Course Description

This course explores the delights and dilemmas of making physical objects. With simple tools and modest materials (paper and pencils, brushes and paint, glue and recycled cardboard) we will make drawings, collages, sculptures, and architectural models. To make means to imagine and design; it also means to research and analyze. Making engages our minds, bodies, and all our senses.

Making something as small as a pencil sketch or as large as a building is a dynamic process. Like music or dance, it takes time and often requires many interrelated steps. While the process of making unfolds in time, its products endure through time. Works of art and architecture are therefore paradoxically at once dynamic and still. They reflect the dynamic processes whereby they were made. They evoke memories and suggest the aspirations of their makers. Buildings, paintings, and drawings embody ideas about what it means to be alive and to experience the world.