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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. 




International Guest House for MOCA ︎ Studio Five


ARCH 691
Fall 2019 ︎
Los Angeles

Instructor
Ryan Tyler Martinez




Drawing by M.Arch student Mher Khachikian


Housing Housing

We use different models of ambiguity in architecture. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown used photographs and drawings of buildings as examples for inexactness within our discipline. We can also look at architectural software and tools as a vehicle for the production of uncertainty through techniques, method and procedures. In the end, architects use multiple readings as a productive tool for the development of design and decision making. In this studio we looked at both definitions of housing – something that covers or protects - as a progenitor for ambiguity and the production of an international guest house – housing as dwelling - for a local museum in Los Angeles.




Work by M.Arch student Andras Rosner
 

Indifference and Exuberance

There has been much debate on how architects should work on architecture today. In this studio students looked at two different approaches: First, at examples of indifference within today’s context. Architect Michael Meredith defines indifference as an architecture that performs and is defined by nondesign: the banal, generic, the unoriginal; the weak; the antidramatic, obscure referents, citations, and mashups; chance; the cheap; a focus on architecture’s representation of itself, as opposed to realism. This type of approach has been proven a clever - simplicity is the ultimate sophistication - output for design. Second, using advanced techniques to produce descriptive objects and exuberance: photorealistic renderings, figuration, descriptive form and shape, color, graphics, projection, boolean operations, volume, mass, accidents, playfulness, intricacy, decoration, a focus on the way things look and work formally. Students worked between these two different modes of production questioning if more is less or less is more. The studio was broken into two (2) parts; Housing – covers or enclosure, and Housing – dwelling, domestic typology, house.




Looking at housing as a tool for enclosure, students reimagined the housing facade. As a point of departure, students investigated the possibility of indifference and exuberance as a design tool. Each student started with a housing precedent to explore the opportunity of misaligning work for creative speculation. The facade was used as a mediator between the interior - exterior, function - form, and the aesthetics and representation of the project. The plan was used as a section, the section used as an elevation. Students blurred the boundary between different modes of representation. This initial study was used as a tool to help make design decisions during the housing (house) development of the project.



Work by M.Arch student Hitisha Kalolia

The Museum of Contemporary Art

Students designed an international guest house for MOCA in downtown Los Angeles. The design focused on the diverse needs, values, behavioral norms, physical abilities, and social and spatial patterns that characterize different cultures and individuals who might visit Los Angeles from around the world. Students looked to ensure access to the house through a rigorous investigation of plans, sections and circulation. The program of the house is a single-family guest house with an additional program that each student had to identify within their own project’s context. 





Work by M.Arch student Parsa Rezaee 


Catalog Description

Students study a contemporary architectural design topic through a vertical option studio orspecialize through the selection of a focus studio. Topics vary and focuses correspond to the post professional tracks.