Arch 454/554 Studio Request
Please submit your preferences for Spring 2025 sections of ARCH 454/554
Placement in architectural design studios is based on student preference, student performance in previous studio experience, and availability. Every effort will be made to place students in one of their top choices or in a studio that best meets their academic needs.
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Deadline:
On or before Friday 11/15, 2025
Spring 2025 ARCH 454/554 Studios:
This studio will be focused on design process and design communication, utilizing a complex urban site and requiring proposals that are at once visionary and practical. We will prioritize issues of context, concept, program, structure, craft, and communication, and will embark on an integral field trip to Portland, OR, tentatively scheduled for the week prior to Spring Break. The project calls for an Intermodal Transportation Center - “the convergence of two or more modes of transportation systems within the urban context, [which may include] international, regional, and local train stations, bus terminals, ports, airports and spaceports.”
This studio will focus on architectural designs in urban and/or community scales and contexts. Different from previous studios which normally deal with one single building, this studio will primarily concentrate on the built environment and human life in a larger scale –we will study factors that significantly impact our social, economic and cultural lives, such as urban forms, streetscapes, place-promotions, human behaviors, public welfares, business opportunities, life patterns & satisfactions, and transportation. The scope of works will involve in development /redevelopment of multiple building blocks and/or a neighborhood. In this studio, we will learn how to apply sustainable urban /community design and regenerative development theories and principles to develop design and planning proposals that improve our life quality, community renaissance and resilience.
The project that we will work on this semester will be a multi-phase neighborhood design in an urban/community area. This project will include research on existing conditions, case studies, programming, neighborhood planning, and targeted area developments.
Idaho Design Build is a critical exploration of architectural design through the lens of design-build methodologies. The primary exercise is a real-time project from inception through construction, complete with budget development and management, specifications, permitting, scheduling, internal and external coordination, multiple client/community presentations and collaboration sessions, design documentation, fabrication and construction.
Involvement in the Idaho Design Build Studio requires in-person attendance on the Moscow Campus, regular travel to the project stie during the semester, including an extended build period, with all students potentially working on-site for the duration of construction. All work in the course will be completed collaboratively and in-studio, under tight schedule constraints, with design progression via open critical input, consensus of the full group, and feedback from project stakeholders. Prospective students should be aware of the fast -paced, physically demanding, and time-consuming nature of this course, but also the benefits of working directly with clients, vendors, and consultants, expanding on skills developed in traditional studios, and seeing a project through from inception to its reality as a benefit to the community.
In preferencing for the 6 cr. Spring 2025 Idaho Design Build Studio, students acknowledge that they will be require to enroll in a Summer ARCH 504 build seminar (3 cr.).
The architectural photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel famously said, “Great buildings only have two enemies: water and stupid men.” While human conflict, greed, and changing priorities can continue to threaten the built environment long after its genesis, water is one of the great forces that architects must wrestle with at the outset. Architecture can, in some ways, be understood as an attempt to control water: directing where it goes, how it is shed, where it is allowed to pool, and how, ultimately, it becomes someone else's problem. This problem of the aqueous in architecture finds its corollary in the Anthropocenic natural environment, which is characterized in part by a man-made condition in which water is either in desperately short supply or in monstrous overabundance, conditions that humans must constantly work to ameliorate but never fully correct.
The body of water that humans have struggled most to control in the modem western world is the Mississippi River. As Boyce Uphott has argued in The Great River (2024), the modem history of the Mississippi River (since European colonization and the founding of the United States) can be characterized by massive human effort to tame, contain, and control a natural force of ineffable scale and proportions. Over the past two centuries, the federal government and state agencies have poured billions of dollars, countless man-hours, and thousands of lives into a levee system designed to control the path of the Lower Mississippi River and its cyclical flooding, in an effort to reclaim and secure millons of acres of its alluvial plains for cultivation and human inhabitation.
This studio investigates the intricate relationship between nature, technology, and culture through the study of the Lower Mississippi River Basin. Our inquiry will involve reconsidering the historical role of water as both infrastructure and a designed landscape. The heavy engineering of the Mississippi River means that it bears little relation to its original course. And urban development along the river has long marked its departure from purely rural associations. Projects will examine interactions between current conditions, future forces and thoughtful programmatic possibilities. This fertile, shifting terrain has been the site of encounter between humans and nonhumans for millennia. But what is its future?