3G3 - ARCH 422 - WINTER 2025
SITUATION
GRADUATE STUDIO
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN3G3 - ARCH 422 - WINTER 2025COORDINATOR
Meredith MillerPROFESSORS
Angela Cho, Meredith MillerMaterial Culture Visitor's Center
As the third and final design studio in the first-year M.Arch studio sequence, this course expands on the design approaches and representation skills introduced in FOUNDATIONS and FORM studios by prompting students to SITUATE their work within cultural contexts, material systems, and physical sites.
Three design projects explore materials, assemblies, and tectonics. From part-to-whole logics of assembly to cultural histories of industrialized building materials (particularly in our Great Lakes region), students make connections between the physical and social impacts of architecture and its nested situations.
For the final project (on view here), students designed a Material Culture Visitor's Center on a site in Toronto's waterfront area where a large urban development is literally reshaping the ground. The area's industrial past is being replaced by commercial and cultural uses, including a park and bike path that connects through the studio's site. Building on individual life cycle research and hands-on experiments on a particular material, each student developed a distinct material and programmatic proposal for the Visitor's Center. Projects had to coordinate ideas about tectonics (an approach to assembly) and steretomics (an approach to the ground).