Past Graduate Topics

TECHNOLOGY
ARCH 7000-T30 | Wednesdays, 12:30 PM - 5:15 PM
All the Buildings Along the Pembina Highway: an urban design study
Brian Rex

Some architecture is bigger than a building.  Some architecture isn’t primarily made of building stuff.  How do we make sense of large scale infrastructural architectures?
 
One way to understand the urban fabric of Winnipeg is by defining its infrastructures (components) across time and how they’ve come together (assembly) in different times.  Using the vernacular traces, lines, lanes, paths, promenades, bounds, properties, lots, spaces, intersections, easements, blocks, fields, swaths, bands, parks, zones, infrastructures, neighbourhoods, and geometries evident in our studies of the city, we get a sense of both how Winnipeg is and how Winnipeg seems to have gotten this way.
 
We are going to perform an architectural analysis on a vernacular place larger than a building by drawing on historical records, by documenting the place as it is, and by building maps from contemporary data.  All this is edited together into a taxonometric model that reveals underlying systems and orders defining the place across time.
 
20th Century Practices of Looking at the Vernacular Landscape
Ed Ruscha
Hilla & Bernd Becher
Robert Smithson
Denise Scott Brown & Robert Venturi
 
Pembina Highway, and all the Winnipeg river roads (such as Portage and St-Mary’s roads), are an urban device quite unique to this city. Winnipeg river roads and their enclosing river lot systems have grown into the dominant block and street geometries of the city.  At its core, it is not a cartesian city like so many of its prairie neighbours.  In Winnipeg the river, river lots, river road, and railroad form an intricate weave and irregularly cross-sectional dance wherever we look.  There’s both some Montréal and St-Louis in the river lot genetics.  Pembina Highway is a monumentally common experience.  Its exactly the kind of space that Jane Jacobs feared, that Scott Brown & Venturi learned from, Ed Ruscha deadpan documented, the Bechers photographed head-on, and Robert Smithson mythologized.  We will pick up their lenses to look at this place as well and we will look to an amazing spate of recent architectural urban design publications as models of production.
 
Contemporary Studies of Vernacular Urban Fabric
Robert Somol, Alex Lehnerer, & Jayne Kelley’s The Western Town from 2014
Jallon, Napolitano, & Boutté’s Paris Hausmann: A Model’s Relevance from 2017
Keith Krumweide’s Atlas of Another America from 2017
Joan Busquets & Dingliang Yan’s Urban Grids from 2019
 
Pembina Highway seems to be free of meaning.  It is never the same cross section in any two places yet its still all the same when we drive down it.  Its specifically generic.  Everything along it seems to exist in graduated ranges of type rather than discrete zones.  In this five week tech topics course we will find the morphogenesis of this artifact of the city and we’ll break it down into a system of constituent parts as a way of telling its story and giving it meaning.

HISTORY & THEORY
ARCH 7030-T19 | Wednesdays, 8:30 AM to 12:15 PM
Theory of Biomimetic Design
Mercedes Garcia-Holguera

This is an introductory level course where students will explore the principles of biomimetic design and their application to architectural products. Students will learn about biologically inspired projects and materials, and will study current methods and tools used in academic and professional venues. Participants in this course will have the opportunity to apply the lessons learned in a self-directed biomimetic project.

Overview: This course introduces students to the importance and influence of cinema in constructing and comprehending urban environments. Addressing cities in an international context (Europe, Latin and North America, Asia, and North Africa) this seminar will provide a structured and historical overview of seminal filmic representations of urban pasts, presents, and futures. ‘Cinematic’ cities address films in which the city serves not just as background, but in which the city plays an active role in narrative construction. The course provides students with the knowledge of ‘seeing’ cinema as both an interpretive art form and an investigative tool. Cinematic cities are ‘framed’ as spaces of hope, desire, danger, transgression, conflict, or reconciliation. These ‘frames’ are reflections of power, gender relations, social justice or injustice; generational, national or racial conflict; center and margin, ‘light’ and ‘dark’, ‘above’ and ‘below’. Deployed in relation to various social and political agendas, these constitute an ‘urban imaginary’ ranging from ‘Sex and the City’, to ambiguous and fluid sites of a racialized or sexualized ‘other’, to contested sites of contagion, crime and combat. These perceptual ‘soft factors’ embody and expand on design intentions across urban, architectural, interior, and landscape narratives; narratives intersecting individual, social and cultural fears and aspirations spanning from the dystopian to the utopian.

Deliverables: Attendance, film screenings, a weekly one-page review of a selected scene of the viewed film, discussion participation and a term paper constitute the course requirements. The paper will focus on either one film of significance and its intersection with an urban environment, or it may be a comparative study of two films. Individual topics will be developed in consultation with Prof. Stern. Students with an interest in urban photography are also welcomed.

Questions: Are always welcome, please don’t be shy. For students having any pertinent enquiries, please feel free to contact me at my email address: ralph.stern@umanitoba.ca

Instructor: Ralph Stern has taught on cinematic representation at the Technical University Berlin, the University of the Arts Berlin, Columbia University, Yale University, M.I.T., the Cities Program at the London School of Economics, and the University of Manitoba among others. He has published on cinematic representation in the AA Files and Cinema Journal among other publications. His own photographic work has been exhibited and published in numerous venues in Europe and North America.

As you know, most of what the architect has by tradition been known to provide probably can be provided today by others more efficiently and to the point. What has always interested me is not what the architect can provide that others can also provide (which is a sort of parallelism), but that which only the architect can provide. And I believe strongly now, more than ever, that only the architect can provide that which can affect the spirit. Spirit is a huge, amorphic word, but anything less, or any pursuit or study or investigation that doesn’t move to that central issue—I was going to say irrelevant—but it’s not architecture. ― John Hejduk in Architectuur en Verbeelding

Design is all about desire, but strangely this desire seems almost subject-less today, or at least lack-less; that is, design seems to advance a new kind of narcissism, one that is all image and no interiority - an apotheosis of the subject that is also its disappearance. Poor little rich man: he is 'precluded from all future living and striving, developing and desiring' in the neo-Art Nouveau world of total design and Internet plenitude.
― Hal Foster in Design and Crime

There is no architecture without spirit and imagination. There are many overlapping factors that make up the associations between art & architecture. Artists often have a great interest in architecture (Piet Mondrian, Dan Graham, Tadashi Kawamata), while architects practice as artists as well (Le Corbusier, Will Alsop, Diller & Scofidio). Critic Hal Foster calls this short-circuit the “Art-Architecture Complex.” Foster uses terms like “encounter” and “connection” to describe the recent relationship between art and architecture to designate the many ensembles where art and architecture are juxtaposed and/or combined, sometimes with art in (what was once considered) the space of architecture, sometimes with architecture in (what was once considered) the place of art. Such ensembles might be the rule in traditions in the West and elsewhere, and the modernist moment of a relative separation of the arts the exception. By using the term “complex” Foster indicates how the capitalist subsumption of the culture into the economy often prompts the repurposing of such art-architecture combinations as points of attraction and/or sites of display, hence public art, installation art, etc.   

While historically architecture has been associated with other grand artforms (music, painting, and sculpture), after the second world war architecture gradually distanced itself from this tradition to become more of a service provider to the construction industry, defaulting to a more consumeristic role. In this process architecture lost its connection to art, phenomenology, and poetry. The integral relationship between art & architecture has been for the past four decades experiencing a new renaissance of recovering architecture’s intrinsic quality as an art form, and a result not only of an individual’s or a collective’s pragmatic needs, but to reclaim the role of architecture as a poetic act, resulting from one’s imagination, and reaching people’s spirit. This topics course will discuss the relationship art-architecture through projects and texts, providing a critical forum to guide anyone to establish personal design strategies to bring imagination and spirit back into the project. The course will include a tour to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, where one of the classes will take place in “Tapume”.

Overview: This course introduces students to the importance and influence of cinema in constructing and comprehending urban environments. Addressing cities in an international context (Europe, Latin and North America, Asia, and North Africa) this seminar will provide a structured and historical overview of seminal filmic representations of urban pasts, presents, and futures. ‘Cinematic’ cities address films in which the city serves not just as background, but in which the city plays an active role in narrative construction. The course provides students with the knowledge of ‘seeing’ cinema as both an interpretive art form and an investigative tool. Cinematic cities are ‘framed’ as spaces of hope, desire, danger, transgression, conflict, or reconciliation. These ‘frames’ are reflections of power, gender relations, social justice or injustice; generational, national or racial conflict; center and margin, ‘light’ and ‘dark’, ‘above’ and ‘below’. Deployed in relation to various social and political agendas, these constitute an ‘urban imaginary’ ranging from ‘Sex and the City’, to ambiguous and fluid sites of a racialized or sexualized ‘other’, to contested sites of contagion, crime and combat. These perceptual ‘soft factors’ embody and expand on design intentions across urban, architectural, interior, and landscape narratives; narratives intersecting individual, social and cultural fears and aspirations spanning from the dystopian to the utopian.

Deliverables: Attendance, film screenings, a weekly one-page review of a selected scene of the viewed film, discussion participation and a term paper constitute the course requirements. The paper will focus on either one film of significance and its intersection with an urban environment, or it may be a comparative study of two films. Individual topics will be developed in consultation with Prof. Stern. Students with an interest in urban photography are also welcomed.

Questions: Are always welcome, please don’t be shy. For students having any pertinent enquiries, please feel free to contact me at my email address: ralph.stern@umanitoba.ca

Instructor: Ralph Stern has taught on cinematic representation at the Technical University Berlin, the University of the Arts Berlin, Columbia University, Yale University, M.I.T., the Cities Program at the London School of Economics, and the University of Manitoba among others. He has published on cinematic representation in the AA Files and Cinema Journal among other publications. His own photographic work has been exhibited and published in numerous venues in Europe and North America.

Overview: This course introduces students to the importance and influence of cinema in constructing and comprehending urban environments. Addressing cities in an international context (Europe, Latin and North America, Asia, and North Africa) this seminar will provide a structured and historical overview of seminal filmic representations of urban pasts, presents, and futures. ‘Cinematic’ cities address films in which the city serves not just as background, but in which the city plays an active role in narrative construction. The course provides students with the knowledge of ‘seeing’ cinema as both an interpretive art form and an investigative tool. Cinematic cities are ‘framed’ as spaces of hope, desire, danger, transgression, conflict, or reconciliation. These ‘frames’ are reflections of power, gender relations, social justice or injustice; generational, national or racial conflict; center and margin, ‘light’ and ‘dark’, ‘above’ and ‘below’. Deployed in relation to various social and political agendas, these constitute an ‘urban imaginary’ ranging from ‘Sex and the City’, to ambiguous and fluid sites of a racialized or sexualized ‘other’, to contested sites of contagion, crime and combat. These perceptual ‘soft factors’ embody and expand on design intentions across urban, architectural, interior, and landscape narratives; narratives intersecting individual, social and cultural fears and aspirations spanning from the dystopian to the utopian.

Deliverables: Attendance, film screenings, a weekly one-page review of a selected scene of the viewed film, discussion participation and a term paper constitute the course requirements. The paper will focus on either one film of significance and its intersection with an urban environment, or it may be a comparative study of two films. Individual topics will be developed in consultation with Prof. Stern. Students with an interest in urban photography are also welcomed.

Questions: Are always welcome, please don’t be shy. For students having any pertinent enquiries, please feel free to contact me at my email address: ralph.stern@umanitoba.ca

Instructor: Ralph Stern has taught on cinematic representation at the Technical University Berlin, the University of the Arts Berlin, Columbia University, Yale University, M.I.T., the Cities Program at the London School of Economics, and the University of Manitoba among others. He has published on cinematic representation in the AA Files and Cinema Journal among other publications. His own photographic work has been exhibited and published in numerous venues in Europe and North America.

HISTORY/THEORY
ARCH 7030 | Wednesday
Theatres of Architectural Imagination
Lisa Landrum

This course explores spaces and agencies of architectural imagination through research and theatrical experimentation. Students will study spatial practices of contemporary architects and theatre artists and learn about influences of performing arts on architectural history, theory and design. Through collaborative improvisation, students will invent stories, staged as multi-media micro-events and framed by questions. In what ways is architecture a performing art? How are architectural and theatrical representation interrelated? Research extends themes from the recent Theatres of Architectural Imagination Symposium and Archimagination events for the 2021 Venice Biennale.

TECHNOLOGY
ARCH 7010 | Wednesday, 8:30 AM to 12:30 PM
Bending Active: Exploring Dynamic Assemblies in Flexible Structures
Lancelot Coar

This course will dive into the dynamic world of Bending Active structures, assemblies of axial elements that self-organize in a reciprocal dance between the actions of the builder and the reactions of the elastic linear elements being shaped. While the traditions of these building systems are based in physical and empirical experimentation the recent rise in digital and parametric design tools now allows us to examine these structures with greater dexterity and more open-ended assembly explorations.

By incorporating a balance of both digital* and physical experimentation, students in this course will create their own bending active structures at a range of scales. We will work in partnership with the FABLab to use new customized digital tools they have developed using Rhinoceros and Grasshopper and 3D printed connection details to assemble these speculative systems in the material world.

*No previous experience is needed using Rhinoceros or Grasshopper to take this course.

HISTORY/THEORY
ARCH 7020-T20 | Wednesday, 8:30 AM to 12:15 PM
Decolonizing Design: Technology and Indigenous Knowledge Part A
Honoure Black

Students will research how Indigenous knowledge, art, and technique impact contemporary architectural methods.  The aim is to introduce Indigenous ways of knowing through a land-focused lens, introducing connections to architectural technology and processes.  The design research will be directed by lectures, workshops, and individual and group discussions.  Each student will entangle their investigation(s) and tease out a thoughtful design reaction.  Students will be encouraged to accelerate the boundaries of analogue and digital methods as they create interventions by blending Western and Indigenous ways of knowing.

Image: Birch Bark Canoe Detail - https://canoemuseum.ca/2016-12-2-looking-closely-treatment-of-a-birch-bark-canoe-part-one/

HISTORY/THEORY
Wednesday, 1:30 PM to 5:15 PM, 216, Arch2
Drawing on the Modern
Terri Fuglem

This seminar/workshop course will examine the non-objective, abstract, and visionary drawings made by architects in the modern era as a corollary to practice. Students will study historic and contemporary examples of drawings through research and graphical analysis/emulation. The major assignment will be either a series of drawings relating to the students’ studio (or thesis) project or an essay investigating the work of an architect of the student’s choosing.

TECHNOLOGY
Wednesday, 1:30 PM to 5:15 PM
Hands on Masonry
Ted Landrum

This course covers the awe-inspiring history and future of masonry, together with wide-ranging  principles, precedents and concerns. Coursework includes a hands-on masonry workshop and a field trip to a stone quarry shop. Students meet industry experts; lay bricks; inspect full scale mock-ups and materials; and review detailed shop drawings produced by master masons. Students present a variety of readings on masonry traditions and innovations, and assemble their individual research in a final booklet.

TECHNOLOGY
ARCH 7010-T34 | Wednesday, 8:30 AM to 12:15 PM
Decolonizing Design: Technology and Indigenous Knowledge (Part B)
Shawn Bailey

Students will research how Indigenous knowledge, art, and technique impact contemporary architectural methods.  The aim is to introduce Indigenous ways of knowing through a land-focused lens, introducing connections to architectural technology and processes.  The design research will be directed by lectures, workshops, and individual and group discussions.  Each student will entangle their investigation(s) and tease out a thoughtful design reaction.  Students will be encouraged to accelerate the boundaries of analogue and digital methods as they create interventions by blending Western and Indigenous ways of knowing.

Image: Birch Bark Canoe Detail - https://canoemuseum.ca/2016-12-2-looking-closely-treatment-of-a-birch-bark-canoe-part-one/

In this interdisciplinary design course, architecture and engineering students will be able to participate in a simulated building development process based on a real site and potential actual project. The course is framed around a practical non-idealized real life situation. Since every building design is unique and renovation projects are especially unique and complex the course will demand solutions that don’t rely on default solutions from textbooks and websites.
Additionally, the course will focus on working cooperatively and in a manner integrated with other related professionals. Integrated design processes and integrated project delivery are increasingly become very common methods by which buildings are designed, constructed and commissioned. Real life practical opportunities are rare in the university context.

HISTORY & THEORY
ARCH 7030-T19
Theory of Biomimetic Design
Mercedes Garcia-Holguera

This is an introductory level course where students will explore the principles of biomimetic design and their application to architectural products. Students will learn about biologically inspired projects and materials, and will study current methods and tools used in academic and professional venues. Participants in this course will have the opportunity to apply the lessons learned in a self-directed biomimetic project.

Students will research how Indigenous knowledge, art, and technique can influence contemporary architectural methods. The aim is to introduce, through a land-focused lens, Indigenous ways of knowing, teaching connections to architectural technology and processes.  The design research will be guided by a series of lectures, workshops, individual and group discussions. Each student will apply their research and tease out a thoughtful design response.  Students will be encouraged to accelerate the boundaries of analogue and digital methods as they develop their interventions from a traditional perspective.

As you know, most of what the architect has by tradition been known to provide probably can be provided today by others more efficiently and to the point. What has always interested me is not what the architect can provide that others can also provide (which is a sort of parallelism), but that which only the architect can provide. And I believe strongly now, more than ever, that only the architect can provide that which can affect the spirit. Spirit is a huge, amorphic word, but anything less, or any pursuit or study or investigation that doesn’t move to that central issue—I was going to say irrelevant—but it’s not architecture. ― John Hejduk in Architectuur en Verbeelding

Design is all about desire, but strangely this desire seems almost subject-less today, or at least lack-less; that is, design seems to advance a new kind of narcissism, one that is all image and no interiority - an apotheosis of the subject that is also its disappearance. Poor little rich man: he is 'precluded from all future living and striving, developing and desiring' in the neo-Art Nouveau world of total design and Internet plenitude.
― Hal Foster in Design and Crime

There is no architecture without spirit and imagination. There are many overlapping factors that make up the associations between art & architecture. Artists often have a great interest in architecture (Piet Mondrian, Dan Graham, Tadashi Kawamata), while architects practice as artists as well (Le Corbusier, Will Alsop, Diller & Scofidio). Critic Hal Foster calls this short-circuit the “Art-Architecture Complex.” Foster uses terms like “encounter” and “connection” to describe the recent relationship between art and architecture to designate the many ensembles where art and architecture are juxtaposed and/or combined, sometimes with art in (what was once considered) the space of architecture, sometimes with architecture in (what was once considered) the place of art. Such ensembles might be the rule in traditions in the West and elsewhere, and the modernist moment of a relative separation of the arts the exception. By using the term “complex” Foster indicates how the capitalist subsumption of the culture into the economy often prompts the repurposing of such art-architecture combinations as points of attraction and/or sites of display, hence public art, installation art, etc.   

While historically architecture has been associated with other grand artforms (music, painting, and sculpture), after the second world war architecture gradually distanced itself from this tradition to become more of a service provider to the construction industry, defaulting to a more consumeristic role. In this process architecture lost its connection to art, phenomenology, and poetry. The integral relationship between art & architecture has been for the past four decades experiencing a new renaissance of recovering architecture’s intrinsic quality as an art form, and a result not only of an individual’s or a collective’s pragmatic needs, but to reclaim the role of architecture as a poetic act, resulting from one’s imagination, and reaching people’s spirit. This topics course will discuss the relationship art-architecture through projects and texts, providing a critical forum to guide anyone to establish personal design strategies to bring imagination and spirit back into the project. The course will include a tour to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, where one of the classes will take place in “Tapume”.

Overview: This course supports the premise that Indigeneity cannot be inscribed within national, political, institutional or disciplinary boundaries without re-inscribing the structures and strictures of colonization. This course also supports Indigenous knowledge as having an epistemic order that is distinct from Western thought and spatial organizations that are distinct from those that govern Western culture. This course proposes that Indigenous design cannot unfold within the parameters of disciplinary knowledge, including the discipline of architecture. The purpose of the course is to explore trans-disciplinary alternatives aligning with Indigenous knowledge such that pasts and presents can be projected into Indigenous futures.

Deliverables: Attendance, extensive readings, discussion participation and a term paper constitute the course requirements. The paper will focus on either on a text or event of significance. Individual topics will be developed in consultation with the Instructor.

Questions: Are always welcome, please don’t be shy. For students interested in the course or any other pertinent enquiries, please feel free to contact me at my email address: ralph.stern@umanitoba.ca

Instructor: A Colorado native, Ralph Stern has been visiting Indigenous lands much of his life and has a deeply personal interest in the material and musical histories of various Indigenous peoples. As Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, he was responsible for various Faculty initiatives regarding increasing Indigenous enrolment, supporting Indigenous scholarships and awards, and providing opportunities for Indigenous students. Through the Dean’s Lecture Series, he invited prominent speakers to address Indigenous tropics, and hosted or supported a variety of conferences and cooperative endeavors both in Manitoba and abroad. He has lectured on Indigenous design topics for the Federation of German Architects (2018) and, together with Marcella Eaton, offered the Faculty’s first Interdisciplinary Indigenous Design Studio (2015). In the 2019-20 academic year, he initiated the Guatemala Studio, addressing Indigenous rights and the recent history of genocide against Indigenous peoples in Guatemala. In the 2020-21 academic year the work with Guatemala continued within the framework of a Graduate Thesis project.

Towards the end of his life, acclaimed structural engineer Luigi Nervi revealed that due to our reliance on using static principles (structures at rest) to guide our methods for designing, analyzing and building structures, we have invariably excluded dynamic principles (structures in motion) from being included in our collective structural intuition. He suggested that until we expand our design language to include dynamic behaviours and material intelligence, our design of structures will continue to exclude the inherent efficiencies and beauty of structures found in the natural world which use dynamic conditions to be formed.
This course explores how we can work with the dynamic properties of flexible and wet materials to create highly efficient structural forms akin to those found in nature. We will accomplish this through the creation of fabric formed ice shell structures. We will work at both a model scale as well as a ‘full scale’ using the unique qualities of our dry cold winter climate to assist in the stiffening of wet fabric membranes to transform them into frozen self-supporting structures.
Students will develop construction methods and design strategies for producing shell structures that engage directly with the properties of building materials and the active forces that move through them. We will examine past and current works of pioneering structural shell maestros such as Luigi Nervi, Felix Candela, Caitlin Mueller, Sigrid Adriaenssens and Heinz Isler (who pioneered the use of fabric and ice construction). Through this work students will expand their understanding of structural design as a practice that can transform passive matter into an active participate in design processes and a teacher of structural intuition.

This course offers an overview of Brutalist architecture. Among the questions the course will tackle are: What is Brutalist architecture? Is there a clear definition? Was this mode primarily defined by aesthetic style or a new way of thinking about design practice? Did Brutalism mean different things in different places? And was there a Canadian Brutalism? These questions will be considered through the writing and work of such figures as Reyner Banham, Peter and Alison Smithson, Colin St. John Wilson, Paul Rudolph, Rejean Legault, and Jonathan Meades. In so doing Brutalism will be read as a field related to a growing sense of historicity within the Modern Movement at the mid-point of the 20th century. We will debate to what degree a highly diverse set of practices might be consider as a linked cluster of practices and interests, among them the use of raw and rough materials, visual forcefulness, a rejection of traditional concepts of photographic beauty, and links to the post-war building practices of the welfare state.

Architects are increasingly directing design and representational skills to social advocacy and creative-critical insurgency, resulting in not only new buildings but new ways to imagine and enact situational transformation. This seminar explores the history, theory and potential of architectural agency in dialogue with drama. Students will study performative practices of theatre-makers and citizen-architects, while devising multi-media micro-events. The course elaborates themes, questions and strategies developed in a recent Theatres of Architectural Imagination seminar, related symposium and exhibition, and a series of Archimagination events staged for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.

TECHNOLOGY
Wednesday 1:30 - 5:15 pm
Hands on Masonry
Ted Landrum

This course covers the awe-inspiring history and future of masonry, together with wide-ranging  principles, precedents and concerns. Coursework includes a hands-on masonry workshop and a field trip to a stone quarry shop. Students meet industry experts; lay bricks; inspect full scale mock-ups and materials; and review detailed shop drawings produced by master masons. Students present a variety of readings on masonry traditions and innovations, and assemble their individual research in a final booklet.

HISTORY & THEORY 1
Place: Experience and Embodied Meaning in Architecture
Carlos Rueda

In generative processes for architectural projects, it is frequent to prioritize aspects of drawing and composition, and ‘dissect’ human necessities turned into programmatic diagrams, all of which arguable risks to reduces design to ‘problem-solving’ via abstraction. It is less frequent instead, but certainly no less relevant, for design to explore ways to re-create more concrete aspects of human lived experience which make up our lives in place.

Place-making, an evident core objective of architectural design, broadly considered, is inseparable from experiencing subjects. Addressing qualities of our experience of place should remain at the core of our métier, for architecture might properly be considered the making of meaningful experience: this is, the building of a better place, or eutopia.

Understanding the notions of place, and its inextricable relationship with that of experience, and their combined relevance in the construction of meaning for humans constitutes the purpose of this seminar. Is made up of readings and practical explorations on ways to address qualitative aspects of architecture. We will immerse in tools for poetic imagining and explore creative writing in their potential to enlighten architectural design.

ELECTIVE
ARCG 7070
Monday: 5:30 - 8:20 pm
Wednesday: 2:30 - 3:20 pm
Interdisciplinary Design
Neil Minuk

Main theme: Bringing ideas into practice

In this interdisciplinary design course, architecture and engineering students will be able to participate in a simulated building development process based on an actual project. The course is framed around a practical non-idealized real life situation. Since every building design is unique and renovation projects are especially unique and complex the course will demand solutions that don’t rely on default solutions from textbooks and websites.
Additionally, the course will focus on working cooperatively and in a manner integrated with other related professionals. Integrated design processes and integrated project delivery are increasingly become very common methods by which buildings are designed, constructed and commissioned. Real life practical opportunities are rare in the university context. 

HISTORY
ARCH 7050-T29
The Architectural Section as Revelation of Space
Eduardo Aquino

This topics course seeks to discuss the architectural section as a way of thought, a form of language. The section reveals the genesis of many projects that are born of this procedure, to announce the spatial continuity of desires between interior and exterior, land and construction. This is where one measures the space referenced to the human scale, where one determines the relationship between the building and the ground, unlike what happens with drawings in plan. The ground is always evident and the plot falls apart, in a direct relationship between architecture and territory, if it is not carefully considered—the design of the floor. Through a series of projects we will analyze and reveal the section not as an afterthought, or a simple project requirement, but as central to spatial thinking in the
design process.

HISTORY & THEORY
ARCH 7030-T19
Theory of Biomimetic Design
Mercedes Garcia-Holguera

This is an introductory level course where students will explore the principles of biomimetic design and their application to architectural products. Students will learn about biologically inspired projects and materials, and will study current methods and tools used in academic and professional venues. Participants in this course will have the opportunity to apply the lessons learned in a self-directed biomimetic project.

HISTORY & THEORY
ARCH 7020
Every Little Thing
Terri Fuglem

The United Nations has declared an environmental emergency. It is well-established that since the 19th century, the effects of human activities & settlements have had accelerating effects on the environment, energy use and climate change

In architecture circles, awareness of this impending crisis has engendered a search for technical solutions: better insulation, more efficient energy use. But in a wider sense, climate change and environmental destruction stem primarily from our very way of life and belief systems.

This seminar course will examine in detail our daily habits, for which even slight modifications, may -- in aggregate, multiplied by millions and even billions of actions -- have dramatic effects in the curtailment of environmental destruction. 

Architecture is the will of the age conceived in spatial terms. Living. Changing. New.

Mies van der Rohe, 1923

Now prepare to make a fantastic assumption. Rome was not a human inhabitation, but also a psychic substance or creature, with a similarly rich and substantial past in which not only whatever has been in existence has never perished also, parallel to the last phase of development, all earlier incarnations live on.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1927

This theory course will explore how meaning in urbanism and architecture informs new architectural action. Mining a place, city, art, or body of architecture for meaning and intention is part of our daily existence. The latent myths, texts, and memories of a place often surface and recede with various triggers. The various “psychic substances or creatures” of the past and future remain present and active in the depths of space and architecture. Students will act as detectives, carefully probing cities and architectural space to uncover the ideas, concepts and theories that drive it. Various methods of extracting meaning and ideas will be studied: analysis, reading, experiential psychogeography, Renaissance white magic, and more. For example, the etymological root of analysis reveals an articulation of the parts to the whole, where extracted elements communicate an explicit idea in a holistic context. Analysis also reveals what cannot be seen and perhaps sensed when one experiences architecture. The sensual dimension through experience uncovers the deepest domain of humanist meaning, poetic articulation, and the literary dimension. We will study various pedagogical models and tools used to extract and construct meaning and context in architecture. How does theory inform architecture? How is theory active without being merely instrumental? What constitutes the unconscious and subconscious dimension of a city? How do we tap into these pyscho-urban states? How can this mined knowledge inform context, inform the creation of institutions and the architecture that houses them? Guest speakers will also be invited to deepen our conversation on this subject. This course will culminate in a small project.

In this interdisciplinary design course, architecture and engineering students will be able to participate in a simulated building development process based on an actual project. The course is framed around a practical non-idealized real life situation. Since every building design is unique and renovation projects are especially unique and complex the course will demand solutions that don’t rely on default solutions from textbooks and websites.

Additionally, the course will focus on working cooperatively and in a manner integrated with other related professionals. Integrated design processes and integrated project delivery are increasingly become very common methods by which buildings are designed, constructed and commissioned. Real life practical opportunities are rare in the university context.

ELECTIVE
ARCH 7120 (history/theory credits)
ARCG 7070 (elective)
EVDS 3710
Indigenous Pasts, Presents & Futures: A Pan-American Perspective
Prof. Dipl.-Ing Ralph Stern RA, MAA

Overview: This course supports the premise that Indigeneity cannot be inscribed within national, political, institutional or disciplinary boundaries without re-inscribing the structures and strictures of colonization. This course also supports Indigenous knowledge as having an epistemic order that is distinct from Western thought and spatial organizations that are distinct from those that govern Western culture. This course proposes that Indigenous design cannot unfold within the parameters of disciplinary knowledge, including the discipline of architecture. The purpose of the course is to explore trans-disciplinary alternatives aligning with Indigenous knowledge such that pasts and presents can be projected into Indigenous futures.

Deliverables: Attendance, extensive readings, discussion participation and a term paper constitute the course requirements. The paper will focus on either on a text or event of significance. Individual topics will be developed in consultation with the Instructor.

Questions: Are always welcome, please don’t be shy. For students interested in the course or any other pertinent enquiries, please feel free to contact me at my email address: ralph.stern@umanitoba.ca

Instructor: A Colorado native, Ralph Stern has been visiting Indigenous lands much of his life and has a deeply personal interest in the material and musical histories of various Indigenous peoples. As Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, he was responsible for various Faculty initiatives regarding increasing Indigenous enrolment, supporting Indigenous scholarships and awards, and providing opportunities for Indigenous students. Through the Dean’s Lecture Series, he invited prominent speakers to address Indigenous tropics, and hosted or supported a variety of conferences and cooperative endeavors both in Manitoba and abroad. He has lectured on Indigenous design topics for the Federation of German Architects (2018) and, together with Marcella Eaton, offered the Faculty’s first Interdisciplinary Indigenous Design Studio (2015). In the 2019-20 academic year, he initiated the Guatemala Studio, addressing Indigenous rights and the recent history of genocide against Indigenous peoples in Guatemala. In the 2020-21 academic year the work with Guatemala continued within the framework of a Graduate Thesis project.