase, to the construction document phase. The course will start with basic concepts moving on to more advanced topics. Layering information and how much to incorporate into the model, based on stakeholders and end users, will be discussed. Capturing the essential information from the BIM model will be explored to develop presentations, bidding documents, and construction documents to relay relevant information to clients, consultants, and contractors. We will discuss when it is imperative to model in 3D and when to overlay 2D linework detail. Real-time rendering techniques that streamline the design process will be explored using Enscape. The skills learned from this course will help you understand the phases of design and documentation in the Revit environment.
48-486 Systems, Cybernetics, Conversation
All Semesters: 9 units
Across many design disciplinesarchitecture and computational design, media and interaction design, design of services and organizationsmethods for grappling with complex adaptive systems is now table stakes. Furthermore, design today demands profound, authentic attention to equity, human and non-human living systems, climate and environment, sustainability and ethics. Overall, designers must have skills to collaborate in cross-disciplinary teams. An encompassing framework for these disparate disciplines and domains of 21st-century design is the transdisciplinarity (or "antidisciplinarity") of Cybernetics. Cybernetics can be understood as the study of "systems with purpose", whether machines or living things, including their unpredictable interactions. Central to Cybernetics is conversation as a mechanism of design, inclusivity, participation, innovation, and the impetus to action. The course offers systems frameworks and models of conversation that are also relevant to Designing for the Internet of Things (48-675), Inquiry into Computation Design (48-727), and Design Studies: Systems (51-277). Class time balances readings, discussion panels, and guest conversations with executing assignments that involve systems modeling; creating conditions for designing that are participatory and inclusive; and prototyping in a range of media (installations, screen-based interactivity, physical prototypes, workshops, etc.) that offer responses to global wicked challenges.
48-493 Representing Activism
Intermittent: 9 units
Efforts to promote social, political, economic and environmental change range in form from written word to direct action. Sources of injustice that those efforts address are multi-dimensional and complex. Effective forms of activism are fueled by creativity that synthesize and distill complex constellations of information and foster understanding. REPRESENTING ACTIVISM explores the role of multi-media graphic representation as a lens through which change and social justice can be fostered. Exploration of efficacy in application will span four dimensions, 1) Social Media, 2) Film, 3) Poster/Graphic Design, and 4) Publication - all aspiring to achieve the status of art. Art and Activism are predicated on exposing the truth. Art has the unique power to convey messages across linguistic and cultural barriers that often divide. Part of the Activist's challenge is to grip and inspire people to action. With the avalanche of information and media modern society absorbs every day, this is increasingly hard to do. Sometimes it is too much to ask people to stop and think: sometimes it's too much just to ask them to stop. Successful art compels this, penetrating apathy and imploring the viewer to look deeper and explore the narrative that is embedded in what elicited a visceral response. This seminar aspires to compel action in the public interest through artful representation.
48-494 Beyond Patronage
Intermittent: 9 units
TBD
48-497 Pre-Thesis
Spring: 3 units
This 3 unit course is designed for B.Arch and M.Arch students a year before their final Spring semester. The course develops an understanding of research methods, and explores the formation of ideas for architecture thesis projects. Many directions of architectural thinking (spatial, material, ideological and procedural), will be discussed and in framing a theoretical position we will see how an architecture thesis can use a creative process to discover and express findings in relation to large questions and to disciplinary discussions. This is a required course for Fall Thesis Seminar in F23 (9units) and Spring Thesis ASOS S24 (18units).

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-500 Advanced Synthesis Options Studio
Fall
Having proven competency in the spectrum of skills determined necessary for tomorrow's architect during the first three years of the program, students in their fourth and fifth year are permitted to select from a variety of studio options, each providing the opportunity to build upon or augment some of those skills with new or more nuanced perspectives. All advanced synthesis studios are open to both years, the vertical integration offering enhanced learning opportunities.The content and focus of each studio is governed by faculty interests, which run the spectrum of architectural pursuits, ranging in scale from the design of a piece of furniture to a city and in approach from a comprehensive and complex building program to a critically-driven speculation. They may also be interdisciplinary in nature, taking advantage of the unique juxtapositions made possible at Carnegie Mellon.
Prerequisite: 48-410
48-505 Advanced Synthesis Options Studio III
Spring: 18 units
Having proven competency in the spectrum of skills determined necessary for tomorrow's architect during the first three years of the program, students in their fourth and fifth year are permitted to select from a variety of studio options, each providing the opportunity to build upon or augment some of those skills with new or more nuanced perspectives. All advanced synthesis studios are open to both years, the vertical integration offering enhanced learning opportunities.The content and focus of each studio is governed by faculty interests, which run the spectrum of architectural pursuits, ranging in scale from the design of a piece of furniture to a city and in approach from a comprehensive and complex building program to a critically-driven speculation. They may also be interdisciplinary in nature, taking advantage of the unique juxtapositions made possible at Carnegie Mellon.
Prerequisite: 48-105
48-509 Architecture Design Studio: Thesis I/ Independent Project
Spring: 18 units
Thesis is a year-long, independently defined research and design project that takes the place of upper level option studios. Thesis is an opportunity to develop skills, thoughts, and habits essential for future success, including mental discipline; independence of mind and judgment; working with advisors; the capacity to focus and pursue a subject in depth and over an extended time; the ability to design and execute a complex project; the skills of analysis, synthesis, and clear writing; and the self-confidence that grows from mastering a difficult challenge. Thesis topics and research agendas are generated by the student, but must be determined in collaboration with an advising team, and approved by a Thesis Coordinator. The School seeks to encourage an expansive range of rigorous and provocative inquiry as a culminating experience for the B.Arch education, including work that speculates, invents, or improves on existing ideas, practices, or systems through research and design; work that challenges the boundaries of the discipline and the profession, and moves beyond mere practice or solution-based work; worj that engages with open-ended and generalizable ideas, as much as with specific situations; work that projects or imagines a better future and an improved world; work that leads to the new knowledge, ideas, understanding, or paradigms. Acceptance into Thesis is dependent on passing the 48-497 ?Thesis Prep? course or its pre-approved equivalent, and submitting a rigorous thesis proposal to the Thesis Coordinator in late August, before the begin of classes. Approval for the 2nd semester is contingent upon successful completion of the 1st.
48-510 Advanced Synthesis Options Studio IV
Spring: 18 units
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL) provide new frameworks for the future of design discipline, while simultaneously questioning the form of authorship and the use of architectural precedent. Offering almost instant resolution of a seemingly complete architectural proposal - the architectural image / sketch can be generated without any design process, prompted solely through natural language in reference to the vast digital archives. Language of architecture typically considers spatial development of architectural forms based on architectural types, elements, programs, and ideologies, while resourcing the historical knowledge of a precedent. However, here the use of architectural reference - especially in context of its ethical implication - might be obscured. This studio will ask how we can expand the design process using AI. What are the consequences of jumping from a narrative into the generation of an instant image, and how does this way of working change design intent, socio-ecological framework, ideological implications and a spatialization process of an architectural proposal. The ambition of this studio will be to examine architecture that inquires into embodied energy as a primary inspiration for formation of matter. The goal is to re-situate design within a hyper-local framework of material resources and life-cycle that positions architecture as a vehicle for ecological and communal restoration. Promoting a shift away from purely data driven rationales, the desire is to engage in the design framed by environmental ethics and sensory subjectivities as part of our collective aesthetic and ecological experience.
Prerequisites: 48-400 Min. grade C or 48-410 Min. grade C
48-516 NOMAS
All Semesters: 3 units
TBD
Prerequisite: 48-105
48-519 Architecture Design Studio: Thesis II/ Independent Project
Spring
Thesis is a year-long, independently defined research and design project that takes the place of upper level option studios. Thesis is an opportunity to develop skills, thoughts, and habits essential for future success, including mental discipline; independence of mind and judgment; working with advisors; the capacity to focus and pursue a subject in depth and over an extended time; the ability to design and execute a complex project; the skills of analysis, synthesis, and clear writing; and the self-confidence that grows from mastering a difficult challenge. Thesis topics and research agendas are generated by the student, but must be determined in collaboration with an advising team, and approved by a Thesis Coordinator. The School seeks to encourage an expansive range of rigorous and provocative inquiry as a culminating experience for the B.Arch education, including work that speculates, invents, or improves on existing ideas, practices, or systems through research and design; work that challenges the boundaries of the discipline and the profession, and moves beyond mere practice or solution-based work; worj that engages with open-ended and generalizable ideas, as much as with specific situations; work that projects or imagines a better future and an improved world; work that leads to the new knowledge, ideas, understanding, or paradigms. Acceptance into Thesis is dependent on passing the 48-497 ?Thesis Prep? course or its pre-approved equivalent, and submitting a rigorous thesis proposal to the Thesis Coordinator in late August, before the begin of classes.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-524 Building Performance Modeling
Fall: 9 units
"You can't hammer a nail over the Internet" Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work The Design/ Build ASO Studio is part of a year-long, interdisciplinary, design-build project to provide a diverse group of students with the opportunity to work with their eyes, hands, and brains to transform an idea from a virtual world into the physical world. The elective is an opportunity for any student to join the spring "build" activity for 9 units. In this semester, we will again work campus constituents to improve the quality of life on campus through engaging design intervention(s). The project is fully funded, and the expectation is that the project will be turned over to the campus community by the last day of classes in the spring semester. During the fall, the Building Integration Option Studio (BIOS) students envisioned a farmer's market for Hazelwood Green creating design proposals at three scales-XL-M-XS. These design proposals for "XS" components will be a potential launching point for the spring build experience. These designs are just that-launching points-they have not been considered in the context of the Carnegie Mellon campus, so design will be a critical component of the early spring.
Prerequisite: 48-305 Min. grade C

Course Website: https://omerkaraguzelphd.wixsite.com/praxismodeling
48-525 Thesis Seminar
All Semesters: 9 units
This seminar is designed to prepare students planning to work on a thesis project in the B.Arch and M.Arch programs. Thesis work is highly self-directed and requires a level of metacognitive thinking, which includes identifying a valid area of concern, understanding the disciplinary discourse around a chosen topic and its cultural and social context, identifying the means and methods to implement the project, and establishing the criteria by which to evaluate the work. This course is structured around the individual effort required to advance these aims. You will enter this course with an initial thesis statement, a body of background research related to your topic, and a set of questions that can be interrogated by engaging in research and discussion. The seminar will help you refine the scope of the thesis argument, define appropriate research methods, sharpen communication about thesis work in all of its phases. In addition, it will facilitate group conversation and exchange of ideas, providing dialogue, feedback, and continued motivation. The collective engagement of all seminar participants, in addition to individual conversations and targeted feedback from the instructor, will support your sustained progress.

Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-527 5th-Year/Senior Seminar
Intermittent: 3 units
Seminar for students graduating from the Bachelor of Architecture and Bachelor of Arts in Architecture programs.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-528 IDeATe: Responsive Mobile Environments
Intermittent: 9 units
As part of this project-based course, we'll get hands-on with emerging technologies, concepts and applications in the Internet of Things through a critical lens. We'll prototype everyday intelligences and design smart and connected devices that examine and speculate on the strange, supernatural, and mystic qualities of the smart home. The first half of the semester will introduce students to building connected devices and intelligent spaces through technical development workshops, readings, applied explorations, and guest lectures. The second half of the semester will be organized as an applied collaborative project.

Course Website: http://daraghbyrne.me/teaching/responsive-mobile-environments/
48-530 Human-Machine Virtuosity
Spring: 12 units
Human dexterous skill embodies a wealth of physical understanding which complements computer-based design and machine fabrication. This project-oriented course explores the duality between hand and machine through the practical development of innovative design and fabrication systems. These systems fluidly combine the expressivity and intuition of physical tools with the scalability and precision of the digital realm. Students will develop novel hybrid design and production workflows combining analog and digital processes to support the design and fabrication of their chosen projects. Specific skills covered include 3D modeling (CAD), 3D scanning, algorithmic geometric modeling, digital and robotic fabrication (additive and subtractive manufacturing), motion capture and computer based sensing, and human-robot interaction design. Areas of interest include architecture, art, and product design.
48-531 Fabricating Customization: Prototype
Intermittent: 9 units
Architects have long flirted with production and manufacturing. From the early days of the Bauhaus and Walter Gropius' experiments with factory-built housing to Jean Prouve's design and manufacturing of architectural components to Ray and Charles Eames' interest in the social potential of mass production, architecture has long been enamored by the promise of technological advancements in manufacturing. This has been pursued to yield greater affordability and accessibility, customization, and expression, and as of late, more carbon-aware material selection and manufacturing. This course builds upon this rich history and foregrounds architectural component customization to explore prototyping and customization within the context of contemporary practice. It introduces students to a range of prototyping and design for manufacturing frameworks. Through case studies and guest lectures, the course leverages techniques of digital manufacturing and fabrication. It offers students an overview of existing and emerging modes of collaboration between designer and manufacturer in service to the production of a customized building component. The course places great emphasis upon the reciprocity of design and prototyping, challenging students to leverage physical artifacts as tools for thinking and testing. Throughout the semester, students will utilize additive and subtractive fabrication techniques to iterate the design of architectural components. Through this process, students will build proficiency in prototyping to design, test, and refine components of limited scope and scale.

Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-541 The Cut, The Beach and Beyond
All Semesters
The Cut, the Beach and amp; Beyond will be a FALL design elective with a SPRING build option studio working with Campus Design and amp; Facility Development, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and campus constituents to improve the quality of life through design intervention(s) on campus.
48-543 Color Constructs
All Semesters
In this course you will study and experiment with the relationships and perception of space and form through two- and three-dimensional optical experiments using color. Lectures, discussions, and field trips will delve into color theory particularly focused on the work of artist, designer, and educator Joseph Albers, look at culturally defined use of color, and its experience. In keeping with Albers definition of color theory as a hands-on experiential and experimental process of creating relationships through perception students will work on skills needed to craft compelling images using linear, planar and volumetric assemblies in digital and analog media. Initial weekly exercises will cover principles of color relativity, intensity, temperature, etc., and consider various principles of graphic perception including but not limited to vibrating and vanishing boundaries, figure ground reversals, and the illusion of transparency. Through this process you will gain an understanding of the use of color in the graphic representation of designs, patterns, diagrams and architectural representations that will inform the use of color in transforming the perception of space. The final assignment will be a three-dimensional color structure.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-545 Design Fabrication
Spring: 9 units
Design Fabrication is a project based seminar exploring the application of Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) in architecture. The course meets in the School of Architecture's Design Fabrication Lab (dFAB), which serves as a context to better understand the interconnected affordances of building materials, machine processes, and modeling software for design thinking. During the semester students receive hands-on introductions to dFAB equipment, including laser cutting, cnc routing, and 3D printing. Concepts will be explored and tested through iterative making/prototyping. Course Focus The course focuses on Transdimensional Fabrication, a manufacturing framework that forefronts design thinking across space and time. A growing array of approaches in contemporary architecture are motivated by this focus (e.g. flat pack, 4D printing, metamaterials, kinetic architecture, robotic origami, design for disassembly, etc.). We will investigate Transdimensional Fabrication concepts through three that forefront design translations: 2D 3D, Space Time, Assembly Reconfiguration Disassembly

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-550 Issues of Practice
Fall: 9 units
Issues of Practice is a required course taught in the fifth year. It consists of three modules: Personal Promotion, Emerging Professional's Companion, and Excursions. The Personal Promotion module provides the students with a framework to create a resume, cover letter, and portfolio. The EPC (Emerging Professional's Companion) provides concentrated study in different aspects of professional practice. The Excursions require students to see how architecture relates to the wider world with architecturally related events that can include volunteer opportunities, lectures, mentorship, or teaching.
Prerequisite: 48-305
48-551 Ethics and Decision Making in Architecture
Spring: 9 units
Ethical Decision Making in Architecture is a required course in the fifth year of the Bachelor of Architecture Degree. It is part of a sequence dealing with professional aspects of the field of architecture, alongside courses like Human Factors, Real Estate Design and Development, and Issues of Practice. It builds on an understanding of the issues of occupancy, economics and practice in design decision making. The course covers basic frameworks of decision making and ethical adjudication through several case studies including Fallingwater, Sydney Opera House, Citicorp Tower, Pruitt-lgoe housing development, Crystal Palace and Kansas City Hyatt. The text for the course is a manuscript by the instructor entitled "Ethical Decision Making in Architecture".
Prerequisite: 48-205
48-554 Entangled: Remaking Nature from the Picturesque to the Hypernatural
All Semesters: 9 units
This seminar questions how we perceive, represent, and reconstruct our world in relation to evolving concepts of "nature" and their manifestation in architecture, art, and landscape. It is focused on the intellectual trajectories that define ecology and environment to arrive at the paradigm shift theoretician Donna Haraway has termed natureculture. We will first familiarize ourselves with historical ways of seeing "nature" and how this has formed the landscapes of the Anthropocene. This will help us put a critical lens on land, environmental and ecological art, ecoventions, architectural living systems, biomimicry, biophilia, and projective ecologies while we consider the influence of gardens, responsive landscapes, hyper-natures, and artificial ecologies in changing the way we design and build. We look for not only relevance but joy and beauty in practices that highlight the relation between desire, responsibility, more-than-human wellbeing, and ecological justice. This may help us build notions of care and stewardship and an understanding traditional and emergent cultural constructs that can define an eco-centric practice which shapes building futures. The course surveys texts from a range of topics including ecological aesthetics, architecture, art, landscape urbanism, and ecologically focused philosophy and theory. It includes weekly readings, discussions, presentations, and visual or written deliverables. Open to graduate and undergraduate students in Architecture and allied fields.
48-555 Introduction to Architectural Robotics
Fall: 9 units
This course provides an introduction to industrial robotics and automated fabrication within the field of Architecture. A series of lectures will cover the basic components, as well as their work flows, needed to design flexible automation - while work sessions will develop skills in hands-on programming, RAPID, work flow simulation, fixtures, and sensors. We will also issue competency-building projects within the lab environment in order to provide students with hands-on experience using the equipment. Upon covering the fundamental software and hardware content, an end-of-semester project will challenge you to apply your newfound knowledge to solve a final prompt. This is a portal course to all sanctioned coursework using the School of Architecture's Robotic Fabrication Lab. Upon successful completion, students will be eligible and prepared to enroll in advanced robotic fabrication courses.
48-557 Formless as an Operation
All Semesters: 9 units
This seminar focuses on the formless as an operation relative to social constructs, parametrics and aesthetics. Geometry is often thought of as a rational or a structure that secures and grounds things, however the structures of the built environment is an unfolding and indeterminate product. Social constructs can be defined as formless or the informe, as coined by George Bataille; an operational existence. In expanding the one's idea of operating, the use of formless allows us to consider the indeterminate. The indeterminate for our purpose in exploring context relative to spatial and cultural traditions. Within social and political space, traditions become spatial operators. How can we spatialize and draw traditions, rituals, and narratives? We will investigate the means and methods of representation relative to the formless and the built environment. Participants in the seminar develop an archive, original visualizations that utilizes multiple mediums and platforms, and culminate in a final project a part of an exhibition.

Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-558 Reality Computing
Fall: 12 units
Reality computing encompasses a constellation of technologies focused around capturing reality (laser scanning, photogrammetry), working with spatial data (CAD, physical modeling, simulation), and using data to interact with and influence the physical world (augmented reality / virtual reality, 3d printing, robotics). This semester the studio will focus on utilizing these technologies to capture places and objects to digitally recreate them for archives, artifacts, and interactive experiences. We will explore and analyze how to optimize these creations for real-time rendering and analyze how these platforms bridge the divide between "virtual" and "real."
48-560 Histories of Urban Design
Fall: 9 units
This architectural and urban design history course examines the cultural histories of the design and redesign of world cities. The scale of urban interventions we will look at varies greatly, from the macro-scale of designing totally new capitals to the micro-scale of altering small nodes within a city. We explore the relationship between form and culture by considering political, social, economic, and aesthetic forces that have shaped the public realm of urban as well as suburban spaces. We focus on recognizing and understanding the rationale behind the design, re-design, and use of culturally important urban spaces during their own time, making periodic forays into the issues that influence those spaces today. Non-majors are welcome.

Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-564 Furniture Design & Construction
Spring: 9 units
This course is for students who already have a basic knowledge of hand tools and machines, and standard fabrication methods. Wood is the primary material, although other supplemental materials are permitted. One functional project will be built during the semester. Because all the equipment in the shop is traditional analog, the fabrication will remain analog. All operations will be done with hand tools or machines operated and controlled by hand. The emphasis of the design phases will also be non-digital. However recognizing the versatility of CAD, students will be permitted to advance and refine their ideas using their computer. One full scale orthographic drawing by hand will still be required, including plan, elevations, sections, and dimensions on 1/8" ply or mdf.
Prerequisites: 48-105 and (48-470 or 48-473)
48-568 Advanced CAD, BIM, and 3D Visualization
Fall: 9 units
This course is designed to introduce a student to 3D software tools, including AutoCAD 3D, Revit Architecture, and 3D Studio MAX. Using building information and parametric modeling, materials, lighting, rendering, and animation students will create integrated CAD/BIM projects, 3D video animations, and realistic renderings. The course objectives are to develop an understanding of how to properly set up and manipulate 3D projects integrating software applications, replicating real world projects in leading architectural, lighting, and design firms; learn how to create details 3D CAD models using surfaces and solids; learn about BIM parametric modeling using Revit Architecture; and learn how to apply materials, lighting, and rendering to AutoCAD, Revit, and 3D Studio Max. At the conclusion of this course, students will have projects and animations created and architectural CAD/BIM standards outlined. Students should have some familiarity with basic AutoCAD 2D commands. Those who don't have AutoCAD 2D knowledge can contact the professor to arrange for on-line tutorials that need to be completed before classes begin. This course will be primarily taught asynchronously via video lectures and other materials. Some live remote meetings will be held for topic previews and project reviews. Remote office hours will be held weekly.
Prerequisite: 48-305
Course Website: https://soa.cmu.edu/courses
48-569 GIS/CAFM
Spring: 9 units
A Geographic Information System (GIS) provides storage, retrieval, visualization, and analysis of geographically referenced data. GIS provides analytical tools to investigate spatial relationships, patterns, and processes of location-based data such as cultural, demographic, economic, environmental, health, physical, social, and other phenomena. GIS creates digital twins (virtual representations) of natural and built environments and integrates many types of digital models. GIS topics include geographic concepts (projections and map scales), map design, geodatabases (importing spatial and attribute data, geocodes, table joins, and data aggregation), spatial data processing, digitizing, data mining, multivariate cluster analysis, drive and walk time networking, raster GIS, spatial statistics (proximity and hot spot analysis), animation, and 3D GIS. CAFM (Computer Aided Facility Management) and IWMS (Integrated Work Management Systems) topics include space and asset management, building operations, environmental health and safety, and real property. The course includes in-person and asynchronous video lectures to learn important GIS concepts and a brief introduction to work management systems. Software tutorials cover leading GIS software from Esri Inc. Applications include ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Map Viewer, ArcGIS Story Maps, and Dashboards. Subject areas are related to architecture, engineering, construction management, building performance, environmental health, sustainability, public policy, urban design, and planning.
Prerequisite: 48-205
Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-576 Mapping Urbanism
Intermittent: 9 units
This seminar provides the critical tools necessary to examine the city as both a representation and a reality in flux. Through an interdisciplinary framework, students study urban history, theory, visual thinking and spatial mapping. Contemporary urban issues are introduced through weekly lectures, readings, and class discussions. Parallel to these urban explorations, students learn to employ a diverse set of representational techniques to create inventive mappings. Upper-level (300 and 400 level) undergraduate students and graduate students are encouraged to register.
48-587 Architecture Lighting Design
Intermittent: 9 units
Through hands-on exploration of light students will develop a design process for lighting public spaces. All classes will be held in a fully equipped light lab to give the students full access to experimenting with light in design applications. Understanding how light creates focus and mood will be explored in class lab exercises. Discussion topics will include the role of the architectural lighting designer in the collaboration process, establishing design goals and a lighting point of view, communicating design ideas, analyzing successful lighting design in case studies for interior and exterior applications, and becoming familiar with the technical tools of lighting design. The final design project will include lighting mock-ups of a building site.
Prerequisite: 48-105
Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu
48-596 LEED Buildings and Green Design
Spring: 6 units
Green building and sustainable design have been rapidly gaining acceptance in all sectors of the building market. Global issues of energy use, emissions, resource depletion, and land use are forcing building professionals to re-evaluate standard design and construction processes, and look to more environmentally friendly practices. The U.S.Green Building Council (USGBC) developed green building rating systems entitled Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEEDTM) in order to define "green building" by establishing a common standard of measurement. LEED considers green building methods and technologies in several categories including site, water, energy, materials, and indoor air quality, and awards points towards an overall green building rating of certified, silver, gold or platinum. Currently, LEED registered projects make up 3% of the current U.S. commercial building market, and Pennsylvania is the third leading state with LEED registered projects. There is now a demand for design professionals with knowledge and experience not only in sustainable design but specifically with the LEED rating system as well. This course will provide students with background knowledge of the USGBC, the LEED system, as well as referenced standards related to specific topics. The course will benefit greatly from the large number of LEED projects in the Pittsburgh region, which will serve as case studies. Upon completion of the course, students will be prepared to take the LEED Professional Accreditation Exam, which is quickly becoming the standard of recognition for green building professionals.
Prerequisite: 48-315

Faculty

JARED ABRAHAM, Associate Studio Professor

VICKY ACHNANI, Adjunct Instructor

SAROSH ANKLESARIA, Fitz-Gibbon Visiting Professor

MARY-LOU ARSCOTT, Studio Professor & Associate Head

NINA BAIRD, Assistant Teaching Professor

NINA BARBUTO, Adjunct Faculty

JOSHUA BARD, Associate Professor & Associate Head

WILLIAM BATES, Adjunct Faculty

ARDAVAN BIDGOLI, Robotics Fellow

PRIYANKA BISTA, Joseph F. Thomas Visiting Profesor

HEATHER BIZON, Special Faculty

GINGER BROOKS TAKAHASHI, Adjunct Instructor

DARAGH BYRNE, Associate Teaching Track

DANIEL CARDOSO LLACH, Associate Professor

DONALD CARTER, Adjunct Faculty

MARK CHAMBERS, Adjunct Instructor

JEFFIE CHANG, Adjunct Instructor

ANNE CHEN, Adjunct Instructor

XIN CHEN, Adjunct Instructor

NICKIE CHEUNG, Adjunct Instructor

ERICA COCHRAN HAMEEN, Assistant Professor & Director of DEI

DOUG COOPER, Andrew Mellon Professor

STUART COPPEDGE, Adjunct Instructor

DANA CUPKOVA, Associate Professor

GERARD DAMIANI, Associate Professor

STEFANI DANES, Adjunct Faculty

JEFFREY DAVIS, Adjunct Faculty

TAMARA DUDUKOVICH, Adjunct Instructor

EMEK ERDOLU, Graduate Instructor

JEREMY FICCA, Associate Professor, Director dFAB

LAURA GARAFALO, Associate Professor

SINAN GORAL, Adjunct Faculty

STEFAN GRUBER, Associate Professor

KAI GUTSCHOW, Associate Professor & Associate Head

NAJEEB HAMEEN, Adjunct Faculty

VOLKER HARTKOPF, Professor Emeritus

HAL HAYES, Studio Professor

MATTHEW HUBER, Adjunct Faculty

ELIJAH HUGHES, Adjunct Instructor

THEODOSSIS ISSAIAS, Special Faculty

JENNA KAPPELT, Special Faculty

LYNN KAWARATANI, Liason Librarian to SoA

OMAR KHAN, Professor & Head

PHYLLIS KIM, Adjunct Instructor

JONATHAN KLINE, Associate Studio Professor

KRISTEN KURLAND, Teaching Professor

JONGWAN KWON, Special Faculty

KHEE POH LAM, Professor Emeritus

JOSHUA D. LEE, Assistant Professor

JUNEY LEE, Assistant Professor

STEPHEN R. LEE, Professor

SUZI LI, Graduate Instructor

TIAN LI, Graduate Instructor

WEI LIANG, Graduate Instructor

VIVIAN LOFTNESS, University Professor, Paul Mellon Professor

TONYA MARKIEWICZ, Adjunct Instructor

JACKIE JOSEPH PAUL MCFARLAND, Special Faculty

CHRISTINE MONDOR, Special Faculty

MELANIE NGAMI, Adjunct Instructor

NILOOFAR NIKOOKAR, Graduate Instructor

VERNELLE NOEL, Assistant Professor

PAUL OSTERGAARD, Adjunct Faculty

PAUL PANGARO, Visiting Scholar in Computational Design

MISRI PATEL, Anne Kalla Visiting Professor

NIHAR PATHAK, Graduate Instructor

STEPHEN QUICK, Adjunct Faculty

SARAH RAFSON, Adjunct Faculty

NIDA REHMAN, Lucian and Rita Caste Assistant Professor in Architecture and Urban Design

MANUEL RODRÍGUEZ LADRÓN DE GUEVARA, Studio Instructor & Research Assistant

AZADEH OMIDFAR SAWYER, Assistant Professor

NATHAN SAWYER, Special Faculty

CHARLIE SCHMIDT, Adjunct Instructor

EDWARD SEGAL, Adjunct Instructor

DIANE SHAW, Associate Professor

TULIZA SINDI, Anne Kalla Visiting Professor

ALA TANNIR, Adjunct Instructor

FRANCESCA TORELLO, Special Faculty

KUSHAGRA VARMA, Graduate Instructor

VALENTINA VAVASIS, Special Faculty

GERROD WINSTON, Adjunct Instructor

GARRET WOOD-STERNBURGH, Adjunct Instructor

HEATHER WORKINGER MIDGLEY, Adjunct Faculty

TOMMY CHEEMOU YANG, Anne Kalla Professor in Architecture

TIANCHENG ZHAO, Graduate Instructor

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