Describing Design.

Integrating Design.

Educating the Reflective and Ethical Designer

In addition to providing resources and exercises for helping students understand building systems as material and construction assemblies, the course also will actively promote the development of an ethical framework for an informed and critical selection of sustainable materials and construction practices that foreground and actively promote the valuation, workplace environment, safety, and social equity of all workers throughout the design, and in particular, the material sourcing and construction processes.

Construction Justice

While the primary focus of the course is on building systems, it is nearly impossible to define where these topics diverge from broader design questions, particularly those related to our belated focus on design justice.

Arch528 Integrative Systems seeks to contribute to this effort through the lens of construction justice.

The course will embrace the task of highlighting the role that construction labor and workers have historically contributed to architecture, typically without any acknowledgment. Discussion of such topics will be integrated into all course Lessons, rather than be sidetracked to a stand alone presentation.

We will actively broaden our sourcing of relevant project examples across a wider range of cultures and financial privilege. We will be including a range of designers whose deployment of building and construction systems reflect a broader array of cultural, social, material, procedural, and environmental values.

To these ends, however, our primary focus will be on the nature of work--of skilled and unskilled craft-- in the construction of architecture, and specifically on the role of construction workers themselves. The history of building construction in this country maps the exploitation of workers in our culture: construction injustice.

The reliance of the design and construction professions on work done by enslaved peoples and by poorly paid and exploited immigrants with little or no access to health care is ongoing. It remains a shameful underside of our profession with its wildly imbalanced emphasis on the role of the designer.

Environmental Justice and Building Systems

It is inherent in a course dedicated to building systems that the subjects of design, construction, and environmental justice should be intricately linked. These subjects are naturally a part of what we refer to as sustainable construction. The course aims to expand the scope sustainability to consider the broad ramifications of our material choices, sourcing, and processing and how this impacts both workers and inhabitants. Environmental justice and social sustainability are mutually dependent.

Current emphasis on energy modeling and sustainable design has tended to reflect the concerns of cold weather climate cultures... Northern Europe, North America, China, Japan... with its emphasis on energy use and heating. This emphasis reflects the dominant structures of architectural education in these privileged societies.

However, the broad belt of cultures and peoples in the warm-weather climates have not gleaned the same design and technological benefits in keeping cool, particularly as climate changes put an increasing stress on the quality of life. Their needs have been long under-served by an architectural profession typically under the academic sway of ideas and technologies serving Northern, cold-weather design.

Some under-informed or inexperienced academics have challenged the appropriateness of air-conditioning as a building design system, advancing privileged, yet distorted arguments that conflate energy usage, human comfort and even morality. This type of thinking should be considered unethical at best and blatantly racist at worst.

Heating buildings has long been seen to be the natural course of events for the designer and user with enormous environmental and social costs long accepted as the natural privilege of cold-weather cultures. Cooling buildings has often been deemed an extravagance. The course will seek to rebalance this focus by emphasizing sustainable means and methods for cooling and ventilating spaces and people and bringing a measure of environmental equity at the smaller scale of the spaces in which we live and work.

Accessibility

The course is tasked with providing instruction, resources and exercises on the subject of accessibility... both in terms of movement through a building but also fair access to housing through study of the provisions of the Fair Housing Act. These topics will be further emphasized in the course as our current cultural awareness of our shortcomings in these areas have become alarmingly apparent.

Making Equity Actionable

While the broader cultural scope of these topics might be better addressed in a studio or seminar setting, the Arch528 faculty believe the very specifics of construction systems offers a wide range of design decisions that can contribute to building a more equitable and ethical built environment and profession.

Building Codes have long been a location of enforcement of shared societal values. Changes in the code to provide for greater physical access and inclusion have been fundamental to educating designers and reshaping our world. However, by their very nature, building codes have often been slow to respond to changes in material and constructions systems, needs for responsible energy use, accessibility and expectations of the quality of spaces we inhabit.

Some uninformed academics place the blame upon building codes for prescribing the quality and safety of construction and limiting the self-determinacy of some marginalized members of our society to build for themselves. This is a naive, if not self-delusional perspective. The building code, however restrictive, has been a powerful agent for safety in construction and inhabitation. Typically, when building failure or fire brings tragedy, it typically falls upon our society’s least powerful of building occupants or residents and noncompliance with basic safety requirements of the building code are often a crucial factor.

Construction Specifications, an oft-ignored cant-laden domain, can be effectively written to describe and specify a wide range of actions, selections, processes, measurements, requirements and values to support a more sustainable use of materials and a more just environment for workers.

Course Lessons and Exercises will model how these tools can be effectively used by the ethical designer in practice and how these should be an irreducible component of what we strive for as improved standards of good practice and quality design.

Online Learning

For the Winter 2023 Semester (and onwards), Integrative Systems is being developed to provide a set of online materials for students in a weekly self-paced, primarily asynchronous format organized around building and construction systems Modules and related Topics. Each topic is broken down into a series of short, focused Lessons with external support resources provided.

The goal of each series of Lessons is and to provide students with background information, resources, ethical perspectives and practical experience to develop a working knowledge of specific building systems in order to make informed selections and implementation as a designer. Each week’s series of Lessons will lead to a short exercise where you will be asked to synthesize materials from the Lessons to gain design familiarity with each building systems for use in your Systems Studio projects. And beyond.

The course will provide access to regular feedback, discussion and problem solving through student team activities and informal and formal meetings with Integrative Systems course instructors and coordination with Systems Studio faculty and student project work.

The goal of the primarily asynchronous course format is to allow students to better schedule their engagement with course materials during a complex semester, yet still provide a rich, dense, challenging, informative, and useful learning experience.

Online Learning Asynchronous Format: Lessons, Learning Checks and Exercises

The Integrative Systems coursework is organized on a weekly schedule this semester. Each week you will be asked to complete and review a number of short Lessons dedicated to building systems topics. Each Lesson will include an associated learning check quiz to help reinforce what you have learned in that Lesson.

At the end of a series of Lessons you will be asked to complete a more comprehensive and synthetic Exercise designed to help you prepare for utilizing material in your studio design work. Some of these Exercises will be completed individually and some will be completed as your studio design team.

You will have to pace yourself throughout the week to complete each week’s Lessons and associated learning checks by 11:59pm ET every Sunday. Depending on the topic, some exercises will take longer to complete, so be sure to make note of the submittal deadlines for them.

Please see the attached schedule for a provisional outline of the Lesson Series and Exercises.

Thursday Morning Discussion Sessions

Thursday mornings from 9-10am ET we will offer an optional online session for discussion of course lesson topics, current events in building systems and in support of your ongoing work and responsibilities. Students will then have a opportunity to break out into small groups for Q+A and discussion with individual Arch527 faculty members.. A Zoom link for our regular meetings will be provided.

These discussions will also be a good opportunity for questions and assistance with class exercises and assignments. It is expected that these discussions sessions should last approximately one hour.

Course Website

A website has been developed for Arch528 Integrative Systems located at this address:

https://integrative.systems/

The website has been organized around the course format of Modules, Topics, and Lessons. The drop down menu will guide you through these series of building system subjects and learning activities.

The menu also has links to further resources and support services.

Website Key Diagrams

You will notice that each Module and some Topics include a navigable “Key Diagram” related to the building system topics to be presented. By moving around these key diagrams you can discover a wide range of accessible links to course Lessons as well as external resources and related information on the associated building systems.

Use these key diagrams to explore and gain a holistic understanding of how the subsequent lessons relate to an overall building project design and to the types of graphic documentation you might be producing for your own studio projects. These key diagrams might provide a model for enhancing and broadening your own graphic studio design communication to provide linkage to a broader range of topics in your work, in presentations and review discussions.

Course User Guide

The webpage menu contains a link to the Course User Guide

https://integrative.systems/about

which graphically sets out the overall course organization and interrelated learning components and activities.

Please review this Course User Guide carefully!

Related Online Locations

While the goal of the course website is to be stand-alone, some of the course materials (specific Learning Checks, Exercises, or Resources) will be hosted on other UM platforms (Canvas.) Links to these external platforms will be clearly indicated in the relevant website pages. Much of the website design is intended to keep you “in window” when moving from page to page, there will be some materials that by necessity will be in “open in new window” format. Keep track of where you are!

For any operational or navigational questions please contact the Arch528 teaching team through our course Slack Channel.

These discussions will also be a good opportunity for questions and assistance with class exercises and assignments. It is expected that these discussions sessions should last approximately one hour, but please be prepared for some discussion sessions to run longer.

Faculty Team Contact

Attendance

Evaluation

NAAB Student Performance Criteria

Course Learning Goals and Student Performance—

NAAB STUDENT PERFORMANCE CRITERIA

Arch 528 Integrative Systems is tasked with meeting a range of Student Performance Criteria as set by the National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB). These criteria ensure that your MArch degree program delivers a rigorous body of information on the design processes and building systems necessary for you to begin your architectural internships and ultimately sit for your architectural registration exams. In order for our program to be accredited by NAAB---and thus have your MArch degree certified to allow you to become a registered architect---specific courses in your program have been designated to meet particular SPC requirements. These requirements are met through both the presentations of information to you and the active engagement with building systems design which demonstrates your ability to deploy the knowledge gained in the course.

The accredited degree program must demonstrate that each graduate possesses the knowledge and skills defined by the criteria below. The knowledge and skills defined here represent those required to prepare graduates for the path to internship, examination, and licensure. The program must provide student work as evidence that its graduates have satisfied each criterion.

The criteria encompass two levels of accomplishment:

Understanding—The capacity to classify, compare, summarize, explain, and/or interpret information.

Ability—Proficiency in using specific information to accomplish a task, correctly selecting the appropriate information, and accurately applying it to the solution of a specific problem, while also distinguishing the effects of its implementation.

The Student Performance Criterion addressed Arch 527 Integrative Systems are the following:

SC.3 Regulatory Context—Student understanding of the fundamental principles of life safety, land use, and current laws and regulations that apply to buildings and sites in the United States, and the evaluative process architects use to comply with those laws and regulations as part of a project.

SC.4 Technical Knowledge—Student understanding of the established and emerging systems, technologies, and assemblies of building construction, and the methods and criteria architects use to assess those technologies against the design, economics, and performance objectives of projects.

SC.5 Design Synthesis—Students develop and demonstrate the ability to make design decisions within architectural projects while demonstrating synthesis of user requirements, regulatory requirements, site conditions, and accessible design, and consideration of the measurable environmental impacts of their design decisions.

SC.6 Building Integration—Students develop and demonstrate the ability to make design decisions within architectural projects while demonstrating integration of building envelope systems and assemblies, structural systems, environmental control systems, life safety systems, and the measurable outcomes of building performance.

Important Course Information

Provisional Course Schedule