Texas Tech University

Special Problems in Architecture

Arch 5301 · 3 Semester Credit Hours

Prerequisite: College approval. Individual study projects in architecture of special interest to students. May be repeated for credit.

Digital Reciprocity

Arch 5301 · Instructor: Nate Imai

Digital Reciprocity is a seminar course that explores the intersection of contextual conditions and emergent forms of data as a means to express opportunities for design interventions.

Design projects and in-class workshops and will structure this seminar and teach basic computational design and coding skills. Lectures and readings will serve to expand upon the concepts covered in this course.

No prior experience required – all levels welcome.

TECHNICAL LANDS

Arch 5301 · Instructor: Jeffrey S. Nesbit

Technical lands are enabled through political and economic forms of projected rationality, empirical instrumentation, and place-based sciences, including military bases, ports, exclusionary zones, radioactive sites, astronomical observatories, to name a few. Thus, practices that marginalize land intentionally produce exclusion zones and mark specific geographies of occupation, inaccessibility, and enables forms of planetary urbanization across distant territory. This seminar explores technical lands which expand material economies and capital through designation of the remote, and often invisible, wilderness under the veil of military, scientific, or technological means.

Sustainability and LEED Exam Prep

Arch 5301 · Instructor: Robert D. Perl, AIA, LEED AP

This section positions sustainability and LEED within the context of architecture design, design methods, and professional practice.

It will consider multiple motivations for sustainability from various stakeholders including the views of owners, users, community members, and designers. As a means of understanding sustainability more comprehensively, the course alternates between preparation for immediately passing the LEED Green Associate Examination and speculation on longer-term issues of sustainability in future architectural practice.

MODEL

design, object, cultus

Arch 5301 · Instructor: Brian C. R. Zugay, PhD

The architectural model is one of the most alluring forms of architectural production, functioning in multiple ways for multiple audiences. As a central tool in the design process, models are instrumental in conceptualizing and developing a project, as well as presenting and communicating a design proposal to a client and to a larger public. Yet models are often separated from these generative and presentational phases and take on other functions and meanings. They also exist and are widely produced outside of the architectural discipline and have wide popular appeal. This research seminar will critically explore and investigate a broad range of historical and contemporary architectural models, their architect and non-architect makers, and their varied purpose, meaning, and agency; and it will evaluate how architecture functions through models in disciplinary, artistic, political, religious, popular, and private contexts.