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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.


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Architecture of the Skin: Understanding Space through Touch ︎ Master of Interior Design Thesis


IDES 660
Spring 2020 ︎
Interior Design

Student
 Reem Aladham

Advisor
Heather Scott Peterson




The connection between sensory response and our perception of space is an underexplored theme in design and architecture, but can help develop a much deeper understanding of how humans interact with, perceive, and use spaces. The human body works with multiple resources to understand spaces and environments around itself. Through the use of vision, smell, touch, hearing and taste, a wide variety of sensory information is captured and processed. Sight seems to be the primary and dominant sense in terms of perception and initial instinctive response. However, other senses like touch, smell and hearing can provide deeper insight from, and interaction with, the physical environment.  In The Eyes of our Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa says, “All sense can be considered as part of the sense of touch, relating to the skin. There is a connection between the skin and the environment.” This thesis explores architecture and the haptic condition of touch, and how it works together with the other senses to produce an understanding of space. Various materials, temperatures, textures and design techniques will be controlled and manipulated to stimulate the senses and generate a corresponding response.





Catalog Description

The culmination of the Master of Interior Architecture, students pursue their self-directed theses in collaboration with a faculty advisor and a selected expert resource. Continual self-assessment and synthesis of the knowledge and skills developed in the program is exercised as part of the thesis development process in order to demonstrate mastery of the critical focus and practice of the discipline.