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WSOA In-Flux

WSOA In-Flux

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WSOA In-Flux is a publishing platform for student work launched by Woodbury School of Architecture in 2020.




Woodbury School of Architecture is distinguished by its multiple locations at the heart of the Southern California creative industries: Los Angeles, Hollywood and San Diego. Together, these sites form a critical infrastructure for architectural investigations.

Our undergraduate and graduate programs prepare students to effect positive change in the built environment, to tackle theoretical debates, and to take on architecture and interior design as critical practices. We educate our students as entrepreneurs, citizen architects, and cultural builders equally committed to professional practice, theoretical discourse, social equity and to formal and technological inquiry.

Our faculty are architects, designers, academics and policy makers practicing in Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana. This internationally recognized and award-winning group works closely with students to teach the skills required to push the limits of practice.



Mission

Good design is a human right. Woodbury School of Architecture produces graduates who affirm the power of design to improve the built environment and the lives of others by addressing the pressing issues of our time. We transform our students into ethical, articulate and innovative design professionals prepared to lead in a world of accelerating technological change.


Vision

The future belongs to Woodbury. Woodbury School of Architecture creates an environment that empowers our students to impact the future of the profession through meaningful built work. We imagine a world in which there are no disciplinary rights or wrongs, where diverse and sometimes contradictory values collide to generate new ideas, design innovation, unexpected practices, and the means to expand the influence of our discipline.


Woodbury School of Architecture offers a welcoming environment for students to develop their own unique design voice.  We approach the design disciplines multi-dimensionally, teaching a range of pedagogies and design methodologies. Our students leave Woodbury with the confidence to engage in local and global discourse.

Through engaged faculty-student interaction, we transform our students into innovative professionals with a commitment to the power of good design. Our students and faculty share a commitment to sustainable practices, community outreach and civic engagement.

Our School of Architecture is among the first 14 accredited architectural programs to be accepted for participation in the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) Integrated Path to Architectural Licensure (IPAL) initiative. Successful students will have the opportunity to have an architectural license upon graduation.

We believe that our school is a role model for the direction in which the profession is heading – improving gender parity and ethnic diversity among its members, and reaffirming the importance of ethical conduct and social responsibility. Ours is a welcoming community for every race and orientation, and we resist acts of intolerance in favor of thoughtfulness, generosity and kindness. The economic, ethnic, and academic backgrounds of our students reflect Southern California itself. We are determined to provide a place for open debate, the respectful airing of differences, and for rich forms of expression and imagination.


Site running on Cargo. 




Archipelagic ︎ Studio Four


ARCH 283
Spring 2020 ︎
San Diego

Instructor
 Marcel Sanchez-Prieto






Work by B.Arch student 


In which criterias can architecture be studied in order to enable deeper engagements with the city? What negotiated conflicts can be found? In what form can a project introduce an architectural typology that reflects the lifestyles of an evolving context?

The studio brief consists on the study of emergent social groups as a means to identify and comprehend the architectural typologies that are transforming the city. Marginalized populations will be at the core of our investigation, with the assumption that it will help reveal how a collective architectural urban entity holds the potential to seed and hopefully contribute a better conception of the city.

Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas use of the concept "archipelago" in its 1977 proposal for Berlin is a principle and acceptance to the concept of architecture as framework for the city, for which has given the gradual rise of western definition to the very identity of the contemporary city as Urbs,  Pier Vittorio explains it as an architecture that is not autonomous but an element that is in direct confrontation to the forces that generates it, that is an architecture as enclave where the relationship between inside (terra firma) and outside (the sea) is vital in negotiating the challenges of different approaches of inhabitation of the city.

The studio will use the conceptual platform of the archipelago to design architectural strategies that question the definitions of spaces in an urban context, continuing with this year overall topic of housing, we will address the call center as an emerging enclave of inhabitation in direct confrontation to restricted spaces for accessibility for housing, marginalize population, modes of labor environments, the dialectics of an uneven border urban territory.




Work by B.Arch student 


Issues at Stake & Context of Intervention
The maquiladora, a building type characteristic of the southern side of the US – Mexico border, is no longer a shed at the periphery, but instead, a typology ingrained in the city, fully absorbed by the complexities of a territory abruptly divided by political borders. The border filtering process that has attracted peripheral flows into confluence, has made the maquiladora a reflection of the constant confrontation of separation and exclusion, where transnational organizations and capital have emerged from practices of marginalization. A second alternate non-exclusive reading offers a more discreet positive outcome, where organizations intersect marginalized groups, offering a first approximation to eminent social problems, turning the opportunism of global capital into an undeclared optimistic social agency.

In recent years, call centers have emerged in Tijuana as the next generation of maquiladora industry; a network space created by the archipelic service companies who operate at the same time zone of the client, but in a different salary zone, working in a hyperspace of global capital while living in a transnational margin. The growth of these companies can be traced since the surpassing number of deportees in 2009, and continue to be of significance with the current political climate. Call centers capitalize on the knowledge of English as a product, but most significantly, on the cultural wealth of deportees acquired during their stay in the US, constituting in most companies almost 90% of their employees. This industry provides well-being and service to American consumers in order to live in the conditions that these workers have been denied. Many of deportees linger at major southern border cities because of their family ties in the US, either spouse and/or children are American, or their family was not deported with them.

We will study the call center as it may primarily reflect economic interests sharpened by the inequalities between regions. However, the interest is to design variations and display how border societies are intricately connected to the production of emerging spaces of labor, where lifestyles and consumption are interwoven, highlighting an ongoing transformation between culture, space and capital.





Work by B.Arch student


Architectural Mediums of Operation

We will inquire about what design frameworks the call center could be built, sustained and transformed. How should it respond to social life and the urban demands, without neglecting the historical dimension of the indeterminacy of border cities? That is, the space is conceived as an instance of society that influences and is influenced by the other social instances of culture, economy and politics. Such a situation will seek to address more complex aspects when considering it as an active participant of social progress.

Working within the concept of the archipelago, the studio will test the universal space of the maquiladora and its scattered proliferation, how the coalescence of these two factors can be studied to provoke views of modernization and critique the forces that guide the production and organization of space in time. If the call center is an emergent participant in the construction of a border context, labor environment, and a possible agent of social outreach, how can it deal with continuities, the definition of limits, ruptures and unequal accumulation of successions in the urban fabric?

The scope of the studio is to design a call center as a technical and highly calibrated condition of the building; to what extent can it absorb through the interior the programmatic interplay of society? and what civic values as an archipelago and interconnected element to the city can induce?




Work by B.Arch student


We will use Archipelic strategies not only as a series of Islands contained within a territory but more as the relationships between defining space and its adjacencies. The Archipelago usually is comprehended as a process that denies a clear understanding of dimension, a specific geometry, orientation, and ultimately of location of the space between individual and collective, we will use archipelic strategies specifically to the contrary, to formally approach a way to manage the negotiated space between interior and exterior, to amplify a clearer understanding of nested spaces, to identify within the boundaries formal experiments in the moments of relation, identifying the opportunities of correlation and divergence. The potential is to discover which are the splintering moments of space that incite an alternate accommodation of space, which are formal deviations that can evaluate the processes to use and how specificity can be incurred in the design process.

Can geometric and figural archipelic explorations be able to frame critical analysis for space generation? Is it possible to see the concept of Archipelago as a way to foresee contemporary theoretical approaches of architecture?

The course will develop a three-dimensional spatial imagination and architectural drawing skills, which index spatial inquiry and allow for two-dimensional representation. Through a series of technique-based exercises, the course will introduce a methodology that interweaves salient skills from architectural drafting, 3D-modeling, rendering, and fabrication techniques.

Moving through a variety of drawing, model making, photography, video, animation, and collage techniques, you will gain the appropriate skills necessary to participate in a verbal and visual dialogue that will explore various methods of representing space, force, material, and form while experimenting with envisioning methods of human habitation.



Catalog Description

Natural and urban site orders are explored and analyzed using writing, photography, mapping and sectional studies to develop site planning and building design with special emphasis given to the relationship between program and external context. Projects focus on influences of adjacencies and environment, through the development of clear systems of movement, space, structure, energy efficiency and daylight.