Lukasz Kowalczyk

What are the concerns that drive one's creative practice? How does one set the terms for its future development? Sophomore Seminar offers strategies for students to explore, reflect upon, and connect common themes and interests in the development of an emerging creative practice that will serve as the basis of their ongoing studies at SAIC and beyond. Students will examine historical and contemporary influences and contextualize their work in relation to the diverse art-worlds of the 21st Century. Readings, screenings, and field trips will vary each semester. Presentations by visiting artists and guest speakers will provide the opportunity for students to hear unique perspectives on sustaining a creative practice. One-on-one meetings with faculty will provide students with individualized mentorship throughout the semester. During interdisciplinary critiques, students will explore a variety of formats and tools to analyze work and provide peer feedback. The class mid-term project asks students to imagine a plan for their creative life and devise a self-directed course of study for their time at school. The course concludes with an assignment asking students to develop and document a project or body of work demonstrating how the interplay of ideas, technical skills, and formal concerns evolve through iteration, experimentation and revision.

Prerequisite: Must be a sophomore to enroll.

The Intermediate Design Studio in the accredited professional graduate degree emphasizes the capacity of buildings, interior space and urban interiors to engage and make tangible the opportunities inherent to diversity, change and the temporal occupation of space and time.

Course Goals and Objectives include developing an understanding of how diversity and temporal or contingent conditions inform architectural space making, form and program. These questions are explored through the design or adaptive re-use of a medium sized building accommodating 100 occupants, sited in a culturally diverse and historically complex context. The design exploration needs to provide evidence of a deep understanding of the ethical and social responsibilities of the architect, of human behavior in a context governed by diversity and change and translated into a design proposition of a contextually sensitive building ? while addressing site conditions, accessibility, building services and systems and user well-being.

Student performance criteria (SPC) that address the most recent National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB) requirements will be highlighted and form part of the coursework outcomes.

Readings, textual and visual case studies and site visits will vary, but always provide the background and theoretical grounding for the site and project analysis and final project development and representation.

Project work is a cumulative archive of the process of problem analysis and design exploration that are translations of observations, facts and ideas ? all being made visible through diagrams, drawings and models. Parts of the semesters work will be conducted in groups and which will contribute to individual project work presented in a final critique.