The ACDL studio foregrounds research by design with strong emphasis on computational design. In the studio students will work in teams of two or three in order to enable lateral exchange of knowledge and skills.

For students that join the studio for the first time main emphasis will be placed on the introduction of specific concepts and approaches in computational design in architecture and related skill building. The design project will act as a vehicle for this purpose and the studio related elective course will serve as a skill building boot camp. For students that may take the studio again in following semesters main emphasis will be placed on the project as a vehicle for research by design and integrated computational design in architecture.

The semester in fall 2014 will commence with detailed design inquiries into relatively small, but well-defined buildings schemes and continues with their gradual proliferation into larger aggregations and urban fabric. A series of computational design methods and tools will be explored towards this end.

The central thematic focus of the studio is the relation between building and urban fabric. The problem of the growth of contemporary cities is that the prevailing expansion and densification modes are predicated on discrete freestanding buildings of which the urban fabric consists. This means that expansion takes up a lot of surface area, while densification entails ever less space between ever-taller buildings. The studio therefore seeks to challenging architectural design that results finite and unconnected objects and instead examines the possibility of expandable architectural designs that can be extended into a continuous urban fabric, such as, for instance the mat-building typology that evolved out of the research and work of GAMMA (the Moroccan CIAM group), Team X (Smithsons, Aldo van Eyck, Candilis-Josic-Woods, etc) and contemporary schemes inspired by this type of urban fabric and building typology (such as OMA’s Agadir Conference Centre or Nexus World Housing project, etc). The aim is to rethink the mat-building typology as a locally specific architecture and tectonic system.

Content and Teaching Methods:
Teaching will take place in the dedicated studio context (ACDL) through lectures, seminars, tutoring and workshops. The studio will have an accompanying elective course that serves as a boot camp to establish a necessary skill base in computational design methods and tools. Topics will be approached both as design factors in an architectonic process and in a scientific way.