Designing Objects, Relationships, and Environments
Core Graduate Studio

Designing Objects, Relationships, and Environments was the first core studio in the 3-Year Master of Architecture program for students with no background in architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This course introduced fundamental concepts of architectural design and representation, including preliminary notions of site, program, and context. The course investigated worlds bounded by enclosures at various scales, with an emphasis on exploring reciprocal relationships between objects—understood as things and beings—and their environments.

In A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, Jakob von Uexküll explains that environments (“Umwelt,” in the singular) are akin to individual ‘bubbles of reality’ – ones that disguise other worlds around each organism. By establishing that organisms are typically only able to see in their own abstracted worlds, von Uexküll determined that each being had their particular and different version of reality itself. His most famous example is perhaps that of the tick, which describes an unfamiliar way of being: the tick can remain still and actionless—it can appear to be without life, inert, Nonliving, or even dead—for up to 18 years until his Umwelt, which is made up of three things (light, which makes the tick climb trees or branches; the smell of butyric acid, which makes the tick drop from such plants; and skin, which makes the tick burrow in order to collect blood), is activated by at least one of three triggers. Much like the tick, which appears inert, many plants, animals, rocks, and other objects in the world are commonly deprived of intentionality and potentiality due to their inability to access human registers of knowledge and practice. But they, too, may be waiting for the right trigger in order to manifest fully and to contribute to different world processes symbiotically.

To do this, this studio collapsed animate and inanimate objects and assumed them all to be design constituencies. Students investigated and designed relationships in hopes that new and inclusive spaces can be devised. Working individually, they found the Umwelt of each of their selected objects and used them as a generative design practice.

Designing Objects, Relationships, and Environments introduced students to a range of possibilities entailed in various models of design in order to make them aware of the power that architecture has to shape the world.

Course Type and Audience
Core Graduate Studio

Institution
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Location
Milwaukee, WI

Faculty
José Ibarra
Michael Jefferson

Term
Fall 2019

Works Displayed Credits
Kelly Iacobazzi
Lisa Sun
Andrew Rexrode