Building complexity: Local natural systems and global principles

The education of an architect at the University of Arizona begins with the establishment of a clear and durable set of principles that encourages regional intelligence and an understanding of our place in a global context. Focusing on the "natural" - as dynamic, inherently ordered and responding to the seasonal flux - allows students to haptically engage our desert biome through iterative and empirically based exercises. These beginning explorations intertwine an understanding of light, material, structure and enclosure with scale relationships that are both near and far; the body provides an ever-present unit of measure and a vehicle for sensory tuning of materially based design operations.