Living Pods is an advanced design studio that reframes urban furniture as an active agent in shaping public space. Students treat the design of public amenities not as a technical problem but as an opportunity for placemaking, critical inquiry, and spatial justice. The central project develops "Living Pods": multifunctional installations that double as microhabitats, integrating pollinator-friendly plants, insect hotels, and water sources while deliberately facilitating positive social outcomes. Working from theory to prototype, students use digital design and fabrication tools to balance the needs of local ecosystems with inclusive design, advancing public space interventions that are sustainable, beautiful, and fundamentally just.

This course examines the art and architecture of the greater Caribbean connecting people, built environments, and landscapes across the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast of the Americas. Performance artist and anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse defines the Haitian Creole word, rasanblaj as an “assembly, compilation, enlisting, regrouping. This course uses ransanblaj as a method of inquiry to gather together stories of the built environment across the Caribbean and across centuries. These stories cover geographically, temporally, and thematically distinct places in the Caribbean to uncover the many variations and profound commonalities in Caribbean architectural practices from before colonization through to the contemporary moment. 

Visualization research is a course that aims to introduce students to the fundamental skill of data visualization, exploring data selection, collection, evaluation, and effective communication to a broader audience. It recognizes data visualization as both a communication medium and an analytical tool, encouraging students to use it for problem-solving and knowledge generation. Through hands-on experience and collaborative efforts, students will select research topics related to design disciplines and apply their analytical and representational skills to transform raw data into meaningful and easily comprehensible information.

Live Corridors: The Role of Architecture in Green Infrastructure is a graduate design studio that positions architecture as an instrument of green infrastructure. Working collaboratively, students analyze the city and design a connected system of green corridors that links existing and potential green areas, with particular attention to the boundary and residual spaces between communities. Each student then develops an individual intervention within the shared system, oriented toward four intertwined aims: biodiversity, sustainable mobility, food production, and education. Through site analysis, community planning, and iterative design, students learn to treat ecological connectivity as a framework for more equitable and resilient urban futures.

A space dedicated to the spirit - “A Place for the Spirit” as put forth by ACSA’s 2023 steel building design competition. The studio is challenged to explore spirit not only in a traditional manner but also through a cultural lens, through the event of Carnival! A discovery phase engages the study of “Carnival” across three interrelated regions of the African Diaspora, all with strong ties to Carnival - New Orleans, LA (southern USA), Trinidad and Tobago (southern Caribbean) and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (South America). Research, Abstraction, Experimentation, Formulation, Innovation and Reflection are the iterative backbones of each phase of the design process, further investigating relationships between culture, festival technology and architectural space.