Facilities

Architecture Facilities

The School of Architecture will occupy a spacious, state-of-the-art facility in the heart of campus adjacent to the University’s highly acclaimed Art facilities. The close proximity to these places of creative exploration and production will encourage cross-disciplinary learning and discovery.
The facility will showcase sustainable design principles. It will feature a primary circulation spine connecting two sides of the campus, two levels of studios, and a two-story Commons surmounted by a continuous skylight that will harvest abundant natural light throughout the day. The Commons will serve as the building’s “agora” (in ancient Greece, the place of public assembly) - an open, shared, central space for educational exchange among all students and faculty. Here, learning will be dynamic and often un-programmed - a flexible place designed to foster serendipitous encounters, collective discussions, debates, displays and project critiques.

Each student will have an individualized space designed to accommodate a laptop computer (with wireless Internet connection), drawing board, storage area for personal items, and integral pin-up space.

Additional facilities include fully-equipped woodshop, plaster-casting room, central printers and plotters, a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Lab, flexibly-furnished classroom space, and a reference library adjacent to the design studios.

 

The Design Studio—the Center of Holistic Learning

Architecture education must seek, generate, transfer, and question knowledge with breadth and imagination. The fundamental place of learning is the design studio – the primary place of research, exploration, and testing of ideas. Marywood’s architecture curriculum is conceived to avoid the idea of segments of knowledge and to favor the concept of quilted knowledge—the notion that we learn most effectively by weaving together concepts and their meaningful applications. Thus, classroom learning and studio learning will form interdependent patterns of holistic learning.