Student reference material

TECHNOLOGY

ARCH 7010 T-02 Advanced Tech. Topics
Hands on Masonry 
Ted Landrum

Registration open to all M.Arch Students (M1 and M2)

Class meets Wed. afternoons 1:30-5:20pm for 5 weeks, Sept 13 - Oct 20
(final project due: Oct 24)

In this course students explore the awe-inspiring scope of masonry traditions and innovations. Students get their hands on masonry buildings, materials, textures, tools, and books; research exemplary architectural precedents; learn about masonry techniques, terms, concepts, principles and materials; discover global histories and futures of masonry; and participate in hands-on masonry workshops, tours and expeditions. Students present their own wide-ranging research to each other, and assembled a Final Masonry Booklet (due Oct 24). Special thanks to the Manitoba Masonry Institute for their decade long participation in this course, especially the Gillis Quarries team, and Brian Gebhardt at Red River College. Thanks also to many guest experts whose participation has improved this course over the years: including John Wells, with Crosier Kilgore; Joe Dahmen, expert in zero-carbon and low-carbon masonry from UBC; Evelyn Tickle from Grow Oyster Reefs; Shayne Campbell, creator of the Manitoba Brick Collection; and Abigail Auld, local writer and curator with knowledge of Tyndall stone geology, buildings and art.  
 

TECHNOLOGY
Architectural Lighting and Shadows
ARCH 7000-T13, Advanced Tech. Topics 

Class meets Wed. mornings 8:30-12:20pm for 5 weeks, Sept 13 - Oct 20
(final project due: Oct 24)

Registration open to all M.Arch Students (M1 and M2)

Ted Landrum

Lighting is one of the most interesting, poetic and fun facets of architecture, especially when considered together with shadows! This course explores how and why architects integrate natural and artificial lighting (and shadows) into design work. Students research an inspiring variety of lighting strategies, concepts, precedents, and equipment; conduct and share their own lighting research and photography; learn 'solar yoga'; construct working gnomons and solar path diagrams; learn how to measure and evaluate light levels; design and build experimental light and shadow study models; present a unique spectrum of research findings to each other; and prepare a Final Lighting Booklet (due Oct 24). Students also meet with experts, and tour exemplary sites where lighting and daylighting were central to design, and continue to be primary contributors to the quality, performance, and experience of space. Special thanks to many guest experts who informed this course over the years: including Mark Pauls, at Manitoba Hydro; David Kressock, co-designer of Millennium Public Library; David Isaac, with WDusk Energy Group; glass artist Warren Carther, and Alison Demare and Italo Aguilar, at Robinson Lighting.  

ARCH 7120 (history/theory topics credits)
ARCG 7070 (elective credits)
EVDS 3710 (undergraduate credits)
BERLIN: The Life of a City
Wednesday 5:30 to 8:15 PM | Education Room 224
Prof. Dipl.-Ing Ralph Stern RA, MAA
Office Hours: Zoom or in-person by appointment

Berlin: The Life of a City focuses on the complex history of one city. Through this, however, the course serves to unveil a multitude of approaches to understanding the built environment in other contexts, serving to provide students with a greater understanding of deep urban history and challenging urban futures contending with climate change, immigration, and opportunity.  

Why Berlin ??? Why not New York, or London, or Paris ??? Why not Rio, or Lagos, or Delhi ???

For one, in Berlin one can start to list of architects who have worked there: Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Walter Gropius, Rem Koolhaas w/OMA, David Chipperfield, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, Peter Behrens, Erich Mendelsohn, Renzo Piano, Hans Scharoun, Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig, Frank Gehry, Hugh Stubbins, I.M. Pei, Herzog & de Meuron, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Santiago Calatrava, Aldo Rossi, Jean Nouvel, Sauerbruch and Hutton … this is a sampling of Berlin’s incredibly rich and varied architectural heritage. 

For another, Berlin’s architectural heritage is, however, not just simply placed ‘somewhere’ within an urban ensemble, but is part of an equally rich ‘Experimentierfeld’ of urban morphologies reaching from a fortified Baroque City through the democratizing ‘Athens on the Spree’; from speculative perimeter block morphologies through ‘aufgelockerte’ garden cities; from Weimar’s ‘City of Light’ through the dark National Socialist dreams of world domination and a Berlin reframed as ‘Germania’; from a postwar ‘city of ruins’ through to a socialist utopia and monumental undertakings such as the Stalin Allee, from occupied houses through the repair of the ‘urban fabric’; from the division of the ‘Wall’ to reunification of East and West; from the ‘poor but sexy’ of a Techno-club city through the production of Elon Musk’s Teslas; from the locus of Syrian and Ukrainian refugees to testing a car-less city geared towards meeting the 2050 European Union targets of a carbon-neutral metropolis.  
In short, Berlin is an urban as well as an architectural laboratory. Berlin is a city in which a great deal of modernist art and literature was created; it is a city with an immensely important film history. It is a city of both the Berlin Philharmonic and Techno clubs such as the Berghain. Berlin has been, with some notable exceptions, a tolerant city fostering life-style experimentation of all kinds. 

Furthermore, as Berlin is both an architectural and urban laboratory, it also engages sophisticated theoretical frameworks to understand how spaces of various scales interact and support the myriad of social and cultural configurations that the city’s four million inhabitants exhibit. Zwischenräume, Freiräume, Besetzteräume, Grenzräume, Spielräume, Bewegteräume, Zeiträume, Kinoräume … roughly translated as ‘in-between spaces‘, ‘free spaces‘, ‘occupied spaces‘, ‘border spaces’, ‘play spaces’, ‘movement spaces’, ‘time spaces’, ‘cinematic spaces‘ are some of the theoretical constructs deployed to conceptualize various ways of understanding the complex spatial matrix of Berlin.

In order to make this course as widely accessible as possible, it is offered in three formats: A) as a graduate history/theory course fulfilling CORE Departmental of Architecture requirements (ARCH 7120); B) as a graduate history/theory course fulfilling ELECTIVE requirements (ARCG 7070); C) as an undergraduate history/theory course fulfilling ELECTIVE requirements (EVDS 3710). 

Finally, this course may be taken in conjunction with the FS 2023 BERLIN STUDIO, which will be offered as a vertical ED4/M1 Studio … i.e., a vertical Studio will be comprised of BOTH ED4 & M1 students !!! The Department of Architecture, for many years, offered Studios in the format and we will return to this for the coming year. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via email (above). 
 

COMPOSING HOME : MEANING, MEMORY, and MAKING
Dr. Christine Stewart, Department of Woman & Gender Studies
Graduate Topics Elective Course (1.5 credits)

In this course you will think through memories associated with a physical space—home— and isolate charged moments/stories that hold meaning. Then, by working through writing processes associated with creative practice, you will develop, revise, and edit a brevity/flash piece of creative nonfiction.

Your final project will be a cnf of 700-1,000 words worth 50% of your grade. You will also be expected to read short essays and discuss them in class, prepare writing for each class meeting that you will share with each other, and give responsive feedback on each other’s iterations.
 

Communication for Architects
ARCH 7020
Research Topics: History and Theory 1
Fall Session 2

Instructor:
Visiting Professor Zach Pauls

Course Overview
Architectural communication captures a wide array of discrete competencies that are essential to master as a comprehensive skill set. Many key communication subcategories are overlooked, underdeveloped, or left to independent growth. Architecture schools spend the majority of teaching/ learning time spent preoccupied with the singular pursuit of Visual Communication skills. Understandably Visual Communication skill development is difficult and the dominant communication language for all designers, these Visual Communication skills account for only a tiny portion of ALL time spent communicating in academic and professional settings.

Consider your own experience in design school or working in a design office. What is the percentage time split between the following two scenarios?

You are in school or the office and the project you are working on is being reviewed by peers, colleagues, professors, managers, and partners. Consider assigning a percentage to the following categories of time spent dedicated to COMMUNICATING by these methods of the design creation and presentation.

____% - Visual (Drawings, 3D Views, Models, etc) ____% - Verbal (The language that you used, specific word choice, sequence of wording) ____% - Non-Verbal (Your posture, your wardrobe, your hand positions, your eye contact) ____% - Written (The carefully written project statement, your project title, image captions, body text). What was the percentage breakdown? 25%, 25%, 25%, 25%,? Probably not.

Most likely all the energy, all the discussion was focused on the graphic/ visual elements. From very early on in your education, the scarcity of emphasis on the other forms of communication is detrimental to the development of those other skills. These proficiencies are exactly, the “skills” that need to be repeatedly practiced and thoughtfully responded to with constructive feedback to develop.

This topics class will focus on a variety of communication modes. Verbal, Non-verbal, Listening, Written, Observation, Intuition and Intention.

Figures
Figure 1: emmartins “5 Senses - The Five Senses World Taste Visual Perception” Image. Accessed August 18, 2023. https://favpng.com/png_view/5-senses-the-five-senses-world-taste-visual-perception-png/r3Qnf3gx

Deep Space - Mining Meaning in Architecture
ARCH 7020
Research Topics: History and Theory 1
Fall Session 2

Instructor:
Sotirios Kotoulas

Course Overview

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

Mies van der Rohe, 1923

If I could sketch out for architects a task list addressing the urgent problems of cities in the developed countries, it would certainly include—at the top of the list—the design of spaces serving human complexity and diversity in new ways.
These spaces will not be characterized by ideas of indoor and outdoor, public and private, and a host of other commonly accepted distinctions. Instead, they will be conceived as elements in continually shifting urban fields that maintain a delicate balance between order and anarchy, between knowledge and the unknown.
Lebbeus Woods 2009

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 course will explore how meaning in architecture, art, and urbanism 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: poetry, analysis, reading, mythological geography, linguistic structure, Renaissance white magic, Baroque cosmology, and more. For example, the etymological root of analysis reveals an articulation of the parts to the whole, where extracted fragmentary 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 do ideas land and manifest themselves 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. Previous speakers included Joseph Becker; Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at SFMoMA, Alexander Mickelthwate; Executive Director and conductor of Oklahoma Philharmonic, Wai Think Tank, Melissa Auf der Maur; Basilica Hudson, and more! This course will culminate in a small work that is part of your graduate studio project. 
 

Beton Waves : Concrete Transformations
ARCH 7030-T19 | Wednesdays, 8:30 AM to 12:15 PM
Research Topics: History and Theory 1
Fall Session 2

Instructor:
Rodney LaTournelle

Course Overview

Concrete is the most widely used building material. And, after water, it is the most used material on the planet. Yet, due to its massive carbon footprint, the nature of concrete production must absolutely change. Produced by mixing sand, gravel, and cement with water; it is cement that is the most carbon intensive component. Up to a massive 8% of global anthropogenic C02 emissions come from the cement industry alone.
Beton Waves examines an earth-friendly approach to concrete design, focusing in particular on geopolymer cement and recycled aggregates. The course gives a brief historic overview of concrete architecture, from the visionary to the everyday, looking at the massive use, advantages, aesthetics, and current ecological limitations of concrete, towards its material, ecological and poetic transformation in a sustainable context. Class discussion will be combined with time for students to design their own concrete forms and for the hands-on production of concrete works themselves. 

Course itinerary includes: 
1. Historical  overview of concrete in architecture
2. Material discussion and introduction of sustainable/geopolymer cement  
2. Working with salvaged material (a fresh aesthetic approach)
3. Designing a modular form
4. Moldmaking  
5. Mixing and pouring sustainable/geopolymer concrete  
6. Assemblage of cured forms into larger structures

ARCH 7120 (history/theory topics credits)
ARCG 7070 (elective credits)
EVDS 3710 (undergraduate credits)
BERLIN: The Life of a City
Wednesday 5:30 to 8:15 PM | Education Room 224
Prof. Dipl.-Ing Ralph Stern RA, MAA
Office Hours: Zoom or in-person by appointment

Berlin: The Life of a City focuses on the complex history of one city. Through this, however, the course serves to unveil a multitude of approaches to understanding the built environment in other contexts, serving to provide students with a greater understanding of deep urban history and challenging urban futures contending with climate change, immigration, and opportunity.  

Why Berlin ??? Why not New York, or London, or Paris ??? Why not Rio, or Lagos, or Delhi ???

For one, in Berlin one can start to list of architects who have worked there: Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Walter Gropius, Rem Koolhaas w/OMA, David Chipperfield, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, Peter Behrens, Erich Mendelsohn, Renzo Piano, Hans Scharoun, Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig, Frank Gehry, Hugh Stubbins, I.M. Pei, Herzog & de Meuron, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Santiago Calatrava, Aldo Rossi, Jean Nouvel, Sauerbruch and Hutton … this is a sampling of Berlin’s incredibly rich and varied architectural heritage. 

For another, Berlin’s architectural heritage is, however, not just simply placed ‘somewhere’ within an urban ensemble, but is part of an equally rich ‘Experimentierfeld’ of urban morphologies reaching from a fortified Baroque City through the democratizing ‘Athens on the Spree’; from speculative perimeter block morphologies through ‘aufgelockerte’ garden cities; from Weimar’s ‘City of Light’ through the dark National Socialist dreams of world domination and a Berlin reframed as ‘Germania’; from a postwar ‘city of ruins’ through to a socialist utopia and monumental undertakings such as the Stalin Allee, from occupied houses through the repair of the ‘urban fabric’; from the division of the ‘Wall’ to reunification of East and West; from the ‘poor but sexy’ of a Techno-club city through the production of Elon Musk’s Teslas; from the locus of Syrian and Ukrainian refugees to testing a car-less city geared towards meeting the 2050 European Union targets of a carbon-neutral metropolis.  
In short, Berlin is an urban as well as an architectural laboratory. Berlin is a city in which a great deal of modernist art and literature was created; it is a city with an immensely important film history. It is a city of both the Berlin Philharmonic and Techno clubs such as the Berghain. Berlin has been, with some notable exceptions, a tolerant city fostering life-style experimentation of all kinds. 

Furthermore, as Berlin is both an architectural and urban laboratory, it also engages sophisticated theoretical frameworks to understand how spaces of various scales interact and support the myriad of social and cultural configurations that the city’s four million inhabitants exhibit. Zwischenräume, Freiräume, Besetzteräume, Grenzräume, Spielräume, Bewegteräume, Zeiträume, Kinoräume … roughly translated as ‘in-between spaces‘, ‘free spaces‘, ‘occupied spaces‘, ‘border spaces’, ‘play spaces’, ‘movement spaces’, ‘time spaces’, ‘cinematic spaces‘ are some of the theoretical constructs deployed to conceptualize various ways of understanding the complex spatial matrix of Berlin.

In order to make this course as widely accessible as possible, it is offered in three formats: A) as a graduate history/theory course fulfilling CORE Departmental of Architecture requirements (ARCH 7120); B) as a graduate history/theory course fulfilling ELECTIVE requirements (ARCG 7070); C) as an undergraduate history/theory course fulfilling ELECTIVE requirements (EVDS 3710). 

Finally, this course may be taken in conjunction with the FS 2023 BERLIN STUDIO, which will be offered as a vertical ED4/M1 Studio … i.e., a vertical Studio will be comprised of BOTH ED4 & M1 students !!! The Department of Architecture, for many years, offered Studios in the format and we will return to this for the coming year. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via email (above). 

ARCH 7020 Research Topics: History and Theory 1
Slowing Down: Exploring Space, Activity and Narrative Through Stop-Motion
Wednesday, 8:30AM - 11:30AM
Jacqueline Young

Students will explore the nature of spatial experience using stop motion animation. By analyzing precedents from filmmakers such as Jan Svankmajer and The Quay Brothers, this course aims to “remix,” an approach that emphasizes the re-analyses of space, activity and composition. By using both digital and analogue techniques, students will communicate ideas that transcend barriers which may exist in the written word. Outcomes will include an outline response to the project brief and a 1.5 to 3 minute stop-motion animation. Class structure will include the demonstration of precedents followed by discussion, opportunity for technical assistance and working periods where students will be encouraged to collaborate, experiment and apply techniques.

ARCH 7020 Research Topics: History and Theory 1
Being a Good Relative: An Indigenous Approach to the Architectural Process
Wednesday, 8:30 AM – 11:30 AM (January 17, 24, 31, February 07, 14)
Instructor: Reanna Merasty

Students will explore what it means to “be a good relative” through an Indigenous lens and how to apply in the profession of architecture. Being a good relative is defined by actions and responsibility to another, to the land, the Indigenous population that resides on that land, and all living beings within. The course will outline how to re-center Indigenous voices through understanding context (history, cultural, site), community engagement strategies, climate resiliency, land protection, and sovereignty. Outcomes include research summaries, discussions, and presentations on local/global Indigenous realities and approaches to design. 

TECHNOLOGY
Frozen Structures / Fluid Forces
Course: ARCH 7000 – Advanced Technology Topics
Wednesdays from 8:30am – 11:15am
Lancelot Coar

This course will invite students to explore, discover, and produce architectural forms that emerge out of an intellectual and intuitive relationship with materials and force flow. The subject of the research will be the transformation of fabric and water into full-scale frozen shell structures. By using the unique climate of Winnipeg, we will explore the development of several shell structure prototypes at full scale with minimal ecological impact. The aim of the research and testing will be to develop efficient and expressive structures using structural intuition, complex force mapping, and playful and careful construction techniques and methods.  This is a hands-on class where students will examine how building materials can help to guide our knowledge and experience of structures in order to develop building systems and structural forms with the aid of well-crafted connections and assemblies. 
 

HISTORY/THEORY
Colonisation, Rentier Capitalism, & Contemporary Land Development : 
an urban design study
Brian T. Rex

Canadian culture is grappling with new answers to the question,”Who owns the land?”.  To some, this seems too tightly framed by the concept of “making the land pay”.  The ultimate patriarch of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, was dead against rent-seeking activities in a society.  Humans are clearly a territorial species.   Rather than continuing this cycle, maybe we need to back up and ask, “What does it mean to own the land?”  

This graduate topical seminar will study the historical development of the concept of owning the land from Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 consignment colonisation of the the coast of Newfoundland to the 19th c. colonisations of vast amounts of wealth via durable infrastructure (railways, canals, etc.) to Herbert Hoover’s 1920s introduction of modern planning and zoning models.  We culminate with a study of the contemporary land development processes that shape our cities to “make the land pay” in short-term profit with long-term civic detriments.

All architecture has a relationship with the land.  The first task of an architect in a professional relationship is to assure the potential client can define their ownership of a subject site.  Architects play a key role in establishing notions of ownership and we are failing as a profession to stand up for concepts of home and civic place-making.  Instead, our designs bend to rent-seeking expectations that are not holistically the best for our society and our future.  This seminar will try to uncover some of the qualities and conditions of contemporary development practices by looking at the ways that colonisation has evolved into this concept of development.
 

TECHNOLOGY
Wednesday, 1:30 PM to 5:15 PM
Architecture and Narrative: Beyond Convention
Shawn Bailey

Students will use a narrative approach to explore drawing, pulling insights from Jo-ann Archibald's "Indigenous storywork." This approach engages in holistic meaning-making, deepening our understanding of how we see the world. This speculative-based course integrates handcrafted, digital, and machine-driven drawings, revealing complex connections in our perspectives. Outcomes include a student-led reading critique, a presentation, and a comprehensive drawing portfolio. Each day will be structured into two sessions: an analysis segment and a laboratory workshop. During these sessions, participants can acquire knowledge, experiment with concepts, and apply them in a hands-on environment.