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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. 




THROUGH THICK N' THIN  ︎ Studio Three



ARCH 201
Fall 2020 ︎
Los Angeles
Instructors
Anali Gharakhani
Eric Giragosian
Erik Carcamo
Sean Joyner



Work by B.Arch Student Thomas Gonzalez 


Partially Similar investigated symmetry in architecture through a study of the part to whole relationships present in centrally planned architecture. Students began with the study of precedents developing and expanding their understanding of symmetry and polygonal geometry. In response to the Woodbury University School of Architecture’s year of Housing, students used partial similarity to interrogate the modern notion of the unit in housing. In lieu of repeatable sameness, the class explored the partial similarity of centrally planned architecture as a means of developing novel solutions to the development the unit and its relationship to the whole. The parameters of centrality and polygonal geometry was used to structure rigorous formal experimentation. In lieu of extreme and endless variation, this studio worked within a set of equally extreme and clearly defined limits. As the third studio in the undergraduate sequence students were introduced to the discourse of geometry and architecture through the study of historical examples and its contemporary digital applications.



Site Plan by B.Arch Student Eloy Sanchez
 

In architecture, dense and porous often refer to material properties. While this is valid, materiality is only responsible for the construction of architecture, leaving much to be uncovered beforehand. The qualitative nature of a given material can lead to affect, atmosphere, light and shadow, spatial continuity and so on. Three specific qualities of transparency, translucency and opacity will lead us to engage with architectural density and porosity. As any given piece of architecture is physically defined by its interior and exterior boundaries, dense and porous thresholds control the union and separation of inside and outside. Basic elements like roof, floor, wall, window, and door reinforce the functional purposes of this separation. Students engaged with these elements but will dedicate much of our focus to the wall poché.





Fo
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 for the architect. A simple way to express fill. Canonical works of architecture, such as orthographic drawings 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.





Rendering by B.Arch Student Jerrick Gemena

While continuing to emphasize fundamentals of architectural design and drawing, students encountered more in-depth digital modeling responsibilities and advance their overall digital skillset. Through multiple representational modes, students engaged with the notion of activating space by way of experimenting with thickness and thinness. 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, a hideout, as a site for organizational innovation. As the Covid-19 global pandemic has enforced rapid change in ways of living, working and socializing, the hideout acts as a device for re-imagining future living conditions. The spatial divisions has been used as a means of limiting human interaction while providing optimal living and working conditions for multiple household units at once, indefinitely. Students developed an architectural disposition for a current and future state of the world in which physical access to resources are dwindled and scarcity is an ordinary part of day-to-day life.




Catalog Description


An in-depth analytical study is made of everyday domestic, work, and recreational rituals through written research and case study, with an emphasis on spatial accommodation of program through materiality, finish, structure, and form. Projects set in limited contexts emphasize the influence of internally driven relationships, with a special focus on hybrid programming.