Preview of Select Fall 2026 + Spring 2027 Courses
FALL 2026 ADVANCED RESEARCH STUDIOS
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ARCH 4010 / ALAR 8010
Plastic Tectonics
EHSAN BAHARLOU
Plastic is everywhere in our buildings, and almost always hidden: behind cladding, in insulation, then landfilled when the building comes down. This studio asks a different question. What if plastic became the architecture you can see, a long-cycle store shaped with intent instead of buried as waste?
In Plastic Tectonics you will design and fabricate a real architectural element from recycled and bio-based polymers, at the scale of a building's exterior envelope or a room's interior. The work moves in three phases: Being (plastic today), Becoming (designing and prototyping your element), and Beyond (recycled or bio-based futures).
Early assignments are research and precedent study, from the Monsanto House of the Future to Verner Panton's pop-era interiors. You then move through site and program into concept work, with 3D-printed sketches and a desktop model. Mid-semester you will fabricate a half-scale prototype on our KUKA KR10, and by the end of the semester, you will fabricate a full-scale piece on the larger KR120, with full drawings.
Recent lab work shows the range: Chair No. 7, a full-size chair printed from polymer pellets, and Axisymmetric Column No. 1, a 2.3-meter structural column in carbon-fiber-reinforced PLA. One is furniture scale, the other architectural, and your project can land anywhere between them. See these and other projects at: ct.lab.virginia.edu/projects.
The method is hands-on and staged. You sketch, model in CAD, test at desktop scale, then rationalize the geometry into a robotic toolpath in Grasshopper. You will not build the robotic process from scratch. It is already set up, and your job is just to get familiar with it. Two workshops put you on the robots, starting with manual control before any code, and we plan to visit Formative 3D to see this work at commercial scale.
You can work on your own or in a pair, and you can pursue a material-led direction that does not use the robots if you prefer. The studio is backed by the Jefferson Trust, which helps cover the cost of your materials whichever direction you take. What matters is the argument you make: that the polymer you choose, and the way you shape it, is an architectural decision worth defending.
Studio Travel:
Falls Church, Virginia (Formative 3D)
Tuesday, September 22, date tentative (subject to confirmation with Formative 3D)
Studio Sponsors:
Jefferson Trust Grant
Course Costs:
Out-of-pocket student cost for studio travel to Falls Church includes meals only, ~$15–25 each.
The Jefferson Trust grant covers studio material costs including: polymer feedstock - virgin/recycled PLA, recycled PETG, bio-based pellets for the KR10 and KR120 prints. Recycled/waste-derived feedstock is essentially free. Student out-of-pocket expenses for the studio fall within the University standards for courses, an anticipated amount of ~ $250 – 300 (materials, supplies, printing).
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ARCH 4010 / ALAR 8010
LATENT GROUNDS: Prototyping Vienna’s Inner City
ILA BERMAN
MONA EL KHAFIF
Vienna is considered one of the most livable cities in the world, comprising an astounding collection of historical and contemporary architectural artifacts and urban areas. It is also currently one of the fastest-growing metropolises in Northern Europe, in part attributable to its central position between Eastern and Western Europe. In the next few years, the city is expected to surpass 2 million inhabitants and to see increasing demand for housing and workplace development, as well as for spaces for cultural and civic life and recreation. Moving beyond the city’s well-known peripheral expansions (and the tendency for most cities to expand outward), this studio will focus on Vienna's remaining residual sites embedded within the existing urban fabric, exploring the developed city as a field of untapped potential to support built spatial, infrastructural, and ecological development.
Through research and the generation of an "atlas" identifying potential sites for the studio, students will engage with and analyze a wide range of recyclable territories ranging from former railway yards and infrastructural corridors to dispersed micro-brownfields, residual urban fragments, and underutilized parcels often hidden within and scattered throughout the city.
Building on Vienna’s truly exemplary history of inner-city regeneration, this studio thus reframes urban growth as an inward process intended to intensify a city's existing yet dormant architectural, landscape, and urban potential, linking experimental design speculation and ecological awareness with developmental logics such as land value, feasibility, phasing, and long-term adaptability. Through mapping, comparative analysis, precedent studies, and fieldwork, while investigating questions of density, affordability, mobility, and environmental performance, students will examine how infrastructural systems, obsolete industrial landscapes, and fragmented urban territories can become catalysts for new forms of housing, mixed-use programming, public space, and ecological repair.
Working across scales—from regional frameworks and district master plans to architectural interventions and repeatable microsite strategies—students will develop speculative, yet grounded design proposals that emphasize prototyping as both a research and design methodology. The studio ultimately reframes these latent landscapes not as leftover spaces, but as opportunities to prototype more adaptive, resilient, and socially inclusive forms of high-quality architecture, urban design, and landscape.
A field trip to Vienna in September will expose students to this vibrant world-class city, provide direct engagement with exemplary built precedents and urban models, while grounding the studio in complex real-world sites and their environs. This will be an exciting global travel studio, seeking students from across the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design certificate programs. This advanced elective research studio will also fulfill the UDC studio requirements.
For more information about this studio, access this presentation.
Studio Travel:
Vienna, Austria
September 20-27
A passport is required.
Studio Sponsors:
Studio travel is being substantially and generously sponsored by the White Ruffin Byron Center for Real Estate and the Department of Architecture.
Course Costs:
Anticipated student cost for joining the trip will be ~ $600 per student. Student out-of-pocket expenses for the studio fall within the University standards for courses, an anticipated amount of ~ $250 – 300 (materials, supplies, printing).
Urban Design Certificate:
This studio will fulfill the studio requirement for the urban design certificate (UDC) program
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ARCH 4010 / ALAR 8010
Permafrost Transects: Designing across urban and industrial Arctic landscapes in transition (Fairbanks-Deadhorse, AK)
LEENA CHO
MATTHEW JULL
This studio investigates how architecture, landscape architecture, and infrastructure design can respond to changing Arctic permafrost conditions and evolving patterns of urban and industrial development in Alaska. As air temperatures increase and precipitation patterns shift, permafrost thaw and melting ground ice can affect the stability of buildings, roads, utilities, and landscapes. These changes are not caused by climate change alone; buildings and infrastructure can also alter ground conditions through heat loss, snow drifting, meltwater accumulation, drainage modification, gravel placement, and surface disturbance. Building on the Arctic Design Group’s prior traveling research studios in Utqiagvik, this new iteration expands the framework from a single Arctic coastal settlement to a broader regional transect spanning Alaska’s sub-Arctic and Arctic environments.
The studio will use Fairbanks as the southern anchor for a field-based investigation into urbanization, infrastructure, and environmental change, north along the Dalton Highway to Deadhorse and the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field on Alaska’s North Slope. This five-hundred-mile route will serve as an environmental and infrastructural transect across changing permafrost conditions, ecosystems, settlement patterns, and land uses.
The studio will be organized in two parts: 1) Context and Sites, and 2) Propositions and Actions. For part I, we will 1a) investigate the regional and localized permafrost gradients and their associated hydrological, geophysical and ecological systems as they relate to changing climate, anthropogenic influences, and development pressures; 1b) analyze historical and precedent examples to understand existing architectural, landscape and infrastructural management practices across differing permafrost regimes and land use patterns; 1c) gather and spatialize environmental datasets, field observations and local knowledge to better understand site-specific conditions and inform design variables and constraints; and 1d) examine Fairbanks, Deadhorse/Prudhoe Bay, and the Dalton Highway corridor’s future plans and priorities, vulnerabilities and opportunities in relation to permafrost, infrastructure, and socio-ecological change.
By synthesizing these various kinds of information, we will then in part II 2a) identify design, land, and infrastructural management approaches that can work across permafrost gradients and associated disturbance regimes, and 2b) develop site-specific strategies that emerge from relationships among permafrost environmental systems, infrastructure, and sociocultural practices across architectural, landscape and infrastructural scales.
The studio is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded MUST (“Measuring Urban Sustainability in Transition”) project, which studies Arctic urban sustainability in transition. Fairbanks is one of the MUST study cities, and the studio connects this research framework to the ADG studio program’s multiyear focus on urban permafrost management. The course will be co-taught by both faculty members in architecture (Jull) and landscape architecture (Cho) as a fully integrated one-section studio, and will emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration and engage experts in environmental sciences, engineering and planning alongside community and federal research partners in Alaska.
Studio Travel:
Fairbanks, Deadhorse / Prudhoe Bay, and the Dalton Highway transect in Alaska.
September 15 - 22, tentative dates (subject to change)
Studio Sponsors:
National Science Foundation
Course Costs:
The studio will cover the roundtrip airfare between the departing airport (either Washington Dulles or Richmond) and Fairbanks, AK; guided coach bus transportation from Fairbanks to Deadhorse; return airfare from Deadhorse to Fairbanks; and partial lodging. Out of pocket expenses include a $250 fixed fee (this will be used toward lodging), meals; ground transportation (e.g. shared Uber) between meeting locations; and cost of travel to/from Charlottesville to departing/returning airport (Dulles or Richmond airport). Student out-of-pocket expenses for the studio fall within the University standards for courses, an anticipated amount of ~ $100-150 (materials, supplies, printing).
Urban Design Certificate:
This studio will fulfill the studio requirement for the urban design certificate (UDC)
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ARCH 4010 / ALAR 8010
MIAMI: The Flooded Metropolis. Housing, Infrastructure, and Collective Futures.
MARIA GONZALEZ ARANGUREN
This studio proposes a deep research investigation into emerging urban typologies in Miami and South Florida under conditions of climate vulnerability and environmental transformation. Miami has become one of the most critical territories in the United States where the housing affordability crisis intersects with accelerating sea-level rise, flooding, and climate migration. Rising insurance costs, increasing property values, and recurrent flooding events are reshaping urbanization and displacement patterns across the region. Rather than treating architecture as isolated objects, the course examines housing, public space, and infrastructure as interconnected networks shaping collective urban life. Special emphasis is placed on housing and collective living models as central questions for the future of Miami, where affordability and climate vulnerability increasingly overlap.
The course investigates Miami Beach and the Biscayne Bay region as a critical case study where architecture, infrastructure, ecology, and real estate intersect under conditions of environmental uncertainty. Students will analyze how flooding projections, porous limestone geology, stormwater systems, and coastal development influence housing affordability, displacement, public space, and urban resilience. Through mapping, environmental analysis, and speculative design research, the studio explores adaptive futures beyond short-term engineering responses, while examining the social consequences of climate adaptation, including uneven exposure to flooding and environmental inequality.
The studio will operate collaboratively through the design of a shared “piece of the city,” imagining the transformation of a coastal urban fragment into a climate-resilient and socially affordable environment. Students will collectively develop a territorial and infrastructural framework integrating ecological, hydrological, civic, and social systems. Within this common framework, each student will design an individual intervention—ranging from housing and collective living models to civic, cultural, infrastructural, or landscape projects—that contributes to a broader vision for the future city.
Working across multiple scales, from domestic spaces to neighborhood and territorial infrastructures, projects will integrate architecture, landscape, public space, and water management strategies, with particular attention to civic space, collective governance, and shared resources.
Miami serves as a prototype for coastal regions confronting similar hydrological and environmental futures, encouraging students to rethink urban living under conditions of environmental transformation.
Studio Travel:
Miami, Florida
September 18-22, tentative dates
Course Costs:
Included: round-trip flight, hotel accommodations, airport transfers, entrance fees, and boat tour. Out-of-pocket student expenses: meals and local transportation during studio travel. Student out-of-pocket expenses for the studio fall within the University standards for courses, an anticipated amount of ~ $250 – 300 (materials, supplies, printing).
Urban Design Certificate:
This studio will fulfill the studio requirement for the urban design certificate (UDC) program
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ARCH 4010 / ALAR 8010
Radical efficiency: Achieving the confidence to build
MOHAMED ISMAIL
Henry Petroski, a rare example of the combination engineer and historian, writes that “we are all engineers of sorts, for we all have the principles of machines and structures in our bones. We have learned to hold our bodies against the forces of nature as surely as we have learned to walk,” (Petroski 1992). Yet, somehow, we lose this intuition as we grow and forget that structures fail, depending on theory more than intuition. It is interesting, then, that our most celebrated structural accomplishments come from unusual designers – structural artists willing to revisit their childhood intuition for inspiration while validating novel ideas using the latest understanding of structural behavior and material mechanics.
Architecture is deeply entangled in pernicious systems of resource extraction and climate injustice, making material efficiency a core mandate of sustainable design. While holistic design might enable material efficiency, the realization of expressive and efficient structures is hindered by the distinct separation of structure from architecture. Due to the complex and wide-ranging challenges of modern engineering analysis and architectural design, they often occur separately in practice and result in works where the structure plays an insignificant (or even adverse) role in the architecture. In response, this studio explores how we might develop an intuition for the resolution of forces, working between abstract computation and local realities to reverse the human and environmental costs of our built environments.
This studio operates at the intersection of performance-oriented design and material ethics. To anchor our work, we will research creative collaborations between architects, engineers, and builders that uncover how shared expertise might spark technical and spatial breakthroughs. Moving from the hyper-precision of a beam to the intimate resolution of a chair, to the public experience of a folly, we will develop workflows that bring together computational optimization, physical experimentation, and ingrained intuition. Ultimately, this studio challenges us to dismantle the barrier between digital design and material reality, suggesting that material efficiency is not just a useful practice, it is an ethical imperative.
Studio Travel:
None
Studio Sponsors:
Precast Concrete Institute Foundation Studio Grant; The grant covers student expenses of $5000 in materials and $1000 in local travel.
Course Costs:
Overall student out-of-pocket expenses for the studio fall within the University standards for courses, an anticipated amount of ~ $250-300 (model-making materials, supplies, printing). ~$50 for local travel if needed (gas or rideshare); Partially or fully funded by the studio sponsor.
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ARCH 4010 / ALAR 8010
Anywhere Specific
KYLE SCHUMANN
ERIK 'RICK' SOMMERFELD (SHURE VISITING PROFESSOR)
The Anywhere Specific advanced research studio will be an immersive experience in integrated project delivery. Design and construction practices will be questioned as students navigate the realization of a real-world project, including material innovation through tools and labor practices, site and program strategies, and project delivery logistics (schedules, budgets, materials, pre-fabrication, transportation, etc.). The studio will bring experimental construction techniques, materials, and technologies from the academy into practice via an inhabitable built proof-of-concept structure.
The instructor team is currently working to finalize details for the studio’s real-world project, which will be designed and constructed for an ecologically focused organization in the mountains of New Mexico or Virginia.
The studio will culminate in the realization of a collective design-build project. As such, students will be required to work productively and collegially as a studio through both the design and construction phases of the semester, and students should be prepared to participate in and learn through physical fabrication work.
Studio Travel:
Domestic travel to rural project site for construction and/or design site visit. Students will need IDs for domestic air travel. Accommodation may be minimal (camping conditions).
Location and travel dates/details TBC.
Course Costs:
Airfare and overnight accommodation will be covered by the studio, along with material costs for project construction. Student out-of-pocket expenses for the studio fall within the University standards for courses, an anticipated amount of ~ $300 (materials, supplies, printing, and daily meals and ground transportation during studio travel).
About Visiting Faculty:
Erik ‘Rick’ Sommerfeld is the 2026 Shure Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia. Sommerfeld is an architect and Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where he additionally serves as Director of Graduate Studies and Director of ColoradoBuildingWorkshop, which he founded in 2009. Sommerfeld’s work and teaching bridges conceptual design and the realities of construction through integrated project delivery, while challenging conventional building assemblies and labor and construction practices.
ColoradoBuildingWorkshop is a globally recognized design-build practice that regularly designs and constructs permanent buildings for non-profits and government agencies focused on the environment, arts, and education. Notable projects include the Holt Watters Field Camp, a research station on Livingston Island in Antarctica, the Aiken Audubon Research Outpost, the Auraria Bike Pavilions, and a collection of 21 cabins for the Colorado Outward Bound School. More about the ColoradoBuildingWorkshop.
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ARCH 4010 / ALAR 8010
Open Kit Affordable Housing
SCHAEFFER SOMERS
Charlottesville faces a persistent shortage of affordable housing in historically underserved neighborhoods. A recent revision to the city's Development Code now permits more diverse housing types and greater residential density across areas previously restricted to single-family use. This studio responds to that opening by developing the Open Kit: a system of pre-designed, standardized components that can be prefabricated and assembled in varied configurations to produce affordable dwelling units tailored to the lot conditions, community priorities, and household needs of Rose Hill, a Charlottesville neighborhood selected for its housing conditions and community character.
The studio's central question is not what can be taken away from a small home to make it affordable, but what a small home must actively do to support a complete domestic life. Affordability in housing has long been pursued through a framework of reduction: less area, cheaper materials, and less spatial generosity. The studio’s approach is based on the theory of affordance: the designed capacity to support the physical, emotional, and social lives of the people who will live there. A particular focus is designing for the full range of residents likely to inhabit these homes across a lifetime: older adults aging in place, residents with varying mobility, multi-generational households, and families at different life stages. Universal design is treated not as a compliance requirement but as a generative constraint that sharpens every component decision.
Students work from three sources of knowledge. The first is personal: readings from Bell Hooks and Gaston Bachelard frame an examination of your own domestic experiences and memories as a research tool. The second is a study of historical and contemporary precedents for integrated domestic components, examined for what each reveal about the relationship between designed space and human activity. The third source is the lived experiences of Rose Hill residents, gathered through community walks, persona development, and neighborhood research conducted by the Housing Futures Lab and extended through community workshops as part of the studio.
The work is organized as four component catalogues: the Living Kit (interior components), the Frame Kit (structure and building systems), the Ground Kit (landscape and site strategies), and the Neighborhood Kit (collective and community-scale components). Architecture and landscape architecture students work collaboratively on separate kits with shared responsibility for threshold elements such as porches, terraces, and garden structures where the disciplines overlap.
The semester concludes with interdisciplinary teams developing site-specific house designs, represented through large-scale physical models, construction documentation, and full-scale details in preparation for future design-build work. Designs are presented in a public exhibit to critics, community members, and Charlottesville Neighborhood Development Services staff. Studio work will inform an open-source library of pre-permitted house designs for affordable housing development in Charlottesville.
Studio Travel:
None; All sites are local to Charlottesville, Virginia
Studio Sponsor:
The studio is supported by the LS3P Foundation Design Interventions Grant — Open-Source Affordable Housing Design Library for Charlottesville: Expanding Equity, Wellness, and Economic Mobility.
Course Costs:
Student out-of-pocket expenses for the studio fall within the University standards for courses, an anticipated amount of ~ $250-300 (materials, supplies, printing). Materials for the final exhibit are grant-funded (exhibit fabrications, final model, details).
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ARCH 4010 / ALAR 8010
Restorative Space: Strategies for Psychologically Supportive Architecture
KATIE STRANIX
The 4010/8010 Research Studio: Restorative Space investigates how architectural elements, enclosures, and environments can mitigate stress, replenish attention, and regulate overstimulated minds and bodies. Students test restorative design strategies across scales and contexts, examining spatial form, materiality, and composition alongside the emotional, cognitive, and sensory dimensions of architecture. The studio pairs rigorous design experimentation with research driven inquiry, positioning student work within broader disciplinary conversations about restorative spaces, adaptive reuse, and the relationship between architecture and mental health.
Students explore the central question – How can architecture be restorative? - through multi-scalar design work that moves from intimate interventions to complex building scale systems. The studio introduces theories and concepts from environmental psychology, biology, sociology, neuroscience, and architecture to ground proposals in research on perception, behavior, embodiment, sensory modalities, and cognitive processing. In parallel, students evaluate adaptive reuse as a restorative practice, considering how existing buildings can be transformed to support environmental, cultural, and community health and wellbeing.
The semester centers on the transformation of the former Fiske Elementary School in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood, one of the remaining vacant public school buildings following the 2013 mass closures. This project asks students to integrate restorative design strategies with programmatic needs, user experience, and the social, historical, and environmental context of Woodlawn. Working with an early twentieth century institutional structure, students engage deeply with material systems, construction logics, and the challenges of intervening within existing fabric.
The course is divided into two assignments – a warm-up and a final project proposal. During the first three weeks, students design a “place of pause” within a 400 square foot site that tests restorative principles at an intimate scale. Insights from this project are then expanded and systematized within the larger Fiske Building site for the remaining weeks of the semester. Both assignments include literature review, case study analysis, fieldwork, prototyping, and iterative spatial experimentation. Studio work is primarily individual, supported by collaborative site analysis and shared documentation of the building and neighborhood.
Studio Travel:
Chicago, Illinois
September 24-28, tentative dates
Studio Sponsors:
The studio is generously supported by UVA’s White Ruffin Byron Center for Real Estate and the Mead Foundation.
Course Costs:
Students are responsible for their meals while in Chicago, with the exception of one group dinner and one group breakfast. Student out-of-pocket expenses for the studio fall within the University standards for courses, an estimated amount of ~ $285 (individual modeling materials, supplies, printing). Instructor will supply modeling materials for the group site model.
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Visit UVA SIS for a complete list of Fall 2026 courses, including additional special topics seminars and elective classes.