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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. 




The Commodification of Shade / The Death of the Author ︎ Degree Project Studio


ARCH 431
Spring 2021 ︎
Los Angeles

Instructors
Ewan Branda




 Work by B.Arch student Josue Perez


This studio addressed three pressing contemporary problems: artificial intelligence and its effects on authorship, the outdoor classroom, and shade as a human right. Today’s intelligent algorithms are sometimes called “intuition machines.” Deep learning, for example, simulates human creative thought by compiling experience from data and then hallucinating new possible realities. The parallels to design are obvious, since all design authorship can be seen as the intuitive production of plausible yet fictitious realities through the making of controlled hallucinations. While the consequences of these methods in architecture are yet to be determined, we can be certain that they will irreversibly change how we view authorship.





Work by B.Arch student Rita Midourian 


The studio asked how so-called intelligent software can help us at the beginning of a design problem. We started with a generative algorithm based on heuristic search and architectural diagrams, then introduced the more recent technique of Neural Style Transfer to augment those results. In so doing, we asserted the recent shift in the role of the computer from tool to collaborator: a tool extends, augments, and amplifies our latent human capabilities, while a collaborator provides original, insightful, and unpredictable proposals that lie outside our expectations.






Work by B.Arch student Raphael Capitulo



Catalog Description

Through a rigorous level of clearly resolved work, students must demonstrate the application of theoretical research and positioning, plus the ability to integrate site, program, and other design issues in a self-initiated architectural design project incorporating a high degree of critical thinking, skill, and craft.