On a Monday afternoon this fall, three graduate studios in Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture jostled for space in the Hugh A. Stubbins Graduate Design Studio, inside the college’s original 1952 building. Dane Hawthorne (shown above, center) of Lakeland, Fla., and Jessica Toal (above left) of Detroit—both second-year M.Arch. students—are part of Minjung Maing’s “Transpositions|Double Skins” studio, which investigates the design and construction of high-performance building envelopes. Students are required to create enclosures for public buildings; model them digitally and physically; build half-scale prototypes; and assess the performance of their designs.
Only steps away, “Seeing and Feeling,” taught by Lars Spuybroek and Daniel Baerlecken, explored the relationship between patterns of variation and building massing; it was inspired by Ruskin’s concept of the “wall-veil” in The Stones of Venice. Within earshot of these inquiries into aesthetics and tectonics, students in the third studio—“Integrated Design and Project Delivery: Four Cross-Discipline Projects”—had formed project teams and were using Revit to learn the collaborative process that’s the future of professional practice. Who said architectural education today isn’t broad?
