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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. 




In the Thick of it ︎ Graduate Studio Two


ARCH 584
Spring 2020︎
Los Angeles

Instructor
 Anali Gharakhani



Work by M.Arch student Richard Grosjean


In architecture, poché is commonly used to represent mass. As an architectural convention it implies a threshold between spaces in addition to the availability of occupiable space or lack thereof. In architectural drawings it is often used to highlight thickness, structure, material or solid from void. Representationally, poché can aid the drawing’s visual properties while alluding to tangible architectural conditions. Although poché as a drawing convention has a long-lived history, it often becomes an afterthought. A simple way to express fill. Canonical works of architecture, such as those drawn by Étienne-Louis Boullée and Andrea Palladio, use this convention as a design tool to configure spatial moments of thick and thin, identify differences and similarities between interior and exterior as well as imposing classical order. Many of these drawings were represented orthographically in plan, section and elevation but more importantly in axonometric and oblique views, highlighting important moments of poché.




Work by M.Arch student Meruzhan Karaptyan


According to Massimo Scolari, “the representation of depth is achieved with so-called parallel perspective, which we prefer to call oblique drawing. In its simplest form, oblique drawing sets two viewpoints side by side, dispenses with shadows, emphasizes outlines, and avoids those gradations of tone that suggest the corporeality of the third dimension.” This studio will research and assemble conventions of technical drawings, plans, sections and elevations as means of representation to negotiate concept, content and context in the development of an architectural proposal.



Work by M.Arch student Garo Klian


Through these multiple representational modes, students will engage with the notion of activating poché by way of experimenting with thick and thinness. More specifically, we will engage with poché as four major devices: as fill, as material, as threshold and as program. This in turn will help articulate specific idiosyncrasies of inhabitation while investigating the potentials of unconventional thickness, spatially, materially and qualitatively. While general methods of manufacturing dimensional building materials often dictate the architect’s design decisions and drive the client’s budget, we will only concern our mission with proposing unconventional interventions that challenge these standard preconceptions. The studio will center around a single architectural program, an archive, as a site for organizational innovation. As the age of print-matter is dwindling with digitization of literature, the archive offers many auxiliary possibilities for an architectural disposition.





Work by M.Arch student Emily Rose Vanags


Catalog Description

Students are exposed to increasing complexity in architectural space through mining the conceptual organizing logics of design via cumulative exploration of modules and units. Programming, contextual and environmental prompts, regulating principles, circulation and urban networks, and systems of assembly become formative drivers through an investigation of housing (habits, habitats, and inhabitations).