Summer 2026 courses

A 6 credit study abroad to Jordan, a country with a long and layered history and a remarkably diverse landscape that ranges from fertile valleys to deserts and mountains, provides a rich setting for this study abroad. This trip offers an immersive introduction to the country’s cultural, architectural and natural heritage. Students will explore major historical sites, learn about traditional construction methods such as mud-brick architecture, and examine the country’s contemporary architecture. The students will also engage with practicing architects and cultural institutions across Jordan. A central part of the experience is a week-long collaborative workshop with students and faculty from a local university in Amman, which fosters exchange and shared learning. The trip also includes visits to some of Jordan’s most iconic landscapes, such as Petra, Wadi Rum, the Dead Sea, and the Dana Reserve, where students will stay in an ecolodge and reflect on the relationship between the land, architecture, and community.

Students will live and work on Keats Island at Keats Camp. During the week, students will work full time with instructors as well as members of the Keats Camp staff to construct the project students designed during the spring semester. This will involve coordination of construction schedules and materials, leading small task teams within the larger 12-person team, collaborating closely to refine the designs as needed to evolving site conditions, and full-time building work to complete the project’s construction in 6 weeks.

Contemporary Practice will survey professional architectural design practice business models and processes through stakeholder panel discussions, online visits with local architectural practices, lectures and assignments.

The course explores topics including specialization and interdisciplinarity; ethics and practice; assembling consultant teams; project management and delivery methods; cost control methods and tools; and project procurement and tendering. Central to the course is a consideration of the future of practice and, through the creation of design value propositions, how this presumed evolution might inform speculative practice business models.

This course will teach fundamental coding, using the programming language Python, as applied to the built environment. Students will be taught the necessary skills to automate common workflows, create geometries, perform sophisticated urban analyses, and explore and visualize large datasets.

Programming does not need to be inaccessible! All code will be written using either Grasshopper or Python notebooks, providing instant visual feedback, which will help students gain a more intuitive understanding of the code they are writing. Foundational programming concepts will be explored through case studies directly applicable to the workflow of a SALA student or built environment professional.

A knowledge of parametric design in general and Grasshopper in particular is an asset for incoming students, but not a requirement. A brief introduction to Grasshopper will be given in class and extra learning material will be provided for self-learning. Students with coding experience are also welcome to join to explore building specific applications of programming.

material immersions will introduce students to relationships between place and material. Sited within a regenerating forest stand and adjacent areas at UBC Farm, and building on the work of last year’s wood course, our group will immerse themselves in this place through walking, observations, sketching, drawings, and making. The material within this place is wood, yellow cedar, which we will be exploring through primarily wood to wood joinery methods to complete the UBC Farm Practicum Program’s gathering platform and some new interventions.

material immersions builds from work with the SALA Materials Lab, a collection of building materials that includes standard dimensional wood framing lumber. This elective looks to origins and material relationships with place. The course will take place outdoors at UBC Farm. We will also have studio space at the MacMillan 3rd Floor Studio. There will be a required shop orientation prior to the course. 

This summer course combines Transformative Botanical Representations and Planting Design to provide students with a comprehensive, critical, and creative investigations of plants in landscape architecture. It brings together two interwoven dimensions of practice: how plants are documented, represented, and storied; and how they are used in design, specified, and stewarded as living kin and systems within landscapes.

Students will be invited to interrogate the ways plants are historically represented through Western scientific and colonial frameworks, while also engaging ecological planting design as a practice that enhances resilience, ecological function, and cultural meaning. The course emphasizes plants as more than aesthetic or functional objects: they are agents, teachers, and kin that carry cultural narratives and ecological significance.

Through lectures, fieldwork, creative explorations, and planting design exercises, students will critically and experientially engage with the sacredness, agency, functionality, aesthetic values and ecological roles of plants. In centering Indigenous sovereignty, Afrofuturism, and decolonial approaches, this course asks how alternative forms of storytelling, design, and care can contribute to more just, reciprocal, and resilient relationships with the land.

Building / Information: Architectural Production with Revit pairs pragmatic training with a critical perspective, placing building information modeling in the context of the broader historical and sociotechnical shifts in architectural production that it is precipitating. It couples the technical learning of an increasingly-widespread architectural design and representation tool, Autodesk Revit, with critical reflection on the use of Revit as a design medium, the analytic opportunities its use can provide, and the design approaches to which it is conducive.

Fundamental techniques will be introduced through in-class exercises and workshops; simultaneously, these techniques will be applied through a semester-long study of an exemplary precedent building. 

Communicating Construction will address the role, composition, organization and conventions of the formal documentation necessary for communication of an architectural design to those undertaking the construction.