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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. 




Emotive Assemblies ︎ Tectonics 1


IDES 259
Fall 2019 ︎
Los Angeles

Instructor

Matthew Corbitt 






The role of the interior designer could be described as the practice of orchestrating a spatial design to provide its users with a particular experience. Though architects could take on a similar intention, the process of creating atmosphere is at the base of the interior designer’s task. This could be understood as the practice of enhancing an interior’s aesthetics and ease of use by way of space planning, wall treatments, and furniture and lighting choices, however, these only hint to their potential tool set. By stepping outside of standard practice and taking on the position of the material engineer, designers can access more and more tools to bring their intended vision to life. Similarly, as materials begin to evolve and change shape, having a set of rules with which to evaluate, interpret and design them will become increasingly important.



This class served as a research platform and a testing ground for the continued advancement of the field by investigating the role of material in experiential design. From empirical experimentations of a single material, students gained an understanding of how color, texture and composition offer designers the ability to orchestrate a particular experience. Students researched experiential design concepts, philosophical and psychological theories surrounding matter and materials and finally, invented material assemblies that produce a complexity of sensorial, emotive and experiential spatial designs.



Methodology

This course was designed as both an analogue and digital testing laboratory, investigating the generative values of material testing, exploration of unconventional production techniques, and analytical design practices. With equal emphasis on expanding the designer’s abilities to design through the act of discovery, evaluation and articulation, as well as, the ability to address and add to the field’s discourse. The course looked at a scientific method as a model of inquiry to empirically study the bounds of a material’s intrinsic abilities, optimal mechanisms of production and evaluate its significance. In an effort to encourage the use of empirical study and shed any cognitive assumptions one may have; this course directed its attention to materials and techniques that have very little antecedent service to interior architecture.











Catalog Description


This course provides a studio-based exploration of the impact of materiality and fabrication in both the generation and reading of form and space. This will be addressed through readings, discussions, exercises, and design/build projects. Issues of craft and technique as they affect the design process will be addressed in both two and three dimensions. An intuitive knowledge of material properties and processes will be gained through full-scale hands-on exploration. Detailing, construction, and fabrication methods, and the application of materials in custom elements are studied through individual or group projects closely related to the body in scale or use. Formal, conceptual, and programmatic solutions are studied through a specific design strategy/process as assigned by the instructor, with an emphasis on new or hybrid programs/functions.