The studio is a next-generation learning environment for a school of architecture, combining a highly adaptable interior renovation with a custom-designed technological infrastructure to enhance design and interdisciplinary learning and instruction.
From the start of the design process we embraced innovative collaborative tools and techniques in a co-creation framework with a multiplicity of stakeholders: students within the school of architecture, students from fields that they would likely collaborate with, professors, administrative staff, custodial staff, and alumni of the school.
The 2000 square foot studio is designed as a prototype for anticipated replication (in whole or in part), maximizing impact at the lowest cost by using off-the-shelf components and technologies in often unintended ways.
We designed the studio to maximize the potential for hands-on exploration with design technologies, and sought to design an adaptable structure that not only would accommodate this, but which would explicitly encourage team-based learning and interdisciplinary work.
For the studio’s conceptual framework, we embraced the idea of a ‘probablistic’ (rather than deterministic) space: a space designed to increase the probability that certain activities will occur within it. We addressed this by
engaging the model and systems of a stage set, which of necessity embraces flexibility and importantly sets up the expectation that change is the normal course of events, through the use of overhead infrastructure and off-stage elements;
specifying and deploying furnishings, technologies, and information graphics that work better as “prompts” of potential uses rather than determinants of use; and
abstracting or ‘despecifying’ terminology used in the design and realization process, primarily through the replacement of words such as “table” or “floor” or “wall” with “surface” to foreground the affordances of design components rather than their preconceived identities (“something that can enable one to draw” rather than “a drafting table).”
Our framing of the space, its furnishings, and its media screens as a integral composition of surfaces in space also provided an opportunity to fluidly incorporate new technologies into the space in unexpected ways. The floor is also a projection surface, desks function either as interactive media surfaces or modeling tables, a 20’ wide tackable pin-up doubles as a seamless multi-projector video wall. These operate as surfaces “where my print drawings can have video overlays of weather conditions over a two month period,” “where my model can be 3d scanned as I construct it,” “where my floor plan is quite literally a full-scale occupiable plan on the floor.” An in-studio 3d printer and 3d scanner afford quick, iterative digital-physical workflows. Furthermore, we specified a set of personal technologies (handwriting-recognition pens, pens that record ink drawings as digital vector graphics, pocket-sized projectors for spontaneous small-scale group meetings, and small tablets for inclusion in scale models as media surfaces) to serve as prompts for how new media technologies can transform design practice.
The studio opened for classes in August 2013, and has already served as a model for the university, which is currently undertaking an ambitious examination of the next-generation learning environment across campus.