In Defense of Beauty: Paris (2025SU)

Telling Stories (2025SU)

Telling Stories takes an experimental approach to storytelling, exploring ways of narrating personal and collective stories in visual media, while focusing on the development of collaborative projects and artistic initiatives that involve the community on various levels from process to presentation. Emphasis will be on interdisciplinary processes from assemblage and installation, to sound and performance, from animation to video, creating projects that use research into histories of place and people as their inspiration and conceptual grounding. Presentations, guest lecturers and field research will examine ways in which art has contributed to the articulation of ethnic identity, exploring the power of storytelling in bringing communities together, expanding understanding and creating social change.

Urban Fictions: Dwelling in Between (2025SU)

Following the example of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, this studio will scavenge San Francisco for scraps—private urban voids to be appropriated and reimagined for public use. If a lot cannot be monetized as “real” estate, what alternate forms of domesticity might slip into the cracks? By cataloging, documenting, and designing in between found conditions of the city, students will project urban fictions—a collective archipelago of residual vacant properties turned common domestic space. The research studio format will enable students to identify typological opportunities in gaps of the urban fabric, into which to propose a network of architectural-scale interventions that seek to externalize domesticity from wash facilities to collective kitchens.