Faculty members affiliated with CAST offer courses through the Situated Technologies Graduate Research Group in the Department of Architecture.
The curriculum engages design experimentation that repositions architecture in an expanded field. The group explores methods of study and conducts experiments that probe the limits of architecture: prototypes, processes, techniques, modes of collaboration, and workflows. It adopts new methods to identify new sites of inquiry, at different scales and within different social and political settings, for an expanded field of practice.
Design studios and seminars result in a wide range of outcomes–buildings, devices, events, infrastructures, tools, workflows, interfaces–and in skillsets that enable students to articulate new agencies for architecture.
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Seminar
This technical seminar introduces computational modeling and simulation in architecture, focusing on geometric principles and digital workflows that connect form-finding, material behavior, and fabrication through algorithmic modeling and physics-based simulation tools.
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Studio
This studio explores the design and construction of dry-stacked masonry systems using recycled architectural stone, combining digital scanning, computational modeling, and mixed-reality tools to translate irregular salvaged materials into structurally legible assemblies.
Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Studio
This graduate design research studio investigates green infrastructure and environmental sensing systems for multispecies urban environments, focusing on ecological restoration and responsive landscape interventions along Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Studio
This studio explores the use of extended reality (XR), particularly augmented reality (AR), in architectural workflows and representation, focusing on real-time data-driven holograms that visualize invisible atmospheric or historical conditions within existing and proposed spaces.
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Studio
This graduate research studio investigates the relationship between culture and technology through a remote collaboration with the rural village of Hida, Japan, exploring mixed-reality tools, traditional timber craft, and digitally mediated design-build processes.
Instructor: Nicholas Bruscia | Type: Studio
This studio will research the potential advantages and pitfalls of integrating mixed reality (MR) into well-established methods of handwork in a variety of contexts (local craft, manufacturing workflow, material production, etc).
Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Seminar
This course surveys the cultural history of VR, AR and MR, focusing on their ontological and epistemological implications regarding conceptions of “the real.”
Instructors: Randy Fernando and Shawn Chiki
Type: Seminar
This course utilizes experiential learning methods to address how designers can interface the
nuances of real and virtual environments during the creative process.
Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Seminar
This seminar surveys forms of algorithmic governance and the various kinds of bias embedded within so-called smart urban systems and infrastructure.
Instructor: Nicholas Bruscia | Type: Seminar
This course introduces students to a variety of computational modeling and simulation techniques that heavily leverage architectural geometry and material constraints in the design-to-construction workflow.
Instructor: Nicholas Bruscia | Type: Studio
Situated (remotely) within the historical and cultural context of Hida, Japan, the studio is a mixed-reality based collaboration with local partners aimed at developing AR-guided carpentry utilizing 3D scanned forest data.
Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Studio
This design research studio explored the spatial epistemology of contemporary remote sensing practices.
Instructor: Nicholas Bruscia | Type: Studio
While stereotomic projection is associated with shaping mass, surface disclinations may be associated with shaping thinness, turning our attention away from the monolithic and toward the monocoque.
Instructor: Albert Chao | Type: Seminar
In dialogue with Hans Haacke’s 1965 Condensation Cube, this seminar investigates how to draw, model, and build physical and digital prototypes to explore tempered environments.
Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Studio
This graduate design research studio will investigate how to map a course of action in face of uncertain conditions.
Instructor: Gabrielle Printz | Type: Seminar
This seminar examines the social constitution of technology, its dimensions of power, and its impossible neutrality in the conceptualization and manifestation of “the future.”
Instructor: Albert Chao | Type: Seminar
The Situated Technologies Spring studio will explore the space of manufacturing and the promise of mass customization.
Instructor: Omar Khan | Type: Studio
The Situated Technologies Spring studio will explore the space of manufacturing and the promise of mass customization.
Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Seminar
This seminar will survey the changing dynamics between manufacturing, labor, technology and society from the Industrial Revolution to the present.
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Seminar
This course will explore the notion of manufacturing variety as influenced by the role of representation in the design and fabrication process.
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Studio
Adopting similar plywood forming techniques exemplified by the Eames’, this sponsored studio will devise flat-to-form, lightweight shells as disaster relief partitions in open, densely packed, interior environments.
Instructor: Omar Khan | Type: Studio
The Cybernetic Factory takes as its subject the architecture of advanced manufacturing and its integration into local economies and communities.
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Seminar
This hands-on course will explore the relationship between materiality, form and the environment through speculative computational drawing and simulation techniques.
Instructor: Mark Shepard | Type: Studio
This design research studio will investigate the limits of sensing, processing, and actuating physical space through the design, fabrication and development of a full-scale installation that attempts to playfully engage the contingencies of its use and occupation.
Instructor: Omar Khan | Type: Seminar
This seminar introduces students to the significant ideas that define the information environment and how they concern architecture and urbanism.
Instructor: Jason Geistweidt | Type: Seminar
This design research workshop investigates this interweaving of code and space within the built environment through project-based experimentation.
Instructor: Jason Geistweidt | Type: Seminar
This design research workshop investigates this interweaving of code and space within the built environment through project-based experimentation.
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Seminar
Using a Vicon Motion Capture System, this course will focus on the calibrated modeling of bending-active wooden elements as a topic from which to gain experience with iterative digital form-finding as related to material behavior.
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Studio
Some composite materials are designed to return to their initial form after deformation by bending or stretching back into position. The studio will explore the scalability of flexible materials, and how we might organize them to produce stable but intentionally flexible architecture.
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Seminar
This course will explore Ricolais’ concept of isomorphic systems via experimentation with bending-active surfaces and their skeletal equivalents.
Instructor: Nick Bruscia | Type: Studio
The studio will introduce students to computational form-finding as it pertains to the design of structurally elegant long-span roof canopies.
