FOR-SITE FOUNDATION

Professors Lisa Findley + Bruce Tomb
Department of Architecture, California College of the Arts
Studio One, Fall 2003

Grounding Architecture
This studio introduced students to tectonics in architecture through an investigation of site and ground. The focus was on the understanding of particularities that site lends to architecture, and to learn to think about buildings in the landscape. The poetic potential of tectonic response was investigated through the lens of the site, and through the understanding the students brought forward from previous studios. The studio included field trips to sites, lectures, reading and writing in addition to making.

Studio Project | FOR-SITE
This third year undergraduate studio course used the future workshop site as the topic of one of three projects. While the students were asked to design the barn, they did not work within predetermined economic or structural considerations as they were not sophisticated or informed enough as designers to integrate such thinking into their work while at the same time reaching for their full poetic potential. Such integration happens later in their curriculum.

Pedagogical Intent
Poetic Understanding and Exploration
ground; anchoring; connection to the landscape (and fear of it); construction of the ground; sectional space; time (starts off with geologic vs. human); inside vs. outside; transitions

Conceptual Skills
3-D thinking and working (plan drawing prohibited; working only in section and model; resolving of vertical movement through section; transitions from inside to out; permeability of walls, ceilings, floors, boundaries

Physical Skills
basics of site documentation (rural and suburban); topographic modeling; wide range of exploratory 3-D drawings such as section perspectives; exploded sections and axonometric drawings, etc.

History/Theory
environmental and land art; intro to contemporary landscape architecture theory; exemplary architectural projects explored through drawing and application

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