These advanced faculty-initiated seminars provide opportunities for students to conduct in-depth investigations of select topics in design. The topics typically align with faculty’s current research.

Winter 2024 term 2

DES 450D: An Important Corner
Bill Pechet

IMPORTANT CORNER 
More than just the collision of two planes, the corner condition represents and affects the spatial, social and environmental meeting of both interior and exterior experience. In its moment, it elucidates a set of relationships describing the aesthetic and structural language of a building, street and city. Read in more lofty terms, it can also speak of the political and metaphysical position that a particular construction has within a given society. 

Oft-ignored, particularly within the setting of studio work, the corner will be the focus of this elective course, giving its existence time, to (pardon the oxymoron) unfold. 

The class will begin with on-site field studies of notable corners that can be found within our city, using drawings and conversations to record how these corners exist in material, structural and conceptual terms. These sojourns will be complemented with a set of chosen readings. 

Following this, students will complete a precedent study for presentation to the class in a seminar format. The precedents will range from the small/domestic, up to the larger/institutional and then further up to the urban design scale. Among a variety of modes of analysis, the class will deploy Hilary Barlow‘s taxonomy of corner types as a lens through which to view these works, using the categories of ‘closed, recessed, slipping, reentrant, interlocking, clipped, open, acute, deformed, masked and void’. 

The final, and most significant focus of the class will require that each student examine a corner condition within a past or current project of their own. This will facilitate the development that part of their design through iterative drawing and modelling exercises in order to add depth and detail to their project(s). 

The class is open to students in the MARCH, MLA, Dual Degree and BDES year 4 cohorts.