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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.


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Portraits in Motion ︎ Visualization 4


ARCH 565
ARCH 3743
Spring 2020 ︎
Los Angeles

Instructor
Ryan Tyler Martinez



Work by B.Arch student Lucas Mok


A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural or man-made. In this class we  focused on animate subject matter (movement, transformation, animation, effects, and sound) as an alternative approach to representing contemporary still life motifs with an emphasis on architectural subjectivities.  We focused on blurring the boundary between multiple scaled objects and functions like bottles and buildings, fabrics and facades, and cups and columns among many geometric, graphic, and object-oriented ontologies.




Work by M.Arch student Nick Daniel


Similarly, to the Academy of Beaux Arts, this seminar began with a 21st century version of “still life” through the use of contemporary techniques. Instead of using conventional representational techniques, this class explored the use of Rhino, Autodesk Maya, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe After Effects as a tool for productivity. Reflecting this shift in current professional and academic discourse, the class explored how the use of software redefines the concept of motion in architectural representation. Students were encouraged to think in terms of technique and composition, instead of abstraction and misalignment of parts.



Work by B.Arch student Christian Boling


This seminar focused primarily on teaching students how to digitally model different types of formal and representational motifs with an emphasis on motion and animation as a tool for representation. Each student designed a digital still life which  helped position and expand their understanding of representational techniques and tools. Students were introduced to MASH, a plug in for Autodesk Maya that supports the production of motion and gravity in a digital environments. Later in the semester, students learned how to render animations in AutoDesk Maya using Arnold Render and Adobe After Effects.



Work by M.Arch student Mahzad Changalvaie



Work by M.Arch student Zhanming Liu


As a point of departure, we looked at the work of Christian Rex Van Minnen, Le Corbusier, Jennifer Bonner, and Aldo Rossi amongst many others. These precedents were used as a foundation for developing skills in constructing compositions, rendering and polygonal modeling. Students also revisited tea and chess sets in architecture as a 3d modeling exercise. The course project allowed students to learn multiple modeling, texturing and rendering techniques. Students explored multi-platform workflows to develop fundamentals in polygonal mesh modeling and representational techniques. Students learned techniques in Autodesk Maya, Rhino, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe After Effects.




Work by B.Arch student Fumiya Ishii




Work by M.Arch student Cody Carpenter


Course Organization
This course focused on specific assignments. Each student was required to 3D model objects, animate a scene, and produce a final film/animation at the end of the semester. Each object should have its own texture map, rendering style, and output which will eventually be aggregated into one animated composition. The objects are specified as follows: Graphic Blob, The Everyday Object, Accidental Form, Spherical Envelope with Hard Edges, The Aggregated Primitive Shape, Tea Set, Chess Set, Building Element, The Architectural Tool.




Some student used alternative objects for their final animations like primitive shapes and basic geometry. As a class, the students interrogated sets of 3D modeled leafs, rocks, plants, bowls and/or stands into their composition. These objects were used in collaboration to each student’s seven objects to create beautifully composed portraits in motion. The use of chiaroscuro lighting techniques and gradient styled backgrounds created a juxtaposition between familiar still life paintings from the past and the new work produced by the students.


Catalog Description

Students advance visualization skills through experimentation with shifting representational technologies, including and surpassing digital fabrication tools and innovative softwares (not limited to BIM, Catia, GIS, Grasshopper/Rhino, rendering engines, and/or website production).