CCA Fall 2025
In Fall 2025, I enrolled in CCA’s Master of Architecture degree program.
Studio 1A: Odd Facades
Studio 1A, taught by Clark Thenhaus, introduced a discourse of architecture as order. The course developed fundamental disciplinary knowledge and skills like drawing, composition, combinatory logic, 3D modeling, and intentional decision-making through the lens of the familiar and the absurd. We photographed local residences; isolated and collaged their features and materials; drew the result as an “as-built” drawing; modeled an interior “chunk” through the facade; and used AI tools to imagine possible expressions.
Studio 1B: Short-stay residences
Studio 1B, taught by Nataly Gattegno, introduced a discourse of architecture as scenario. The course explored physical model-making techniques; the generation of usable floor plans on arbitrary slices through boolean operations on cubes and cones; the imposition of a short-stay program and associated narrative on the plan and on aggregations of the plan; the creation of plan, isometric, and section drawings; and the fabrication of quarter- and eighth-inch-scale physical models.
Design Media 1: Non-typological forms
Design Media 1, taught by Morgane Copp, developed techniques of sculptural form creation and image-making. We created three-dimensional objects from operations on geometric primitives and surfaces; created context-free drawings of the objects and possible interiorities; 3D-printed the objects; unrolled their surfaces and created printed textures for wrapping on the objects; photographed them in the context of scale-ambiguous ground and sky imagery; rendered the objects with fenestration and texture for collaging into urban street-scene photographs; and rendered possible human-scale interiors.
The exterior images are each a dialogue between the object and a possible urban context, but they are also a dialogue between a rendering and a photograph. There are certain non-negotiable properties that must align between the two for the sake of a convincing illusion, such as camera position, lighting, shadows, and reflection; but then there are properties like texture, scale, and entourage that can cause either the object or the context to amplify or soften the “weirdness” of the other.
Materials & Methods: Agri Chapel
Materials and Methods, taught by Brendon Levitt and Dave Maynard, consisted of a lecture series on the opportunities and liabilities of various historical and contemporary building technologies. The lab portion of the course divided students into teams to analyze existing structures through the lenses of foundation, armature, and enclosure, and to fabricate physical models that communicated the tectonic logic of their design. My team, with Eitan Reuven, Alma Odeh, and Síle Kelly, studied Yu Momoeda’s Agri Chapel in Nagasaki, Japan.
