This studio investigates how architecture can emerge from the negotiation between rigidity and softness. Titled Soft, Medium, Hard, the semester centered on the design of a compact residence for two people, beginning with the loose assemblage of rigid, everyday materials such as pipes, wooden blocks, and duct tape rolls. These everyday components were tested for their scalar and spatial capacities, forming the basis for early volumetric experiments. Midway through the term, students shifted focus to soft envelope systems composed of stacked and pliable foam. To inform these softer layers, we studied relaxed human postures—hunching, slouching, leaning—treating the body as a model for how architecture might bend, compress, or yield to certain forces and gravity. The studio emphasized hybridization, layering hard structures with responsive soft envelopes that sag, bend, peel, wrap, and rest in unexpected ways. Final proposals challenged architectural norms by foregrounding informality and material behavior as active design agents.

Student work (in order): Corban Vogler, Alison Keplinger, Megan Reymond