Interior Architecture

First year studio kicked off the Spring 2017 semester with an interesting change here at IARc.  The 51 first-year studio students were split into sections under the jurisdiction of three great IARc professors: Professor Maru Torres-Antonini, Professor Felicia Dean, and Professor Stoel Burrowes. The way these students learn is more progressive now as professors switch each section every 4 weeks. The switch happens after the completion of each section project. First-year studio’s overall learning goal is to tap into all objectives and concepts of design all while giving opportunities for students to create and add to their portfolios.

Professor Maru Torres-Antonini teaches form, space, order, and their relationship to human experience through her studio assignment.  Specific content and skills addressed by the project are spatial definition, spatial experience, circulation, and architectural scale model building.

Professor Felicia Dean teaches model building through weaving and textile creation.  For her project, students will learn how to create 2D and 3D woven pattern designs for tablet weaving.  Students will also conceptually develop, design, and create a woven interior product by applying knowledge from their research of poetry and the elements and principles of design.

Professor Stoel Burrowes teaches design processes and their relationship to human experiences through his studio assignments.  Specific content and skills addressed throughout his projects are curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, and radical collaboration.  Splitting wood, learning to create mortise and tendon joints, making a mallet, wood turning, ideating and modeling are just a handful of activities within his section.

During their completion of these section projects throughout the semester, students and professors also will travel to Charlottesville, VA and Mill Run, Pennsylvania to tour Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.