“A chair, a house, a signature.” -Mary Woods

The course leveraged this notion to guide the studio, albeit not in that order. Taking literally the word signature, students utilized their autograph as the starting point for the studio in the first exercise. Less a clear textual representation of one’s name and more a stylistic graphical expression of one’s individual character, the studio embraced the student’s individuality, using their literal signature as the starting point for design. Understanding the signature as an abstract sketch and also a familiar gesture, the studio translated these graphic elements into spatialized constructions.*

The studio was divided into three exercises, each building upon the prior: spatialize your autograph, design and build a chair, create a house for the collection of chairs.

The second exercise of the course was to design and build a chair. Using the development of the geometry in the signature studies, students expanded their designs into a full scale model made of a paper material. They were required to study various structural attitudes related to the material constraints. The final deliverable was to build a chair that supported a 6’-1” individual weighing 200 pounds.

The final design exercise of the semester was to create a house for the chairs the students built in project II. Located in Ithaca, New York, students selected one of 12 sites near Ithaca Falls Gorge. The topographically dynamic site required students to engage with site analysis and respond by carefully defining perceptive spaces.

Using these analyses, students were asked to address and index the chairs’ formal and functional characteristics, calling into question how these analyses could generate program for the house. The programtic deliverables required the students to develop spaces for the home that were defined as production, relaxation, relief, and rejuvenation. An additional design aspect for the students was the way in which they speculated on the relationship of the chair and its projection to the human. This called into question topics such as scale, circulation, and interaction. The primary intent of the studio exercise was to curate and organize the chairs as objects in a container (house).

*syllabus excerpt