Category: Pedagogy
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Rituals of Place: Measure and Meaning in Ephemeral Landscapes
Carley Rynar, Bradley Walters, and Adeline Hofer When we engage the physical world outside the studio, site and landscape become more than passive tableaus or inert media within which we operate. The lands within which we work are, in fact, complex and nuanced fields marked by overlapping and competing systems. When we consider the human condition within these natural…
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“Oculata Manus” published by Routledge
The essay “Oculata Manus: On the Role of the Body in the Making of Creative Minds” was published as a chapter in Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design, edited by Stephen A. Temple and published by Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. The chapter was co-authored by Bradley Walters and Lisa Huang.…
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Oculata Manus: On the Role of the Body in the Making of Creative Minds
Bradley Walters and Lisa Huang Young designers and beginning design students are often motivated more by emotion, immediacy, and sensuality than by ideologies, theories, or abstract principles. Causal relationships that are remote in perception, time, or space are less relevant than those that are immediate, present, and concurrent. Even when students understand the presence of…
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“Oculata Manus” published in Vorkurs Journal
The essay “Oculata Manus” was included in the inaugural edition of the Journal Vorkurs, edited by Zachary Wignall and Elizabeth Cronin. The essay probes pedagogies based in materiality and making, with particular reference to a new curricular structure introduced in Graduate Program at the University of Florida School of Architecture. Citation:Walters, Bradley and Lisa Huang.…
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Vicenza 3.0: Imparando dal Passato International Exhibition of Student Work
Working with Giancarlo Busato and Sotirios Papadopoulos, Bradley Walters co-curated an international exhibition of work prepared by students from the University of Florida School of Architecture. The exhibition included prints and engravings prepared by students in the Vicenza Institute of Architecture study abroad program in Vicenza, Italy. Citation:Walters, Bradley, Giancarlo Busato, and Sotirios Papadopoulos. 2016.…
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Here be Dragons: On the Value of Incompleteness in Drawing
As a warning to unwary seafarers, the Lenox Globe (ca. 1503-07) included the following cautionary inscription on the eastern coast of Asia: “HC SVNT DRACONES” (hic sunt dracones). The Latin phrase offers an ominous warning, translated directly as “here be dragons” (1, 2). For some, this alludes to the presence of mythological figures lurking unseen,…
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Dead Letter Office
To speak of “live” projects is also to acknowledge the presence of “dead” projects, those for whom there is no client and at the end of which there is no plan to implement or full-scale project to occupy. The dead project is severed from implementation and/or actualization, disconnected from productive processes, and often lands in…
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Urban Seams and Sutures: Strategies for Intervening in Pre-Industrial Urban Landscapes
The urban condition has become “a space of spontaneous self-organization and emergence, it is inherently dynamic, connected, interactive, a messy assemblage of networks, systems, ecologies, all competing with and contaminating, each other” (Furján 2008, 52). While these conditions and phenomena are experienced by many, they pose particularly acute problems for those in the design fields…
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Detours and Denouements
Architectural education is challenged by the pressing needs of a changing profession. With increasing costs and diminishing fees, firms deploy digital tools and/or outsource work to more efficiently deliver design services. Schools are similarly streamlining processes, responding to charged professional and political environments. With constrained funding, curricula at many schools are being abridged, shifting programs…
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So you want to be an Architect?
Assistant Professor Bradley Walters, AIA, NCARB serves as the IDP Education Coordinator for the University of Florida. In this annual lecture, he introduces the Intern Development Program (IDP) and provides an overview of steps required to become a licensed architect in the United States. While the discussion is specifically targeted to current undergraduate or graduate students…
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Drawing Space
To say that the drawing has been displaced by building may be all too self-evident, both in practice and in academia. It is interesting that the displacement has been caused in part by the success of architectural drawings, drawings that evolved from two-dimensional ideas to three-dimensional models to photorealistic renders to full-motion video. The drawing…
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Speculative Making: Engaging Mass and Matter
Young designers and beginning design students are often motivated more by emotion, immediacy, and sensuality than by ideologies, theories, and/or abstract principles. Close and/or causal relationships that are remote in perception, time, and/or space are less relevant than those that are immediate, present, and concurrent. Even when students understand the presence of these remote relationships,…
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Figures and Fields
Figures and Fields: A Lecture by Bradley Walters This lecture weaves together professional work, research, and student work within a narrative that engages space, field theories, surface, landscape, environment, and ecology. Poster background image: Mapping of bee movements, responding to specific environmental conditions. Student work from Architectural Design 5, ARC 3320, Fall 2009. Instructor: Bradley Walters. Univerza…
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Active Lines: Liminal Marks + Material Constructions
The planning and development of large-scale projects requires investors to commit significant capital resources to their realization. These commitments are made based on the promise of a return, whether it is in the form of financial gain, an icon in one’s name, or both. The promises are materialized in words, numbers, and in visual documents:…
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Out of Thin Air
We cannot expect to extract ideas and schemes from the student without first feeding his mind and imagination. Bernhard Hoesli and Colin Rowe, 1954 (1) As informational networks bind us ever more tightly together, they also introduce unseen gaps and fissures within fields of knowledge. While in some cases, these are the product of distraction…
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Materialisms and Excess
Waste not, want not.1 Austerity is in the air. Excess is out; efficiency is in. Quantitative measures supercede the qualitative just as performative and operative strategies displace poetics and play. And in these historical moments, the serious obligations of professional practice are often drawn into the academy. The balance shifts from open-ended speculation to applied,…
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Knots and Nurbs: Relational Spaces in Variable Fields
Legibility of constructed space is largely based on relationships internal to a work, relationships that can be read or understood through the terms of the construct itself. Components are set in relation to one another, marking purpose and intent, shaping space through their interactions within a field. It is through numerous iterations, constant study and…
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Powder Puffed Faux Fat & Safe Sex
Following completion of my undergraduate studies in architecture at the University of Florida and work in practice, I prepared a portfolio of work to accompany applications for graduate studies. This document, compiled in January 1997, was titled “Powder Puffed Faux Fat & Safe Sex.” The document included an introductory preface, included here to provide additional…
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