ARCH 672/692 + MUD 732 S/F 2025
ARCH 672 PROPOSITIONS + UD 732 - STUDIO III
FALL 2025Repair Manual
Repair Manual reframes architectural design around a question the discipline has long deferred: what if the future of architecture lies not in building more, but in repairing what already exists? Situated at the intersection of architecture, urban design, and environmental ethics, the studio positions repair as an active, political, and generative design practice rather than a technical afterthought.
Centered on the Horace H. Rackham Educational Memorial Building in Detroit, the studio treats the building as a living subject: materially aged, institutionally burdened, culturally resonant, and environmentally consequential. Students engage the Rackham as both site and proxy: a lens through which to confront deferred maintenance, embodied carbon, civic responsibility, and the ethics of institutional presence in the city.
Working across scales—from forensic material analysis to urban narratives and speculative protocols—students develop propositions that spatialize care, maintenance, adaptation, and refusal. The studio draws on international precedents in architectural repair, with particular attention to civic and cultural experiments in France, engaged directly through an intensive workshop.
Repair Manual insists that repair is a design stance, a political position, and a disciplinary pivot—away from extraction, toward stewardship, continuity, and collective futures.