Digital Charrette
Module Code UBLLY1-15-M
Faculty Built And Natural Environment
Level M
Module Leader Mina Tahsiri
Tutors Eduardo Costa
The module requires students to work collaboratively as a team simulating a competition setting. In response to an open design brief, the team develops a proposition for an architectural structure. The competition encourages a creative reconsideration of the nature of architectural structure and promotes experimentation with materials and fabrication techniques. One limiting parameter of the brief is that the structure must be buildable within an outlined timeframe and budget for the project. To this end, each team is required to provide a concisely written and illustrated report to explain their plan for the execution of their design.
This studio-based module will include a theoretical seminar-workshop to encourage more in-depth design explorations and thus continue the theoretical strand running through the programme. The theoretical investigation and the brief will explore characteristic human-environment interaction theories to enable students to understand their design's potential experience.
The module runs as a short, intense 4-week architecture studio. This academic year students will work as one group developing a proposal to an architectural brief, which will subsequently be built at 1:1 scale in the Make & Build module. Students are encouraged to use the expertise developed in other related modules to generate and refine proposals for architectural structures designed following computational architectural practices. The problems posed by the brief includes the practical questions of structural integrity, fabrication, joint design, fixings and assembly sequencing that are integral to the consideration of architectural practice at 1:1 scale; and so students must account for these physical issues in their project solution. The project must aspire to design an experience for the user. Accordingly, the theoretical strand will inform the human environment interaction character of the proposal. The historical, theoretical and critical understanding of experience design will be discussed in seminars. Students are invited to read and collaboratively distil seminal texts to be discussed in the seminar sessions.
