Coordinator: Pat Klieopatinon

The second semester of First-Year Studio is titled Interface: Envelopes, Elements, and Enclosures. It will extend the first semester’s primarily abstract investigations of form and space into more specific human engagements through materiality and making, contexts, and environmental conditions. The aim is to speculate relationships, further interpretation, and consequently develop meaning.

Projects will reference the body as a critical generator of the occupiable, modular “envelope” in dialogue with time and place. Defining ways of connecting the body to the “enclosure” will be examined through the interface of architectural “elements”. Various topics, approaches, and methodologies are pursued—from the scale of artifacts and human interaction, to 1:1 material experimentation, and systematic making and thinking.

The semester concludes with the adaptation of consequent strategies into tangible design proposals situated in a precise context. It will require students to produce a series of empirical documentations, narratives, physical constructions, and definitive representations to demonstrate understanding of material tectonics, human interactions, and atmospheric qualities.

Coordinator: Eduardo Cilleruelo Terán

Instructors: Adrian Anaya · Najmeh Bahabadi · Rebecca Barnes · Lahib Jaddo​ · Terah Maher · Lauren Phillips​ · Michael Simonds, AIA

This studio asks participants to contribute to the imaginaries of the land they inhabit by tracing deeper connections between architecture, place, material, and time—and by testing how those connections can serve a civic purpose as shared infrastructure. In this work, authorship fades into an unbounded territory, guided by the desire to endure and to give something back.

Coordinator: David Turturo, Ph.D

Instructors: Adrian Anaya · Nero He · Erin Hunt · Jimmy Johnson, AIA · Pedro Mena Vega, Ph.D · Michael Simonds, AIA · Steven Roop

How does architecture face the city? In Façade City, we study the city as architecture's most complex yet necessary context. The city is a space where people come together and where buildings line up. Façade City alternates between elevational studies of the city's ephemeral accumulations and planimetric studies of the city's concrete aspirations. This oscillation between vertical, horizontal, spontaneous, and planned helps us to query aesthetic, regulatory, ecological, and socio-economic constraints. With post-digital media and a combination of digital and haptic tools, we consider how architects imagine and realize evocative communal spaces. Façade City begins with a fast-paced study of urban fabric and street walls in small courthouse towns to establish urban principles. Then we investigate the more complex conditions of 6th Street in Austin, including a two-day site visit. With these skills and site research, we proceed with a collaborative charette to launch individual projects. Each project combines context and façade as spatial generators for a mixed-use building in a dense urban site.

Coordinator: Victoria McReynolds

Instructors: Logman Arja · Hendrika Buelinckx, Ph.D · Pat Klieopatinon · Asma Mehan, Ph.D · Daniel Pruske​ · Peter Raab​ · Christi Wier, AIA

Ogallala Commons Residency, continues the spring 2025 exploration of a mobile semi-permanent interdisciplinary ecological dwelling above the Ogallala Aquifer, this time through the lens of solar generosity and unpredictable precipitation. We will develop architecture in relation to sunlight’s capacity for energetic, thermal, and ecological propulsion with the aid of spectral readings and thermal imaging as a means to engage water extremes within the Great Plains Prairie.

Design thinking will take place through extensive modeling, constellation drawings, radiant-imaging, and research at the scale of body, building, site, informed by conversations with interdisciplinary experts, coordinated meetings with the partner Ogallala Commons graduate studio, and site visits.

Instructor: Logman Arja

The Museum of Masks of the World (MMOW) is an educational, transcultural, anthropological museum of masks from around the world. The West Texas Human Rights Retreat seeks to collaborate with the Huckabee College of Architecture to design a museum in Lubbock County that will be the “mask capital of Texas,” the foremost curator of masks from all continents. The museum aims to promote global cultural education and enrichment that brings visitors face-to-face with different cultural conceptualizations and reproductions of the human face. MMOW's mission is to inform, educate, enrich, and entertain its visitors by opening them to the world of masks as art forms that represent and reflect diverse worldviews, cultural values, and systems of artistic communication.

Students will leverage additive manufacturing technology and ceramic fabrication to study, map, and articulate major masks and characters from around the world as a departure point for architectural propositions. Students will be introduced to ceramic 3D printers to fabricate their models. Through interactive demonstrations and tutorials, students will develop a workflow spanning digital fabrication and machine craft. Through research and regular presentations, students will create a body of work on museum designs and character representations.

The plan is to have six continental pavilions exhibiting masks from the six continents of the world, a “hall of masquerades” performance space, a museum store, a classroom, a computer graphics lab, and workshop space for hands-on training in the production and restoration of masks.

Instructor: Hendrika Buelinckx, Ph.D

This studio … will seek inspiration and pay homage to the Early 20C Modern and Mid-Century Modern residential architecture of SoCal, will continue to document and critically examine LBBs current housing developments, and will culminate in the exploration and tectonic articulation of design proposals to dwell poetically between a parking lot and a playa lake on the TTU campus.

Instructor: Pat Klieopatinon

“The world is waiting for a new generation of architects, ready for a break, and tired of this rat race for money and success. It is time to return to basic values…. We have learned how architectural organisations systematically neglected social cohesion and conditions for belonging in favour of serving and even stimulating individualism… Buildings are separate units, merely like storage boxes chopped up into floors and separating walls; devices to protect us from each other. Lots of green also, but what happened to the streets that have traditionally kept the city together, providing rooms for belonging? We need streets as rooms for children to play near the front doors of their homes and also neighbours to meet… Instead of designing with exclusively specific purposes in mind we should also include space for alternative interpretations, which are generated by spontaneous situations. Every horizontal plane may become a table under certain circumstances but whether we call it a table is dependent on its context… Maybe we should consider buildings more as instruments, open to different tasks at different times.”

--Herman Hertzberger. “Letters to a Young Architect.” Architecture Review, September 2020.

Instructor: Asma Mehan, Ph.D

Architectures of Pause is a fourth-year undergraduate design studio examines adaptive reuse as an architectural, cultural, and ethical practice. The studio focuses on the transformation of abandoned and underutilized industrial buildings into spaces that cultivate pause, calm, and collective care within the contemporary city. Rather than approaching reuse as a problem of optimization, branding, or redevelopment efficiency, the course positions adaptive reuse as a critical architectural act that engages memory, materiality, and social life.

The studio is situated entirely in Houston, Texas—a city shaped by oil and gas infrastructures, logistics networks, shipping corridors, and large-scale industrial landscapes, as well as by environmental vulnerability, flooding, heat, and spatial inequality. Within this context, students are asked to critically rethink the role of architecture in shaping embodied experience, collective presence, and urban life beyond productivity-driven paradigms.

Through site-specific research and design, students investigate how industrial buildings can be re-inhabited without erasing their historical and material traces. Architecture is framed not as a neutral container for new programs, nor as a tool for aesthetic sanitization, but as a mediator between industrial memory and emerging modes of inhabitation—where care is constructed spatially, atmospherically, and ethically rather than programmatically.

Instructor: Daniel Pruske

Throughout the last century, a degradation of the public domain through neglect in relevant planning strategies, an inward retreat from social consciousness enabled by technology, and the rise of architectural aggregation and their subsequent monetization through developer culture have all, in part, shaped our urban environment.

These issues serve as a backdrop and departure point for an architectural critique and approach favoring strategic thinking, performative balances, and re-engagement with broader social needs and architecture through a process/studio we will call CRITICAL MASS.

Strategic thinking will be used in analysis and response to the stated problems, leading to expandable/adaptable, formal/spatial planning and design approaches. Dynamism will seek balance with practicality using imaginative planning at various depths—criticality—and scale—in the sense of massing—as allies.

This conceptually rigorous approach seeks to establish socially aware, tectonically varied, strategically balanced hybridizations of landscapes, architectures, and urbanities into a richly differentiated public realm.

Instructor: Peter Raab

The United States is experiencing a profound shortage of attainable housing, with the “missing middle” of mid-scale, mid-income typologies largely excluded from zoning, financing, and construction norms. This studio responds to that gap by framing housing not only as a building problem, but as a civic, spatial, and policy question shaped by land use, entitlement, infrastructure, and the morphologies of neighborhood form. Working within the framework of the 2026 ACSA/Think Wood Timber in the City 6: Urban Habitats competition, students will develop replicable, wood-based housing prototypes that bridge the scale between the detached house and the large apartment block.

The studio emphasizes rigorous tectonic and material inquiry, leveraging mass timber and panelized systems alongside digitally fabricated components to address constructability, carbon responsibility, and architectural quality. Proposals must operate across scales, from detail and assembly to block pattern, public realm activation, and urban morphology. Students will investigate how policy constraints, code frameworks, and development realities can serve as drivers of innovation, producing attainable, human-scaled housing that supports dignified living, community resilience, and equitable urban growth.

The studio is intentionally demanding, with expectations aligned with the rigor required for nationally competitive work.

This studio fulfills requirements for the Undergraduate Certificate in Ecological Architecture and Design.

Instructor: Christi Wier, AIA

This studio investigates the millennial housing crisis through the lens of adaptability, affordability, and social equity. Faced with rising rents, shrinking ownership opportunities, and increasing urban precarity, millennials are redefining what home means. This studio challenges students to respond to these conditions by reimagining housing.

Shipping containers serve as the primary design medium—both as a pragmatic construction unit and a critical architectural framework. Their standardized dimensions, global availability, and capacity for modular aggregation allow students to explore alternative housing typologies.

Students will engage with real-world constraints such as zoning, density, and climate resilience while questioning conventional ideals of domestic space and community living. The studio positions architecture as an agent of advocacy—capable of addressing systemic housing inequities while envisioning new forms of living aligned with millennial values of flexibility, sustainability, and shared resources.

Coordinator: Darrick Wade, AIA

Instructors: Lenora Ask, AIA · Chandler Cooke · Chris Powitzky

This studio is the building-scale continuation of ARCH 5600: Radical Urbanism – Neighborhood in Ft Worth. Each student will design a 15,000–20,000 SF mixed-use building including:

• A publicly-oriented commercial or community-serving ground floor,
• Residential or office program above,
• A minimum of two stories.

The semester simulates professional practice with early design lock-in and intensive system coordination and documentation.

Coordinator: Anthony Cricchio

This studio positions artificial intelligence as an active design partner embedded throughout the architectural design process—from site analysis and precedent research to concept generation, iterative development, performance evaluation, and final representation. Students will explore how AI-driven tools can expand architectural thinking by generating alternatives, revealing hidden patterns, and testing design decisions against spatial, environmental, and cultural criteria. Rather than treating AI as a tool for image-making alone, the studio emphasizes critical authorship, asking students to evaluate, edit, and redirect AI outputs through disciplinary judgment and architectural intent.

Design work will be structured around a sequence of research-based exercises that mirror contemporary architectural competitions, integrating AI-assisted workflows for massing studies, programmatic organization, façade logic, environmental performance, and narrative construction. The semester culminates in a fully resolved competition proposal, demonstrating how human creativity and artificial intelligence can operate together to produce rigorous, innovative, and contextually grounded architecture.

Instructor: Ali Ghazvinian, Ph.D

Jules Rimet’s Dream explores architecture as a system of collaboration between human, machine, and material. The studio focuses on the design and development of a reconfigurable stadium system, conceived for its first deployment during the 2026 World Cup (in the US, Mexico, and Canada) and later reconfigured for other global events, including the 2028 Olympics (in Los Angeles).

Students work with a modular design logic rooted in polyhedral geometries, developing architectural modules that can be assembled, disassembled, and reorganized through robotic and drone-assisted processes. While informed by ongoing research into AI and machine collaboration, the studio emphasizes Design Thinking: Addressing spatial qualities, Tectonic logics, and Informed decision-making within future-oriented systems.

The semester unfolds through a sequence of phases, from Unit to System, to Structure and then back to the beginning to define a heuristic design framework. The studio studies Stadium typology, Modular topology, and Long-Span Structures’ Tectonics.

Instructor: Sina Mostafavi, Ph.D

Live in Motion frames architecture as a disciplinary inquiry into assembly, aggregation, and transformation across scales. The work examines how individual architectural constructs operate as generative units whose spatial, material, and organizational logics expand into collective terrains. Motion is understood both as physical mobility and temporality, and as the capacity of architectural constructs to transform, adapt, and reconfigure over time and space.

The investigation spans scales from micro-architecture as individual constructs to mega-structures as collective terrains, engaging questions of use, adaptation, and collective form across diverse contexts. Individual constructs are developed as compact architectural frameworks that support living, working, and other forms of occupation, while remaining open to deformation, extension, and reconfiguration. Through aggregation and variation, these constructs give rise to collective terrains that articulate new spatial relationships and alternative collective forms of urbanization.

The studio unfolds through a progression from individual research and design studies into collective design and build explorations. Emerging design-build systems contribute to this process by positioning machines, materials, and making practices as active participants in co-design and co-production. Mock-ups and prototypes are developed to examine assembly, disassembly, customization, and adaptability, situating architecture as an assembled system capable of operating across changing terrains and collective conditions.

Instructor: Lingyi Qiu, Ph.D

Aging has become a global issue affecting many developed countries. In the United States, adults aged 65 and older now number more than 61 million, representing nearly 20% of the population. Approximately one in four people over the age of 65 experiences social isolation, which significantly increases the risk of chronic illnesses such as heart disease, depression, dementia, and premature death. Designing age-friendly environments that support dignity, health, and well-being for older adults is an important social responsibility of architects.

This studio challenges students to design integrated, university-affiliated living environments that support aging in place while fostering meaningful intergenerational connections. Through design, students will explore how architecture can promote emotional and physical well-being across generations by integrating wellness spaces, biophilic strategies, responsible materials, and inclusive design principles that address diverse abilities and life stages. The studio will participate in the AIA Design for Aging 2026 Student Design Competition.

Instructor: Chris Taylor

This studio will masterplan, design and detail iterations for a mobile semi-permanent interdisciplinary ecological residency at three locations above the Ogallala Aquifer. If William Carlos Williams was right in Patterson “—Say it, no ideas but in things—” then architects can say there are “no objects, only relationships.” Everything, even ideas, are built of entangled connections. A single-family house is not an isolated assembly sitting flatly on the land. It’s more a pimple——or a tomato——an outward expression of myriad inputs and outflows of resource, energy, and care. Connected to hydrologic, metabolic, and legal infrastructures that make its existence possible. This studio situates architecture within the complex and interwoven forces and histories that shape contemporary life on Earth. It springs from the belief that to make architecture is to make a thing, that helps us think, about the thing, we are trying to make.

Eduardo Cilleruelo-Teran & Victoria McReynolds

“Cloud Hunting: A Territorial Interrogation on the Architectures of the Datascape” studies the territorial infrastructure of energetically hungry industries. We become observers and investigators, reading traces of these data centers and crypto mining vessels across the landscapes, logistics, and law to understand their footprint on economies, resources, and politics. This course runs as a hybrid workshop combining short-form writing, forensic research, and speculative model-making. Fieldwork and datasets inform material experiments that visualize scale, spatial erasure, environmental risk, and extractive footprints. A critical atlas of artifacts toward more accountable digital ecologies guides the production of this course.

Jimmy Johnson, AIA

The class will focus on the primary sections of the International Building Code and how to interpret those sections of code and how best to apply them to building design in the studio environment. A general overview of the code will be the focus that will be broken down into ten sub-sections spaced throughout the semester. Each subsequent section will pull from previous exercises, readings, and research that will be required to complete and fulfill the current assignments. Specific focus will be given to Building Use and Occupancy, Building Heights and Areas, Types of Construction, Fire and Smoke Protection, and most importantly, Means of Egress. Assignments will be required to interpret code phrases, execute calculations for proper interpretation of code, and finally make design decisions that have been informed by the building code exercises. Other aspects of the class will include Special Requirements of Use and Occupancy, Fire Protection Systems, Electrical Systems, Mechanical Systems, and Plumbing Systems. A deep knowledge base will be gained to apply aspects of code compliance within the design studio as well as the on-site construction observation portions of the AXP.

Pedro Mena Vega, Ph.D

Far from being a given reality that one can only experience passively, space is an active ground where architecture and urbanism play a significant role in shaping, framing, or conditioning everyday life. More so, it is a fundamental crossroads for disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, economy and politics, for which alternating conceptual models have been proposed and prevailed over time. This course will provide the theoretical background for an introduction to the different phenomena concurring in urban space with an emphasis on the possibilities and limitations of architecture as a tool to decipher them. Students will select a specific site to do research about and present their findings in a visual essay together with a public presentation.

Chris Taylor

Drawing from Horizon (2019), other writings, and the university Sowell Collection archives by Barry Lopez (1945–2020) this course will take up the charge and responsibility to search for reciprocity between the human and more-than-human worlds. We will seek to address Barry’s statement that “Change is coming fast, though, on multiple fronts. Most of us begin the day now uncertain of exactly where we are. Once, we banked on knowing how to respond to all the important questions. Once, we assumed we’d be able to pass on to the next generation the skill of staying poised in worrying times. To survive what’s headed our way—global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments—and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.” Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, 2022

Nero He

Pedro Mena Vega, Ph.D

Over the past five hundred years, architects have continuously developed new ways to shape their design intentions into specific drawing types. Some of these graphic paradigms stand out as unique approaches that helped advance architecture in unexpected directions, changing the way we see and register the built environment. From late-18th century developed surface plans to post-digital collages, five milestones have been identified which will be presented and unraveled in class in order to apply these techniques to tackle the challenges of drawing architecture in the contemporary world. The result will be an exhibition of graphic works to showcase the multiple possibilities for expression in our discipline.

Erin Hunt

This graduate seminar explores soil-based 3D printing as a framework for climate-responsive construction and housing research. Students examine local soils as building media through material testing, computational modeling, and digital fabrication. The course investigates how wall-section assemblies can integrate thermal performance, structure, and environmental adaptability. Through readings, digital workflows, and printed prototypes, students translate regional material properties into architectural strategies for low-carbon, passive design.

Sina Mostafavi, Ph.D

Smart Prototyping examines prototyping as an architectural mode of inquiry in which intelligence emerges through the interaction of matters, mediums, and machines. Prototypes are framed not as representational artifacts, but as active constructs through which architectural thinking is tested, negotiated, and transformed. Emphasis is placed on hybrid architectural intelligence, where reasoning is distributed across material behavior, spatial organization, design intent, and modes of making. Prototyping enables performative variation and personalized customization by linking design development with physical assembly and testing. The scope of the work spans three interrelated modalities of smart prototyping, ranging from data-driven approaches that support variation and customization, to mixed-reality and phygital processes that connect design and assembly, and toward collaborative modes of co-design and co-production where human and machine intelligence intersect. These modalities are explored through contextualized and situated building investigations, operating from micro-scale artifacts to larger architectural and urban constructs. Architectural knowledge is advanced through experimentation, iteration, analytical reasoning, and empirical testing, supported by iterative design development, physical and functional evaluation, and one-to-one prototyping as a means of inquiry, validation, and disciplinary contribution.

Darrick Wade, AIA

Architectural design of landform, access, and utilities within regulatory site context.

SimHinman Wan, Ph.D

This graduate elective surveys the enduring significance of East Asian traditions and their presence in the modern world. Among the sociocultural factors that have shaped the local built environments historically, we will look closely at Confucianism and Buddhism as influences traversing geopolitical borders. We will also consider vernacular developments in structural systems, material utilization, and spatial geometries that are based on the land, climate, and other natural conditions.

SimHinman Wan, Ph.D

This graduate theory seminar is an introduction to the humanistic perspective on environmental studies. A key point of exploration is the interdisciplinary concepts that inform architectural thinking and creativity. Among the topics for discussion are the historiography of sustainable architecture, the shift from global to planetary awareness, green imperialism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and environmental justice.