Spring 2026 Architecture Electives
The School of Architecture’s Spring 2026 electives invite students to engage with a range of topics, from digital visualization, detailing, and fabrication to housing development, material reuse, and urban design. These courses are designed to encourage critical thinking and hands-on experimentation across scales, materials, and methods. Full course details are listed below.
ARC 499 Topics in Architecture: Understanding Architecture
Tues/Thurs 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. | Instructor: Jordan Hines
Designed for non-majors, this course provides a foundation for understanding architecture's formal, spatial, social, and environmental aspects, focusing on the scale of buildings. Students will develop an ability to think critically about architecture by learning how to analyze buildings and the larger forces that shape them. Through lectures, fieldwork, and varied assignments, students will learn how to communicate their ideas effectively using fundamental architectural vocabulary and drawing methodologies. We will study architecture as a physical outcome of cultural processes.
ARC 499/599 Pattern + Surface + Skin: Body Ornamentation
Wednesdays 11:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. | Instructor: Regina Summers
This course explores how natural systems, like patterns, materials, and spatial structures, can inform architectural design through biomimicry and computational processes. In this course, students will analyze Kentucky’s native species to develop original, nature-inspired patterns translated into digital collages, parametric models, and wearable designs. Through workshops in Grasshopper and AI image tools, as well as iterative digital fabrication, students will produce a final project that transforms natural logic into personal, body-scale expression.
ARC 592 Construction, Fabrication, and Installation: Fabricating Play
Tues/Thurs 3:45-5:00 p.m. | Instructor: Jason Scroggin
Fabricating Play is a design build course focused on the design, development, fabrication, and assembly of architectural constructs from scale of models to design installations. The course begins with individual investigations of material and form and then moves forward as a team to select the elements, aesthetics, forms, and methods to fabricate the final construction(s).
ARC 634/499 Architectural Detailing
Wednesdays 9:00-11:00 a.m. | Instructor: Bill Massie
This detailing course explores innovative building construction techniques through their assembly. It includes weekly lectures focused on contemporary methodologies and student-led research presentations. Students will spend the semester researching an architect or building, examining both its construction and conceptual details and ultimately producing a written and graphic contribution to the seminar detail book.
ARC 405 Digital Visualization I
Tues/Thurs 3:00-5:00 p.m. (and some weeknights) | Instructor: Martin Summers
This course introduces students to computer visualization in architecture, focusing on 3D modeling, rendering, and animation software for architectural projects. This course consists of a series of workshops, from which students participate in four, which are graded. The course also includes readings and discussions about the last 30 years of computational advancements and their impact on architectural tools, techniques, and discourse.
UED 501 Introduction to Urban & Environmental Design
Thursdays 10:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Instructor: Jeff Fugate
In recent decades, the relevance of urban design to sustainable management of the built environment has dramatically increased. Meanwhile the scope of environmental design has expanded significantly to address multiple scales. As the twenty-first century progresses, urban design is increasingly important, as it is at this scale that design and aligned professions engage with the most urgent social, political, and environmental issues. UED501 will introduce students to the form and function of cities, contemporary issues in urbanism, methods of analysis and representation, and foundational approaches to practice. Organized as a workshop, thecourse will utilize readings, case studies, and exercises to inform a visualized urban district and articulated design program.
ARC 499/599 Design and Development of Housing – Real Estate Workshop
Thursdays 10:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Instructor: Jeff Fugate
Innovations in housing have long been part of the social program of Architecture and Urban Design. While housing remains the primary driver of new projects and economic growth, its escalating cost places this fundamental human need beyond what many households might afford. The role of an empowered designer to address contemporary challenges cannot be understated. Empowerment begins with understanding how the processes of design and development are interconnected in theproduction of new projects for construction. Organized as a workshop, this elective will introduce students to the fundamentals of real estate development processes, site selection, financing, and design considerations in the development of housing opportunities.
ARC 499/599 Topics in Architecture: Dis- / Re-Assembly
Fridays 10:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Instructor: Leen Katrib
This is the first in a series of experimental electives that will investigate the potential afterlives of materials to re-imagine their new assemblies. Part materials research, part making, the elective positions students to identify and engage with a wide variety of local and regional waste streams to source, salvage, sort, and granulate materials—from single-use sets and props built by the Department of Theatre and Dance’s scene shop, university’s Surplus inventory, salvage yards, postconsumer products, to our very own FabLab.
