Residential Design/Build Studio

Graduate Design Studio

Tom Loew, Fall 2018

The Residential Design/Build studio affords students the opportunity of exploring custom home design and the fabrication methodologies of residential scale projects. The studio promotes creative solutions which balance design exploration with the demands associated within today's residential architectural practice.

Students in this course face a challenge where today's residential home market is characterized by people wanting to build homes on smaller budgets. Making the challenge even harder is that in many instances, architectural design is scarcely considered as a necessity or even as a viable measure by residential clientele. Clients commonly hold the belief that money spent on architectural design diminishes their financial assets rather than contributing economy to the intended work. The large supply of available standardized home plans perpetuates this belief.

The emerging standard of custom home design is largely defined by altering a facade detail, or modestly reconfiguring interior partitions all within preset plans reflecting quantitative values of homes based purely upon square footage. The landscape of residential projects being built, by and large, reflects the notions of economy, functionality, financial commodity, even insignificant objectivity as the sole conceptual drivers for production. Even more noticeably, these notions are seldom considered integral components of an influential or an integrated design process. Consequently, the very nature of residential design practice has now evolved with an ongoing and mandatory necessity to give clients a tangible understanding of what opportunities critical and objective design thinking bring to a project.