Next Fall 2026 priority decision deadline for Transfer Applicants is February 15.

ARCH-464P Barbara Laurie NOMAS Design Competition

1 Credits

Architecture is place bound. As one of the remaining place-based artifacts left in design, architecture is conceived and executed with particularity. It is rooted in the restrictions and aspirations of place. And intrinsic to an understanding of place, is its inherent physical, cultural, social, and historical characteristics that impact the built environment. Yet to any place there is also the universal, or what might be called analogously, the factors of place that are essentially the same from locus to locus. As such architecture should as well entertain the possibility of emphasizing, simultaneously, the conditions of place which renders it common. So this course will attempt to explore a project situated so intrinsically to its site that it's extraction seems impossible, yet it is so generic that a plausible argument can be made for its deployment on any site that suffers from a similar trauma.Miami, Florida is a city so rich in specificity that it has become a caricature of itself. So much so, in fact, that it's a complete fabrication. Our task will be to authenticate an architecture for Miami through the brief of the National Organization of Minority Architects, Barbara G. Laurie Student Design Competition.