Spring/Summer 2008

Instructor: Craig L. Wilkins
Time: Tues., Thur. 9:00 am-12:00 pm
Credit: 3 hrs.

Course Flyer

For the past two decades, American culture has been marked by an almost palpable sense of anxiety about the nation's inner cities. Urban America has been consistently depicted as a site of moral decay and uncontrollable violence, held in stark contrast to the allegedly moral, orderly suburbs and exurbs. This strategy was successful in deflecting attention from growing income disparities and in helping to secure popular support both for reactionary social policies and the assumptions underwriting them.

This seminar course will examine the scope of these problematic representations of the city, the ideologies that informed them, and expose how the practices of urban planning and architecture are often knowingly and unknowing complicit in shaping what we believe about others' (and our own) place in the world, and the interests such ideologies ultimately serve.

Studying the variety of techniques employed by Hollywood filmmakers, advertisers, journalists, network television news and weekly news magazines, we will explore the legacy of media bias against cities and their inhabitants. Further, we will look at how such biased ideologies make use of urban planning, urban design and architecture to spatialize and embed themselves in the built environment, thus underscoring and legitimatizing their particular problematic worldview. Finally, we will look at how activist forms and expressions of design practice can shape and sustain cities, fashioning practical solutions to address the demonizing of it and its inhabitants and ultimately revealing new possibilities for cities that acknowledges current shortcomings and replies to the needs of multicultural constituencies.

Instructors: Harry Giles and Lars Graebner
Credit: 3 hrs. (Structures credit)

Course Flyer

This is a one-off offering to participate in a project on the cutting edge of sustainable industrialized prefabrication and construction research that incorporates principles of mass customization integrated with whole house design integration.

This workshop will involve innovations in detailing for industrialized manufacture of prefabricated housing. The activities will involve working on a manufacturing model that effectively integrates constructional, functionally adaptable and energy efficient features. A whole-house prefabrication concept will endeavor to integrate building enclosures with services and assembly systems within an automobile assembly paradigm. The enclosure is structured as a hybrid monocoque (or unibody) metal skin enclosure module to form multi-story, prefabricated volumetric housing units. Virtual prototyping will be deployed using solid modeling and fit-up animation to facilitate customized manufacture with reconfigurable strategies in collaboration with the Manufacturing department at the school of Mechanical Engineering.

The workshop will also include field trips to the factory of a modular housing company and steel fabricators.

The projected outcomes of this workshop will be to develop and detail a fully operational prototype for construction during the summer. There will be an opportunity to continue onto the construction phase, building on the virtual prototype modeling developed in the workshop.

Admission to the course will be by permission of the instructors and the numbers are limited.

Instructor: Dale Winling
Time: MW 3:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Credit: 3 hrs.

Historic preservation has played a significant role in the recent re-urbanization of American cities. Now, amid concerns about climate change and energy shocks, preservationists are lauding the energy efficiency of rehabilitating old buildings and reinvigorating compact development patterns. This course will critically examine the history, theory, and practice of the preservation movement while students learn the tools and skills of the field through client-based term projects.

Instructor: Sudha Maheshwari
Time: MW 6:00 pm - 7:30pm
Credit: 3 hrs.

Spatial technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are increasingly becoming an integral and invaluable part of the planner’s toolkit. They combine the power of visualization and the intelligence of databases to provide planners with tools to manage land, understand patterns and interpolate trends related to land and human activity. Spatial technologies are being used by many other professions for similar uses such as public health, climate studies, natural resources, environmental management, civil engineering, transportation, business management, crime analysis, sociology, etc.

This course will provide students with an introduction to GIS and related technologies, with particular emphasis on gaining hands-on skills to solve problems and uncover trends. The course will cover a wide breadth of knowledge related to the basic principles and concepts of GIS, theory and tools of spatial analysis and a broad exposure to GIS applications in the field of planning and land use, infrastructure and environment. This course will provide you with the skills needed to make you more marketable in the workplace.