3G2 - ARCH 412 - FALL 2025
FORM
GRADUATE STUDIO
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN3G2 - ARCH 412 - FALL 2025COORDINATOR
Adam FurePROFESSORS
Adam Fure, Tess ClancyForm Studio investigates the relationship between building form and social formation.
The semester begins with a series of abstract formal exercises and culminates in the design of a collective living community. The final project asks students to consider the nature of domestic space and what it means to share and care for one another beyond assumptions of individual ownership and comfort.
The site is a neighborhood composed of formerly single-family parcels, reimagined as a mix of housing and services for their community. Students work across multiple scales and levels of resolution: each project designs approximately one-third of a city block at the scale of massing and urban organization, then focuses more closely on a smaller portion of the site through detailed plans and sections.
Alongside foundational concepts of site design—such as circulation, core-periphery relationships, and scale—students critically examine how space is allocated at the level of urban design. This framework allows them to interrogate ideas such as private property and single-family zoning and to explore alternative models of collective living.
Through this work, students develop an understanding of form across multiple registers: from abstract relationships of geometry and space to the tangible effects architecture has on social relations.
STUDENTS
Lindsay Robertson
PROFESSORS
Adam Fure, Tess Clancy
Childish treats the mind of a child as form. The project imagines collective housing shaped by curiosity, recognition, and geometry, where circulation is learned through inhabitation and ownership. Interlocking volumes, shells, platforms, bridges, and voids create a spatial world one comes to know only as home, navigable through memory and play. Program and cognitive development intertwine: spaces for dwelling, care, and exploration fold into one another, resisting fixed hierarchies of public and private. Through iterative geometry diagrams and massing studies, the building emerges as an index of relationships, positioning architecture as an active participant in shaping the “shared”, imagination, and shifting becoming.
STUDENT
Kiki Chen
PROFESSORS
Adam Fure, Tess Clancy
This communal housing project proposes a campus where flexible office spaces for remote workers are gradually integrated with intergenerational family residences. A contrasting formal language of quarter-circles and rectilinear geometry generates transitions between open and enclosed spaces, further reinforced by changes in flooring and ceiling heights. This interplay also extends into masses and voids, delineating interior nooks or passageways and public access versus private courtyards. Business, pleasure; squares, curves; public, private — this spatial design offers a holistic approach to work-life balance that rejects the severance of the office worker from their identity as a community member.
STUDENT
Surya Cannon
PROFESSORS
Adam Fure, Tess Clancy
This project imagines a childcare-centric intentional community in Detroit's Little Village neighborhood following John Dewey's philosophy of democratic education. Family members (including children) vote annually for preferred units, rotating between living spaces as their needs change over time.
The site is arranged into age-based courtyards. Birth-oriented buildings are made publicly accessible on a commercial street, while teens are tucked into the neighborhood. Wedge- shaped exterior voids inform the interior, creating unique but spatially equal residential units. Spaces are separate yet shared, using views, gaps, and overlaps to facilitate parenting and learning, independence and safety.
One highlighted building houses a communal kitchen, the other allows teens and parents to live semi-independently.
STUDENT
Cassie Halszynski
PROFESSORS
Adam Fure, Tess Clancy
The Orchard is a collective housing project developed from a language of fragmented compound shapes. Its form reimagines the meaning of privacy within community through shifting fields of vision and circulation—as a result of the piloti, trees, and curtains. Embedded in the culture of Michigan’s apple orchards, the growing and processing of apples is downscaled and placed within an urban context. The orientation of the site situates the marketplace on the commercial avenue, creating a public entrance to the orchard as both a private community and public park, maintaining residential privacy through elevation while fostering connection through transparent circulation.