The seminar gives students an opportunity to explore the material condition of architecture from the physical and the intellectual standpoint, exposing material practices that develop solutions applied to the constructive and the emotional alike in architecture. The seminar enhances an experiential approach to space through its material qualities, and is based on intense reading and discussion sessions, as well as short writing submissions and a photographic assignment. The seminar frames an evolution of the experience of space from the physicallity of the haptic and tangible to the more ambiguous of the atmospheric, which has been intensified in the architectural production of recent decades.

Students will work on a material and photographic exploration on the material experience that surrounds them. The photographs shall genuinely reflect an exploration of the material experience framed within some of the most remarkable architectural masterpieces in Buffalo. The photographs will revolve around statements or thesis developed by each of the students preceding each group of photographs. The resulting document shall unveil other perspectives in the way we perceive our built environment through material properties.