This is a vertical studio combining students in their fourth and fifth year of the BArch program with students from the architecture graduate programs. Students may choose from a diverse range of options of study proposed by different faculty members. In general the studio options are grounded in a conceptual basis that invites disciplinary innovation. These studio options vary from year to year.Section Description:ROAR Rural Organizational Architectural ResearchStitched into the American landscape are thousands of intercontinental ballistic missile silos dating from the Cold War. The assumed quietness of the bucolic American prairie once concealed some of the worlds most technologically advanced and geopolitically sinister landscapes. This geographic dislocation from urban centers was highly strategic, and, yet while the American prairie was nipped and tucked with billions of dollars worth of military defense infrastructure in the form of ICBM missile silos, a kind of technology in the garden cities across the US were also fortified by rings of Nike Missile silos designed to shoot down incoming missiles. From San Francisco to Chicago to New York among many others 915 missile sites encircled metropolitan centers offering the strangest form of urbanism or perhaps suburbanism. Today as military defense strategies shift to other means many of these sites lay idle offering a perplexing scenario for reuse. On one hand their remote splendor offers the potential for leisurely retreat to the American garden, while on the other hand their darker geopolitical histories beckon for critical forms of critique and appropriation. These are sites with deep political histories and futures as well as countryside frontierscapes that have long captivated the spirit of the west while maintaining covert relationships to urban centers. Thus while we might often think of urban as the city proper in this studio we will explore extraurban relationships through the lens of covert militarization as part of the urban works sequence.This studio considers the postmilitary missile site by proposing controversial interventions appropriations and adaptive reuse strategies emphasized by form typology materiality and environmental sensitivities. Each student will be asked to address the reuse of the existing missile silo itself and its associated infrastructure through architectural interventions broadly termed a visitor center, as well as to consider altering existing landscapes through surface topography plan and subterranean conditions section.In this studio each student will work individually within their local missile site context to be chosen by each student. There will be some aspects of individual work that feeds into group research however each student will be asked to develop a theory of adaptive reuse and appropriation through a series of techniques regarding architectural form material and environmental consciousness in relation to broader cultural social or political contexts which manifests in the design proposal. Considerations for anachronistic types such as bell towers or belvederes, among others, as well as communally engaged types such as reliquaries or museums are encouraged in concert with current technologies and environmental concerns. To explore these types we will engage formal strategies using compound figures composed with geometric primitives spheres cones cylinders and cubes.

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