ARC 404: Digitizing and Designing Toward Spolia

Instructor: Nick Bruscia
ARC 404
Spring 2026

DESCRIPTION: 

This studio will engage students in the design and construction of dry-stacked masonry systems using recycled architectural stone. Design work will foreground interlocking, weight-bearing, and friction as primary drivers of form and assembly, placing geometric control, tolerance, and sequencing at the center of architectural decision-making. Drawing from historical and contemporary precedents, students will experiment with assembly strategies that translate irregular, salvaged stone into structurally legible systems without mortar, using both computation and physical modeling to evaluate contact surfaces, load paths, and stability.

Through practices of digital quarrying stone once discarded and retrieved into a vast collection, will be documented, classified, and recomposed, extending historical traditions of spolia through contemporary workflows. Throughout the process, students will gain exposure to production- aware digital practices including LiDAR and/or photogrammetry-based 3D scanning, point-cloud and mesh processing, computational physics-based simulation, and guided manual assembly using mixed reality visualization.