BUILDING a Strawman: a proposal for the technology sequence in the professional curriculum

This is purely my own attempt at formulating a method of working within a context (the curriculum), on a site (the students), with resources (the available faculty). It is designed as a strawman to entice discussion and serves only as a starting point.

I think material culture, in general, has changed far more in the last ten years than this curriculum reflects. I think there are two veins of construction that a student needs to learn today. This bifurcated nature has always been there and always is intertwined but our necessary professional expertise is more and more split between building in bits and building in atoms. Vito Aconci said, "Architects don't make shelter, they make drawings and models of shelter." We can agree that such models need to be informed and knowledge based speculations so knowing both building construction and building representation is necessary, symbiotic, and not exclusive but set into a definable difference.

The duality I propose is this:
There is a BUILDING Sequence. There is no construction sequence. There is no media sequence. Media, like materials or structures, is in the service of BUILDING. The two parts of the BUILDING sequence are:
The Technology of Building Information (Representation)
The Technology of Building Material (Construction).
They start in first year together in a general course that enframes the intellectual nature of technological thinking, diverge for a time, and they end in an integrative course and two subsequent electives.
I think a lot of current "floating" coursework should be brought into this stream to support the teaching you two are already doing. We should get to the point- if we're we're not teaching something that leads to better core professional skills then we're wasting an undergraduate's time in professional education. We should present our curriculum as the practice of architecture as manifest in the representation and construction of buildings.

In this outline I imagine that DES is redirected, the required math and physics courses are integrated into the larger picture (and become logical prereqs), the media sequence is dissolved so that the two drawing courses become more directly connected to the studio sequence (and the individual instructors in drawing have more autonomy), the bar for what is an appropriate media elective is raised to relate to "building information", and the rest of that coursework is shaped to form a Building Representation sub-sequence intertwined with the Building Construction sub-sequence. This is less course curriculum change than comprehensive course sequencing and association across the curriculum.

Fall, Year One:
"Thinking Through Technology" (formerly "DES")
Drawing 1
Physics 1
Math 1

Spring, Year One:
Studio 1
Building Information 1 (Intro to Digital Media)
Math 2
History 1

Fall, Year Two:
Studio 2 (Form)
Building Material 1 (Materials and Assemblies) (Prereq: Math 1 and Physics 1)
Physics 2
History 2

Spring, Year Two:
Studio 3 (Program)
Building Material 2 (Structures 1)
Building Material 3 (Site, Surroundings, and Ecology) (Prereq: Science 2)
Drawing 2

Fall, Year Three:
Studio 4 (Structures)
Building Information 2 (Digital Modeling)
Building Material 4 (Structures 2)

Spring, Year Three:
Studio 5 (Envelope)
Building Material 5 (Environmental Systems)
Building Information 3 (BIT)

Year Four:
Studio 6 (Urbanism)
Information Building Material 1 (Integration of Informational and Material Construction)
Building Theory
History 3 (Topical)

Graduate:
Comprehensive Studio
Three Topical Studios
Information Building Material 2 (Topical Building Information) (formerly "Media Elective")
Information Building Material 3 (Topical Building Construction)
Building Research (formerly research methods)
Professional Practice