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ARCH4442-1 / Fall 2025

If Buildings Had DNA

Objects are imperfect. They make 1-D an abstract idea, downgrading dimensionality, incapable of processing dynamic patterns or implicating situational spatiality. This is even more true for buildings. Details too often hide, cover-up, beautify. We will bring them out of hiding and celebrate the Importance of Imperfection. Building and otherwise.

This intensive seminar presents a close examination of building biologies and technologies, its histories and labour: equal parts about content and organization. A project about details can’t help but also internally consist of a set of details itself; here, we will study its DNA in specific projects over time.

Through close written, modeled, drawn and imagined examinations of specific project and sociologies, we develop methodologies –“lenses”– with which we study the built and born environment. We will take a “grassroots” –or “from the bottom up”– approach; a project emerging from details is a more robust project than a project that merely sponsors details or requires them. Certainly not just for buildings.