GRADUATE STUDIO
ARCH 422 - WINTER 2022
COORDINATOR
Meredith Miller
PROFESSORS
Catherine Griffith, Meredith Miller
Laura Peterson, Jono Sturt
A SITUATION is the manner in which objects and/or people are disposed in a particular location and time. As the final studio in the first-year graduate sequence, Situation builds on the previous semesters’ emphasis on compositional, geometric and social logics by focusing on material, cultural and circumstantial factors. Where Form studio developed aptitudes for abstraction, enabling students to describe and develop spatial and organizational relationships at the scale of the building and the block, Situation studio is concerned with real and virtual scenarios at various scales, temporalities and platforms. Moving away from abstraction then, Situation confronts “realism,” an interpretation of given conditions that is informed by and mediated through representation.
A range of design strategies, research methods, and representational techniques situate architecture in contexts not defined only by locality or geography, but also by material, cultural and circumstantial conditions. Students' final design projects stage temporary "Material Cultural Centers" in an underused city-owned site in Ann Arbor. Building on an earlier stage of material life-cycle research, the project applies a critical awareness about building materials not as neutral artifacts but as momentary embodiments of much longer processes that encompass various scales, locations, and temporalities.
A range of design strategies, research methods, and representational techniques situate architecture in contexts not defined only by locality or geography, but also by material, cultural and circumstantial conditions. Students' final design projects stage temporary "Material Cultural Centers" in an underused city-owned site in Ann Arbor. Building on an earlier stage of material life-cycle research, the project applies a critical awareness about building materials not as neutral artifacts but as momentary embodiments of much longer processes that encompass various scales, locations, and temporalities.