Kimberly Ayala Najera

Introduces the meaning and making of architecture and interior architecture through individual and group design projects. Students learn design processes by experimenting with materials and exploring architectural and interior architecture representation, and measure the implications of their work on broader cultural contexts. Students work on design projects using the latest software and digital tools, and develop techniques for integrating analog and digital design and fabrication processes. Students research historic precedents and contemporary culture and design to inform their work. This course requires students to have a laptop that meets SAIC's minimum hardware specs and runs the AIADO template.

This two-day core design is structured around three clear goals: identifying the issue(s) at stake for the project, understanding its connection both to architecture and society; exploring architectural strategies and their relationship to the overall ambitions of the project; and developing graphic tools to convey the relevance and quality of the design exploration. Students conduct research, increase the sophistication of their approach to design and formal analysis, and use rigorous representation techniques. The 40,000-sf project has educational, health, leisure, and cultural programs at its core, operating at the scale of the neighborhood and the city.

The project is modeled after the nonprofit private institution SESC that operates with forty-three buildings in twenty-one cities of the municipality of S?o Paulo. Reference buildings from that network are Lina Bo Bardi?s SESC Pompeia (1986) and SESC 24 de Maio, designed by Paulo Mendes da Rocha and MMBB Arquitetos. A series of case studies are used to illustrate outdoor and indoor programmatic and experiential approaches. This course builds on Arch/Inarc Studio 2 by introducing architecture projects of increasing complexity and scale, and requires presentations of increasing clarity and technical competence.

The course will include pinups, discussions, critiques, and presentations. Assignments include case study analysis, site research, spatial exploration, program and user study, and interior space definition.


This course requires students to have a laptop that meets SAIC's minimum hardware specs and runs the AIADO template.

This seminar will explore definitions and characteristics of interiority, historically and theoretically. It is not a survey of interiors but an exploration of the condition of interiority, physically, experientially and culturally. Physically, interiority is the product of boundaries and the tension of boundaries defined; experientially we spend the majority of our lives 'inside'. Culturally and psychologically, it implies habitation, the way we exist within inhabited space, how we negotiate boundedness and openness and the relationship between ourselves and spaces. The seminar will examine these conditions, looking particularly at the challenges to the notion of the interior offered by new technologies. The course will be conducted as an open seminar with presentations by faculty and students, and will form a basis for the self-development of critical and analytical skills in terms of exploring interior spaces, both literally and metaphorically.

This introductory design studio introduces a broad range of investigative techniques and applies the results to the design of a multi- level environment designed from the inside to the outside.

Course Goals and Objectives
1) Integrate ideas about enclosure and envelope with scale, site, structure, program and form, experimenting with skin effects and affects as a generator of a design, adapting an existing building, and addressing the existing building envelope.
2) Investigate the design of building skins including design, technical, structural, environmental, and social performance, ranging from cultural questions to accessibility, through the conceptual design of a small public building.
3) Develop design and graphic skills by completing the conceptual design of a small public building with a complex program, producing architectural drawings and models at an accomplished level, demonstrating a command of drawing and modeling conventions and an ability to manipulate those conventions to convey ideas relevant to a particular design idea.
4) Demonstrate awareness of the role of accessibility and sustainability in the design process.