Fall 2018, Arch 200A – The Animal House

The education of an architect begins with the establishment of a basic spatial literacy through the defi nition and use of operations and tools. The completion of projects which culminates in the formation of a thesis. In this spirit, our semester opened with a project that manifested as a series of related operations that introduce strategies and themes that will echoed in the projects that followed. The architectural operation is an exercise narrowly focused on a distinctive design issue which encompasses techniques of production and representation, spatial and geometric experiments, human scale and various understandings of the human figure, and material explorations. Through acquiring competency in the sort of operations that architects use in the conceptualization of their work, we can begin to understand architecture as a practice based discipline, and come to the realization that is not through rumination, but “only through an operation that an architect can exercise a design decision.” The Animal House explores the making of a thesis in the process of shaping inhabition