ARCH 11B [Pakravan]

Introduction to Design

Introduction to design concepts and conventions of graphic representation and model building as related to the study of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and city planning. Students draw in plan, section, elevation, axonometric, and perspective and are introduced to digital media. Design projects address concepts of order, site analysis, scale, structure, rhythm, detail, culture, and landscape.

ARCH 24 [Martin]

Freshman Seminar: Design Thinking

Description: Forthcoming
 

ARCH 98/198BC

Berkeley Connect

Berkeley Connect is a mentoring program, offered through various academic departments, that helps students build intellectual community. Over the course of a semester, enrolled students participate in regular small-group discussions facilitated by a graduate student mentor (following a faculty-directed curriculum), meet with their graduate student mentor for one-on-one academic advising, attend lectures and panel discussions featuring department faculty and alumni, and go on field trips to campus resources. Students are not required to be declared majors in order to participate.
 

ARCH 100B [Creedon]

Fundamentals of Architectural Design

Introductory course in the design of buildings. Problems emphasize conceptual strategies of form and space, site relationships and social, technological and environmental determinants. 100B stresses tectonics, materials, and energy considerations. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings and field trips.
 

ARCH 100D [Various Instructors]

Architectural Design IV

Students work on individual and/or group design projects that build on topics from previous studios with additional integration of conditions pertinent to architectural production that may include architectural precedents, context, landscape and urban issues, envelope, structure, and tectonics in the design of buildings. It may also include relevant and pertinent social, cultural, and technological issues facing architecture and design.
 

ARCH 102B [Fields]

Capstone Project Preparation Seminar: Architecture Design Research Track

Description: Forthcoming
 

ARCH 102B [Baker]

Capstone Project Preparation Seminar

Description: Forthcoming
 

ARCH 129/229 [Buresh]

Models: Plain and Simple is a seminar format exploration into the potential and trajectory of architectural design in three dimensions. The course is guided in part by The Architectural Model: Histories of the Miniature and the Prototype, the Exemplar and the Muse, by Matthew Mindrup, (2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in which he writes: 

“For over 500 years architects have employed models as tools to test, refine, and illustrate their ideas about architecture in three dimensions. But these uses do not encompass the entire scope of models’ utility to also signify, simulate, record, instruct, inspire and generate architectural designs.” 

Models: Plain and Simple will therefore focus on architectural models’ capacity to signify, simulate, record, instruct, inspire and generate design. We will conceive/discuss/construct/fabricate models both physical/material and digital formats. Given the circumstances of this time we will wrestle with the challenges and possibilities of the physical and the material in the digital.

ARCH 139/239 [Crysler]

Design, Dispossession and Dissent: Spatial Politics and the Global City 

This seminar will examine struggles over contemporary processes of dispossession in architecture, urbanism and the built environment. Readings, presentations and course discussions will situate dispossession in relation to overlapping social, economic and political conditions of gentrification, eviction, and displacement produced by municipal debt, austerity urbanism, recent “superstorms,” wildfires and other climate change events. Particular emphasis will be placed on understanding the potential and limitations of emerging forms of socially engaged scholarship, art practice and design activism. Case studies will extend from protest movements and spontaneous interventions in urban space, to longer term strategies involving transformed models of production, economic exchange, urban governance and public space.

ARCH 139/239 [Turan]

Architecture and Anthropocene

In light of the current climate crisis, what can architecture contribute towards a new planetary imagination of our contemporary environment beyond environmentalism and technological determinism? Rather than limiting the role of design simply to a solution to the problem of climate change, can we speculate on architecture as a measure through which the environment might be reimagined? This course is an elaboration on this question, and on the disciplinary and cultural potentials of such a provocation. It positions climate change as a cultural and political idea that requires a renewed architectural environmental imagination. Organized around particular themes and case studies, the seminar aims to identify new directions for critical thinking and speculative work in contemporary architecture, design, and scholarship.

ARCH 140 [Brager & Schiavon]

Energy and Environment

This course covers a wide range of topics that affect the experiential qualities of the indoor environment and the energy that we use to heat, cool and light spaces to create those experiences. Topics include climate analysis, energy flows in buildings, thermal properties of building materials, thermal comfort, solar shading, daylighting, passive heating and cooling, indoor air quality, acoustics, and mechanical systems. Throughout, the course connects fundamental principles to design applications.  By starting with physical principles, students form an intellectual basis for evaluating buildings and understand the new technologies that will inevitably be introduced to the field. Students will also become skilled at using a variety of tools and modeling techniques that will enable them to design, predict, or evaluate the thermal and visual needs of their building to design.  
 

ARCH 144/249 [Salter]

Introduction to Acoustics

This 1-unit course focuses on what architects need to know about acoustics. The first part deals with the fundamentals of acoustics, including how sound levels are described and measured, and human response to sound. The course then covers building acoustics, mechanical equipment noise and vibration control, office acoustics, design of sound amplification systems, and environmental acoustics. 

ARCH 160 [Buntrock]

Introduction to Construction

This introduction to the materials and processes of construction takes architecture from design to realization. The course will cover four material groups commonly used in two areas of the building assembly (structure and envelope): wood, concrete, steel, and glass. You will understand choices available and how materials are conventionally used. By observing construction, you'll see how our decisions affect the size of materials, connections, and where they are assembled. Architects must understand not only conventions, but also the potential in materials, so we will also study unusual and new developments.
 

ARCH 169/269 [Iwamoto]

The Window

Description: Forthcoming
 

ARCH 169/269 [Guiterrez]

Plant Fibres and Design: Origins and Future 

Description: Forthcoming
 

ARCH 170B [Crawford]

A Historical Survey of Architecture and Urbanism 

Description: Forthcoming
 

ARCH 179/279 [Castillo]

Design Radicals: Spaces of Bay Area Counterculture

This upper-division/graduate history seminar examines spatial interventions and design tactics employed by intersecting Bay Area alternative cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, including hippies, eco-freaks, Black Panthers, Native Americans, Chicano activists, feminists, gay men, disability rights activists, and free school advocates of children’s liberation. Lectures, readings, and seminar discussions explore each of these counterculture episodes as a case study in spatial strategies for social and personal transformation. The final project is a 20 minute conference-style presentation on any spatial or performative practice employed by a Bay Area Counterculture of your choice.

ARCH 200B [Atwood]

Introduction to Architecture Studio 2

Introductory course in architectural design and theories for graduate students. Problems emphasize the major format, spatial, material, tectonic, social, technological, and environmental determinants of building form. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings, and field trips.
 

ARCH 200D [Atwood]

Skills 

Description: Forthcoming
 

ARCH 202 [McKay]

The Urban Watershed

The history of how water is managed is the history of the city. Our ability to live together in greater proximity and density is tied with our ability to channel both clean and dirty water. Today, urban development struggles with the challenges brought by climate change requiring shifts in our associations with water. After decades of taking water supply and disposal for granted, we need to reassess its values and its dangers in a near future of precipitation volatility, water scarcity and flooding. Water scarcity already affects four out of every ten people in the world (WHO) and 90% of all-natural disasters are water related (Wahlstrom and Guha-Sapir). The underlying premise of this studio is that we need another revolution in water strategies, and these transformations will take place in both the private and the public realms of any city. 

This studio will explore new paradigms in integrating water systems with other urban systems, leading to transformed building typologies for mixed-use buildings. Water will be the primary lens, focused on increasing water production for droughts, growing water retention during storms, improving water quality, and increasing biodiversity.

 

ARCH 204B [Anderson]

Utopia, Mytopia, Dystopia Here

 

ARCH 205B [Rael]

Studio One, Spring

This course is the second semester of a one-year, post-professional studio intended for those students who have a professional architecture degree and wish to explore current design issues in a stimulating, rigorous, and highly experimental studio setting.

ARCH 209 [Calott]

Public Interest Design Seminar: Defund the Police

This Public Interest Design Seminar will be both, design and issues-based research, focused on community design implications of defunding the Oakland police. This impending measure opens up funds for other necessary neighborhood-serving programs to address inequality and racial issues, which may, or may not, be combined with some remnant police functions. In the tradition of the small Koban structures in Japan used for community policing, design proposals will seek to extend these through the introduction of additional programs. Similarly, as a means to reinforce Mexico City’s educational and cultural infrastructure, its Mayor recently commissioned 25 of the country’s most prominent architects to design new “Points of Innovation, Freedom, Art, Education, and Knowledge” (PILARES, https://www.archdaily.com/948297/mexican-architects-design-25-new-facilities-for-mexico-citys-pilares-program) facilities in some of its poorest neighborhoods, which will also serve as an example for the Seminar’s purpose. The Seminar will work with identified community leaders, the Mayor’s Office, members of the City Council, and the Police Department, among others, to investigate the unexpected design opportunities of defunding the Oakland police.  

The Seminar will also cross-pollinate with an MRED+D Studio working with the Oakland Unified School District investigating redevelopment and monetization strategies for several of its vacant buildings and sites throughout the City. Since both classes will be sharing many of the same community constituent “clients”, municipal agencies, elected officials, and possibly sites, this interdisciplinary approach seeks to identify and address many of the same core issues getting in the way of equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice in the development of our cities.    
 

ARCH 209 [Davids]

Architecture and Landscape

The design of the built environment is inextricably linked to the history of a site, its spatial, material, and phenomenological conditions, natural and social ecology. Placed in inhospitable surroundings, even well-designed buildings are unlikely to retain their value and public appreciation declines over time, leading to blight and premature demolition. Integrated buildings and landscapes create better, more interesting environments, and their mutually beneficial reciprocity enhances the quality of urban life.

This seminar will explore how the conceptual connection of Landscape + Architecture can enrich current architectural, landscape, and urban design practice, expanding the potential inherent within each discipline. The seminar will be divided into two parts: the first half will consist of readings, presentations, and discussions; during the second half, students will select a landscape, cultivated or not, and adjust it to accommodate a building, or choose a building and design a complementary landscape around it, adjusting the architecture if necessary. In either case, a thoughtful approach to the process of integrating buildings and landscapes is as important, if not more so, than the finished project. Ideally, architecture, landscape, and planning students will work together in teams, but students in any of the three disciplines may choose to work independently.

ARCH 229 [Caldas]

Spatial Enquiries in Virtual Environments

This is a 5-week course offered at the beginning of the semester. The course focuses on modes of design collaboration and architecture enquiry using remote virtual platforms, more specifically the newly developed Virtual Wurster. Students will conceive pedagogical and ludic activities and games that take place in the VW remote environment and connect to objective goals such as: studio - building scale; studio - urban scale; studio: interior design; history and theory; building science and technology. Research will focus on UX/UI (user experience/user interaction) on the platform, namely research on multimodal information media, integration of traditional architecture 2D representations like plans, sections, elevations and renders into 3D immersive environments, gamification of architecture learning experiences, multi-user collaborative games, applications of real-time internal cameras to capture occupation inside virtual models, and design of virtual tours. Proposals will not imply coding, but instead making creative uses of existing system capabilities. Students will also be expected to connect with the different MArch studio sessions taking place this semester to help envision creative uses of the Virtual Wurster platform across the program.

ARCH 230 [Turan]

Advanced Architectural Design Theory and Criticism 

Seminar in the analysis and discussion of contemporary and historical issues in architectural design theory and criticism. 

ARCH 240 [Betti & Caldas]

Advanced Study of Energy and Environment

Minimizing energy use is a cornerstone of designing and operating sustainable buildings, and attention to energy issues can often lead to greatly improved indoor environmental quality. For designers, using computer-based energy analysis tools are important not only to qualify for sustainability ratings and meet energy codes, but also to develop intuition about what makes buildings perform well. This course will present quantitative and qualitative methods for assessing energy performance during design of both residential and commercial buildings. Students will get hands-on experience with state-of-the-art software to assess the performance of building components and whole-building designs.
 

ARCH 249 [Betti]

The Performance of Form 

My initial thought is to develop 249 around environmental analysis and simulation techniques as architectural form finding tools. The course would assume some familiarity in Rhino. Grasshopper and a grasp of basic environmental design concepts would be welcome prerequisites but I'll introduce the basic concepts as they arise. A series of tutorials and exercises will delve into different strategies to integrate environmental analysis in the design process and to generate "environmentally informed geometries" at different scales, from building mass to facade through computational methods. We'll discuss and explore strategies to be used at different points in the design process and reflect about the meaning of form finding and optimization in the context of building design and how to deal with uncertainties (both in the simulation and in the design itself).
 

ARCH 250 [Schleicher]

Introduction to Structures

This course focuses on the fundamental principles that affect the structural behavior of buildings. Through lectures, lab sessions, and digital exercises, students will learn analytical techniques for measuring and evaluating the flow of forces through structural systems. They will also begin to appreciate the factors involved in choosing an appropriate structural system for their designs. Students will learn to consider the structural behavior of buildings as a fundamental factor in the design of architectural proposals. Over the course of the semester, students will work in teams and explore different structural systems and materials commonly used in contemporary architecture. The goal of the class is to gain a fundamental understanding of the forces, moments, and stresses in typical building elements such as columns, beams, frames and walls and to make better informed decisions when designing resource- and environmentally-friendly buildings with lightweight and material-efficient structural systems.

ARCH 259 [Schleicher]

Robotic Fabrication

The emergence of robotics in creative sectors has sparked an entirely new movement of collective making that is inextricably open and future-oriented. Challenged by increasingly complex technological and environmental problems, architects, designers, and engineers are seeking novel practices of collaboration that go far beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. This collective approach to working with robots is not only revolutionizing how things are designed and made, but is fundamentally transforming the culture, politics, and economics of the creative industries as a whole. Unlike most other CNC devices, today’s robotic arms are not restricted to any particular application but can readily be customized and programmed to suit a wide range of specific intentions, both at the material and conceptual level. This versatility has shifted the perception of robots as mechanistic, utilitarian devices suited to standard serial production, toward understanding them as creative tools for exploring, designing, and realizing physical objects and the built environment. The goal of this class is to investigate the unique possibilities of robotic manufacturing and combining it with emerging technologies such as AR/VR, 3D scanning, and data-driven 3D printing for the development of new and creative building processes. Working together as one team, the students in the class are given the task to envision a novel workflow for smart fabrication and human-robot interaction that could fundamentally change how we are going to produce, assemble, and operate our built environment in the future.

This class is open to graduate students from the fields of architecture, electrical engineering, and computer science. Prior experience in robot programming, AR/VR, 3D printing, 3D scanning, and design programs such as Rhinoceros and Grasshopper would be beneficial.
 

ARCH 269 [Anderson]

Drawing on Construction: Timber Frame and Mass Timber Construction
 

ARCH 269 [Buntrock]

Interior Architectural Expression

This seminar looks at specialty interior construction in residential and commercial buildings. This includes stairs, cabinets and casework, elevator interiors, in offices, restaurants and other commercial settings. Each of these has practical limitations that are important to success. We’ll consider typical (and atypical) materials and finishes, substrates, accessibility, modularity, regulations and guidelines set by trade organizations such as the National Kitchen and Bath Association.

Course Prerequisite: Arch 160/260 - Introduction to Construction or permission by instructor.

ARCH 271 [Castillo]

Methods of Historical Research and Criticism in Architecture

This practice-oriented graduate seminar explores tools and theories of architectural history, including archival research, visual source material and its analysis, and oral history and ethnographic methods, new trends in historiography, grant writing, and pedagogical approaches. Class time is devoted to seminar discussions of assigned readings. Assigned projects include writing a short review of a recent book of your choice for an academic journal and preparation of a pre-dissertation funding proposal.

ARCH 375

Seminar in the Teaching of Architecture 

This class is intended for first-time graduate student instructors, especially those working in studio and lab settings. The class covers a range of issues that normally come up when teaching, offers suggestions regarding how to work well with other graduate student instructors and faculty, and how to manage a graduate student instructor's role as both student and teacher. The greatest benefit of this class comes from the opportunity to explore important topics together. Using a relatively light but provocative set of readings, the seminar will explore the issues raised each week. There will be one assignment intended to help students explore their own expectations as educators.

ENV DES 1 [Ruggeri]

Introduction to Environmental Design

This course is an introduction to design, not just of drawings and objects, but also as buildings,  landscapes, and urban spaces. It looks at design not in isolation, but as one of the processes in  the complex web of ecological and human-made transformations at play within our shifting  urban environments. By engaging in this course, you will also gain first-hand experience of  critical tools for understanding and successfully designing livable, resilient places--through  drawing, measuring, mapping, and representing transformative visions involving architecture,  landscape architecture, and planning. The course is open to all undergraduate students. 

ENV DES 106 [Cesal]

Sustainable Environmental Design Workshop

This course is the capstone for the Sustainable Environmental Design major at the College of Design.  It is open only to SED majors in their last year.  The course will undertake a multidisciplinary approach to proposed sustainable design problems.  Student projects will be self-proposed and self-guided.  Projects will require independent as well as collaborative research potentially in partnership with an external 'client' organization (depending on quarantine conditions).  All projects are expected to demonstrate a mastery of sustainable environmental design, and speak to current sustainability issues within the designed environments.