Huckabee College of Architecture
Rank your studio preferences at www.arch.ttu.edu/lottery. The lottery link is active only between August 24, 2:30 PM–August 25, 9:00 AM. Once submitted, you will receive a confirmation email stating your studio choices have been registered.
Students will be notified via email Wednesday, August 26 before 1:00 PM.
Coordinators: Pat Klieopatinon & Terah Maher
Design Studio 1, posits that form & space are the architect’s primary materials; and that an essential task of the architect is the use of form to delineate and shape space.
The Studio explores architectural representation - the drawing and the model - as the primary vehicles through which architects practice critical perception, critical analysis, transformation of ideas, and the communication of spatial intention. The methodology of abstraction is the foundation of all architectural representation, and therefore the studio will introduce and emphasize a language of architecture, to support the clarity, precision, and quality of architectural ideas.
The studio will utilize a variety of representational methods, both analogue and digital, to develop and describe studio projects that examine the relationship between form and space. Methods of representation employed throughout the semester include hand-drafted drawings, physical models, diagramming, photography, vector drawings, and digital collage.
Coordinator/Instructor: Lauren Phillips
Instructors: Adrian Anaya · Rebecca Barnes · Matt Forster · Lahib Jaddo · Deborah Pittman · Mark Segovia · Michael Simonds, AIA
ARCH 2503: Architectural Design III — Shaping Space introduces second-year architecture students to design as a cumulative process of observation, analysis, spatial organization, and communication. The semester begins with students studying architectural case studies and Lubbock’s First Friday Art Trail, using both as sources for understanding how space is shaped by movement, occupation, structure, light, and public life.
Students then develop an abstract Spatial Proposition, translate that idea into a specific site through investigations of ground and structure, and ultimately transform the work into a proposal for a Lubbock Academy of Visual Arts. Throughout the semester, emphasis shifts from discovery and experimentation toward coordination, refinement, and architectural argument.
Drawing, diagramming, physical modeling, digital modeling, writing, and presentation are integrated throughout the course. The goal is for students to understand architecture not as the search for a predetermined form, but as an iterative process of testing and shaping relationships.
Coordinator/Instructor: Ke Sun, Ph.D
Instructors: Sadaf Alikhani · Lenora Ask, AIA · Matt Forster · Erin Hunt · Pedro Mena Vega, Ph.D · Mark Segovia · David Turturo, Ph.D
Urban public space encompasses both speech and spatiality, where encounters, conflicts, metaphysics, perception, and non-human agencies negotiate through dialogue and analogue. The studio conceives urban architecture as a subversive topography disclosing a latent stratum of social relations, memory, civic rituals, and human experience suppressed by homogeneous urban environments prioritizing economies of extraction, appropriation, and productivity.
Political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s thesis of agonistic public counters rational consensus, which corresponds to Rem Koolhaas’s critique of Manhattan’s “lobotomy,” driven by grid’s subjugation of nature and the separation between hyper-programmed interiors and monolithic exteriors. The studio proposes a collision between the bifurcation of ‘podium’ and ‘tower’, transforming them into “thick” strata of urban surfaces to reconstruct cultures of conflict and negotiation that democratize streets/space.
The primary goal is to explore how a horizontally organized, stratified planar spatial system can generate typologies altering/engaging civic life, urban grids, and the socio-spatial hierarchy of the city.
Coordinator/Instructor: Victoria McReyolds, RA
Instructors: Hendrika Buelinckx, Ph.D · Jimmy Johnson, AIA · Pat Klieopatinon · Asma Mehan, Ph.D · Steven Roop · Michael Simonds, AIA · Eduardo Cilleruelo Terán
Airways of the Llano Estacado, posits architecture as a bridge connecting the Llano Estacado Caprock with the Americas Central Flyway. Students will design an Ornithology Center situated within the Yellow House Draw riparian corridor, focusing on characteristic birds: kite, kestrel, hawk, heron, crane, owl.
Organized around three phases, the studio gains understanding of designing architecture with avian ecologies, site conditions, and performative structures. Work is informed through research, models, drawings, and discussions taking place alongside visits to the South Plains Wildlife Recovery Center, conversations with interdisciplinary experts, and touring the Yellow House Draw. Each project cultivates connections across scales of enclosure, from tiny burrows to expansive migratory pathways, and from structural connections to environment building.
Students will thoughtfully move between site and tectonics to develop projects that dial visitors’ awareness towards sub-ground, ground, on-ground, and above-ground conditions, while accommodating programs of recovery, gathering, gallery, lectures, and equipment space.
Instructor: Hendrika Buelinckx, Ph.D
The focus of this studio is to create a home for a deserving family in the Lubbock community, all while illustrating the process of experiential learning in a full Design-Build Project.
Students will gain the opportunity to experience the step-by-step processes of schematic design, design development, and construction documentation as well as the on-site construction for a single-family residential project.
We will collectively work as a full-service design team to create a single complete project. This will include the conceptual design and marketing imagery for presentation to the Lubbock Habitat Construction Committee. The committee will select a design to be further developed. The class will then work as a team to fully develop and document the winning design into a complete marketing package for the client, a complete construction manual and specification, as well as a complete set of working drawings that will be submitted to the City of Lubbock for a building permit.
Instructor: Jimmy Johnson, AIA
The focus of this studio is to create a home for a deserving family in the Lubbock community, all while illustrating the process of experiential learning in a full Design-Build Project.
Students will gain the opportunity to experience the step-by-step processes of schematic design, design development, and construction documentation as well as the on-site construction for a single-family residential project.
We will collectively work as a full-service design team to create a single complete project. This will include the conceptual design and marketing imagery for presentation to the Lubbock Habitat Construction Committee. The committee will select a design to be further developed. The class will then work as a team to fully develop and document the winning design into a complete marketing package for the client, a complete construction manual and specification, as well as a complete set of working drawings that will be submitted to the City of Lubbock for a building permit.
Instructor: Pat Klieopatinon
The Citizen Architect uses his/her insights, talents, training, and experience to contribute meaningfully, beyond self, to the improvement of the community and human condition.
The Citizen Architect stays informed on local, state, and federal issues, and makes time for service to the community.
The Citizen Architect advocates for higher living standards, the creation of a sustainable environment, quality of life, and the greater good.
The Citizen Architect seeks to advocate for the broader purposes of architecture through civic activism, writing and publishing, by gaining appointment to boards and commissions, and through elective office at all levels of government.”
The AIA National Board of Directors, 2008
Instructor: Asma Mehan, Ph.D
Detroit and Torino represent two major centers of twentieth-century automobile production whose industrial development profoundly shaped their architecture, urban form, labor geographies, and cultural identities. While Detroit developed through the spatial and technological systems associated with Ford and American mass production, Torino emerged around FIAT and a distinct European model of industrial urbanization. Today, both cities provide significant yet contrasting contexts for examining the architectural future of industrial heritage.
Architecture of Pause investigates adaptive reuse through a comparative study of these two post-industrial cities. The studio examines how factories, production spaces, and industrial landscapes originally organized around machinery, efficiency, repetition, and labor can be critically transformed to accommodate programs centered on yoga, Tai Chi, meditation, contemplative movement, physical restoration, and collective care. The relationship between industrial production and the human body becomes a central architectural question, connecting issues of scale, movement, materiality, atmosphere, time, and spatial experience.
Students will investigate selected industrial sites in Detroit and Torino through historical research, urban mapping, precedent analysis, and comparative documentation. Attention will be given to the relationship between existing industrial structures and new architectural interventions; strategies of preservation and transformation; environmental and material performance; and the relationship between industrial scale and contemporary forms of occupation. The two cities therefore function not as independent case studies but as parallel laboratories through which students can examine how different historical, cultural, climatic, and urban conditions produce different approaches to industrial reuse.
The studio positions adaptive reuse as a critical architectural practice capable of negotiating between heritage and transformation, industrial production and contemporary urban life, and the scale of the machine and the experience of the human body. Through the comparison of Detroit and Torino, Architecture of Pause asks how the industrial structures that defined twentieth-century production can acquire new architectural and civic roles in the twenty-first century.
Instructors: Steven Roop & Michael Simonds, AIA
Instructor: Eduardo Cilleruelo Terán
The Columbia River is North America's most engineered watershed, a corridor of dams, locks, transmission lines, irrigation, ports, and now hyperscale data centers drawing on the cheapest power on the continent. As one of the main energy arteries of the American West, it binds hydropower, agriculture, salmon, treaty rights, and computation into a single operational landscape.
Working between Quincy and The Dalles, students will investigate critical infrastructure, from farms and warehouses to power plants, dams, and data centers, as architecture: territorial, contested, increasingly automated.
The studio leans toward the proposal of a residency for multidisciplinary research on infrastructure, lands, water, and air, a place where technical systems become legible, public, and shared. Scales shift from territory to building, with drawing and large-format models as the primary instruments of the work.
Coordinator/Instructor: Daniel Pruske
Instructors: Adrian Anaya · Deborah Pittman · Chris Powitzky
Complexity Theory: the study of complex and chaotic systems and how order, pattern, and structure can arise from them.
Founded in 1984, the Santa Fe Institute is a theoretical research center dedicated to the study and understanding of complex systems at a variety of scales. It is a bastion of collaborative thinking where differing fields of expertise including physics, biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, political science, and others converge, seeking understanding of how the layered forces driving our world collide and integrate.
Using a conceptually driven, layered approach to the development of organization, all studios will use the Santa Fe Institute as a model for group projects. Sites in Houston, Long Beach, Los Angeles and Tempe—each with unique contextual constraints and potential when combined with program and process—will be the differentiating aspects amongst the studios.
Instructor: Amir Halabi
The Pajarito Plateau extends from the Jemez Mountains to the Rio Grande, its mesas and canyons cut through the Tshirege Member (shur-GAY), the upper Bandelier Tuff deposited by the Valles Caldera eruption approximately 1.25 million years ago. In geology, a member is a distinct body of material identified by its composition, position, and extent. Tshirege, commonly translated from Tewa as “bird place,” names an ancestral Pueblo site near White Rock.
Design is approached through a reversed sequence, beginning and ending with collecting, archiving, and documenting as active processes—drawing on practices of material witnessing, archival reconstruction, and deep mapping. From Susan Schuppli and Akram Zaatari to Shannon Mattern, evidence is gathered and transformed through drawing, modelling, montage, photography, writing, moving image, and material work, with documentation continually realigning the project.
Susan Buck-Morss notes that “the images were the inspiration for the writing of the text, rather than being illustrations of the text.” This reciprocal relationship between image, material, writing, and narrative extends into architectural design and display.
Projects move from fragment to landscape to building to presentation, as individual research develops into collaborative landscape interventions, small architectural propositions, and a scenographic final review.
Studio travel: five-day field trip to the Pajarito Plateau, northern New Mexico.
Instructor: Sina Mostafavi, Ph.D
3AM Studio, standing for Augmented Adaptive Additive Manufacturing Architecture, is a recurring design studio that critically investigates how emerging design-build technologies, including computational design, artificial intelligence, robotic fabrication, additive manufacturing, and prefabricated construction, can reshape architectural material culture, tectonics, and modes of production. Positioned within the paradigm of Industry 5.0, the studio approaches 3D printing not as an isolated fabrication technique but as part of an integrated design-to-production framework operating across material, component, building-system, and architectural scales. The Fall 2026 studio, Additive Archives, shifts this investigation toward public cultural infrastructure. The studio begins with a site-independent study of Dutch art, architecture, design, and material culture, translating these investigations into a full-scale architectural folly or installation and associated fabrication systems. These studies subsequently become anchored within selected urban contexts, potentially including Rotterdam, The Hague, and Eindhoven, as well as corresponding contexts in the United States. Through the design of publicly accessible art depots, studio participants will question conventional relationships between the museum, exhibition, archive, and storage while exploring how additive, prefabricated, and modular modes of construction can support larger and vertically aggregated architectures, new forms of public access and visibility, and contemporary relationships between cultural heritage, material production, and architectural space.
Instructor: Christi Wier, AIA
This studio explores adaptive reuse as an opportunity to transform an existing commercial shell building into a meaningful place that responds to the cultural, economic, and environmental needs of El Paso. In partnership with EP Riverbend, students will research the site, community, and client vision to develop and justify their own building program rather than working from a predetermined brief. Projects will integrate architecture, landscape, and a custom clay block screening wall developed in the companion seminar course, demonstrating material innovation and environmental performance. Throughout the semester, students will engage in a professional client relationship through presentations, design reviews, and evidence-based decision-making while applying the International Building Code (IBC), ADA Accessibility Standards, and principles of architectural practice. The final proposal will balance creativity, technical rigor, constructability, and client needs while contributing to the ongoing revitalization of the EP Riverbend development and the broader El Paso community.
Instructor: Chris Taylor
This studio explores adaptive reuse as an opportunity to transform an existing commercial shell building into a meaningful place that responds to the cultural, economic, and environmental needs of El Paso. In partnership with EP Riverbend, students will research the site, community, and client vision to develop and justify their own building program rather than working from a predetermined brief. Projects will integrate architecture, landscape, and a custom clay block screening wall developed in the companion seminar course, demonstrating material innovation and environmental performance. Throughout the semester, students will engage in a professional client relationship through presentations, design reviews, and evidence-based decision-making while applying the International Building Code (IBC), ADA Accessibility Standards, and principles of architectural practice. The final proposal will balance creativity, technical rigor, constructability, and client needs while contributing to the ongoing revitalization of the EP Riverbend development and the broader El Paso community.
Instructor: Logman Arja
This course cultivates a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship by integrating additive manufacturing technology, ceramic fabrication, and urban agriculture. Students will design, prototype, and build environmentally conscious urban farming and foodscape systems that address contemporary challenges in food production, resource efficiency, and the built environment.
Using ecotechnology as a guiding framework, the course explores the convergence of ecological systems and emerging technologies through advanced digital fabrication, hydroponics, and material experimentation. Students will transform raw clay into customized growing systems, develop functional hydroponic prototypes, assemble a foodscapes pavilion, and evaluate the environmental, social, and economic impacts of their work, as well as the rate of technology adoption. In doing so, students will engage with entrepreneurial methods and frameworks, such as the Nine-Block Canvas, Lean LaunchPad, and value proposition design.
This focus on innovative solutions aims to empower students to make meaningful contributions to sustainable communities.
Instructor: Erin Hunt
This seminar gives students the opportunity to design and fabricate components for a full-scale architectural project installed in El Paso, Texas. Working with commercially manufactured masonry units, the class will develop approximately 250 custom ceramic blocks that transform a conventional screen wall into a site-responsive, computationally designed system.
Students will use explore pattern, porosity, airflow, and the distribution of custom units across the wall. Digital simulations and iterative prototyping will inform the geometry and placement of the inserts, while hands-on fabrication will introduce clay 3D printing, material testing, drying and firing strategies, dimensional tolerances, and production planning.
The course will move from digital design to physical production at architectural scale. Students will contribute to a shared fabrication workflow, develop assembly drawings and a component-labeling system, and help prepare the finished pieces for delivery to El Paso. The project offers direct experience with computational design, ceramic 3D printing, environmental performance, and the realities of producing a large collection of unique architectural components.
The completed wall will provide students with a built project for their portfolios and may contribute to future exhibitions, design competitions, and research publications. No prior experience with ceramic 3D printing is required and all materials will be provided.
Instructor: Sina Mostafavi, Ph.D
This course on Augmented Robotic Production focuses on experimental and one-to-one scale prototyping of architectural assemblies using emerging design-build technologies. Participants engage with computational design, AI-enabled workflows, industrial-scale multi-robotic fabrication (RF), human–robot collaboration (HRC), large-format additive manufacturing (LFAM), and augmented reality (AR)-enabled production and assembly. The course emphasizes informed variation through computational design, simulation, material experimentation, and iterative prototyping, integrating design intent, fabrication logic, material behavior, and modes of production within the design process. Depending on participants’ interests, identified objectives, and targeted innovative aspects, various additive, subtractive, and hybrid fabrication processes will be explored and employed to develop novel computational-to-production workflows. The semester begins with individual assignments and evolves into collaborative group projects focused on the design and fabrication of architectural assemblies through hybrid human–machine intelligence. Selected outcomes will contribute to the Dutch–USA 250 Initiative and will be presented in a public exhibition at the Museum of Texas Tech University. Through AI, robotics, iterative experimentation, and applied prototyping, participants will develop, test, and refine new relationships between computational design, materiality, fabrication, and architectural expression.
Instructor: Joseph Aranha
The course focuses on works of modern and contemporary architects in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Topics include modernization, globalization, rapid urbanization, national identity, and other forces of change that have shaped and continue to influence the built environments of the Global South. Students will study and critically examine works of contemporary architecture, including those rooted in indigenous knowledge and vernacular practices and local responses to uses of materials, socio-economic and environmental challenges.
Instructor: Arman Hamidzadeh Mahdian
Architectural Competition Lab: Design Through Architectural Firm Practice introduces students to collaborative design through the workflow of a professional architectural firm. Students work as an integrated team, taking on different disciplines and responsibilities while developing a proposal for a real architectural competition. The course begins with research into the competition brief, jury and their work, previous winners, evaluation criteria, site conditions, and cultural context. This research informs a clear design strategy and conceptual direction. Students explore site analysis, concept development, spatial design, technical coordination, visualization, and architectural storytelling. Particular attention is given to developing a representation style responding to the competition’s theme, identity, and narrative. Through collaboration, critiques, and iterative development, students experience the coordination and decision-making of architectural practice. The course culminates in a cohesive, professionally developed competition proposal prepared collectively by the class for final submission.
Instructor: Tahmures Ghiyasi
FLOW introduces students to the fundamental principles of architectural geometry, bridging mathematical concepts with digital and physical design practices. Students will explore the role of geometry as both a generative and analytical tool in architecture, learning how to construct, manipulate, and evaluate forms through geometric reasoning. The class combines lectures on theoretical foundations, tutorials in Rhino and Grasshopper, and hands-on workshops in digital fabrication.
Huckabee College of Architecture